Would You Trust This Man?
WOULD YOU TRUST THIS MAN? Trinity
Acts 9:20-31 15.9.19
You know that we help train young men in the Philippines to be church planters. One of the themes we press on them is: “HOW YOU START USUALLY DETERMINES HOW YOU FINISH”. In other words, the culture you build into the church at the outset, for your own work, and for the life of the church, shapes what kind of church you will have 5, 10, 25 years from now.
- Use music and entertainment to get people in, then you will need to keep using them to hold them.
- Build it on your personality, and people will be held by you and not by Jesus.
- Ignore doctrine now, and you’ll have to ignore it all the way along.
- Sideline holy relationships, and church will be a classroom rather than a family.
It’s usually true that the culture you build at the start is the one you end up with. The same is true for new stages along the way.
For us, 2020 signals a new stage: our own building with new opportunities and new challenges – something of a new start. The culture we build as we start this new stage will largely determine what we are 5, 10, 25 years from now.
What shall we build into our culture from the start of this new stage? This is one of the ways the book of Acts is so helpful to us.
Back to the start for a moment. Should the name of Jesus be known as loudly and clearly as possible in Tamworth? Yes. As much as in Tokyo, Tehran or Timbuktu. For he is Lord everywhere and he owns them all. Of course people in all those places should know and love Jesus as Lord and God.
That is why the story of the Book of Acts begins in 1:8 with Jesus’ promise that his name will be taken into the whole world … “beginning at Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Of course it should be. Who else is Lord in Jerusalem and Judea and to every town and tribe at the ends of the earth?
Jesus owns Tokyo, Tehran, Timbuktu and all of Tamworth. In none of them does life make any sense apart from him. He alone is the one to whom every man and woman, boy and girl who lives there must ultimately give account.
Peter and John and James are at the pointy end of making Jesus known in the first part of Acts. They are joined by Stephen in chapter 7 and all the believers from Jerusalem and Philip in chapter 8.
Thee man behind most of what happens from then on is Paul. Jesus said in 9:15 “he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel.” Paul is THE man from here on.
As Warwick showed us last Sunday, that’s a strange choice. Paul is the one determined to train wreck the whole show, and has the education, the training and the authority to do it. How can he be the key man to the universal spread of the gospel of Jesus as Lord?
How he begins is critical for everything he does from then on. The start determines how he finishes,and how we start and how we finish. In at least two big ways:
- JESUS IS MADE KNOWN BY WORDS FROM OUTSIDE
Paul had been headed to Damascus, no doubt with a small army, to arrest any Christians he found there, to bring them back to Jerusalem to be tried and hung, but he was arrested – stopped in his tracks – by Jesus, before he got there, and is wonderfully converted.
Apart from a trip off to the desert of Arabia, he spends the next 3 years in Damascus. Doing what? Verse 20 “he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying he is the Son of God.” and v22 “Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ.”
The first thing we know that Paul does once he is a Christian is that he speaks. He uses words. Not words about himself, or words about the felt needs of the people of Damascus. Words about Jesus.
When Paul finally gets to go back to Jerusalem, how does Barnabas sum up what Paul had been doing in Damascus? He told “how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus” (v27b). He would have done more than that during 3 years there, but that was front and centre: spoken words … words about Jesus.
Paul is back in town in Jerusalem for 2 weeks. What will he do here? V28,29 “He went in and out among them at Jerusalem, preaching boldly in the name of the Lord (Jesus). He spoke and disputed against the Hellenists …”
What is at the heart of God’s program for this man Paul? Words … words used in talking, preaching, disputing and proving. Words used to talk all about Jesus.
Isn’t that what you would expect? He’s an apostle, and that’s what apostles do. That’s only partly true, for they do a lot more than that. The big deal here, and all through the rest of Paul’s life is that he is a user of words. He declares. He announces. He tells truth that is from outside this world.
It is what he tells others to do. It’s what he tells the elders from the church at Ephesus in Acts 20 to do. It’s what he writes in the 13 chapters of God’s church planters manual in 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus … read the Word, preach the Word, pass the Word onto others who will in turn pass the Word onto others next in line.
I nearly didn’t talk about this theme today, because it’s all so obvious. Except that I’m not sure it really is.
- If it were obvious, would we so quickly swap reading the words God has written for watching the latest Netflix movie?
- If it were obvious, would we so easily plan to be somewhere else when there is the preaching of these words on Sunday, or at the June Conference or somewhere else?
- If it were obvious, would churches swap sermons for discussion groups, or food pantries for talking-evangelism?
- If it were so obvious would we press so much for words about us, our needs, our beliefs, than words about Jesus?
We’ve been talking about 100 great ways to connect with people once we get into our new building in Craigends Lane. We sure need to do that. We can’t connect like we used to 40 years ago, or the way Paul did 2000 years ago.
This doesn’t stop with connecting. We connect in order for people to hear words. Words spoken from outside this world.
In the new building there will be laughing and loving and eating and playing and being together in new ways. The new building is primarily an auditorium. An auditorium is for auditory purposes – where we listen and hear. Where we will gather every Sunday and on hundreds of other occasions, to listen to words God has declared.
We will be doing our best to speak words in a way that makes sense in 2020 … words that bring healing to sad and broken lives … words that bring the Living God near to people.
That’s why they must be words about Jesus. That is why they must be echoed words, coming from Jesus through Paul and others. Declared words from outside this world.
When this Church began 39 years ago, we began with the deliberate culture that put preaching and hearing the words of God about Jesus front and centre.
And the next 39 years? Are we determined, absolutely determined that the declaration of the words of Jesus will be front and centre? Are we? Am I? Are you?
The first part to Jesus making his name known is that he does it by words … words declared from outside. The second part is:
- WORDS SPOKEN BY PEOPLE GOING THE WRONG WAY
Back to Damascus with Paul. It has become obvious to the Jews there that Paul has betrayed their cause. He is dangerous threat to the future of Judaism, and it’s clear that he must go. An ambush is set up in which he will have his throat cut.
Someone blabbed about the plan and it is “became known to Saul” (v24a) and “his disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a basket” (25).
This is a pretty heady chapter – brilliant light, sight miraculously restored, astounding conversion and powerful preaching. In the middle of all that we’re told about a little opening in the city wall, and a smelly fish basket being used to drop Paul outside the city.
I think this is not a small detail. God is saying something here about the culture in his kingdom … about the way in which Jesus builds churches.
If you were a Roman soldier, one of the highest military awards you could earn was the corona muralis. You win it when you and your mates are attacking a city, and you are first up the wall to plant your Legion’s flag on the top. Corona muralis – the crown of the wall.
At the end of the letter of 2 Corinthians, Paul talks about weakness and power – who are the big people and who are the little people. What degrees does Paul boast about? What decorations does he sport? What does Time magazine say about him in its feature “The 50 Most influential people of the Century”?
What’s Paul’s big boast? “I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall” (2 Cor 11:33). “You want big? Don’t come to me”, says Paul. “I’m the original basket-case.”
>> Who then are the big people in the churches of Jesus? There aren’t any.
>> What can we brag about to show that we are just as important as any other group in Tamworth? There isn’t anything.
This world rates the guy who scales the wall first. Paul boasts about the fact that he was going in the opposite direction. Our culture says ‘up’, but God’s gospel is so different, it says ‘down’.
Jesus had promised that his name would be made known in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Are you keeping score of how that’s working? Luke is. He says in verse 31 “So the churches (the better reading, I think) throughout all Judea and Samaria had peace and were being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, they multiplied.”
Do you need fancy credentials to make a difference in this world? Do you win by running with the crowd, or against the crowd? We know well enough that in 2019 we’ve never been running more against the flow, going this way, while the mood is all that way.
- Unborn life is cheap and expendable. No. It’s precious.
- Gender is all in your head. No. God made us male and female.
- Sex is for recreation and the only limit is consent. No. God made it for marriage alone, for love and for procreation.
- God has no place in modern life. Life is what you make it. No. Apart from Jesus, life can’t make any real sense.
- Truth is what you think. No. Jesus alone is true truth.
God builds his kingdom through words spoken by people who are willing to go this way, while the rest go that way. Your views don’t fit in 2019? They’ll never fit. If you don’t prize most what others prize most, you will never fit.
You’ll always be going over the wall the wrong way, a basket case to the minds of many, while others are on about getting up the wall first and getting what goes with that.
Real churches are made up of people going the wrong way. The losers, the basket cases.
I asked whether the name of Jesus should be known loudly and clearly as possible in Tamworth, as much in Tokyo, Tehran or Timbuktu. The answer is: of course it should be.
Then what matters as we move to a new stage in our life together is what has always mattered in the kingdom of Jesus:
>> words about Jesus spoken, preached, declared, from outside.
>> by people who are willing to be going the wrong way, and for whom that’s not a problem.
Is it exciting that we are soon to be plonked into the middle of life in Tamworth in a fresh way? You bet it is. Will it make a difference, a real difference?
Only so far as we talk and explain and declare and preach Jesus as Lord and God … and only in so far as we are prepared to be going over the wall the wrong way while we do it.
Are you excited about the future? With 2000 year old words that alone give life in 2019 and 2020, who wouldn’t be?