As we prepare ourselves to hear God’s Word, let’s ask His blessing once more.
Our great God, we thank You for Your Word. We confess to You freely and openly this morning that if You had not revealed Yourself to us we would be in the dark in so many ways. Father, we thank You for giving us Your Word. It is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. We thank You as well that Your Word is not a dead letter but it’s living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword. Indeed it is the sword of Your Spirit, and great promises attend to the reading and especially the preaching of Your Word. So Father we ask that You might fulfill those promises in our midst. May Your Spirit wield His sword, may You convict us of sin and train us in righteousness and thoroughly equip us in every good work, and in so doing, Father, we would ask You as well to glorify Your Son in our midst. And it is in Jesus’ name that we ask these things. Amen.
Please open your Bibles to Acts chapter 13. Acts chapter 13. We’ll be reading just the first three verses of Acts chapter 13. Acts 13:1-3. And as I read and as you follow along in your Bibles, remember that this is the Word of God. Acts 13:1-3.
“Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a lifelong friend of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.”
There are a number of great charges that God gives to His people in the Scriptures; a number of great moments where God, as it were, encapsulates the mission of His people. So we might think in the Old Testament of Deuteronomy chapter 6, the Shema – “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.” Or in a slightly different vain, in the Old Testament we might even think about the Ten Commandments where God presents to His people His Law that they are to keep, that they are to observe throughout all generations. When we come to the New Testament we have statements like that as well, encapsulated mission statements, as it were, for the people of God. And one that is perhaps at the forefront of our minds, particularly this week, is the Great Commission that Jesus gives in Matthew 28. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
And accompanying that commission that the Lord gives, shortly after giving that commission, He also gives a great promise, and that promise is recorded for us at the beginning of the book of Acts in Acts chapter 1 before Jesus ascends into heaven. He tells those same disciples to whom He gave the commission, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” The Lord promises that He will use these disciples to begin to fulfill the commission that He had given to them. And when you read through the pages of the book of Acts, you see the Lord do this in remarkable ways. You see the expanding circles of the Gospel, the expanding circles of the church of Jesus Christ. And sometimes the Lord does this in ways that are unexpected. In Acts chapter 8 for instance, as the church in Jerusalem has begun to gather and to grow, the Lord brings about a great persecution against the church at Jerusalem. It says they were scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria and those who were scattered, it says, “went about preaching the Word.” So the Lord providentially intervenes in His church so that they might spread out and that they might continue to share the Gospel in fulfillment of the promise of Acts 8 and even in fulfillment, in some measure, of the Great Commission.
The Lord does other miraculous things in those early chapters. You might remember the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch or the conversion of Saul where the Lord Jesus Christ appears to him and he is brought to saving faith. Or Peter going to Cornelius and his family after receiving this great vision from heaven. But Acts 12 marks something of a transition point in those ever-expanding circles of the Gospel in fulfillment of Acts 1 and in fulfillment of the Great Commission. At the end of Acts chapter 12, you’ll notice this phrase that’s repeated again and again at key moments in the book of Acts. In Acts 12:24 it says, “The Word of God increased and multiplied.” And that’s a kind of signal in the book of Acts that the Lord is continuing to do His work.
But in Acts 13:1, there is a marked change. In fact if you survey the commentaries on the book of Acts you’ll see that many of them recognize this to be, in a sense, part two of the book of Acts. Because in Acts 1 through 12, the Lord fulfills His promise in all sorts of extraordinary ways and the Word of God continues to go forth. But in Acts 13, there is, in a sense, a new era when the church begins in an organized and orderly fashion to obey that commandment and to send forth missionaries. One commentator said that chapters 1 through 12 are the first great movement from Jerusalem to Antioch and then chapter 13 begins this second movement in the book of Acts. And because it comes at the beginning of this second movement where the church is self-consciously obeying the command of the Lord Jesus Christ and sending forth missionaries, these verses serve as a kind of template for us; a template for how this is supposed to work in the church of Jesus Christ as the church fulfills the Great Commission.
There are a number of things we can observe just in these three verses. These verses are written for our instruction and every detail here, I think, is significant for us. And the first thing that I think we need to observe is that, in fact, this is a work of the church. Missions is the work of the church. You see here in chapter 13 that we are dealing with an established church. “There were in the church at Antioch” – and in fact actually the grammar in Greek is somewhat more emphatic than that. “There was, being a church in Antioch, these prophets and teachers.” So the first thing we have to bear in mind when coming to this passage is that missions is not something that we outsource to other agencies, it’s not something we can avoid in the life of the church. It’s not a kind of optional, added extra. What we see in the book of Acts, the pattern that is established here in Acts and continues throughout the history of the church, is that missions is one of the great works of the church. Just as we look to the book of Acts and we see in Acts 2 that those believers in Jerusalem, that church in Jerusalem devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. And we see that as a model. And we see in the book of Acts how elders are appointed and that constitutes what we would call a particular church. So here we see that the church sends missionaries. It is one of the patterns in Acts to which we must conform. And churches have done that, by and large, throughout the history of the Christian world.
And it’s striking that these verses give us a window into the first church that sends out missionaries. And I want to point out a few things about this church that I think are instructive for us. First, we see that it is an established church. And we know it is an established church because that’s what it’s called but also because of the leadership that it has in place. If you look in verse 1 it says, “There were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers.” This is a kind of puzzling turn of phrase. This isn’t normally how we would refer to leaders in the church of Jesus Christ. The first thing to note, though, is that this isn’t two separate offices. It appears to be one office that Luke, under the inspiration of the Spirit, calls “prophets and teachers.” I think the older commentators by and large get it right when they suggest that this is actually a kind of synonym for what we might think of today as teaching elders within the church. They’re teachers, primarily; it makes that clear. But what are they teaching? Well, they are teaching that which God had revealed. They are teaching the prophecies. They are teaching what Peter calls the “more sure word” of Scripture. So Luke refers to them in this way as prophets and teachers. In other words, this church at Antioch had men, several men, who were ordained to teach. And what they taught was nothing less than the Word of God. So it’s important to see that. It’s important to see that this was an established church. It was a church that gave priority to the proclamation of God’s Word.
We know how significant this is in the life of the church when the apostle Paul is writing his last letter to Timothy. This is the great instruction that he gives to Timothy. There are going to be difficult times to come, but you need to continue in the things that you have learned and ultimately Paul says you need to preach the Word. That’s what leaders like this in the church do. That’s what they had in the church at Antioch.
And this company of pastors in the church is named by Luke. We’re given their names. And we’re meant to understand, I think, in seeing these names, the variety of ways that the Lord had been at work in building this church and bringing it to this point. I want to look at these names, beginning in verse 1. It says they had “prophets and teachers” and the first one who is mentioned in Barnabas. Barnabas is listed first, perhaps some would suggest, because he is the oldest of all of those mentioned, but probably it’s because whether or not he was the oldest, he was the one that had the greatest experience and therefore the greatest authority in the church at Antioch. Barnabas might have been called something like their senior minister at the church in Antioch. We know something about Barnabas from the book of Acts. We know that he was from the tribe of Levi. We also know that he was not from the Hebrew speaking part of the Jewish world. He would have been part of the Jewish diaspora. In Acts 4 it tells us he was originally from Cyprus. And actually, Barnabas wasn’t the name you would find on his birth certificate. Barnabas was actually a kind of nickname. His given name was Joseph, but Barnabas means “son of encouragement.” Why did he receive this name? Well in Acts 4 it tells us that he gave a great gift to the church and we see him coming alongside the apostle Paul and introducing him to the church at Antioch when Saul was just converted. He was a great man of God, a great encourager, yet vast experience in the early church and so he is mentioned first here. Barnabas was one of these teaching elders at the church in Antioch.
The second name that we have we know much less about. His name is Simeon, Simoen who was called Niger. And the text gives us this little indication of which Simeon it is. And this term, “Niger,” refers perhaps to the color of his skin. It’s just the word that means “black” but it could refer to some kind of ethnic origin that he had. This is significant too. It’s a way of distinguishing him of course from others who might have had the same name. But it’s also indicative, I think, of the variety of ways in which God had drawn men to Himself and the variety of those who served even in leadership in the early church. He’s listed really as one of the ministers in the church at Antioch.
The third one who is listed is Lucius of Cyrene. Now we know from Acts 11 that it was men from Cyprus and Cyrene who first came to Antioch, who first brought the Gospel to Antioch. And it’s possible that Lucius was one of these men who had left Cyrene and traveled to Antioch and who had been used by God to instruct and teach the church. He had a Roman name and probably a Roman origin himself.
And then the fourth man, whose name is Manaean, and it says that he was someone who was “a lifelong friend of Herod the tetrarch.” This is interesting because Herod the tetrarch, Herod Antipas, is the one who put John the Baptist to death. In fact, he was the one who was not only instrumental in the death of John the Baptist but he had a peripheral role in the death of Jesus Christ. The man from the most sophisticated part of society. Here’s one of his lifelong friends whom the Lord has saved. What different paths these men took. Herod the tetrarch putting John to death and Manaen serving in the church at Antioch.
And finally we have Saul. We know about Saul. Formerly a Pharisee of Pharisees, a persecutor of the church of God. He had been present at the stoning of Stephen and the Lord had gloriously converted him. What a remarkable, diverse group of men who gave leadership to this church at Antioch. What a remarkable sign of the grace of God being fulfilled just in the way that Jesus said it would be fulfilled, just in the way that Jesus commanded all nations represented here in this church at Antioch.
But I want you to notice too that it’s not only that attention is given to the leaders of the church but also to the priorities of this church, also to, as it were, the mission, the occupation of the church. What was the church doing in Antioch? Well the text tells us very clearly what the church was doing, what it’s priorities or core values were. What does it say here? It says in verse 2, “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting…” Simply put, these believers, this church, this mission-sending church led by those who taught them the Word of God, was a church that was worshiping God and seeking the Lord in prayer. I don’t think this should be any surprise. They were taught well. They had the Scriptures opened to them regularly. So what did they learn from that? How did the Holy Spirit use that? Well the Holy Spirit used it to promote in them a desire to worship their God and to seek Him in prayer.
You know, worship, true worship of God is one of the dividing lines in all of Scripture. It goes throughout the Bible from the very beginning to the very end. Those who are God’s people worship Him. And Jesus said, “The Father seeks worshipers who worship Him in Spirit and in truth.” And what could be said of this church in Antioch? It could be said that they heard the Word of God, they valued the Word of God, they prized the preaching of the Word, they prized the worship of God.
Notice not only were they worshiping the Lord, they were also fasting. This is indicative of the way in which their prayers were intensified for the building up of the kingdom of God. Of course in these times men and women would fast as they were praying and that gave some measure of intensity to their prayers. They were seeking the Lord earnestly in prayer, forsaking other things that might have otherwise been lawful or even good in order to pursue the Lord. This church was a praying church, and they weren’t just lifting up the request to the Lord. They were actively seeking Him.
I want to just stop here and look at this picture in verses 1 and 2 and ask you some questions. Are you prioritizing the hearing of the Word of God? Is that something you prize in your life? What would someone have to give you to give up your Bible? I hope the answer is that you wouldn’t give up the Word of God and the sound preaching of the Word of God for anything that anyone could offer you. Do you prize the Word of God? And then secondly, do you prize and value public worship of God? Is that something that is a priority for you? Is that something that anyone who knows you would say, “Oh yeah, he’s someone who loves to worship God. She is a worshiper of God.” And then we might also ask this question – “Are you praying? Do you pray earnestly, not just for your own needs but for the needs of the world? Are you seeking the Lord in prayer?” Is this description something that could be said of you?
What comes from all of this? What comes from all of this is of course is the church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, sets apart two of those teaching elders for the work of missions. Now who do they send? Look it says in verse 2 they set apart Barnabas and Saul. The Holy Spirit told them to set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work to which He had called them. Barnabas, who was perhaps their most senior leader, their most experienced, most gifted, most godly example in the church at Antioch. Barnabas is sent. And then Saul is sent. He is later on in this chapter called Paul, the man whom the Lord had transformed, a man whom the Lord had trained for three years after his conversion and perhaps another two years here in Antioch; a man trained by God for this great work. They didn’t send people who were unprepared or untrained. They didn’t send people who were of no use to them, and so they could therefore sacrifice to the peripheral work of evangelism. No, they sent two people who arguably would have been considered pillars of the church. “How can we live without Barnabas, and Paul, our most promising young man?” These are the men who are set apart by the Holy Spirit and are sent by the church.
Now it is one of the things that I face on a regular basis looking at men who are training for the ministry. So often men who are training for the ministry and the churches which support those men who are training for the ministry have a kind of attitude that, if a man is really gifted, well what he should do is he should stay here and he should preach or teach at a place that is high profile. That’s what his gifts warrant. Because the Lord has gifted him so well, he needs to stay and make use of those gifts in ways that we could easily see and that will be richly rewarded. That’s not what happens here. That’s not actually the template that we have in the Scriptures. One of the old Presbyterian teachers that we have spoke to candidates for the ministry and he said that many of them will say, “I am going to prepare to serve the Lord but I want to serve the Lord here unless I am especially moved to go somewhere else.” And he said really anyone who harbors this isn’t fit to be a candidate for the Gospel ministry at all.
I want you to notice as well that these were men who were ordained for this task by the church. It ties in with what we saw earlier in verse 1. This is a work of the church of Jesus Christ. Missions is the role of the church and men who are qualified are sent by the church and this is the way in which God ordinarily works to fulfill His great commission. But did you know there is something else that we need to notice here. In fact, it’s really the most important thing to notice in these three verses. This whole thing, this whole undertaking of the church to send men out to fulfill the Great Commission and to embrace the promises that Jesus Christ gives to His people, this whole endeavor is a work of God from beginning to end. These three verses do give us a kind of methodology but they are more than methodological. They are really theological. Look at verse 1. The teachers are proclaiming the Word of God, the prophecy of Scripture. In verse 2, all the people are worshiping the Lord and the Holy Spirit is at work calling some of them to missions. In verse 3, the setting apart is not in an HR office but in the church of Jesus Christ as the men who are sent have hands laid on them in the midst of fasting and prayer.
And that’s why in verse 4, if you look down to verse 4, it says these were men being sent out by the Holy Spirit of God. And then in verse 5 you see they proclaim the Word of God. And in verse 12, when the men in Cyprus, the proconsul of Cyprus believes, it says he was “astonished at the teaching of the Lord.” This is the great thing that we must keep in mind whenever we consider missions. It is a work of the church and it is a work about which the Lord has given us clear instructions, but it is ultimately a work of God Himself. We are, if nothing else when it comes to missions, we are completely committed to the fact that this is a supernatural undertaking. We can derive our methodology from Scripture, and we must derive our methodology from Scripture, but we are dependent upon the Lord. When we look at Acts 13 and these men who are sent out, we are looking at men who had a real and true knowledge of the living God and we are looking at a church that was filled with people who actually had a living knowledge of their Creator. These are men who could say, “I am crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God.”
So I ask you, as you look at this description, do you have this knowledge of God? Do you know God in this saving way so that those words uttered by these men are words that you could utter honestly yourself? “I know this God. This God has saved me.” If this is not true of you, if you couldn’t say this, then I want to plead with you as a minister of Christ in the clearest way I can that Jesus Christ offers Himself to sinners. He offers freedom from guilt, forgiveness of sins, hope for the future and meaning and purpose of life right now as you are guided and filled with His Holy Spirit whom He promised to pour out on His people. Perhaps you are a Christian and you are looking at this passage. You know God. And I would say to you, is the God who is described here, the God who is at work in the great task of missions from this first sending church on, is He the God that you know today? I think it’s true to say that we very often have much too small a view of God. The knowledge of God rests lightly upon us. But this God, this God who is at work in the church, in Acts 13, is a God whose power enabled His people to go to Cyprus in Acts 13 and Poseidon Antioch and Iconium and Lystra and then to Macedonia and the places like Galatia and Philippi and Thessalonica and Berea and Athens and Corinth and Ephesus and Rome, and in the fullness of time to places like Jackson, Mississippi. This is an utterly supernatural work of our great Creator God.
And that’s why when we enter heaven and we see gathered before the throne people from every tribe and tongue and nation and we reflect on the promises of Christ and the Great Commission that He has given to the church, and we think about the way in which He used vessels like us to fulfill that commission in our day, we have to declare what this paragraph declares for us – to God alone be the glory and hallelujah, what a Savior. Let’s pray together.Our great God, we do come to You with gratitude in our hearts. We thank You that You have given us clarity in Your Word, clarity about what the church is supposed to look like, clarity about how it is that missions is to be done. O but Father, our thanks to You goes far beyond that because You have given us Your Spirit and You are at work to fulfill Your promises. May we today live in light of those promises that You have made to us, and in so doing, may we glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, amen.