A Tale Of Three Cities
A TALE OF THREE CITIES Trinity
Acts chapter 14 10.11.19
You don’t have to guess how the book of Acts is going to end. We were told at the start: “You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (1:8)
The few frightened followers who heard those words were locked in a little room, unwilling to go onto the street, let alone to the ends of the earth. That promise sounds crazy.
Within 30 years, the name of Jesus is heard in the palace of the Roman emperor, in almost every major Roman city, all the way out to India, and just about every country in between.
How on earth did that happen?
You could say “It’s down to the Holy Spirit.” He came and changed and equipped and energised ordinary people to do extraordinary things. That’s perfectly true. They did what they did because God sovereignly sent his Spirit on them.
My question today is not what did the Holy Spirit do, but what did they do? What was their chosen strategy and what plans did they make in order to be the witnesses of Jesus to the end of the earth? Luke writes up their strategy in every chapter of the story, from the little room in Jerusalem to the palace of the emperor in Rome.
Now that makes a problem for us. If it’s the same in every chapter, we’ve heard it all before, and we may be tempted to ho-hum our way through another chapter. Nothing new here, we say.
As we read chapter 14 of Luke’s story, yes, we’ll see some old or familiar things, but I am hoping we’ll see them come together in a fresh way today, in a way that challenges and refreshes us.
What is the strategy for making Jesus known? What was always the strategy? And still the strategy? The only strategy?
It has two parts:
- TELLING THE WORD OF GOD
Before you ho-hum that, just remember that there are churches all over the place that ditched that. They think that lobbying for new laws, creating welfare programs or running feel-good support groups are front and centre. Which means that whatever they have, it is not apostolic Christianity.
Today we are with Paul and Barnabas in the Turkish towns of Iconium, Lystra and Derbe. What could they do that would be enough to deliver people from shallow and superstitious lives? Or to restore people to each other, and to the Living God? Or to answer deep longings of hearts made for eternity? Ore to deeply change people?
14:1 “At Iconium they entered the Jewish synagogue and SPOKE”
14:3 “they remained a long time speaking boldly for the Lord who bore witness to the word of his grace.”
14:7 “To Lystra and Derbe and there continued to preach the gospel.”
14:21 “they preached the gospel to Derbe”
14:25 “When they had spoken the word in Perga”. Etc.
They could have run a soup kitchen for the poor, started a lobby group for refugees or a hundred other very good things. Luke keeps repeating the point so that we see clearly that their top priority is speaking a message about Jesus which God has given in his word.
They didn’t do it because that was popular. Jews in Iconium so hate what they are saying and doing, that even the police get involved in a lynch mob, and Paul and Barnabas have to run for their lives.
That mob, together with others from chapter 13, tracks Paul and Barnabas down at Lystra, “they persuaded the crowds, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing that he was dead.” (v19) To say that they hated Paul is an understatement.
Keep reading: “But when the disciples gathered about him, he rose up and entered the city, and on the next day he went on with Barnabas to Derbe.” (v20) A day after being stoned and left for dead? You could follow Paul all 100km to Derbe, by following the blood stains on the road … you don’t get belted with sharp stones and not have serious injuries to show for it.
Why endure all that hatred and injury and pain? Why go to such lengths to tell the gospel to people?
It is because the Word of God shows Jesus like nothing else. It is because there is life in this Word and because it changes lives, communities and everything else.
Yes, there were some miracles along the way. God granted signs and wonders at Iconium (v3) and the man in Lystra who had never walked now did (v10). They are God’s works not Paul’s and they are support acts for the main act. Healing miracles don’t convert people and never have. They point to the telling of God’s Word.
Let’s stop. Is there power in these words to open blind eyes and subdue hostile hearts? Power to change lifelong habits, and restore long-term breaks in families? Power to bring you to Jesus?
Paul doesn’t have power like that. When the people of Lystra wanted to make him into a god he assured them that he and Barnabas were “mere men” … “We also are men of like nature with you, and we bring you a gospel, that you should turn from these vain things (their Roman gods) to a Living God who made” everything. (v15)
No preacher, program or pope has power to do only what the Living God does through his Word. This Word is truth. It is dynamite.
- Do you sometimes think nothing much is going to happen if you give a grandchild a Bible, or invite a friend to come and hear a sermon?
- Do you sometimes baulk when friends say “Surely you don’t believe that we will go to hell if we don’t follow YOUR God. Or when family members want you to celebrate the love between these two men?”
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Do you push this Word away and say “Sure, some Christians think this or that, but I’m rethinking things right now”. If you are bold enough to say what the Bible says, do you apologise for it?
You know where that goes. You start cutting corners with what the Bible says, then it’s no time before you lose confidence in it all. Small cracks bring down big Boeing planes.
Friends, Paul and Barnabas are saying “Whatever it takes”. Whatever it takes to make this Word clear. Whatever it takes to bring people to where they will hear this Word to discover the true and living God.
Whatever it takes? The embarrassment that comes from a mocking culture? Division? Personal threats? Legal threats? Loss of personal entitlements? Inconvenience?
God is committed to the strategy of telling his Word because it shows who he is and because it has power to do what nothing in this world comes close to doing.
- Telling the Word of God .. is the first half of God’s strategy.
- BEING THE CHURCH OF GOD .. is the second.
Perhaps, because of a bad church experience, or distrust of institutions or just the autonomy of our age, some Christians have a low opinion of church, and of all churches. Jesus? Yes. Church? No.
That’s not on if you are committed to God’s strategy for making the name of Jesus to the end of the earth.
When Paul and Barnabas went to these towns, who sent them? A church did. The church at Antioch in Syria (13:1-3).
To whom is Paul accountable, under God? That church. After all the preaching, we read in v27 that when they arrived back in Antioch, “They gathered the church together and declared all that God had done with them, and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. And they remained a long time with” the church there.
Sent by church. Cared for by church. Church members.
How about the work they did in these towns? That was a church work!
After they got to the last station on the line, Derbe, maybe a year after they started, they backtracked through Iconium. Lystra and Derbe.
What for? The Word of God hadn’t made just converts, but churches. Vv22,23 say that on their way home they “strengthened the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. And … they appointed elders for them in every church.”
The goal and outcome of their preaching was the creation of real, identifiable, local churches. Not branch churches of Antioch. Not mission stations. Not disconnected Christians, but churches with their own leaders - several leaders (elderS) in each (singular) church.
Churches aren’t casual democratic shapeless entities. Paul urged these churches to “continue in the faith” … not “in their faith”, but in “the” faith … in statements of truth that said this is “the faith”. There is a doctrinal shape to real churches.
More than that, real churches have leaders who lead. Men who meet certain requirements that are spelled out clearly enough in other places.
What was the best thing that Paul and Barnabas could have left in these cities? The Word of God, held and shown by local churches.
When Paul later wrote to Timothy who was a leader in the church at Ephesus, he outlined standards for the life of that church. Why did that matter? Because it is “the household of God, the church of the Living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.” (1 Timothy 3:15)
The Word of Jesus is to be held by churches, shown in the church, and held up and held out by the church of Jesus.
Do you think maybe we downplay the vital place that a Jesus-church has in the strategic purposes of God? As though the Word of God floats around somewhere in the ether? When God has in fact entrusted that Word to churches like ours. To believe it, display it, and to tell it? I’m sure we do.
Do you think maybe we underestimate the powerful effect on others of seeing a church which lives under the Word of God? Where community life is marked by love and forgiveness and inclusion and purpose and generosity? I am sure we do. There is no other group in a community which has as much to say by its life as a Jesus-church.
The story of the book of Acts is the story of the gospel going to the end of the earth … and of the church of Jesus being planted all over this world in small towns and big cities, to display and tell that Word to make Jesus known.
Some of us here aren’t going to be able to explain all the ins and outs of the gospel, even if our lives depended on that. You may need to work on that. But the bottom line is that it is churches, whole churches, which show and tell the gospel.
By the way you help shape our church to be what shows off Jesus, you’re part of God’s strategy for this world. By the way you back others who can speak the Word of God clearly, you’re part of that same strategy. Evangelising is primarily church work.
- Can you see how impossible it is to say you are for the Son of God and the Word of God, but not for the church of God?
- Is it exciting to see that this task is not a personal or individual one, but something we can do together, each playing a part?
- Are you seeing that real, apostolic churches make this their priority … believing the truth about Jesus, showing the changing power of Jesus, and telling the gospel of Jesus?
- Are you beginning to sense that churches like ours in Tamworth have a place in the purposes of God which means that when it comes to what God says, there is nothing for which we need to apologise, or be defensive. That we have something to say and show which nothing other than a Jesus church can say and do?
It goes without saying that we are not what we should be, and not yet what we might be but by the powerful and changing Word of God we are what we might never have thought possible.
What a breath-takingly wonderful place that is to be!