If you would take your Bibles and turn with me to Acts chapter 15, we’ll pick up where we left off a couple of weeks ago beginning in verse 35. You can find that on page 924 in the pew Bibles in the pews in front of you. Acts chapter 15.
In my top five list of most played songs of 2023 was a song from several years ago called, “All Your Favorite Bands” by a band called “Dolls.” And it goes, “Late night drives and hot french fries and friends around the country, from Charlottesville to good old Santa Fe. When I think of you, you still got on that hat that says ‘Let’s Party.’ I hope that thing is never thrown away.” And then the chorus goes like this, “I hope your life without a chaperone is what you thought it’d be. I hope your brother’s El Camino runs forever. I hope the world sees the same person you’ve always been to me, and may all your favorite bands stay together.”
There’s something about our favorite bands that makes us nostalgic. We want them to stay together. We don’t want them to break up. We want them to keep making the music that we love to hear and there’s something sad about the end of our favorite bands. There’s something sad about the end of a friendship and the fragility of relationships even in our own lives. There’s something sad about the end of an era.
Well, Acts 15 is the end of an era. Barnabas and Paul, Paul and Barnabas – they were such a good team and they had a great run and we see them all throughout these opening chapters of the book of Acts. Barnabas had taken Paul when he had first become a disciple of Jesus. He commended Paul to the apostles in Jerusalem. Barnabas had brought Paul to Antioch and they took the lead in gathering and teaching and preaching to the Christians there in that city. They gathered the resources from the disciples in Antioch and took those down to the strugglings saints who were in Jerusalem. Barnabas and Paul were the first two who were set apart and sent off on the foreign mission field and they went to Cyprus and to the other Antioch and to Lyconia and the surrounding region. They had a prominent role in what we saw in the beginning of Acts chapter 15, in that delegation that took place in Jerusalem and in that decision and declaration that the good news about Jesus is for both Jew and Gentile alike, without exception. Paul and Barnabas were there for all of those things and their fingerprints are all over the opening chapters of Acts and all over the initial growth and spread of the church and the Gospel.
And now that comes to an end. Right when they are about to go out, set out on a second missionary journey, and they part ways. And they part ways over something that seems like on the surface to be somewhat insubstantial, insignificant, a minor disagreement. Why couldn’t Barnabas and Paul stay together? Well this passage is about their parting of ways and there’s something sad about that. But there’s some good news in it as well because it shows us in these verses how God uses messy relationships and messy people for His own good purposes. And that’s exactly what happens at the turn from Acts 15 to 16. So before we read these verses, let’s pray and ask God for His help and blessing.
Father, we pray as we come to this passage tonight that You would help us to see something from this relationship, Barnabas and Paul, that we would see something in it of our own relationships and how we need to be held together by the Gospel and focused on Christ and submitting ourselves to be used for Your purposes and for Your glory. We pray that You would give us Your Spirit tonight, that we would understand what You have to say to us, that we would apply these words to our lives and that You would strengthen this church even as You strengthen the churches in this time in which Acts was describing. And so we pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Acts 15, starting in verse 35:
“But Paul and Barnabas remained in Antioch, teaching and preaching the word of the Lord, with many others also.
And after some days Paul said to Barnabas, ‘Let us return and visit the brothers in every city where we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are.’ Now Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark. But Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia and had not gone with them to the work. And there arose a sharp disagreement, so that they separated from each other. Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and departed, having been commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord. And he went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.
Paul came also to Derbe and to Lystra. A disciple was there, named Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek. He was well spoken of by the brothers at Lystra and Iconium. Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him, and he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places, for they all knew that his father was a Greek. As they went on their way through the cities, they delivered to them for observance the decisions that had been reached by the apostles and elders who were in Jerusalem. So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
Well maybe you’ve heard that saying, a quote that is repeated from time to time through church history, it goes like this – “In essentials, unity, in nonessentials, liberty, and in all things, charity.” “In essentials, unity, in nonessentials, liberty, and in all things, charity.” Well there’s something like that that we can see from these verses that we just read in Acts 15 and 16. And that will be our outline for tonight, those three points – unity, liberty and charity.
First is unity. Now unity might seem like a strange place to start because these verses begin with a fight. And we read about it in verse 36. It says that, “After some days Paul said to Barnabas, ‘Let us return and visit the brothers in every city where we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are.’” And verse 37 says that, “Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark.” But that caused a problem for Paul because Paul didn’t want to take with them someone who had abandoned them and had turned back to go back home earlier in their missionary journeys. And so because of that, there arose this “sharp disagreement,” verse 39 says. And this sharp disagreement was such that they separated from each other. This sharp disagreement. There’s a Greek dictionary that defines this word in Greek as “a provocation which literally jabs or cuts someone so that they must respond.” That’s the type of conflict that we find here in these verses at the end of Acts chapter 15.
So it would be easy for us to make certain assumptions about this word and about what happens after it, to construct this whole story about what happened next – about how this was Barnabas and Paul’s big falling out, they never worked together again, they never spoke together again because we don’t hear about Barnabas anymore in the book of Acts and we’re not told anything at any point in the New Testament about their reconciliation. This is just perhaps another example of hurt feelings and nursed grudges and festering conflict that is really all too common in the church. And it’s true. Personal conflict is a major cause of trouble among Christians. You may have heard it before that the number one cause for missionaries coming off the field, the number one reason that missionaries come home from the mission field, it’s not because of persecution, it’s not because of a lack of support, it’s not because of a lack of fruit or because of homesickness. No, the number one reason they come home is from personal conflict with other missionaries on their own team. And it’s not like it’s just a missionary problem because it happens all the time in the church as well, doesn’t it, with personality differences and there’s failed business partnerships. There’s lifestyle differences. There are school loyalties that get in the way.
I remember reading an article some years ago and the headline of the article was, “Why You Truly Never Leave High School.” Think about some of those dynamics from high school about popularity and unpopular, about someone who is self confident and those who are self conscious and all the different groups that form in high school and how those things somehow never quite disappear from all of our lives. And you can see even those same social dynamics start to creep up and display themselves decades later in things like Sunday school classes and discipleship groups and even in the church at large. That’s because relationships are messy. Relationships are messy. And that was the case with Barnabas and Paul. They enjoyed this season of fruitful ministry together and yet here they are at the end of Acts 15 and they have this sharp disagreement with each other and they go their separate ways.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they sever their relationship and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they left each other in open hostility with open wounds toward each other. And in fact, I think that there are some things we can find in this passage in which there is actually an agreement between the two of them. And we have to be careful about reading too much into the silence of the rest of the New Testament. Just because the New Testament doesn’t tell us more about Barnabas and Paul that doesn’t mean that they never came back together at any point. And there are signs of agreement that we find even in this passage. If you notice in verse 36, what is it that they wanted to do? Paul and Barnabas wanted to go through the cities where they had preached the Gospel to visit the brothers. Paul and Barnabas wanted to do the same thing. They both felt like it was their duty to do that, they just had different opinions on how it was going to be done. But they didn’t let their differences of opinion prevent it from being done.
And by the time chapter 15 ends, that’s exactly what we find happening. They are going to the cities where they have proclaimed the Gospel, where they have proclaimed the Word of the Lord, and they were visiting the brothers. Barnabas and Mark went to Cyprus, Paul took Silas and they went through Syria and Cilicia and then on to Derbe and Lystra. And what did they do? Verse 41, “They were strengthening the church.” They were doing what they had initially set out to do – strengthening the churches. They did not let their differences, they did not let their differences of opinions interfere with the big picture. They kept the big picture in mind. They kept in mind and in focus the call of Christ and the ministry of Christ and the health of the church in all of these places. And when they went out, they went out “commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord,” is what verse 40 says. Think back to chapter 13. Think back to when Paul and Barnabas were initially set apart and sent off. How were they set apart and sent off? They were set apart and sent off, “commended by the brothers, to the grace of the Lord.” The same thing is happening here in these verses.
And in fact, there’s no reason for us to think as we read this story that something similar happened here as what we read about last time in the first part of Acts 15. If you remember, there was this debate and dissension over circumcision. Well that debate and dissention didn’t allow the church to be split. No, they came together. They gathered together. They considered the matter. They came to a consensus. They put a plan in place and then they set out to execute that plan. Well we have no reason to think that that’s not exactly what happened in these verses with Paul and Barnabas. Yes, there was a difference of opinion, but they came together with the brothers. They made a plan; they set that plan in order and they would go their separate ways but they would go their separate ways to do the same thing, the same ministry that they were committed to do to strengthen the churches in the different places where they had already been. There is a unity, there is a unity of purpose in these verses and as a result the churches were strengthened even though it came through a time of conflict. Barnabas and Paul were united when it came to the essentials. They were united when it came to the core principle, the core purpose of the church that Christ had called them to do.
But when it came to matters of opinion, when it came to matters that required wisdom, there was liberty. That’s the second thing we’ll see is liberty. Liberty allowed them to go their different ways and liberty is involved in the matter of Timothy and circumcision. Now one of my favorite stories from our mission trip to Peru this past summer was when we were coming back through customs and one of our team members went through customs wearing this bright yellow t-shirt, bright yellow Inca Kola t-shirt which is the national soft drink for Peru, and he was wearing a sort of Indiana Jones style fedora hat with a bright Peruvian woven band around the crown of the hat. And as he went through customs, the customs agent asked him, “Are you bringing any souvenirs back into the country?” and he just very casually shook his head, “No,” and the customs agent let him on through, let him go his way. Everything about him, what he was wearing, screamed “tourist to Peru” except for what was coming out of his mouth or the way he answered that customs agent.
Well think back to the beginning of Acts chapter 15. Think back to that Jerusalem council and to the decision that was made there. Remember what they decided? They decided that circumcision was not required for salvation and Barnabas and Paul, they had delivered that message to Antioch and now Paul continues to spread that message to other places as well. Verse 4 says that they went on their way through the cities “and they delivered to them for observance the decisions that had been reached by the apostles and elders who were in Jerusalem.” So they were delivering this decision that circumcision was not required for salvation. Do you see what Paul is doing? He was going around and telling these Gentile Christians that they didn’t need to be circumcised and Paul was one of the main advocates of that position at the Jerusalem council. But what does he do before he goes and takes that message to the Gentile churches? He has Timothy circumcised. And that doesn’t seem to make any sense. He had Timothy circumcised and then went out to tell people that they didn’t have to be circumcised, that circumcision was not necessary. What is that about?
It seems like the appearances didn’t match up with what was coming out of his mouth. What’s that about? What was going on? Well it’s Christian liberty. It’s Christian liberty. And Timothy was one of these disciples in Lystra, he had a good reputation among the brothers, his mother was a Jew, his father was a Greek, and everyone knew it. And Paul wanted to take him out for ministry and so for Paul, in order to reach the Jews through Timothy and in order to be all things to all people, as he writes in 1 Corinthians 9:22, he had Timothy circumcised because Christian liberty meant that circumcision was no longer a first order issue in the Christian life. The Gospel set people free from the need to be circumcised, but at the same time, it also set people free to be circumcised if that’s what it meant to win more people to the Gospel. Paul says it in Galatians chapter 5 verse 6. He says, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything but only faith working through love.” It doesn’t impact anything one way or the other. You can take it or leave it. There is freedom when it comes to circumcision.
And that’s true in a bunch of other areas in the Christian life as well. We find throughout the New Testament that Christians are free to eat both foods that were considered clean and considered unclean. But Christians were also free to refrain from eating those foods if they caused offense to their Christian brothers. Likewise Christians were free, free from any mandate to observe days of ritual fasting but also free to fast. And there’s liberty. We can apply these in different ways. There’s liberty when it comes to legally and responsibly drinking alcohol, but there’s also freedom to refrain from drinking altogether. There’s freedom when it comes to choosing a school option for your children, but there’s also freedom to not impose that same choice on someone else in the community. In other words, what’s right for one person might not be right for the other person. And what’s right in one situation or one circumstance might not be right in another circumstance and situation. As long as we are being obedient to God and honoring God in those kinds of decisions where there’s no clear law and instruction in the Bible, then we are free to choose what God leaves us free to choose.
But because of that, it’s complicated. It can be complicated. And I can think of at least three conversations recently that I’ve had in which the issue of Christian liberty has come up. Things like, “What do we do about celebrating or remembering secular holidays? What about participating in a community Passover meal? What about riding in a Mardi Gras parade?” Those are matters of Christian liberty and there’s room for differences among different people and their different circumstances and according to their consciences. There’s room for difference even among Christians who want to do the right thing. And that’s not bad. That’s not all bad because the Gospel sets us free. As we come to Christ for salvation by faith we are set free. “There is therefore now no condemnation.” We are set free from the condemnation of the law. We are set free from the bondage to our own flesh, to doing merely what our instincts tell us to do. We can say, “No.” We can say, “Enough.” We’re free from the bondage of our flesh and we are free from comparing ourselves with others and always trying to measure ourselves with what someone else is doing and what looks good in other people’s lives. We are free from those things. That’s a good thing. “For freedom Christ has set you free,” Paul writes in Galatians chapter 5.
But it does mean there is room for differences, and because of those differences that exist among good, faithful Christian brothers and sisters, there’s also a call for grace. There’s a call for charity. And that’s the third thing we see in this passage. There’s unity, liberty and charity. Several years ago there was a Dutch design group who designed kind of a classic band t-shirt. It was simple but it became viral and spread all over the place. It was just a t-shirt with four words in New Helvetica heavy font, each on a separate line, separated by an “&” symbol or an ampersand. And it just said these four words – “John & Paul & Ringo & George.” And that’s all it said and that’s all it needs to say, right? And you know what it’s talking about? There have been all kinds of knockoffs, all kinds of imitations to this t-shirt as it spread around the world. There was one from New Orleans that says, “Water, Heat, Boil Mix, Onions, Corn, Potatoes, Sausage, Garlic, Crawfish, Mushrooms & Lemon.” It’s a recipe, but it screams “South Louisiana” doesn’t it? You know what it is just by looking at those words.
Well I thought about those t-shirts because as I was studying this passage this past week I jotted down a list of five names, fives names on the paper – Paul, Barnabas, John Mark, Silas and Timothy. Those are the five names that we find in this passage. Those five names that appear over and over again throughout the New Testament and different translations may count up differently how often you find those names. You can find Paul’s name, of course, the most throughout the New Testament – around 200 times. But Barnabas, we find his name around 29 times. John Mark, 11. Silas or Silvanus, 16. And Timothy, 26. These are significant names in this story. These are significant names in the story of the New Testament and the spread of the church in these early days. And really even as prominent as they are in the story there’s a lot we don’t know about them. But if you look at different places and you try to find out a little bit about each of these different characters you can piece together some hints and a few details and we can find out about places in which these men were described as having wisdom and encouragement, usefulness, faithfulness, sincerity. But there’s also places where we find these men places like dissension, like we have in these verses. There’s hypocrisy. There’s desertion and there’s frequent ailments.
I saw John Mark Baird this morning. He told me to take it easy on John Mark tonight in this passage! To not be too rough on him for abandoning Paul and Barnabas and leaving them for home earlier in their ministry. Well thankfully for this John Mark and for us, that wasn’t the whole story for him. And we could look at other places in Mark’s letters – we’ll actually look at it next Sunday morning in the book of Philemon – how that wasn’t the end of the story for Mark. But the story of Mark is a redemption story.
Alexander White, he has a book, it’s an old book of Bible characters from the New Testament. And there are several chapters devoted to the apostle Paul. These are some of the chapters that Alexander White writes about Paul. There’s Paul as a preacher. There’s Paul as a man of prayer. There’s Paul as a controversialist. There’s Paul as the chief of sinner. He was all those things. He was all those things, sometimes all at the same time, because for every one of these names and for every one of these men they had their differences, they had their strengths, they had their weaknesses. They were complicated. Just take Paul. Just take Paul from this passage in Acts 15 and 16. We don’t know if he’s right about either of these issues that he just read about. We don’t know. Maybe he should have been more gracious to Mark. Maybe this sharp disagreement that we find in this chapter, maybe it was his fault. We don’t really know if it was right for him to circumcise Timothy in order for the Gospel to bear fruit in those places. We don’t know those things. Paul may very well have been in the wrong in all those things and yet we can show to Paul a level of grace and charity, can’t we?
And we know what happens through the ministry of Paul and through the ministry of each of these five men as the story goes on. Chapter 15 verse 41, “And he went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.” Chapter 16 verse 5, “So the churches were strengthened in the faith and they increased in numbers daily.” The churches were strengthened. Why? Was it because Paul and Barnabas and Mark and Silas and Timothy had it all together and they made all the right decisions and they were in perfect harmony with one another? No, it wasn’t that at all, but it was because of the grace of God working through them. It was because they were redeemed by the grace of God. They were set free by the grace of God. They were set on a mission purpose by the grace of God. And that’s what allowed them to strengthen the churches in all the places they went – not because of them, not because of their strengths and their abilities but because of God’s grace working through them even in their weaknesses and through their conflict at times.
Someone sent me a story a few weeks ago. It was an old sermon illustration about a life saving station. And this life saving station was located on a dangerous sea coast where there used to be a lot of shipwrecks. And the people would go out from time to time when there was a shipwreck and they would go in to rescue the people who had suffered the shipwreck and they would bring them back in. But as they grew in their prominence, as people heard more about them, they updated and upgraded some of their equipment and some of their building where they were located on the coast, so much so that it came to the point that they so much enjoyed gathering together that they didn’t enjoy as much going out to rescue people at the sea. Anyway, when they rescued people they would come in and they would be wet and they would be dirty and they would mess up their nice and new upgraded facilities and equipment. And so there was a disagreement between the people in this life saving station and some went out to go and start a new place, to recapture some of the original purpose, but others stayed in the old place but not to go out and rescue anymore.
And it’s a cautionary tale – it’s just a simple sermon illustration – a cautionary tale about what happens when the original purpose is lost, about what happens when personal preferences take over and become chief and the main focus, about what happens when love is lost for one another and for the dying. And these verses from Acts 15 and 16, they remind us that yes, relationships are messy, Christian liberty can be challenging, people are complicated, but God works through all of those things to accomplish His purposes. In fact, that is why Jesus died and was raised. He died and was raised to give grace to messy sinners like all of us, to bring us together into a relationship, to give us this amazing liberty and freedom and to call us to love one another as He has loved us – with radical, sacrificial love and grace. Those are the blessings of the Gospel. Those are the blessings of the Gospel that He has poured out on us to enjoy because of what He has done for us on the cross. And we receive those things and live those things out by faith. And that is how Jesus strengthens the churches in the book of Acts. And you know what? That’s how He strengthens this church as well.
Let’s pray.Father, we thank You for this Word from Your Scripture to us tonight. We thank You for the realism of it, for how it tells us the way things really were and not some cleaned up version. We ask that You would help us to apply that same principle to our lives and that we would not present some cleaned up version of ourselves but in our rough spots, in our warts, in our bruises and our failures, our mistakes, our setbacks, that You would help us to lean more and more upon Your grace, to rely more and more upon Your love and Your kindness to us. Would You work through us in this place that we would not lose our first love, that we would not be easily split from one another, but that we would love one another and that through doing that You would commend the Gospel, commend the goodness of Christ to the world around us and that You would grow and strengthen us as well. We pray this in Christ’s name, amen.