The Resilient Gospel

Okay, here we go.

Acts 13.

Here's what we're gonna see this morning.

The resilience of the gospel.

The resilience of the gospel.

Look, most of us, we have a breaking point with culture, right?

We have this moment where following Jesus publicly is going to cost us something significantly.

And so we come at this perceivable cross in the road.

And here's how some of us engage that moment.

Some of us, we fight against it, right?

We treat this cultural resistance as some type of war to win by our own strength or strategy or how much outrage we can muster up against this wickedness that we experience and see.

Others of us, we don't fight, we retreat from culture, right?

We we go into this self-preservation and we pull back from people and conversations that might invite conflict in our life.

And then there's some of us, we stay present in the moment, but we are consciously managing the risk.

What I say and how I say it and who I say it to, how is it going to impact my relationships?

You see, these types of people, we we keep the relationship, but we lose the message often.

Fight, flight, manage the risk, whatever it is, these feel like the only options that we have when it comes to the cultural growing hostility toward Jesus.

But Acts 13, I think, shows us a better way, in fact, I would say a more faithful way, forward.

You see, Paul and Barnabas, they're sent out from Antioch by the Spirit straight into resistance.

Cultural resistance to the message of the gospel.

First, there's the sorcerer who's trying to blind a Roman official to the truth of Jesus.

Then there's the city's leaders trying to physically run them out of town.

But here's what we see: neither one of them, neither resistance actually stops the gospel.

Because the gospel is resilient.

It's not because Paul and Barnabas fought harder, it's not because they hid better, but because the gospel was never theirs to protect or manage the outcome of.

Let me say that again.

The gospel was never theirs to protect or manage the outcome of in the first place.

I love the words of Charles Spurgeon when he says, we don't have to protect the gospel.

It's like a lion in a cage.

All we have to do is unlock it and open the door.

You see, we're actually simply called to be faithful to a gospel that always accomplishes what its intend and purpose is to.

So let's dive into chapter 13.

First, we see in verses 1 through 3, the church sins by the word of the Spirit.

The church sins by the word of the Spirit.

That we're in Antioch and this diverse community, right?

Of prophets and teachers, a leadership team of Jew and Gentile.

There are these high-up Roman connected people, Cyrenians there.

Here's what it's showing us that the gospel was creating this new grace-reconciled community.

It was no longer about ethnicity or social status.

It was simply about trusting in Jesus and his finished work on our behalf.

This grace-filled message was creating a grace-filled community.

And while this new community was worshiping and fasting, the Holy Spirit speaks to them.

In Paul and Barnabas's missionary journey, they weren't as much sent by the church, as much as they were released by the church in an obedient response to the voice of the Spirit.

You see, notice the order for just a moment.

Worship, fasting, the Spirit's word spoken, and then faithful obedience.

And this is where we need to sit with this this morning.

Mission doesn't start with our own strategy and initiative.

Mission starts with our dependence.

Our dependence on a God who is on mission.

Right?

That's the very nature of our name.

It's helping us remember that the mission of the church is not something that we create or initiate or strategize our way around.

The mission of the church is to join a God who is already on mission to redeem and restore and reconcile a cosmos unto himself for the glory of his name and the good of his people.

We simply get to participate with him in this work.

And so mission starts with dependence of a God who is on mission for us.

This was a common reality of the early church.

They knew that they had been commissioned by Christ to take the gospel to the world, but they remained absolutely dependent on the Spirit's particular direction and presence in that work.

So their days were filled with these rhythms of prayer, fasting, and worship.

Because they wanted to ensure that wherever they were taking the gospel, it was where the Spirit was sending them.

You see, we need to invest these rhythms into our daily lives.

You have the Spirit of God in you.

You've been, if you are in Christ, you've been filled and sealed by the Spirit.

You're perpetually being filled by Him, and it's for this purpose of faithful mission of which He's called us to.

But we can go days and weeks and months without any sense of awareness of the Spirit's presence or the Spirit's voice and how he's actually sending us a mission.

Where is he sending you to?

Who is he sending you to?

Who is he sending your way that you might faithfully proclaim the gospel of Jesus?

We need to be a church as the early church was structured and ordered and how they lived their daily life, dependent that the Spirit of God actually resides within you, desires to speak to you and direct your daily life on mission for the glory of Jesus.

You see, this was normative for them.

But yet, how abnormal it's become for us.

In verses 4 through 12, we see that the gospel meets its first resistance.

The gospel meets its first resistance.

Paul and Barnabas are released by the church in this faithful obedience, and they sail to Cyprus and work their way to Paphos, where they encounter the proconsul Sergius Paulus, a man that the Bible says of intelligence, who's seeking to hear the word of God.

And this is important because we're going to understand who this man is in light of everyday mission.

But first, standing between him and that word of which he desired to hear was a man named Bar Jesus.

Now, there's really nothing significant to his name.

Bar in Hebrew simply means son of.

So if you think back to the apostles in the Gospels, Simon Bar-Jonah, Simon, son of Jonah, right?

So this literally just meant son of some dude named Jesus.

Not Jesus, like we think.

It was a very common name.

Yeshua would have been the Hebrew.

We would really more translate it to Joshua.

So let's kind of take the mysticism out of it.

It was just some dude named Son of Joshua.

But there was something particular about him, and it's that he was a Jewish magician.

Elimas was his Greek name, and that Greek name meant sorcerer.

And he was on staff, so to speak, with this pro-council.

And Luke tells us plainly what this man, Elimus, is doing.

He says he's seeking to turn the pro-counsel away from the faith.

He's standing in between the pro-counsel and the apostle to try and deflect the message of the gospel away from him.

So this wasn't just someone with sincere hesitancy or confusion or doubt or skepticism.

No, this is direct opposition with malicious intent.

And here, against this man, Paul does something that he doesn't do anywhere else amongst these crowds of people of whom he's carrying the gospel of Jesus forward with.

No, he looks intently at Elimus and he calls him son of the devil.

Why?

Because he's a man making crooked the straight paths of the Lord.

Now that language matters.

Paul calling him that son of the devil and why he's calling him that name, that language matters because Elimus, he's not just resisting for himself.

He's trying to actually bend the path of someone else away from Christ.

And here we're introduced to something about Paul and his engagement with the culture that we're actually going to see carried out throughout his entire ministry.

And here I think this is helpful for us.

When we're trying to understand our own cultural engagement with others, maybe this matrix or this rule to live by will profit you.

Because here's what we see in his ministry.

He's tender to the broken and he's tough to the breaker.

No, you see, the target of Elimas's opposition wasn't Paul.

It was Sergius Paulus's soul.

And this is something I think that we ought to embrace about our own cultural engagement.

We have to work to discern if the person that we are dealing with is someone who is broken.

Maybe they have opposition or doubt or skepticism or fear, but really they're only impeding on their own soul.

They're broken.

And our posture needs to be tender toward them.

Long-suffering, patient, kind.

But to the breaker, to the one who is actively working to impede the souls of others.

We need to be tough.

We need to be tough.

We need to meet their opposition with our own bold declaration of truth and judgment.

Look at what Paul does to this breaker named Elimus.

He pronounces blindness upon him.

And it falls immediately.

And it covers his eyes, and it's this declaration of judgment against him.

One who was trying to blind the eyes of others around him, now has his own eyes physically blinded by the hand of the Lord because he's a breaker.

Trying to make crooked the straight paths of God.

Now, Jesus carried this posture and temperament within his own ministry.

Jesus was so tender to the broken.

We forget that.

We forget how kind and patient and long-suffering, how he embraced prostitutes and harlots, how he sat at dinner with thieves and tax collectors, how he was long-suffering with those who stumbled their way into the kingdom.

Jesus was tender to the broken.

He was fulfilling Isaiah's own prophecy about him.

A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.

But to the breakers, Jesus was tough.

Jesus was tough to the breakers.

He flipped their tables, he drove them out with a whip, he declared judgment on them, he called them devils and serpents and whitewashed tombs.

Any person who tried to get in between him and another to prevent them from coming into the kingdom, Jesus was tough.

He called them for what they were, but to the broken, always he tender.

And that needs to be our normative disposition, right?

Because we kind of have two camps in this room.

Some of you are just tender all the time.

You're so nice and you're so kind.

And I love you.

Because you should probably be tough with me sometimes, and you're not.

And then there's some of you in this room, you you like embody the old adage, if you're a hammer, everything's a nail.

And like these people aren't your enemy.

These people are just people who are trying to understand truth and they're confused or they're afraid or they're hesitant or they're whatever.

You see, we need the spirit to discern the moment.

To see the person in front of us for who they really are.

Are they broken?

Are they a breaker?

Jesus was tender to the broken and he was tough to the breaker.

Not everyone needs to be met with your aggression.

And not everyone needs to be met with your benevolence either.

I want you to notice something about what verse 9 says about Paul.

Before he was tough to this breaker named Elimus, it's important that Luke puts in there, he was filled with the Spirit.

He was filled with the Spirit.

What's Luke trying to help us understand?

That the Spirit filled Paul to such a nature that he got proper discernment and engaged that cultural moment in righteousness.

That's important for us to understand.

You see, we need spirit-informed discernment on how to engage the image-bearer that stands in front of us.

After Paul's toughness toward Elimus, the pro-council believes.

It says, astonished at the teaching of the Lord, he believed.

You see, the first breaker, Elias, he couldn't stop at the gospel.

We have to see this to put it all together.

The gospel was so resilient that this sorcerer could not stop it accomplishing what it intended to.

Saving this proconsul.

Through Paul's spirit-filled faithfulness, he became the very occasion for its confirmation in his life.

Now, verses 44 through 52, we see the gospel meets its second resistance.

So let me set the scene because you can already tell I skipped a bunch of verses, right?

Here's what's happened.

Paul and Barnabas and move on, and they're in the synagogue in a normal setting of teaching.

At the end of the teaching, the religious leaders actually invite anyone to speak a word of encouragement.

It's kind of like an open mic situation.

We won't have that here, but uh they did it there, and it kind of backfired on him a little bit.

But anyway, Paul was like, hey, I'm gonna take this opportunity to preach the gospel.

So he stands up at open mic time and he's like, here's what I want you to know.

You all killed the Savior that God the Father promised you, but he raised from the dead, and now if you repent and believe in him, you will be saved.

I love it.

Paul's just bold, Paul's just faithful.

And here, if we look at Stephen's sermon earlier in Acts, the first martyr of the church, and we hold it up to Paul's sermon here in the synagogue, we'll see so many parallels.

And what that shows us is that they were understanding the Old Testament as the unfolding of revealing Christ in his salvific work and his nature as Christ.

You see, this is the reality that we see in Luke chapter 24, when Jesus is resurrected from the dead, appears before his disciples, and he helps them understand.

Luke 24 · chapter mention

The scriptures actually say he opens their minds so they may understand.

Thus it was written.

And so all of scripture pointing to Jesus, and here's what Stephen was preaching, here's what Paul is preaching is that everything you're holding dear as truth and revelation from God actually points to the man you crucified and killed, but yet he raised from the dead, fully affirming and proving to us the reality that he is the Messiah that was promised.

And now repent and believe.

This is the message of the church that Jesus is the fulfilled promise of God for his people.

And how do we most certainly know that?

Because the tomb is empty.

That's how we know.

Because the tomb is empty.

Now, in Poseidon Antioch, almost the whole city gathers to hear the word of God preached.

And this time, the opposition doesn't come from some street sorcerer.

No, it comes from within the synagogue.

And look at verse 45, because it shows us the motivation for their outrage.

It says that the Jewish leaders were filled with jealousy, watching the crowd follow after Paul and Barnabas.

So let's look at motivation here.

They weren't being motivated by this like pursuit of protecting doctrine.

They were motivated by this fear of losing power.

This fear of losing influence over the people.

And so they became outraged and resistance.

And what did Paul and Barnabas do?

They didn't soften the message to try and keep the peace.

They didn't look around them at the hostility that was growing, the tension that was building, and they didn't say, hey, look, we need to edit this message a little bit so that people will like us here.

No.

They simply, faithfully proclaim the truth.

They actually quote Isaiah directly to the religious leaders' faces in light of their resistance.

They say, I have made you a light for the Gentiles.

Here's what they're declaring.

You've rejected everything that we've delivered to you about who the Christ is.

And so we're going to take this message of grace and hope and eternal life, and we're going to turn away from you, and we're now going to offer it to those dogs, the Gentiles, of whom you hate and of whom disgust you.

We're going to take the promises and treasures of God and we're going to deliver it to them.

Because it was always the eternal purpose of God to make one people from every nation, tribe, and tongue.

And so your refusal is a judgment upon yourself.

And we're going to take the hope of this glorious gospel and we're going to deliver it unto them that you may see, even though whom you have cut off and count as unequally human, will be brought in to the very favored, blessed family of God.

That's what they're saying when they say, I have made you a light to the Gentiles.

Hey, we've delivered the truth of Christ to you, and you've rejected it, you've thrown it out.

Now we're going to take it to them.

And at verse 48, what do we see?

The Gentiles rejoice.

They rejoice at hearing the good news of their inclusion into the family of God through Jesus alone.

They rejoice, and the scriptures say this.

And as many as were appointed to eternal life, believed.

Let's park there for a minute.

As many as were appointed to eternal life, believed.

This is the here's what this is.

It's the assurance of mission and gospel outcome.

That statement is the assurance of mission and gospel outcome.

If I want us to walk away with anything today, it's this.

And that should be freeing and liberating.

Because what we see is the gospel always accomplishes its intent.

Even in the rejection of the gospel from the Jews, that wasn't missional failure.

Like we have to get this right.

That wasn't missional failure.

That was the gospel accomplishing its purpose and intent.

Judgment upon them.

And for all those who believed, what was that?

Was that because Paul and Barnabas were just smarter in that moment in the way they articulated their argument of the gospel and Jesus being Lord over all creation?

Was that because the Gentiles had a better moral compass or were more wise and able to understand, or they were more soft and had some sense of inherent goodness that caused them to believe and have faith?

No.

It was because all who have been appointed by the sovereignty of God's hand to eternal life believed and received with joy the good news of Jesus.

The gospel always accomplishes its intent.

And why is that good news for us?

Because all we have to do in mission is be faithful.

That's all we have to do is be boldly and courageously faithful.

Because when you preach, when you show, when you demonstrate the gospel to someone, its outcome is its intended purpose.

So that gives us such confidence and mission.

That's what drives the church into culture.

Knowing that the outcome isn't dependent upon us.

As many as were appointed.

Those whom God had appointed to eternal life, what?

They believed.

And so what do we see in this passage?

And not in this passage alone, but I would say the arc of scripture is that the belief is determined by what?

Where you're at in life in that moment.

Your ability to understand what's being like, like what is the determining factor of the belief?

Scriptures are clear, it's the appointment of God.

It's the appointment of God.

So what do we do?

We realize that the outcome of mission is not based on us, it's based on Him.

And that is good news.

So we just simply and freely need to be faithful to it.

Now the leaders respond to this preaching of the gospel by stirring up the city's elites and driving Paul and Barnabas out of the district entirely.

And here's this detail in the text worth paying attention to.

It says that as they were leaving the city, they turn and they shake the dust off of their feet at them.

Why is that important?

Maybe it triggers a memory from the Gospels when Jesus sent out the 72 disciples to preach the kingdom of God, and he said, If anyone does not receive the message of my kingdom, what you ought to do?

Shake the dust from your feet at them.

What's happening in that moment?

Two things.

The first is this it's the removal of guilt from the messenger.

The removal of guilt from the messenger.

Let me help us understand this.

They had one job.

It wasn't to manufacture or produce an outcome, it was simply to be faithful to proclaim the message of the kingdom.

And when they did that, faithfully, guilt was removed from them.

So in that act of shaking the dust off, they're declaring, I've done what I have been held responsible to do.

And the outcome is not mine to dictate.

But the second thing that that's doing, it's actually declaring judgment on the one whom they're shaking the dust off at.

Saying, you've refused to receive this glorious gospel of grace.

And now you stand in your own judgment.

So this is what they're doing as they're leaving the city.

Because they're so freed by the reality that the outcome is God's and not theirs, they're able to turn away from this extreme resistance, shaking the dust off their feet, saying, We did what we were supposed to do.

Now you stand in your own judgment.

That's missional faithfulness.

That's missional faithfulness.

Because here's what we want to see: the resilient gospel, it cannot fail.

Only our faithfulness can.

The gospel cannot fail.

It will not fail.

Only our faithfulness to it can.

Let's look again at what actually happened in this chapter.

A sorcerer tries to prevent a seeking man from the truth, and yet that man believes anyway.

A city's leaders try to drive out the gospel from their district, and the gospel spreads throughout the whole region, Luke says.

Neither of these oppositions even slow down the gospel's advance.

Luke doesn't record a single verse where the gospel's advancement is hindered or genuinely threatened.

It is always accomplishing its intended purposes.

What is in question every single time is whether Paul and Barnabas will stay faithful in face of the resistance that they're experiencing.

This is exactly what God had already promised.

Before Paul ever even preached a word in Acts 13, God told Ananias in Acts 9 that Paul was what?

A chosen instrument.

For what purpose?

To carry his name before Gentiles, kings, and the people of Israel.

So here's what we see in this: that the mission success was settled and determined before the mission began.

Think about that for a moment.

The mission success was settled and determined before the mission began.

I love this old statement from the Puritans.

You probably heard me say it too many times, but they used this about the nature of the gospel.

The same sun that melts the wax hardens the clay.

And so what are they saying in that?

They're saying that the radiant light and heat of the gospel always accomplishes its intended purpose.

For some, it'll harden their hearts even further like sun on clay.

It'll make them more rebellious and resistant to the gospel of his grace.

But for others, it's like the light of life that is shining upon them.

And they're brought from death to eternal life by its warmth and mercy and grace.

That's the effect of the gospel.

It's not the effect of how good you are at arguing your way around a tense-filled situation.

You see.

But the gospel was resilient in Cyprus and Antioch.

It's resilient now in this place, in this cultural moment, for the exact same reason, because the Lord has determined and appointed its accomplishments with inside of his world.

It was never ours to make succeed.

The outcome was never in our hands.

It was a treasure deposited to us that we were simply called to steward.

That's it.

But we so live our life as if the outcome rests on us.

And man, that's a burden that we were never meant to carry.

You see, the gospel cannot fail.

But our nerve, our courage, our willingness to stay present and declare the truth when it costs us something, man, that can fail.

That can fail.

And that's the tension that you and I inhabit every single day of our life.

We fail to believe that the gospel is resilient.

And so we live in this unfaithful self-reliance.

Let me help us understand this.

You felt this moment of what seems like an impasse in a relationship.

Like if you keep pressing in, you're going to lose them.

It's going to cost you people that you love.

Your neighbor.

They make it clear that faith is an unwelcome talk in their presence.

You have a coworker who frames some comment about your church as off or outright wrong, right?

Or maybe you have a family gathering that continually is growing more and more tense as beliefs come up.

In that moment, what do we not do?

We don't usually reach for this trust-filled dependence on the spirit, do we?

No.

We reach for our own strength and strategy on how we're going to make it through this situation with the least possible amount of loss.

We enter into self-preservation of risk management.

We assume somewhere beneath the surface of that moment that the gospel's advance depends on how we handle it.

That if we don't manage it correctly, something is going to be lost.

So we default.

Some of us disappear from the conversation entirely, while others of us we stay in the room, but we're relying on our own plan of attack.

Either way, the same unbelief is the current underneath all of it.

We don't trust that the gospel is actually resilient and actually able to accomplish all of God's intended purposes.

Some of us in this room, we retreat from mission in the face of resistance.

We retreat from mission.

This is the person here in this place that used to invite friends and family to church, but now you do your best to keep faith and friendships in these compartmentalized silos because you're afraid of the risk?

Or what about the parent in this room who has adult children who still don't believe and you keep getting those eye rolls every time you bring up Jesus?

Or what about the ways you've stopped inviting neighbors and having backyard barbecues or inviting them to your home for dinner because the conversations kept getting more and more tense.

None of this looks like rebellion on the surface.

Honestly, it just looks like exhaustion.

Trying to tread our way through a resisting culture.

But really, it's self-protection that we've dressed up as wisdom.

I'm just picking my battles.

Right?

And that can be a true statement.

I don't want to dismiss that statement outright, but many of you in this room, you've either said it yourself or you've heard people say, I'm picking my battles, I'm picking my battles, I'm picking my battles, and you've never seen them actually fight one.

Because it's just a statement we've conjured up to be able to avoid any battle at all.

You see, this retreat feels safe because it avoids the visible cost of resistance, but it trades mission for comfort.

It trades mission for comfort and it calls that trade good.

Wise, careful.

The spirit didn't fill Paul and Barnabas so that they could withdraw from the moment in Cyprus and Antioch.

The Spirit didn't fill Paul and Barnabas so that they could retreat like cowards the moment that they faced opposition and resistance.

No, the spirit filled Paul and Barnabas so that they could faithfully endure through any circumstance that they faced.

He filled them to go toward it and to endure through it.

Others of us, though, we we manage mission in the face of resistance.

We like to manage mission.

And I think this kind of works itself out in two very distinct ways, but there's the same motivation driving both.

Because this posture, it looks faithful because you're present in the moment.

You're not running and retreating.

No, you're staying engaged.

But the key thing to see is that they edit the message to survive the room.

They edit the message to survive the room.

There's two versions of this that show up most often: the fighter and the softener.

The fighter and the softener.

The fighter, what do they do?

They fight hard for cultural influence.

They want to win the argument.

They want to be able to craftily word every single phrase so they can fight them into submission.

Certain that enough strategy and strength can out-argue any hostility that they may face with inside the world.

And so they stand and they fight.

What are they relying on underneath the surface?

They're relying on their own cunningness, their own argumentation, their own knowledge base, their own apologetic craft.

They're not relying on the spirit.

They're relying on how good they are.

That they might actually produce the outcome they so desire.

But what about the softener?

Man, the softener loves to talk about virtuous things like purpose and community.

But they never quite get to sin and judgment, repentance.

Right?

They'll throw out terms all day.

They'll be vocal about love and kindness and grace and acceptance and all those things are true.

Yet somehow they leave behind them in the dust and go silent about where Scripture says Jesus alone is the only way to be reconciled to God the Father and to have eternal life.

That you must repent of all of your wicked rebellion and submit to his lordship in all of life.

We go silent on those things.

But love and kindness and goodness.

What are we doing?

We're editing the message.

Why?

Because somehow we've convinced ourselves if we can get them to like us, we can get them to like Jesus.

Oh.

It's a horrible, horrible plan for mission.

Both versions, the fighter and the softener, are actually trusting the same thing, and it's not the Holy Spirit.

They're not trusting the Holy Spirit, they're trusting their own management of the situation for the outcome they desire.

One manages by force, the other by omission, but neither is depending on the Spirit to do what only the Spirit can do.

None who believed in Antioch needed Paul or Barnabas to soften the message of which they were proclaiming.

Nor did they need them to argue more artfully.

No.

Each one needed the truth spoken plainly entrusted to the Lord to produce the outcome that he had intended.

That's it.

And so here's the reality, right?

We tend to think the outcome rests on us.

What we see about the resilient nature of the gospel is that it only asks for our faithfulness because it always accomplishes its intended purpose.

Why?

Because the resilient Christ accomplished a resilient gospel.

Where we retreat, every single one of us in this room have had a moment where we've retreated like a coward in fear in the face of cultural resistance.

But guess what?

Church Christ never did.

He never ran or hid or retreated.

No, where we managed outcomes to protect ourselves.

Christ trusted the Father completely, even to the fate of the cross.

Jesus faced a resistance infinitely greater than some street magician or some jealous crowd.

He faced the full weight of sin and death for every person of which he came to save.

And he did not flinch from it or hide his face.

He did not soften the message of the kingdom or try to negotiate his way out of the situation.

No, in Gethsemane, he bowed before his father and said, Not my will, but yours be done.

At Calvary, he stayed nailed to the tree when he could have called down legions of angels to rescue him.

He was faithful exactly where every single one of us in this room have retreated and hid, and where every one of us has tried to manage the terms for our own protection.

Jesus was faithful when we were unfaithful to him.

But he wasn't only faithful, church, he was victorious.

Every power, every power that tried to break the purposes of God, the schemes of Satan, the entrapment of sin, the finality of death itself, hurled all that it had at Jesus on that cross, and none of it broke him.

Three days later he walked out of the grave, proving that the very thing sin and death intended to be his defeat was its own undoing.

This is what Paul means when he calls Jesus both our victor and our substitute.

As an unfaithful coward.

And he took what we deserved, every bit of it.

But he's our victor in that Christ crushed what we could have never crushed in our own strength.

Elimas tried to break the gospel's path to Sergius Paulus.

The Antioch leaders tried to break its path through their city.

Neither one laid a hand on the actual outcome because the resilient Christ had already secured all of it on a hill outside of Jerusalem, decades before either one of those men were even born.

The outcome of Acts 13 was decided at Calvary.

Whatever resistance to the gospel that you're facing this week, it's not stronger than what Jesus already faced, church, and what Jesus already defeated.

So here's my prayer for us.

My prayer is that we become a people, the Spirit empowering us as a resilient people.

Paul and Barnabas didn't rely on natural courage in Cyprus and Antioch.

Luke tells us plainly that they were filled with the Holy Spirit.

The moment that he confronted Elimus, the same spirit who set them apart for mission, empowered them for mission.

And that spirit, church, indwells you today.

If you are in Christ, you are filled with that same spirit.

And you're filled, not to make you louder and arrogant and boastful and more callous, not to make you a coward or fearful or one who runs in the face of opposition.

No, you were filled with that same spirit to be faithful.

Faithful.

Tender toward the broken.

Tough toward those trying to break what God is doing.

So don't retreat this week.

Don't manage your way around the resistance that you meet.

Church, depend.

Depend on the Spirit.

I want you to think of one unbeliever in your life.

A neighbor, coworker, family member, friend.

Think of one person in this week take one step.

One step forward to building an intentional relationship with them for the sake of the gospel.

And just seek one thing.

To be boldly and courageously faithful.

That's it.

Let the gospel do what it's already determined to do.

Because of the finished work of Christ Jesus.

The most liberating thing that you can hear is that the outcome does not depend on you.

It depends on Him.

And so the resilient gospel cannot fail.

Only our faithfulness can.

So depend on the Spirit and God.