Acts 12:24-13:47 | When God Works a Work

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Take your Bibles again and open them to the Book of Acts, that long, long section that Anton had to read, I get to preach.

Hope you're ready for a few hours.

No, there's way too much here in the book of Acts and Acts chapter 13 for us to cover it in great detail.

Acts 13 · chapter mention

But there is a lot that helps us understand what's going on in God's program, what's going on in the book of Acts, and what needs to go on in the local church that we find in Acts chapter 13.

Acts 13 · chapter mention

And as he often does, the Lord has led us to a passage in the book of Acts that prepares us well to partake in the Lord's table together.

We'll do that a little bit later.

The end of Acts 12 here actually begins a much larger section that goes all the way through chapter 15.

So at the end of chapter 12, there's these three guys, Paul, Barnabas, and John Mark, and they're initiating a new movement of ministry in a new region of the world.

That goes all the way through the end of chapter 15, where they return back to the city of Jerusalem, where the leaders of the church have to decide what do we do with this new movement.

This is just the very beginning of that.

It's sometimes called Paul's first missionary journey.

I don't think that's the best term because Paul was doing ministry before this.

But it starts in Antioch, north of Jerusalem, on the seacoast of the Mediterranean Sea, in Syrian Antioch, and includes stops in several locations until they end up in what amounts to about central modern-day Turkey.

That's the summary of Acts chapter 13.

Acts 13 · chapter mention

This section is the beginning of a history of church missions, displaying the progress of the good news of Jesus.

It applies to us.

Sometimes we think that history is hard to apply to us.

This does apply to us, but to correctly apply it, I think we need to remember what Luke is doing.

He is recounting how Jesus is acting in his world.

Specifically, Luke is recording it to encourage his benefactor by the name of Theophilus.

He wants to take this man and bolster his faith, his confidence in the work that God is doing.

So in this section, Luke wanted Theophilus and by extension, us to be confident about God's international work.

Jesus is the God of the Jews.

And he's the God of non-Jews or Gentiles as well.

He's not only the King of the Jews, but he's the king of all who put their faith and trust in him.

So this section of Acts, even though it sounds a little pedantic, where you go here and then here and then here, it recounts how powerfully transformative God's work is.

So I've said before that this New Testament book does not recount the acts of the apostles, but God's acts.

Luke tells the story of God working.

Now I want you to look with me at more towards the middle of the chapter for a moment before we really dive into some of the details.

Look at Acts chapter 13 and verse 41.

Acts 13 · chapter mention

Luke.

Luke does something interesting here in his quoting of the Apostle Paul's sermon.

In this section, beginning in verse 41, the Apostle Paul is quoting from the book of Habakkuk.

And he says, Look, you scoffers, be astounded and perish.

For I'm doing a work in your days, a work that you will not believe, even if one tells you.

Now in Habakkuk, the object of God's work was the pagan Babylonian army.

He was sending the Babylonians to discipline his people, Israel.

They were instruments of God's wrath and God's judgment.

And he says, Listen, you're not going to believe this, even if I tell you.

The Apostle Paul grabs that sense and brings it into his sermon to the Jewish people in the middle of Asia Minor, and he switches out the object.

It's no longer the Babylonians, it's the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul says that what was happening in those days was a similar, astonishing work with Jesus as the object, not in judgment, but in salvation.

He even emphasizes it.

He adds an extra word.

It doesn't really work well in English, but it looks a little bit like this if we were to translate it literally.

I am working a work in your days that you will not believe, even if someone told you.

This is the theme of the book of Acts.

God is working a work.

Will it be believed?

Will it be received?

That divine work takes on a distinctly inclusive form at this stage in the Acts narrative.

God's people include more and more and more non-Jews.

In part because of a Jewish rejection to the gospel, and in part because of Gentile faith in God's work.

Now, in this section, Luke recounts four components of God's work.

These components are integral to effective mission work by the local church.

Now he doesn't command us, Luke doesn't command us to develop these elements in our mission programs today.

But we have to know how powerfully and purposefully God grounded his work of taking the gospel to the world in these four components.

The end of chapter 12 sets the stage.

Anton started a little bit later at the end of chapter 12 than I want to start.

Look with me at verse 24 of chapter 12.

But the word of God increased and multiplied.

And Barnabas and Saul returned from Jerusalem.

Luke records that the word of God increased and multiplied.

Now remember, that comes after Peter has been imprisoned, and an angel then released him.

Not everything is rosy for the church.

Nevertheless, the word of God is powerful and effective, and the preaching and the teaching of God's word increases.

An attempt to squash the expression of the word of God only makes it spread more rapidly.

Meanwhile, Barnabas and Saul delivered an offering for the poor in Jerusalem, and they're returning now to Antioch in Syria, and another young man, John Mark, comes with them.

Luke now turns his attention from Jerusalem to Antioch.

In God's work, this local church in Syrian Antioch becomes the foundation for the Lord's work to reach the ends of the earth.

So notice with me four components of God's work that by application are integral parts of an effective mission work.

The first one is that God's work included a faithful church.

God's work included a faithful church.

We see this in verses 1, 2, and 3 of chapter 13.

The assembly of believers in Jesus in the Syrian city of Antioch was faithful.

And Luke reveals here four characteristics of their faithfulness.

Again, we can't go into a lot of detail about any of these things, so I'm going to be moving quickly through these.

Number one, they were faithful to the Word of God.

Remember that in chapter 12, verse 24, Luke places this within the boundaries of the Word of God flourishing.

The testimony and the proclamation of Jesus, the Word, is increasing.

And we're told in Antioch there were prophet teachers.

The English Standard Version says prophets and teachers.

I think it's more likely that we should translate that as a hyphen, prophet, hyphen teacher teachers.

That is, there's not two different kinds of people, prophets and teachers.

There are one kind of person who is a prophet teacher.

Throughout Scripture, prophets occasionally foretold the future as part of divine revelation.

But a prophet's primary duty is to proclaim the word of God, to say what God has said.

They were preachers and teachers.

The church in Antioch was blessed with a collection of disciples who led the people in the proclamation and the teaching of the Word of God.

They were faithful to the Word.

And God, in return, was faithful to them, establishing them in the Word.

They were faithful to the Word.

They also faithfully demonstrated the power of God's multi-ethnic work in their leadership.

Lukel's five prophet teachers: Barnabas, Simeon, Lucius, Mannean, and Saul.

Barnabas, you'll remember, was a Levite Jew from the island of Cyprus, which makes him what we call a Hellenistic Jew, a kind of a Greek Jew.

He was a Jewish person with a Greek background.

We're not told of Simeon's background, but Luke does tell us that he was called Niger, which is a Latin term meaning black or dark.

That probably indicates he was originally from the coast of North Africa.

Some would even say he may be the person who carried Jesus' cross on the way to Golgotha.

We can't be sure about that.

Lucius, we're told, is from Cyrene, another location on the coast of North Africa.

Menaeon grew up in the same household as Herod the Tetrarch.

This is the Herod who tried to kill the infant Jesus.

We're not told if they were related, if he was a stepbrother or whatever, but the term that Luke uses is a very specific term that indicates they grew up together in the same house.

We have Saul, a Hellenistic Jew from Tarsus who was trained as a Pharisee, who supported the murder of Christians.

You see the diversity of people?

You have wealthy people, you have people from various ethnicities, you have people from scattered regions around the Mediterranean world.

But this isn't diversity for diversity's sake.

Luke is showing us how the gospel has progressed.

Within a decade or so of Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection, a local church is led by a diverse group of men impacted by the gospel.

They come together to serve the Lord uniquely.

And they also faithfully interacted together with their sovereign Lord.

We're shown that they are immersed in the ministry of the word through teaching and prayer and worship.

They're immersed in offering themselves to the Lord through fasting.

This altogether readies them to hear and respond to God's work, which is the last element of their faithfulness.

They listen and respond to the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit in verse 2 says to them, Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I've called them.

We aren't told here how the Spirit spoke.

That is, was it an audible sound that they could all hear?

Was it an inward impression?

Was it some kind of voice in their minds that they heard?

We're not told that.

But Luke clarifies that God the Spirit is initiating a work of God.

And this church responds.

God leads and the people respond.

God directs and the people send.

God did an incredible work and he used a faithful church to do that work.

Now again, Luke isn't giving us a prescription for how to do mission.

But by application, we cannot deny that God chose to work through a local church that was faithfully word-centered and Christ-focused and lived out the power of the gospel.

That would be a good pattern to emulate.

In verse 4, we move on to a second component, which is God's work included faithful witnesses.

Luke recounts their faithfulness in three ways.

The first way that he recounts their faithfulness is that Paul and Barnabas first went somewhere familiar.

They went somewhere familiar.

Barnabas, again, from a priestly family on the island of Cyprus.

Where are they going?

They sail to home.

Barnabas goes home.

The very first stop on their mission work was a location with the same language, the same culture, and the same community that was familiar to at least Barnabas.

Notice then that God first used what the church had.

He just took who they were and used that.

A faithful church had faithful witnesses, and God used their particular backgrounds to further the gospel.

There's nothing special.

God uses his people in ways that he's already prepared them to serve.

That's a way that God has used faithful witnesses.

The second characteristic that we see here about their faithfulness is that Paul and Barnabas starkly contrasted the unfaithful false prophet.

I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to get this map big enough.

Since we're all low on sleep this morning, I figured I needed to have pictures to keep us all on track here.

So you can see there that in the bottom right-hand corner is the city of Sidon.

Further down from that is Jerusalem.

So way up in the corner, you see Antioch there.

Antioch is set back a little bit from the Mediterranean Sea, so the port itself was Seleucia.

They sail to the island of Cyprus.

They travel about 112 miles across the island of Cyprus, presumably speaking about Jesus as they go.

And then on the island's western side, they encountered a Jewish prophet named Son of Jesus.

He's Jewish, and in Hebrew the word bar means son.

He has bar Jesus, son of Jesus.

Luke calls him a false prophet.

Here's a man who is unfaithful to his people, who is unfaithful to his God and an enemy of the gospel.

So Paul correctly identifies the situation.

This false prophet is not the son of Jesus the Messiah, but a son of the devil.

While Paul, Barnabas, and Mark labor to guide people down the straight paths of the Lord, this son of the devil attempts to make them crooked, just like the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

And God confirms this contrast between the unfaithful and faithful Jews by blinding the false prophet.

As a result, Sergius Paulus became the first recorded Gentile convert of the Apostle Paul.

And he's a government official, no less.

Another way that Luke displays the faithfulness of his witnesses is God grants them fruit.

Their faithfulness resulted in Paul and Barnabas's first Gentile conversion mentioned in Scripture.

But notice how Luke records the details.

The proconsul in verse 12 was not impressed by the mighty miracle of blinding his false prophet.

No.

Instead, he was astonished at the Lord's teaching.

Luke establishes the early church and its mission in the proclamation of the word of God.

It's grounded in preaching and teaching of God's word.

So yet again, Luke bolsters our faith and trust in God's work, specifically in the power of his word to change people.

God has imbued his word with the capacity to change lives.

And Luke shows us how in the early church the people, the witnesses in their faithfulness trusted God's work through the power of his word.

They faithfully trusted that God would bring fruit from speaking his word.

So again, a proper application might include our trust in God's choice to use his power of his word through faithful witnesses.

Do you trust God to work through you by simply telling somebody what you heard in church on Sunday?

That is, if you're hearing what God's word says.

That is, can God work through his word in spite of your abilities or inabilities?

The answer is yes, he can.

Are we willing to trust in that?

The first mission trip in church history was built upon faithful witnesses speaking about Jesus and preaching and teaching the word of Christ.

That's how the word of God spread.

That's how the growth of the church occurred.

God worked an astounding work by expanding Christ's kingdom over Caesar's territory merely through speaking his word.

And that work continues today.

Of course, that means that faithful recipients of that word are needed.

And if we have faithful recipients of God's word, we're going to have unfaithful recipients.

Sergius Paulus was the first faithful recipient on the island of Cyprus.

Paul and Barnabas and Mark traveled to mainland Asia Minor, modern Turkey, from the island of Crete, at which point John Mark turned around and went home to Jerusalem.

So I think it's a little reddish, orangish line that goes from Cyprus north to Perga.

And then there's a green line that comes south.

South tracing John's trip back to Jerusalem.

Something caused John Mark to leave Paul and Barnabas.

Later in the book of Acts, we discover that Paul felt that Mark had abandoned them, had abandoned the work in an unfaithful kind of way.

But Paul and Barnabas went on to Antioch in Pisidia.

This is not Antioch in Syria.

This is a different Antioch.

This is likely one of the Galatian cities that Paul would later write to.

And here, Paul preaches one of the most extended sermons in Acts.

I think it might be the shortest, shortest sermon that Anton's ever preached when he read it.

Right, Anton?

Yeah?

Paul and Barnabas go to a synagogue and they're asked to have a word to say, and Paul preaches one of the longest sermons recorded in the book of Acts.

So Jews are the primary audience, with some Gentile God fearers present as well.

You remember Cornelius was a God fearer.

Somebody who believes in the Jewish God but has not converted to Judaism in whole.

Paul and Barnabas are allowed to encourage the people in verse 15.

And what would be more encouraging for a Levite and a Pharisee to do than to show these folks how the Old Testament points to Jesus?

That's the essence of Paul's sermon.

They read the law and the prophets, and so Paul shows them from the law and the prophets in the Psalms how it all points to Jesus.

We can't go into detail how Paul takes them from Israel's exodus to Christ's resurrection, but I want to highlight two distinct elements impacting this section where Luke recounts this sermon.

The first distinct element is the reaction to the Word of God.

Won't you see the reaction to the Word of God in Antioch?

Again, we are in initially a Jewish synagogue with a primarily Jewish audience with probably a handful of Gentile God fearers present.

And there are four reactions that we find in this section.

The first one is that the people asked in verse 42 with a sense of intensity to return the next Sunday, the next Saturday, I'm sorry, the next Sabbath to speak again.

Nothing that a preacher likes more than to be asked to say more.

Paul and Barnabas are enthusiastically invited to return the next Sabbath to say these things again.

That's the first reaction.

The second reaction is in verse 43 that many people responded positively to the message.

We're not told for sure specifically if they genuinely believed in Christ, but they were interested in the message in verse 43, and Paul encourages them to continue in the grace of God.

Verse 44 gives us the third reaction.

Almost the whole city gathers the next week to hear Paul and Barnabas.

That would make me a little bit nervous, but it'd be a pretty neat thing to have the whole city in our parking lot to hear the word of God next Sunday.

The fourth reaction is in verse 45.

There are unfaithful recipients.

The response of the city makes the Jews jealousy and antagonistic to the gospel.

Luke told us at the end of chapter 12 that the word of the Lord is expanding.

More and more people are hearing of Jesus.

Churches are springing up in more areas.

And if we look ahead to verse 49, Luke returns to that, saying the word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region, not just Antioch, but all around Antioch.

So Jews are the primary audience with some Gentile God fearers.

Paul and Barnabas are allowed to encourage the worshipers, and they do so by pointing to Jesus.

The result is the word of God is spreading and expanding, and people are being encouraged.

But some are antagonistic.

In spite of that, in verse 52, we read, and the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.

So we see then that people, in spite of the antagonism, are believing in Christ and becoming disciples.

The unbelieving Jews become resistant and obstinate to the gospel.

And in their antagonism and obstinence, they fulfill Habakkuk's prophecy in verse 41.

They were scoffers of the work that God was working.

In Habakkuk's time, they wouldn't believe that God was using the Babylonians.

In Antioch, they would not believe that God's Messiah would be crucified, buried, and raised to life for the forgiveness of sins of the Gentiles.

Wait, God wants to save them?

And this is how He's doing it?

Yeah, no.

We're not going to accept that.

But we have to see that God's word is more powerful than the opposition.

Some received the word joyfully and faithfully.

The word of God is still being resisted in this region today.

That's why some of our missionaries are being asked to leave the region.

But the word of God continues to expand because the word of God is powerful.

Why is that?

It's because of the final element that I want to point out in this chapter, and that is the content of God's message.

God's work included a saving savior.

God's bringing salvation through Jesus, the Savior, is a second distinct element in Paul's sermon that Luke weaves into this chapter in an emphatic way.

Let me show this to you as best I can in one slide here.

Notice in chapter 13, verse 23, where we read, God has brought to Israel a Savior.

Who?

Jesus.

Not bar Jesus, but Jesus, the Son of David, as God promised.

Verse 26.

To us, to the Jews, has been sent this message of salvation.

When they reject it, Paul says, Great, what Isaiah said applies to us, where God said, I've made you a light for the Gentiles that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.

There is a Savior that's being proclaimed who brings salvation to the people.

The gospel message includes God's promise and fulfillment of that promise.

It includes Christ's rejection, his death, and his resurrection.

It includes the confirmation of all of that by many people, all in Paul's sermon, including the apostles.

This is the good news, verse 32.

We bring you the evangel, the good news, that what God has promised has come.

All this has been fulfilled.

This is the astonishing work that God has worked, all in the face of Caesar.

All in the face of Caesar.

You see, Paul and Barnabas are in Antioch in Pisidia, which was the location of an Augusteum.

An Augusteum was a temple built to worship Caesar Augustus as God and Savior.

Augustus had established the city as a Roman colony when he settled a whole bunch of Roman soldiers in the city.

They promptly built a temple to worship Augustus as our God and Savior.

Every month on the 23rd of the month, sacrifices were offered at the Augusteum in honor of Augustus.

And on his birthday on September 23rd, there was a whole celebration to honor Caesar Augustus as God and Savior.

Here's Augustus.

But Augustus was dead.

And Jesus, the true Savior, died, was raised, and is alive forever.

And he brings forgiveness and justification to all who believe.

That's the incredible work that God worked.

Paul's mission was to call everyone who would listen to him to believe in this word of God.

And you must believe too.

That is the church's mission to proclaim the word of God that God has promised, that God has fulfilled, announcing the good news of the astounding work of God to justify sinners through the saving work of the divine Savior, Jesus the Messiah, not Caesar Augustus, not any other person.

God's astounding work in Acts has one extraordinary component.

To declare sinners righteous.

And to offer the forgiveness of sins that now welcomes Gentiles through faith in the Savior King.

That's the work that God works.

And as we've seen, there are there are faithful recipients of that message and unfaithful recipients of that message.

So hopefully this all makes sense now in the context of verse 41, and why the Apostle Paul centers his sermon and why Luke centers the entire book of Acts on one statement from Habakkuk.

Be astounded and perish.

Would you pray with me?

Lord Jesus, I thank you for your work.

Thank you that you have given us your word as a powerful, powerful tool to change the world.

You haven't called us to change the world through any other means but by the proclamation of your word.

And you've given it the power to do that.

And we see that primarily, Lord, in and hopefully all of us who are present today.

That by your spirit working within us, you have given us ears to hear the message of Jesus Christ crucified and risen again for the forgiveness of sins.

We ask this for your glory and your praise, our Savior and our God, Lord Jesus.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.