It was great to be here this morning and it’s good to be back again tonight and see so many friends. We’re going to look tonight at Acts chapter 11. It’s backwards in the bulletin. You’ll see Acts 1, but that was this morning, and we’re on Acts 11 tonight. But that’s okay because actually it’s really one sermon in two parts, so they go together. This morning we looked at the fact that we’re on the mission, that there’s a primacy to that and that we have a calling to be witnesses to Jesus Christ and that we’ve been given a power for it, the power of the Spirit of Christ, and that it’s actually Jesus’ ministry in us as we do ministry today. And we’re going to talk about some of the same things we saw in Acts 1 because they’re right here in Acts 11, but tonight has a little more of a focus in Acts 11 on the corporate nature of that mission. So this morning really we focused a lot on the personal call to witness, and here we see a little bit more about the broader, corporate call to a church. And there’s lessons here for any church, whether it’s First Pres, or St. Columba’s in Edinburgh; whatever it might be. The relationship between Antioch and Jerusalem churches that you’re about to see says a lot; it teaches us something. So we’ll pray and then we’ll read Acts 11 and we’re going to read verses 19 to 26. And this prayer as we read Scripture is from Psalm 143:10. So let’s pray this together.
Lord, teach us to do Your will, for You are our God. Let Your good Spirit lead us now on level ground. And we ask for this especially as we hear Your Word, and we pray this in Christ’s name, amen.
So chapter 11, verses 19 to 26:
“Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Hellenists also, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord. The report of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a great many people were added to the Lord. So Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. For a whole year they met with the church and taught a great many people. And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians.”
This passage, like most of the book of Acts, is descriptive, not prescriptive. So it doesn’t tell us exactly what to do or think. It tells us what happened. But nevertheless it’s God’s Word. We come to the book of Acts and in the midst of the description we can learn, we can find prescription at the same time. And when you look at the church in Antioch, one of the things that we see that ultimately is they are learning here for the first time in history, the Jerusalem church, the Antioch church, what it means to be a church that’s both in and for a city and for the worldwide mission at the same time. To be all about the local mission and also about the worldwide mission simultaneously. That those things actually go together. And so three lessons here to see tonight. There’s the call in this passage to be catholic – bear with me. There’s the call to Jesus’ simplicity. And there’s a call here on the church to be empty and hungry. Alright, so let’s think about that.
The Call to Catholicity
First, the call to catholicity. The point of Acts 11 in the text, specifically the section we just read, is to show how the Antioch church was established and became the hub church for the mission that would go to Europe, present-day Europe as we call it, and that would happen through Barnabas. This church is going to send Paul and Barnabas to Europe ultimately and all the churches we listed in the countries this morning come out, really, of the Antiochian church in this moment. We saw this morning, chapter 1 verse 8, the thesis. You, we are the witnesses of Christ from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth. The Antioch church is the historical moment where the ends of the earth section of that thesis starts. This is the beginning of that movement. It’s no longer Jerusalem, Judea or Samaria. Now in Antioch we have moved to the ends of the earth. We are going beyond those lands. And they’re going to send the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
Now this church here got planted 1,990 years ago, approximately. And here we are, we’re still working on this. We’re still doing what they started. We’re taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth – Mississippi and all over the world. And it makes sense that Antioch would become this, as a lot of commentators will say, this hub for the great mission to the Gentiles. And it makes sense because Antioch is not very well known now, but at the time it was the Roman military capital of the East and it was called, popularly, “The Queen of the East.” It was one of the great cities of the Roman Empire. And it was previously a capital of its own empire around 300-200 BC until it’s going to get conquered just a little after that by the Romans. It was about 500,000 people, about the same size as the Jackson-metro. It had a very distinct city-center, aqueducts, public baths, temples, a lot of culture both good and very bad. And we actually have poetry from the first century about Antioch. And that poetry is written all about the roughness of the city. How well it was known for its criminality, it’s very public sin in the middle of the city-center. And it’s location, it’s size, it makes it a perfect place for the mission to the ends of the earth to begin. And that’s exactly what happened. One scholar says that, “The Christians there caught the vision of the empire-wide mission and Paul would be the one who would mostly carry it out and Antioch was the sponsoring church.”
Now New Testament scholars – though there’s debate about this – they will often say that when you look throughout the book of Acts you see that there is a historical development of churches like Antioch, Jerusalem, Antioch, and eventually Rome, and that these are in large measure hub churches that become well-known throughout the empire at the time for being very, very focused on sending, on planting churches, on sending the Gospel wherever they could sent it. So they were both deadly serious about the mission that was local, but at the same time they became what we would now call resource churches. They were churches that were sending people all over the place. Now we have to be careful about that and looking too much for that in the book of Acts because every single church is called to that same exact mission, right? But it’s also historically a reality that God has chosen in certain places to develop churches that have a very particular sense of being hub churches – of churches that plant, of churches that send. And it’s not secret that First Pres Jackson is one of those churches. It’s a hub church. It’s the reason that this missions week happens and you bring back all sorts of people that you’ve sent. I’m one of them, and I’m grateful for that. And St. Columba’s is like that too. St. Columba’s in Edinburgh is about the same age as First Pres Jackson is and both, because of their location – capital cities in the very center of that capital, being old and historic, at least now are places that make sense for being sending churches. While all are, there are some that especially take up that calling and plan and send all over the world.
Now that’s not the main point of the passage, but it’s a reality and it makes sense that this is how the ends of the earth movement began right here in Antioch. But what we learn in what happened, descriptively, is something of a mindset for hub churches especially, but for all churches, a mindset we can learn from the relationship here between Antioch and Jerusalem. And to see that, you’ve got to back up just a little bit in verse 19 and get the backstory. So in verse 19, it refers to “those that were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen.” Now this has taken us all the way back to chapter 7. And in chapter 7, you will remember that Stephen was, in chapter 8, ultimately murdered. He was one of the first deacons and he was the first martyr of the church. And he was murdered by none other than Paul. Paul was the head of a group that stoned Stephen. And it said at the end of chapter 8 that Paul approved of Stephen’s execution and that he carried on from there ravaging and dragging people out of their homes. That’s the verbs that are used. Those are verbs that are usually reserved for animality in the Greek texts. They have the connotation of a wolf. So he would go into homes – he did it to Stephen – and he would bite him, ravage him, and then drag him – that’s the verbs – by the leg. And that means Paul hated the Gospel and he hated the Christians. And the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church. You see, it was Paul’s ravaging and raging, his murderous, violent heart, that sent the Gospel to the ends of the earth. It says here in verse 19 that Saul’s hatred for the Christians, that God used to send the church to Antioch. They left Jerusalem – why? Because they were afraid of the persecution. And they get to Antioch and all of a sudden Antioch becomes the hub for the worldwide mission.
And First Pres Jackson exists in a long path because of Antioch. We could, if somebody could – God can – trace it all the way back to planter after planter after planter, all the way back to this moment here at Antioch. Oh boy – what a redemption story! The worldwide mission kicks off because Saul murders Stephen. And Saul, at the end of this passage, verse 26, becomes the apostle that will disciple the Antiochian Christians and teach them what it means to live the Christian life. This church will send Paul to be the primary missionary to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Oh boy – you never know what God’s going to do at any given moment, with any given event, even as bad and tragic as it might be. He did something here.
And when they got to Antioch in verse 20, we see that some people were speaking not just to Jews but to the Hellenists, to Greek-speaking, non-Jews. And this is the big point. This is the primary idea. It makes sense of just the previous story where Peter, at the end of the passage, verse 18, says that God has declared that the Gospel is for the Gentiles. Now here we are after Saul murdered Stephen, these people have traveled far and wide and now they are, for the first time, telling the Gospel, it says, “preaching Jesus,” to Hellenists, to people who are not Jewish, to Greek speakers. And this is the mindset – it’s simple, it’s old hat to you, you know it but it really is one of the main messages of the entire book of Acts. And that is, that the Gospel is for everybody. The Gospel is for everybody. It’s for all kinds of people, all types of people, and the church has got to keep a mindset and a focus – especially the hub church – that the Gospel is for everybody. For every type of person, class of person, every nationality. Where do we want to plant churches? Where do the Antiochian Christians and us want to take the Gospel? The simple question is just – Where do people live? And that’s where hub churches especially have the mindset that that’s where we want to take the Gospel.
Now what that means – here we are at our point. This is our long point, by the way. The Gospel is, what it means is the Gospel is catholic. Not Roman Catholic. They don’t own that word. That word is much bigger, much more important. The Gospel is catholic, meaning that it’s scope – the word “catholic” just means that it’s universal. It’s for everyone and it’s got to go everywhere. And that’s the mission of the church. But there’s also another way that you look across the New Testament and realize that the Gospel is catholic and that’s in a way that you might not first think, but the Gospel is catholic in that Jesus Christ is doing a universal work, as God declared in John 3:16 – “God so loved the whole world that He gave His only begotten Son.” But that’s not just every person. That’s not just that it should go everywhere, but also that the Gospel came to fix every problem. The Gospel has a catholic scope in that it actually addresses everything that the world faces.
You can think about it maybe in this way. Sin in a catholic problem. Sin, from the very beginning, enters into the world. Bavinck says that, “Sin affects much, in fact, everything.” And Jesus Christ comes into the world to affect much, in fact, everything. He comes to bring a catholic Gospel. Just think about it. If you say – you do say; this is reality – “I struggle with guilt because I’m guilty” – Jesus Christ is your justification. And then you say, “I struggle with shame because my sin has caused shame,” Jesus Christ restores the fullness of the identity of the image of God in us. We say, “I struggle with pride because I’m a human being.” We all do. And Jesus first comes into the world in the incarnation and lays us low. His incarnation is our judgment first, but then the low are exalted in Him when they’re united to Him in the resurrection. We have the problem of justice – that we have committed injustice and we live in an unjust world. And Jesus Christ comes to set free the prisoner to sin; to set the captives free. We face the problem of personal suffering and evil that’s committed against us and the misery of life and tragedy all around us, and Jesus came and He was swallowed up by the problem of evil and yet He defeated it from the inside. We face the problem of spiritual powers, of darkness all around us, the demonic and Satan. Jesus Christ came and He defeated Satan from the inside.
And you see, the Gospel, Jesus Christ came to save the world. He came to fix in a holistic way the problems that our sin has cost us. And that means that Jesus Christ is the holistic solution. He brings a holistic salvation. And here in the book of Acts, we learn that this Gospel is catholic. It’s got to go to everybody because it’s for the world. God so loved the world. Now if the Gospel is catholic – last thing here and then we’ll move on – the church, the church is called to be catholic too. And we confess that in the Apostles’ Creed. We say that the church is catholic. That’s not only a reality but a calling at the very same time. And you can see this in a couple of ways in our passage. In verse 22, for example, the report of what was happening in Antioch came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. Now there is so much packed into that first clause because it doesn’t say the drama that occurred that we learn about later in the book of Acts. By the time you get to Acts 15, you realize that there were a lot of people in Jerusalem who said, “We’re not interested in this thing going anywhere else. We’re not interested in those people. We think that the Messiah came just for us. We don’t necessarily want to see this spreading. We’re not sure what to think about that.” They weren’t excited about the work.
And then, packed into this tiny little clause, the Jerusalem church, the apostles there, prevailed and they sent Barnabas to Antioch to say, “We care about what God is doing anywhere He might do it. We’re not only out the local, we’re about the local – we’re very serious about local ministry – and at the same time, we want to be a part of anywhere that God might call us to help spread the word of the Gospel. And this is the mindset of the catholic church, the church catholic. The mindset of a hub church especially.
And let me close with this. I think there’s a lot we could say, lessons that come out of that reality, but one is this. It helps us to remember that the mission of God is bigger than any one institution. Bigger than any one single local church. That local churches are so critical and important and beautiful, but they as an institution are not the mission. They exist for the mission. You know, so I don’t exist to serve St. Columba’s, but I serve in St. Columba’s for the sake of the mission of God. And you as well here at First Pres. And seeing the catholic scope of the reality of the Gospel and the church helps us to remember that God has put us here or there or wherever you are in the world to be deadly serious about local ministry and also wonderfully excited about anything God might do anywhere that He might do it.
The Call to Jesus’ Simplicity
Now secondly and more briefly, there’s also in the light of this calling that we have to be as corporate bodies, families, institutional churches, to be serious about the local ministry, to be serious about the worldwide ministry at the same time, that witness, I think there’s a help here and a call to Jesus’ simplicity. This morning we talked about how difficult it is to talk about Jesus Christ in the late modern world we live in. And it really can be very challenging. And I think there’s a gift here across the book of Acts but it shows up right here and it’s in Paul’s letters. And that’s a certain type of simplicity. And the simplicity is this – to know that both the local ministry and the worldwide ministry has a simple focus on Jesus. And again, just like the previous point, you say, “I know that. I know that the Gospel is for everybody, and I know that the simple focus is on Jesus.” But it really matters. It’s very important. Let me show you just a couple of things. In verse 26, an amazing moment where we learn that it’s at Antioch when the church is about to spread to the whole world that Christians are first called Christians. And the word “Christian” just really means “a person who follows Jesus.” So they’re being called that by outsiders. And so the way that these first Christians in Antioch are known is simply as “the ones over there that follow Jesus.” There’s a real simplicity about that. They’re just the ones that are following Jesus.
But also in verse 20 – and this is the main idea – they go and they talk to the Hellenists, to the Greeks, and what did they do? It says that they literally heralded the Lord Jesus. They proclaimed the Lord Jesus like a news messenger, like a newspaper, heralded it. They preached the Lord Jesus. Now when you come to the apostle Paul, he says, 1 Corinthians, “I preach Christ and Him crucified.” Richard Gaffin, one of the great New Testament scholars of our time, he says that when the apostle Paul refers to the crucifixion in his letters, “I preach Christ and His crucifixion,” it’s a synecdoche. It’s synecdochal. You remember that one from what grade grammar was that? We talked about eleventh grade this morning. Maybe that was eighth, ninth grade? Synecdoche. It’s when you use a word but you mean lots more than just what the word means. So Gaffin and others have said that when Paul says, “I preach Christ crucified,” he is including in that crucifixion word incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, all of it; that it’s all built into that proclamation of Jesus Christ, right there in the midst of just the word “crucifixion.”
Now here’s why, I think for us that is very important. Because when we go out into the world in Jackson and wherever God might send us, and we talk to people about Jesus, which we saw this morning – that’s the mission; the specific mission – talk to people about Jesus – especially for late modern people, what’s going to happen when you do the work of fellowship and you put people at your table and the conversations eventually start to come and you really do lay out the Gospel message, what they’re going to do is, people – maybe you’re here today, you’re struggling with these questions, it’s very legitimate. They’re going to say, “Okay, but what about the violence in the Old Testament?” They’re going to say, “What about all the questions that the scientists have brought up about the origins of the universe? What about the problem of the question of marriage and who can be married? What about the problem of gender?” All of these things are going to come up from most late modern people. The world of indifferent secularism. These are the kind of questions that are going to get raised. And Christianity has the answers to that, absolutely, and good ones. And there is a freedom, I think, in the New Testament to remember that you are called to Jesus’ simplicity – to preach, herald the testimony, as we saw this morning, the message of Jesus.
And Paul actually does this. He helps us a lot because in 1 Corinthians 15, he kind of whittles the evangelistic call down and he says at the end of the day, “Did Jesus Christ walk out of the grave on the third day or not?” That was really the final question. That’s Jesus’ simplicity. There are answers to those questions and those are all hard things, but did Jesus Christ, did He die and did a man in the middle of history come back to life? And if He did, I’ve got to believe everything He believed in. If a man did that who claimed He was God and He really did come back from the grave, then we can get to those questions, but if you don’t believe that, the rest is futile. There’s no point in talking about it. There is a real invitation in that reality. No matter how hard evangelism gets, no matter where you might take the mission to a Jesus simplicity – let me wrap up. That means that we’ve got to be sharp on what the Gospel is. We’ve got to really know the Gospel and understand it and be able to articulate it. We’ve got to know that the Gospel is – we are saved by the work of Christ and not our work.
And we’ve also got to be able to contextualize that to a degree. We mentioned that this morning, but you see, they’re talking to the Hellenists, and we see all throughout the book of Acts that when they’re talking to the Greek speakers or the Jews, Hebraic, Aramaic speakers, all different types of people, Roman, pagans, whatever it might be that Paul and Barnabas and others speak the Gospel not with compromise but in a way that the listener can really hear it. And so there’s a certain type of contextualization that has to go on here.
The missiologists, the Christian missiologists will often try to do the work of talking about a broad view of what drives a culture. And so whenever a missionary like Paul and others will take the Gospel to a place in the world, they have to do a lot of thinking about what drives this culture. What are most people unaware of, yet being driven by? What assumptions? What desires? And one of the things that you’ll see really commonly is this sort of whittling down to three basic cultures. And they are first, one, focused on guilt and justice – so that’s a culture where everybody knows they are a sinner in some respect; that there’s something wrong with them. And then there’s the culture that’s focused on shame and honor. And that’s a culture where people are most concerned about the problem of carrying on the legacy of people who have come before them. They want to carry forth the community ideals and honor their parents and their family. It’s very communal. The first is more individual. Then there’s the culture that’s fear based. So it’s concerned about disasters, about the curse of the world, about famine, about earthquake, about demonic forces, witchcraft, spiritual powers. There’s cultures that center everything around that problem.
But now, the missiologists – you don’t need to be taught this by missiologists; you know this – there’s a new kid on the block and it is indifferent secularism. And in indifferent secularism, which is very late, it’s very recent in human history, it’s very different because indifferent secularism starts from the premise that “I don’t have any spiritual needs. I’m an individual and my problem is simply to curate and create my identity.” And so there’s a call to contextualization today because we have to be able to help people in the late modern world that we live in see that they have a deep spiritual need, that guilt is very real, and that Jesus Christ is the only way.
Now let’s conclude here and say simply this. Simply this. Jesus simplicity. There is a call to contextualization. We see it in the Bible. Jesus did it. He preached the Gospel in unique ways to different people – the woman at the well, Nicodemus. And we have to do it as a family, as an individual, as a church body – Where are we? Where has God put me? And how do we best take the Gospel to the people around us, wherever God has put us? And at the same time, it’s very common and very easy to get so bogged down in the questions of contextualization that we forget Jesus’ simplicity. And at the end of the day, you’re actually very free. You’re free to just go talk about Jesus. The New Testament frees you to just say, “Did a man walk out of the grave on the third day in the middle of history? And are you willing to believe that? To put your faith and stake your hope in that?” And if He did, then you’ve got to give Him everything. And that’s actually the simple message that we can take to the world.
The Call to be Empty and Hungry
Lastly, let’s close with this. There’s a call here also in the Jerusalem church, the Antiochian church, to be an empty and a hungry church. Very simple. It’s the same point that we made this morning at the end. We need mission power. And the power that Antioch had to establish a church, to take that Gospel to the ends of the earth, to present-day Europe and all the way to Jackson, Mississippi eventually – where did it come from? How did this happen? When you look closely at the details of what’s going on in Antioch, there’s a word I think that’s appropriate. And it’s the word revival. There’s a revival happening. Many people suddenly coming to faith through an intense work of the Holy Spirit. But how did it happen? Historically we already said how it happened. It happened because Paul murdered Stephen. And that’s why the Antiochian church was born from a mere historical understanding. That’s what creates it. But why did it really happen? What’s the objective reality underneath that historical fact that made this happen? And its’ very simple. Again, it’s in verse 21. It says, “The hand of the Lord was with them.” And so the reason that this revival, this intense work of the Spirit could take place and the Gospel could go to the ends of the earth, is because the hand of the Lord was there and with them. I think there’s a simple call here, again, to be a hub church, a church that is both deadly serious about the local ministry and also about the worldwide ministry. And also to take on the character of first saying, “And we are empty.” We’re empty. If the hand of the Lord doesn’t come and do anything and be with us, then we can built it but it will be in vain, Psalm 127:1. And that means there is a call to realize our emptiness and therefore a call to be desperately hungry for God to do something, to be here, to do a great work, to go into our city and send us and let us be His instruments.
There’s just an illustration as we conclude. There is an amazing moment happening in Scotland right now. Some of you may be aware of it. It’s been international news. But just ten days ago or so our First Minister resigned. It’s essentially the Prime Minister role for Scotland. And when that happened, the question of course became, “Who is going to be the next First Minister, the head of the state?” And all of a sudden, in a place that has very few Christians and is advanced in the world of indifferent secularism, the frontrunner as of today is a member of the Free Church of Scotland, the denomination in which I serve. We are a tiny, tiny little Christian denomination and church in the midst of Scotland. And not only that, she is a woman of great public faith who lives out Christianity and believes in Jesus Christ. Now I don’t want to talk about politics. I’m not talking about the political aspect of it. I simply want to say that all of a sudden in a place that’s been hard to reach people, Christianity is on the front page of every paper every single day. And even this morning there was a story of an interview of one of my friends in Dundee, a church planter. And the question has now become, “What is the Free Church and what do they believe? What does this woman believe in?” And so today on the front page of the Times or Herald, I can’t remember, it had a whole section – “They believe the Gospel.” And the Gospel of Jesus Christ was laid out on the very front page of the primary Scottish paper. I don’t know what God’s going to do with it, but it feels like a great reversal, but there’s a lot of people who are really upset about it and a lot of people that are having hope in it.
Now we are praying for revival right now for that, an intensification of the work of the Holy Spirit is something we didn’t expect. And I know that, I think the entire theme a couple years ago was “Revival,” was focusing on prayer. You see what this means? If there is one lesson from this passage, it’s that we’ve got to come to God in corporate, committed, kingdom-centered prayer because prayer is the means that God has chosen to give to us by which He loves to bless, to bring His hand into the space that we are ministering. And that means that above all, we are invited tonight to commit ourselves to the mission by committing to kingdom centric prayer in the coming year.
Let’s pray and ask God to help us.
Lord, we want to be people of prayer because we want the hand of the Lord to come down. And Lord, we see that You use tragedy, You use Paul’s ravaging and raging. You use totally unexpected political shifts. You use all sorts of things to begin moments where there is an intensification of Your holy work. And so we do ask for that. We ask for that for Jackson. We ask for that in the midst of the ordinary means of grace. We don’t ask for anything unique except for an intensification of the work of the Spirit in that very space. And so You did it in Antioch. You’ve done it all throughout history. And we long for it here. Send us as instruments wherever we are – in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods, and in this great city, Jackson and it’s metro. And so we pray for this now in Christ’s name, amen.