We Are Church | Nameless for the Name - Acts 11 | May 18

You are listening to Teaching from Mountainside Church in Boone,

North Carolina, where we live as real people who are a part of a real family

serving a real God in the high country.

To learn more about our church, stay connected, or partner with us, visit mcboone.com.

Meanwhile, the believers who had been scattered during the persecution after

Stephen's death traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch of Syria.

They preached the word of God, but only to Jews.

However, some of the believers who went to Antioch from Cyprus and Cyrene began

preaching to the Gentiles about the Lord Jesus.

The power of the Lord was with them,

and a large number of these Gentiles believed and turned to the Lord.

When the church at Jerusalem heard what had happened, they sent Barnabas to Antioch.

When he arrived and saw this evidence of God's blessing, he was filled with

joy, and he encouraged the believers to stay true to the Lord.

Barnabas was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and strong in faith,

and many people were brought to the Lord.

Then Barnabas went on to Tarsus to look for Saul.

When he found him, he brought him back to Antioch. Both of them stayed there

with the church at Antioch for a full year, teaching large crowds of people.

It was at Antioch that the believers were first called Christians.

During this time, some prophets traveled from Jerusalem to Antioch.

One of them named Agabus stood up in one of the meetings and predicted that

the Holy Spirit, predicted by the Spirit that a great famine was coming upon the entire Roman world.

This was fulfilled during the reign of Claudius.

So the believers in Antioch decided to send relief to the brothers and sisters

in Judea, everyone giving as much as they could.

This they did, entrusting their gifts to Barnabas and Saul to take to the elders

of the church in Jerusalem.

Glad to see everybody. How are you doing? Good morning, family.

My usual greeting. I have to turn my head at an awkward angle to look at you, Josh.

You guys, so as we think about this chapter, Acts chapter 11.

Acts 11 · chapter mention

And this is really the latter half of the chapter as well.

The first half recounts, it retells the story that we talked about last week, Peter and Cornelius.

But this latter half, when it talks about the church in Antioch,

we really, we get this sort of surprising encounter, the surprising circumstances

that are involved in this story.

And we'll get to why that is, but to set it up a little bit.

This is what I this is how I was thinking about it do you

remember do you remember the name game that song

a lot of us who are probably a little older remember this song to that's the

funny thing to my generation would be like Eminem's song Slim Shady you know

he says what my name is I don't know what it is for y'all's younger generation

but for the older generation the name game the,

the Katie Katie Bo Beatty Banana Fanna Bo Beatty and then most of y'all growing

up were like because you're a bunch of degenerates.

You're like, what name can I get my friend to say so that they say something bad?

That's how they played the game. So for the younger kids, it's a fun game.

It's actually a song, but don't make people say bad things. I want to play a different name game.

It'll be apparent why in a little while, but this one is a quieter name game.

It's more like, can you name? So can you name your four grandparents?

Probably most of us can. Can you name your four? No. Well, in circumstance,

there are circumstances that

make it difficult for that, but it's going to get difficult for all of us.

Can you name your eight great-grandparents?

I can't. I know Jenny probably can.

No, it gets really hard, right? How about your 16 great-great-grandparents?

It's like almost completely gone for most of us,

unless your family kept good records or you were really into ancestry.com or

one of them was famous, maybe then you might remember.

But for most of us, it gets really hard even two or three generations back. Here's the crazy part.

If we assume that a generation is 30 years average, we go back 10 generations, 300 years.

It's not in the great scheme of things, that's not very long.

You already have 2,000 relatives.

If you go back 20 generations, that's over 2 million relatives.

And then if you go back 30 generations, you've already racked up more than a

billion relatives in 900 years. Isn't that crazy?

Within a thousand years, each of us has a billion relatives.

And so that's mind-blowing. It's also a bit humbling because I couldn't tell

you the vast majority of their names. I don't know their stories.

I don't know their experiences, their struggles, their victories.

I don't know what they loved and what they believed.

In many ways, it's as if they were never here.

And so this is the uplifting part of the sermon because someday that's going to be us.

So you really, you know, like met you this morning and, and,

and, and pumping some life into you a few generations from now,

our, our pictures won't be on anybody, anybody's walls.

Our names won't be spoken. It'll be like, we never existed except there's a

turnaround. I'm not just going to leave you hanging.

Except that we are, none of us are here by accident.

We are all here because of people we can't name, both physically,

biologically and spiritually.

We are here as a direct result of people whose faces we've never seen and who's

never seen our face, but they were faithful and they prayed and they sacrificed

and they kept going and they shared Jesus.

So if we take this generational question a little bit more spiritual,

who shared Jesus with you?

Who shared the gospel with you? Who discipled you?

What had to happen for you to meet Jesus?

And for some of you, it might be clear in your head that a friend invited you,

your parents told you about Jesus, they raised you in the church,

that you had a conversation that changed your life.

But for others, it might be more complicated, like a big ball of spaghetti,

all interwoven together, that it was moment after moment, grace upon grace,

that brought you to the point where your eyes were opened.

But regardless of our spiritual stories, the truth for all of us is this,

is that our stories are the results of a multitude of stories.

For every story that we have, there's a story behind that, and then there's a story behind that.

There's generations of nameless saints that have resulted in the product of your faith here today.

And Paul in 1 Corinthians 4.15, He writes that, though you have countless guides

in Christ, you do not have many fathers.

And I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

So every believer has a spiritual lineage of sorts.

Paul talks a lot about this a lot in regard to children and brothers and all

the ways he uses these familial metaphors.

But every believer has a gospel family tree, we could say, that we are the result

of faith passed down through people we don't know with stories we've never heard.

And yet their faithfulness led to you, their prayers led to you.

And maybe more stunning, more unbelievable is that how many unnamed people will

one day be traced back to you?

How many unnamed people, a thousand years from now, how many billion people

are gonna be in your spiritual lineage because of your faithfulness today?

Because what Acts 11, this second half of Acts 11 is about, believe it or not,

is that it reaches back to us because this is the first church plant in a way.

This is the first missional church plant.

And it was planted by believers whose names we'll never know.

The Bible doesn't tell us who they were, but their faith set all of this in

motion that we are the direct product of these believers.

So let's talk about Antioch for a moment, just for a minute.

This is not the church down the road or some city that you may be familiar with nearby.

I don't know. Is there Antioch, North Carolina? Probably.

This is the ancient Antioch, right? Massive, multicultural, messy.

In the Roman Empire, Antioch is the third largest city, just behind Rome,

just behind, I don't know, what is it? Alexandria? Yeah. Let's say Alexandria.

So it's the third largest city. It's a hub of wealth, trade,

culture, but it's also a city that's very deeply divided.

So we can think of it in our minds, what would help us process it,

almost as thinking it as a bit like New York or a large city like that,

where you have these different cultural areas.

We had in Antioch, you'd have little Jerusalem and Greek town and these Roman

enclaves and the Syrian quarter that people living next to each other,

but not really living with each other.

And one historian talks about how in Antioch, there were as many,

if not more than 18 different cultural silos within the city that literally had walls.

There were literal walls between these different cultural groups,

these 18 or more cultural groups within Antioch.

And nobody really crossed those boundaries, these walls.

They never went in and out unless it was absolutely necessary.

So this is Antioch. It was a booming city, deeply divided by culture.

Full of, I feel like a lot of these ancient cities, this can be said about that

it was quite a debauched place.

It was very hedonistic, but I feel like we say that all the time about these ancient Roman cities.

It might've been a Roman thing more than anything else, but it was a large city.

So all of that still rings true.

And yet this is where the gospel broke through.

These are where the gospel tore down these cultural walls, these dividing lines,

not just of culture, but socioeconomic, racial, cultural, religious, everything.

The gospel comes into this deeply divided city, and this is where the walls were first broken down.

This is the site of the first multi-ethnic, multicultural missional church plant.

And what's even more surprising.

Is because this is before we just hear at the end where Paul and Barnabas are

starting to come on the scene.

This is before Paul and Barnabas are going out on their missionary journeys.

This is while the apostles are still in Jerusalem. So the church wasn't planted

by Peter. It wasn't planted by John.

It wasn't even planted by Paul and Barnabas. This was planted by just some faithful believers.

And the verse that Luke tells us in Acts 11 is some of them.

That's what we get. some of them, just some unnamed believers came to Antioch

and they started sharing the gospel.

They started sharing the gospel with Jews. They started sharing the gospel with Greeks, it says.

And that's all we have, some of them, that there's no names,

there's no stories, there's no titles.

There's not a lot we get to know about these spirit-filled nobodies,

except that they lit a fire in the darkness that hasn't been extinguished since.

This flame has continued to go and it's been, it's traces back all the way to us.

And this is the church that eventually will commission Paul and Barnas.

It will send out the first missionaries.

It will send out the gospel to the ends of the earth.

This is how the beginning of Acts that, that we will be as witnesses in Jerusalem

and all Judea and Samaria to the ends of the earth.

This is how, this is the church through which that is accomplished.

That the gospel goes all the way to the ends of the earth by the end of the

book of Acts as a direct result of this church that was planted by some of these people.

And this is our spiritual family tree and it all starts with some of them.

So I just wanna reiterate that we are here today as the direct result of the

obedience of these nameless saints.

That we are here because they were faithful and because they prayed and because

they took the gospel with them.

That somebody shared the gospel with somebody who discipled someone, who invited someone.

And down the line, it leads to us. It births faith within us.

And, and the gospel reached us as a result of this church in Antioch.

And I, that might be unbelievable, but I'm not overstating the significance of this.

This is where the gospel launched from. And so we are all traced back to this faithfulness.

And for me, there, I guess the way to wrap our heads around this idea,

not that we necessarily need to, but when you go to the movies,

right, I don't go to the movies anymore, but when you go to the movies,

you almost have to stay through the credits because there's probably an extra

scene at the end about something.

So you have to at least sit there for three minutes or more,

probably not to see anything. So it's a little bit frustrating.

But when you watch the credits, there's hundreds, thousands of names that go

by, like lighting crews, set designers, second camera assistants,

gaffers, whatever that means.

There's these lists of hundreds of people that have come together to make a movie.

And without them, the movie doesn't get made. The story doesn't get told,

but we don't know who these people are, except for the first 10 names that are the top billed casts.

We don't know who are the people that went in to telling this story.

And fun fact, I have a cousin, it's actually my mom's second cousin.

Her name's Fern Champion, which sounds like a made up name. So maybe she's a

made up person, but I've never met her,

but she was a casting director and so if you watch movies like The Mask with

Jim Carrey and Wayne's World you know the classics her name is on the credits.

As the casting director and I remember watching VHS tapes of movies that she

was involved in just waiting for the credits to see her name on there I don't

know who she is she's not an actress she's not she didn't write the story she

didn't direct it but in the same regard without her the movie doesn't get made,

And, and that's us because we're not, most of us, we're not going to be Paul's.

We're not going to be Barnabases. We're not going to be Peter's.

We may never preach sermons or plant churches or go overseas.

But we are essential to the story of God.

Every one of you is essential to God's story, to the telling of God's story,

to being a part of God's story.

We are part of, we used to say, and outside we're part of a bigger story.

There is a larger narrative going along that around that we are part of.

Our stories are wrapped up into this story.

So you are essential, that we are the sum of these that get to carry the gospel

with us into neighborhoods, into schools, into friendships, into the Antiochs around us.

You are essential to the mission of God. And that's why I'm here too.

I'm not the star of the show. I'm not Peter.

This church isn't built on the rock that is me, because I'm very comparable

to Dwayne Johnson in that.

Even so, I'm more like the coach or the cheerleader to change metaphors with,

you know, that just gets to cheer you guys on.

I get to encourage you. I get to equip you.

I get to cheer for you, to remind you that you're part of the story,

that you're an essential part of this story that God has written from the beginning

of time, that you are carriers of God's presence into the world around you, into this moment,

into this church, into this family, into this town that we all live in.

And maybe nobody will ever know our names.

And that's okay. That's okay.

William Barclay said it this way. It's always been one of the tragedies of the

church that men have wished to be noticed and named when they did something worthwhile.

What the church has always needed, perhaps more than anything else,

is people who never care who gets the credit for it so long as the work is done.

What we need are some of these nameless saints who just care that God is glorified.

And these unnamed believers, their names might not be written down in any history

books, but their names are written down in God's book that we see in Revelation.

Their names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life and the faithfulness that they hold.

Because the end, it's not about our name. It's not about ourselves.

It's not about making a name for ourselves.

It's about lifting up the name that is above every other name,

the name to which every knee will bow, every tongue will confess,

the name above every other name.

And the Jews had this sort of built in that's been lost over time.

You guys remember that Hasidic Jewish rapper, Modish Yahu, back in the day? You guys remember him?

You just made a face like, what are you talking about?

There was a Jewish rapper. his name is not literally Matish Yahoo,

but that was his, that was his performing name. Isn't his name's like Matthew or something, you know?

And he had a popular single on the radio called King Without a Crown.

He's still kicking around today. He's like 50 years old now and he's still kicking around.

He's not Hasidic anymore. He shaved his beard and he became just more normal

Jew, I guess. I don't know.

But the, one of the lines of the song is Hashem's name, Fire,

blaze, burn bright and I believe, or Hashem's rays, fire blaze and burn bright and believe.

And this is, this is this just Jewish ideology that takes me back.

I actually listened to that song a few times. So now YouTube's trying to push

me other things from him. I'm like, I don't know those.

Listen to the first line of the song, the first verse of the song.

He says, you're all I, all that I have and you're all that I need.

Each and every day I pray to get to know you, please.

I want to be close to you. Yes, I'm so hungry. You're like water for my soul when it gets thirsty.

Without you, there's no me. You're the air that I breathe. It goes on and on in this regard.

Like this is, this is a praise song from a Jewish context, but it's no less

true about the God that we serve or God we serve is the same God,

but you know, we have Jesus.

And so there's a missing piece in here, but the praise is still true.

It's written from the Old Testament.

And so even as like, before you really understand it all, you can sense the

weight of that idea, Hashem's Reis.

We might not understand what it means, but there's a weightiness to it,

something that we might've lost over the years. And Hashem literally means the name.

This is a way that Jewish people would refer to God without using his proper

name that he gives to Moses, Yahweh. So it was too holy to say that, to say his name.

And so they even wrote it in a way that couldn't supposedly be pronounced.

But I think all of Hebrew is written without vowels, so that's not necessarily helpful.

So they wouldn't say it because it was too holy. It's not that they were like

avoiding God, but they were in their mind honoring him.

We don't even want to approach misusing the name of God as the Ten Commandments command us.

So we're going to substitute it when we say it and when we read it by just saying the name.

So this is all in reverence that they poured into this name.

And again, we've lost some of that reverence over the years as we've gotten

away from the more religious aspects of Judaism.

But we can all understand that the name that we use with regard to someone indicates

our relationship with them.

And for them, using this substitute euphemism, the name communicates their awe,

communicates their wonder, communicates their reverence for God.

And if I were to refer to Jenny constantly as Mrs.

Hoffman, that would communicate something about our relationship.

I'm not sure if it's good or bad, to be honest.

It could go either way. If I refer to her as honey, or dear or babe,

which I find weird, but I know a lot of people refer to their significant other that way.

That communicates something else. Something you're all looking at.

It's like, that's how I communicate to my wife. And I was like,

well, you know, you can be weird. That's fine.

That can be, that tells a different story. It tells a story of intimacy.

It's that we have history that Jenny uses something that she says,

you're my favorite, which makes me uncomfortable.

And then she's upset that I don't say it back to her.

I can't win, guys. I'm picking on you a lot today. Sorry.

But that it all communicates something about our relationship,

that it's personal, that it's intimate, that we have history.

And so the way that we speak about God communicates the relationship that we

have with him, the reverence that we give his name, whether we just treat him

like a personal assistant or do we treat him like the king of kings,

the name above all names.

Do we hold that line where God is our friend, that Jesus is our friend,

that he is our king and that he is our savior?

Can we hold the line of all of those things in the way that we respond to God

and the names that we use for God?

Because the names of God communicate his character.

They communicate his presence, his glory.

So just to, to read a couple of verses, Proverbs 18.10 says,

the name of the Lord is a strong tower and the righteous run to it and are safe.

It's safety. It's a haven, it's a foundation that we can rest on.

That God is an everlasting rock, right?

First Chronicles 16, eight says, give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name,

make known among the nations, what he has done.

That the name of God is to be praised because it is communicated in all of his

activities, all of the things that he has done.

It's why we see one of the most popular names for God or the way he refers to

himself throughout the Old Testament is, I am the God who rescued you,

who brought you out of Egypt.

Communicates his character. Malachi 1.11 says, From the rising of the sun to

its setting, my name will be great among the nations, that there is a glory and honor due his name.

That his name will be great, not mine.

His name will be great, not yours. It is his name that will be great among the nations.

And here's what is absolutely mind-blowing and wild to think about.

That this name, holy, untouchable, this blazing glory of a name,

that God invites us to bear it.

He invites us to have his name carried through the nations, that we would bear

his name, that we would bear his image,

that we've been invited to lay down our names and carry his.

That's just amazing. It is mind-blowing that we don't need to be known.

And I didn't prepare to say this

because this would just lead me on a rant that I didn't want to go on.

I'm like, I'm so frustrated when I watch Christian songs, and even when it's

a group, it's like featuring this guy's name. Like, why?

Why does your name have to be on this? Why do our names have to be involved?

It's about His name. And we don't follow Jesus to make a name for ourselves,

to make ourselves famous, to bring glory to our name,

but that we would make His name famous among every nation, every tribe,

every neighborhood, every workplace, every nation.

Everything that we are involved in, in our lives, in our families,

that we get to make the name of Jesus famous.

And that's why we do this. That's why we plant churches. That's why we love

our neighbors. That's why we give when it costs. That's why we forgive when it's hard.

That's why we do any of this is because of His name, to make His name famous among all peoples.

Because there is a name above every other name, a name that one day every knee

will bow to, every tongue will confess.

And we get to carry that name. We have been given the privilege of bearing that

name, even if we're forgotten in the process.

And that is an amazing thing. It is a mind-blowing reality.

That's why we do this. And the gospel doesn't erase our name,

but we are invited, we don't stop, but you don't stop becoming you, right?

But we get invited to lay down our names, to lay down our reputations,

to lay down our needs to be seen or known or remembered.

And we get to lay that down for the one name at the feet of the one name that

is above every other name.

And that's just an amazing concept that becoming a Christian in our world,

in our world of therapy and self-help, becoming Christian isn't self-help.

It's not self-realization. It's not self-actualization. It's not self-anything.

It's a letting go. It is a death. It is a laying down. It is transformation.

Jesus said, whoever wants to save their life will lose it. Whoever loses their

life for me and for the gospel will save it.

He puts it in context that this is the very heartbeat of discipleship,

that Jesus invites you to become unknown for the kingdom of God.

Which maybe isn't the most enticing offer for a lot of people.

If we were guaranteed success in all that we did for God, I think a lot of people would sign up for it.

But the fact that we are invited to lay down that His name might be glorified,

And the promise is that in our obedience to Christ, in our faithfulness,

what we discover is who we were truly made to be anyway.

Like we get to discover the names that God uses for us, who he calls us,

who we are to him, his children, his beloved.

In Acts 11, we see this so beautifully lived that these unnamed believers who

fled persecution after Stephen's stoning,

they found themselves in Antioch, that they carried the gospel with them in

faithfulness wherever they went.

And because of their everyday obedience, that church was born,

a movement was ignited, that thousands of years later birthed faith within us.

And so the Spirit of God has this beautifully disruptive way of making ordinary

things eternally, eternally significant, I think is a great picture of this.

When we believe that our job doesn't matter, when we fall into the lie that,

our prayers for our family or for those around us, our quiet faithfulness in

these hard seasons, when we believe that lie that it's invisible,

we're stepping away from such a beautiful reality that God works in the ordinary,

that God sees and that God breathes life into these mundane things and makes

them holy as we carry out his gospel and faithfulness.

And the wild part is that we keep praying for and waiting for this big moment

for God to work some clear calling, some more inspired setting.

But all the while the spirit is saying, let me work right here.

With what you have. Let me work with it.

You don't need to try and find the place where God is going to use you best.

We just need to surrender to where God wants to use us now.

Ray Steadman said that the Holy Spirit at work is like a great river,

cutting a fresh channel, going wherever he wishes.

But here's what we do. We get out our shovels, we dig the trench,

we pour the concrete and we say, look, God, look at the thing I made for you

to work in, for this channel for you to flow in. I've got a plan.

But the spirit doesn't follow our blueprints. He follows his own.

And then we, because we've carved these channels that the spirit's not flowing

through, we wonder why we feel so dry, why we feel so empty.

But God carves his own channels. And so maybe the spirit's trying to move,

not in the someday, but in the right now.

In this family, in this job, in this hard thing that you didn't choose.

This hard life circumstance that you're going through that you never asked for?

Maybe the Spirit's trying to move here.

Maybe the thing that we're calling ordinary is the exact place that God is trying

to do something miraculous with.

What if we stopped trying to move ourselves towards some version that we believe God can use best?

What if we just offered Him what we already have?

What if God is calling us to grow where we're planted right now,

rather than transplanting ourselves to some version of church that we believe

he moves in best, rather than some version of reality, some version of relationships with one another?

Because I think that's just carving our own channels. We're just trying to dictate

where we want God to move.

What if we just trust the spirit and that God wants to do something fresh with your ordinary?

And he usually starts that by this giving you an imagination,

a creativity for the things that perhaps you have stopped looking for him to move in.

He would give us an imagination, a creativity for the places that we're not

even looking for him to move anymore, that we've moved away from.

To be nameless and faithful, as Luke tells us.

Because he doesn't tell us these believers' names. He just says some of these, right?

But the weird, crazy turn of phrase is that it is also the first time that they

are given a name, Christians.

So these, some of these, these unnamed believers, it's the first time that they

are named as Christians, and they didn't give themselves this name.

It wasn't the church deciding through a branding committee how they wanted to

be viewed by the rest of the world.

This was given to them by the outsiders, from their neighbors,

from their coworkers, from the city officials, from the governors,

people who looked at these believers and they said, it's not that they're religious,

it's not that they're moral.

They kind of remind me of this guy, Jesus.

And so there are these little Christs and they didn't claim the name for themselves.

They didn't promote the name for themselves.

This is the name that they reflected and therefore that's how people saw them.

These people remind me of Jesus.

So here's the question. Would anybody

in your life know that you weren't a Christian if you didn't tell them?

And there's a part of this where you have, if you talk about Jesus,

that's one good way for them to know you're a Christian.

I'm not saying you don't tell them anything, but if you didn't tell them you

were a Christ follower, would they notice by the things that you talk about,

by the things that you do, by the way that you live, by how you treat your neighbor?

Is there anything that screams in your life that you are a follower of Jesus?

That someone would take notice and said, this person has been with Jesus, I can tell.

And it's not spiritual image management. It's not trying to make ourselves look like Christ.

It's not about this projecting some image.

What it is is about being filled with the presence of Christ so that we can't

help but reflect the name that we carry.

This is what happens in Antioch.

The believers, they're carrying the name of Jesus, but they're not just carrying the name now.

They're carrying his presence. They're carrying his spirit into the lives of those around them.

So real quick, as we kind of get towards the end of this, what do we see in them?

What are some things that we see in these believers? We see that the hand of the Lord was with them.

That's what it says, that the hand of the Lord was with them,

that this isn't a man-made momentum.

This is a movement that has been created by God. We talk about this at the very

beginning of Acts, that the church is a movement of people.

It is not a building, but it is a movement of people to which you belong.

It's not an event that we tend. It is a movement of people.

We see that they spoke the word of the Lord to all people. It says that they

carried the gospel with them and they told Jews, but it also says that this

is kind of the first place where they start telling Greeks about Jesus.

They're breaking down these dividing walls. They're breaking down these socioeconomic

cultural distinctions, and they're becoming united as one people.

This is this radical inclusion that we talked about last week.

It's not just about surrounding ourselves with people that look like us or that we gravitate towards,

but it's about risking being offended and uncomfortable because God's family

looks like the diversity of the world.

They gave sacrificially. They're sending this support to others in need.

They had a good reputation, so much so that Barnabas is sent to check it out.

That he saw the grace of God in some of these believers who are unnamed and

called Christians for the first time.

They remain steadfast, faithful, purposeful in their lives.

They discipled one another. they lived life with one another.

Paul and Barnabas spent a year teaching this growing community.

How would you feel about having Paul as your pastor?

It's crazy to think about, discipling you. The apostle who met the risen Christ,

who was an expert in the scriptures,

who wrote most of the New Testament, for have him as this life on life, spirit-filled truth,

soaked discipleship with Paul for a year, being formed into a people who breathed

the gospel, living together, growing together,

being shaped into something new together. It'd be crazy.

We see that they listened to the word of God. They listened to the spirit of

God. And in that listening, they were prompted and they acted.

And they responded to the prophetic word with generosity, with unity.

It wasn't just a church, it was a movement. It was a community where they laid down their names.

They laid down their preferences, their paths.

And so what they did is they carried with them the one name that really matters, Jesus Christ.

And they never set out to be famous. We'll never know their names.

We'll never know who they were.

Maybe one day in eternity, we'll get to know.

But God knows who they are. Heaven knows their name.

And their faithfulness echoes through eternity because they carried the gospel

with them beyond culture, beyond comfort, beyond convenience.

Jesus says in Revelation 3.5, the one who is victorious will be dressed in white.

And I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life,

but will acknowledge that name before my father and his angels.

The world may never know our name, just reality. But Jesus does.

He sees your faithfulness. He sees your sacrifice. He sees your obedience in

the ordinary hidden places.

That's one of the names that we talk about with God. He's the God who sees.

He's the God who sees you.

So let's bring it full circle. We think about who shared Jesus with you,

who walked across that room or across that border, across the years of silence

to bring the gospel into your life.

You may not know, you may know that person, but behind that story,

there is another story. You may not know that one.

You may not know that name, but you're here because they were faithful.

You're here because the spirit of God was living and active in their faithfulness.

And here's the bigger question for us, because I don't think,

I don't think we're trying to make a name for ourselves.

So the bigger question is not, are you trying to build a kingdom for yourself,

a name for yourself? I don't think we're trying to do that.

But the bigger question is this, who will be in God's family because of you?

Who will be a part of your spiritual lineage? Who might find Jesus because you

decided to pray when no one else would?

Who might experience grace because you forgave when it was hard and when others wouldn't?

Who will hear the gospel because you had courage to speak up.

Maybe that doesn't look like preaching. Maybe that doesn't look like being an overseas missionary.

Maybe it looks like a coworker watching how you treat other people.

A neighbor who you've been loving on for years.

A neighbor who maybe you mow their grass for them, and surprise them with love.

Maybe it's raising our kids to know and love Jesus.

Maybe it's someone who watches how you walk through suffering and becomes amazed

at how you could possibly stand in that.

Maybe it's someone who hasn't even been born yet. Someone who will walk in your

spiritual footsteps because of your faithfulness, because of your yes to Jesus today.

Here's a bunch of just what ifs, hypotheticals.

What if your quiet obedience today leads to somebody's breakthrough tomorrow?

What if a story of salvation 10 years from now starts with your surrender today?

What if your yes to God right here in anonymity becomes a spiritual chain reaction

that outlives you, outlives your name, because it's not about our names.

Who in our lives right now needs the hope of Jesus?

Who has God already placed in your path, in your current circumstances,

in your current relationships, in your family, in your friend group,

in your workplace, in your neighborhood?

Maybe somebody you've overlooked or written off.

What if we stopped waiting for some ideal moment and we recognize that God is

just asking us to be faithful in the ordinary and he can use that.

So here's your commissioning.

We're sending you out into the everyday. So here's the commissioning.

Go and live nameless for the name.

Go and plant seeds that you may never see grow.

Go be faithful where no one's watching. I feel like Jesus has a lot to say about

that, right? The Sermon on the Mount.

It's like all of these faithful acts are done so that the Father can see,

but it doesn't really matter if people see them.

If we're being faithful, people are going to notice.

Think about the parable of the talents, right?

Be faithful with what God has given you. We don't need to dream for more.

We just need to be faithful with what we have now.

God will entrust us with more. To those who have, he'll give more too.

Let's be faithful with what he's given us.

Go carry the name that is above every other name, Jesus.

Be carriers of his presence in your everyday, ordinary, mundane.

And I just pray for some power encounters of the spirit in your everyday.

Ones that after they happen, you're just like, I didn't do anything.

Just reading my Bible at Starbucks. That was weird.

All of the effort we put into these things. I just hope God just creates some

power encounters in your life that you're like, I didn't do anything. That wasn't me.

And then we could just celebrate that together. Amazing things that God is doing

in your everyday right now.

Go live nameless lives for the glory of the name that is above everybody.

Music.