Acts 20:17-38 – Foundations

Acts twenty, verse seventeen through to thirty-eight.

Now from Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church to come to him.

And when they came to him, he said to them, You yourself know how I lived among you the whole time.

From the first day that I set fruit in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews, how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in plot public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance towards God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me, but I do not account my life of any value, nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.

And now, behold, I know that none of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again.

Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God, pay careful attention to yourself and to all the folk flock that to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.

I know that after my departure, fierce woes will come in among you, not sparing the flock, and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things to draw away the disciples after them.

Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish everyone with tears, and now I commend you to God and to the world of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those that among all those who are sanctified.

I coveted no one's silver or gold or apparel.

You yourself know that this hand ministers to my necessities and to those who were with me in all things.

I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the works of the Lord Jesus.

How he himself said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.

And when he had said these things, he knelt down and prayed with them all.

And there was much weeping on the part of all.

They embraced Paul and kissed him, being sorrowful most of all, because of the word he had spoken that they would not see his face again.

And they accompanied him to the ship.

It's a miracle that City Church is nine.

It's a miracle that uh we are still going, that we're still here.

I remember day one.

I was thinner then.

My beard didn't have gray hairs in it.

It was much smaller.

There was about 10 of us on a Sunday evening.

We didn't know what it would what would become of it.

Starting City Church was a lot like flying a plane while building it at the same time.

I think probably we launched a little bit too soon, which is why I say that it was a miracle.

It's a miracle that that a church like ours has grown and developed in a city like ours, in a day like ours.

You can see evidences of God's hand of those miracles everywhere.

Some of you have uh come back to celebrate our birthday today.

Welcome back.

It is a miracle that has been brought about by the Spirit of God working through the Word of God as it is proclaimed and spoken about in all of the different ways that City Church does, because that is how God works in the world.

It is the Spirit of God working through the Word of God.

We have a God who speaks, who speaks to us, who has made himself known, and then his Holy Spirit takes that word and brings it alive in us, as indeed both Gus and Jackie testified to in their interview.

You hear what they said?

They heard the gospel.

And perhaps for Gustavo, he had been hearing the gospel before, but it was when the Spirit of God, working through the Word of God, brought it alive in his heart.

That is how God works, and it is how God builds the church.

The church is not built around structures and programs, policies.

It is not an organization in the man-made sense.

It is created when the gospel of God is proclaimed and the Spirit of God works to gather people and to transform hearts.

We're in week number two of a five-week series looking at some of the fundamentals, some of the foundations of our life as a as a church.

And last week we looked at uh the mission of the church and our call to go and to make disciples.

That is, that is first and foremost what we are about.

We are a disciple-making people, we are disciple-making disciples, but all of that uh lies cold and dead if it is not vivified and fueled and informed by the word of God in the scriptures.

It's the Spirit of God works through the Word.

And so this week we want to take time to consider the Bible, the scriptures, what we call God's Word.

And we'll be uh doing so particularly from Acts chapter 20.

Acts 20 · chapter mention

If you uh are new, let me just explain, as I have done before, our normal practice as a church is to take books of the Bible and to go all the way through.

In about a month's time, we'll be starting a series in the in Paul's letter to the Philippians, and that will take us through to around about Christmas time.

We'll go through the whole letter.

This series right now, it's a little bit more topical because we're laying the groundwork of what our foundations are as a church.

And one of our key foundations is the scriptures.

The reason why I think it is important for us to consider the Bible and what it is, is because it seems to be a self-evident truth in our city, in our day, that the Bible is quite obviously nonsense.

Why would you read it?

Isn't it just a bunch of fairy stories to get the kids to go to sleep on a long camel ride out of Israel?

Why would you trust it?

Isn't it regressive in its ethics?

Isn't it riddled with inaccuracies and with holes?

And wasn't it ultimately cobbled together by people who desire power over others?

There is so much confusion surrounding the Bible and what it is, what its purpose is, how you're meant to read it, and let alone what it means.

And yet, this book is the single most impactful book that has ever uh crossed the horizon of this world.

It is the most paradigm-shifting, life-transforming work in all of human history.

It is unrivaled and yet so reviled.

It sits at the very core of Christian life and teaching, and it sits at the core of who we are.

We are people of the book.

We are people who are unapologetically shaped by the scriptures as our final authority for life and doctrine.

In fact, to forsake the Bible is to not be a church.

You can look like a church, you can have the trappings of a church, you can have the uh the forms and appearance of a church, but if the scriptures are not at the core informing your life, then you are not a church, because it is the scriptures that creates the church, not the church creating the scriptures.

Do you see?

As we celebrate our birthday, we remember what has given us birth.

That is the Spirit of God working through the word of God.

That is a central conviction of ours.

Now, I want to do three things in the time that we have remaining, and we'll see if we can get it done in about 20 minutes or so, because the elders will be like, you need to be snappy today.

Okay, so let's see.

We're gonna look at what the Bible is, we're gonna look at some common misconceptions about the scriptures, secondly, and then thirdly and finally, we'll consider uh Paul's uh Paul's address to the Ephesian elders, what G Day read for us in Acts chapter 20, and how his ministry was shaped by the scriptures and what we can learn from that.

Acts 20 · chapter mention

It's not a full exposition of Acts chapter 20.

Acts 20 · chapter mention

Uh, that would be a wonderful passage uh to uh to fully expound in its context, but we are we're looking at it through a particular lens this morning.

First of all, let's clear the decks.

What is the Bible?

The Bible, at its most basic, is 66 books written by 40 or so authors in three primarily different languages over the span of about 1,500 years.

66 books, 40 authors, three languages on three different continents over a span of about 1,500 years, multiple genres.

It is basically a library.

There are narratives and poems, there are legal documents and songs, there's prophecy and biographies, there are letters.

But the thing that is remarkable about the scriptures, that given its multiple authorship, given the span of its writing, it has one overarching story.

That's what we'll be looking at in detail in the City Life course.

One overarching story.

You imagine for a second that your radio in your car, imagine that it had 66 uh different stations.

And as you flick through them, you hear different styles of music, you hear uh blues and jazz and rock and classical, you hear RB and hip-hop, but as you listen to the lyrics of each of those different genres, you realize actually they are singing one song.

That's what the Bible is doing.

Multiple genres, but one story.

What is that story?

Well, it is the autobiography of the God of the universe.

It is how he tells us what he is like, what it is to follow him, it is the story of humanity created by him, and yet in treasonous rebellion against him.

And it is God, it's the story of God in his mercy, lovingly coming to save people and to create a new world.

That is the story of the Bible.

That is what Christians mean when they say that the Bible is God's word.

The Bible is pretty clear about that.

The Bible in itself testifies that it is God's word 4,000 times just in the Old Testament.

So the first two-thirds of your Bible uh are the words uh God said or equivalent, thus saith the Lord, 4,000 times in the Old Testament.

Now, some of you, if you're uh have you, if you've got your brain switched on, you're saying, well, okay, that sounds great.

So the Bible is the word of God because it says it is.

Uh that's convenient, isn't it?

So it's a good circular argument.

Well, then you look at Jesus and his life and ministry in the uh in the Gospels.

The Gospels are biographies, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

And Jesus himself uh regards the Old Testament as God's word.

He appeals to it, he sees it as authoritative, he affirms its truthfulness, and he sees it as ultimately pointing to him.

And so before we dismiss the the Bible is the word of God because it says it is, one of the things that you have to contend with is the Bible says that it's the word of God because Jesus says it is.

Jesus says that the Bible is the word of God.

And so one of the things that you have to wrestle with if you're a skeptic is was Jesus telling you the truth?

Or was he lying to you?

When Jesus affirms the authority of the scriptures, what do you say about him?

Then you would push back at me a little bit further.

Well, hold on, we'll get back, we'll get to that.

Just look and see what I'd written down.

Similarly, the uh the New Testament, so the other letters, have a similar awareness of their divine nature and authorship.

So Paul, uh, who wrote most of the letters of the New Testament, writes in 1 Corinthians 14, he says, What I'm writing to you is the Lord's command.

Paul has this awareness that he is writing with the same authority as if God were speaking.

What I'm writing to you is of the Lord's command.

Peter, in his letter, in his second letter in chapter 3, verse 16, also looking at Paul and his writings, says that Paul is sometimes hard to understand.

Well done, Peter.

Thank you for that.

I feel a bit more human now.

Paul is sometimes hard to understand, but wicked men twist it as they do the other scriptures.

See what's happened there?

Peter's looking at Paul and his writing and saying, that's of the same level as the Old Testament.

Paul's writing Bible.

And wicked men twist it as they do the other scriptures.

Now, what I was going to say, and here's where you probably want to uh push back, at least some of you is well, all that you've said is just circular.

It's all circular reasoning all the way down.

The Bible is the word of God because it says it is.

Yes, readily admit that it is all circular.

Because I am not going to pretend to you that I can step outside of the thing that is my ultimate authority and adjudicate it by some other authority, because then that would be higher.

Do you see?

Every appeal to authority that you have in your life is ultimately circular.

Imagine for a second here that you are here as a rationalist.

You're a Dawkins, Sam Harris-esque rationalist.

You prioritize reason above all else.

How do you know it's true?

Well, you'd say, well, because I use my my my my my reason.

I reason out from first principles.

I use my rationality to affirm reason.

Or you're an empiricist.

You know, you you do you you prioritize what you can measure, what you can see.

Well, how do you know that your empiricism is true?

How do you know that you're not inside the matrix?

Not actually joking.

If you're an empiricist, how do you know you're not inside the matrix?

Because you say, well, because I can see and I can taste and I can touch the world around me.

I know that it's there.

At the core of every worldview, whether you're a rationalist or an empiricist or a materialist or a Christian, there is an article of faith.

An article of faith that says, this is true because it says it is.

You see?

You don't step outside of your reason and your rationality and say, actually, in order to affirm my rationality, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do some chicken entries.

You don't do that.

That would be nonsense.

You use your reason.

Every worldview at its base has a circularity to it.

So the question is not circular or not, it's which one makes the most sense of your life and of the world around you.

It would be foolish and disingenuous and lacking in integrity for me to pretend like I could appeal to some other authority.

As C.S.

Lewis says, said, he's dead now.

As he said, I do not believe in the Bible.

In the same way that I do not believe that the sun has risen because I see it.

I believe that the sun has risen because by it I see everything else.

It is the way he sees the world.

It is the way I see the world.

And so if I was talking to you and you weren't a Christian and you were a skeptic, one of the things that I'm going to do quite early, I'm going, do you know what?

I'm going to argue for the Bible, for the claims of the Bible, from the Bible.

That's my bias.

That's my circularity.

What's yours?

Tell me yours.

Momaso and see which one makes more sense of the world and your experience in it.

What about some common misconceptions?

I had five and I deleted two of them.

One of the common misconceptions is that the gospels were written hundreds of years later, hundreds of years after the fact by people who had no idea what really happened.

The reality is that if you examine the evidence, that simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

It's far more likely that the letters of the New Testament were written, majority-wise, in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses.

In fact, the gospel writers themselves presume that you can verify their accounts by talking to the eyewitnesses.

There are many, we can talk about this, or you could pick up, you could pick up a book by Kyle called Richard Balcom.

It's a good thick book, actually, called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

I'll give you one example.

The end of Mark's Gospel, when Jesus is carrying the cross in Mark chapter 15, there is a section where Simon of Cyrene, you may have heard this story, there's a man called Simon of Cyrene who comes and carries the cross for Jesus.

Mark 15 · chapter mention

In Mark's gospel, Mark inserts that Simon of Cyrene was the father of Alexander and Rufus.

You think, oh, that's nice, isn't it?

It's good to know his lineage, it's good to know they had a couple of sons.

Why does Mark put that in there?

Because Mark doesn't spare details.

He's a short, pithy gospel.

You'll read him in about an hour.

He's only 16 chapters long.

Mark puts that in there because he is presuming, because he's writing around about 55 AD, that if you are a skeptic, you can go to Cyrene, you can find Alexander and Rufus, and you can say, Was your dad at the feast about 20 years ago when they crucified who they called the Christ?

Was he there?

Did he carry his cross?

Oh, okay.

I'm actually reading a historical account.

In uh 1 Corinthians 15, when Paul is explaining to them uh these matters of first importance and what the gospel is, he talks about how the Lord Jesus appeared post-resurrection to 500 people at one time.

And then he says, many of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.

That's his metaphor for death.

The idea being that if you were a motivated skeptic, you could hop on a boat from Corinth across the Mediterranean and go there and speak to those eyewitnesses.

Did you see the post-resurrection Jesus?

Or was it a 500-person strong delusion like those happen?

The Bible writers assume that the first readers could check their story out.

The second misconception is that the Bible was cobbled together by people much later to consolidate power.

This is the this is the Dan Brown hypothesis.

Have you ever read the Da Vinci Code?

It's the idea that there's uh there's a bunch of there's a bunch of guys in uh in dresses and pointy hats uh sitting in a council called Nicaea, uh, which took place 325 AD, there with uh with the Emperor Constantinople.

And it is it is as though they're taking the different uh all of the different gospels and going, yeah, like that one.

No, that goes in the reject pile.

Yes, yes, no, yes, no.

Uh so we'll take Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, because those are the those are the good ones, those are the ones that will consolidate our power base, but all of this about the Gospel of Mary and uh and Jesus kissing Mary and uh and then you've got the gospel of Peter and and Judas and all of these things.

We're gonna we're gonna reject those because they're all a bit mad.

And actually, if you read them, they are all a bit mad.

Uh in fact, in the uh Gospel of Peter, uh Jesus as soon as he's born comes out and speaks to Mary and says, Behold, I am your Lord.

Uh, I don't know if you've ever uh been in a birthing room, but the baby isn't speaking very much.

Uh, and so it's a little bit crazy.

So, what do you do with that?

Is it that those guys were going yes, no, yes, no?

And all of those documents were all of equal standing?

Well, no.

Sadly, that's not true either.

There was a guy, there was a guy called Arenaus, or if you're American, Irenaeus, who lived at 130 AD, that is the generation immediately after the disciples, and in his writings, he lists 23 of the 27 New Testament books.

Says, there they are.

These are the ones that are being accepted by the church.

These are the ones that we know we can trace back to the apostles.

And so 150 years later, what's happening is not that they uh that the constanticae is going, hmm, which one should we put in?

No, all they're doing is they are confirming what the church had accepted from the earliest days.

And the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary and the testimony of Pontius Pilate and all of those other documents, Gospel of Thomas, that's the other one.

People find these uh scholars, oh, a new gospel found.

Well, actually, the the truth is that in the second, third, fourth century, there was a sect called the Gnostics.

They liked mystical bonkers thinking.

And in order to give their uh theology legitimacy, they would write these documents and then they would put the name of Apostle on them.

But they were immediately rejected by the church.

The church would read it and went, What is this?

Jesus was speaking as soon as he was born.

No, it was immediately rejected.

And what Nicaea was doing was confirming that.

So it's not that his men were seeking to consolidate power.

Third objection is, well, okay, well, all right.

But you can't really believe the miracles and stuff.

Yeah, this is the Benjamin Franklin objection.

You look at Benjamin Franklin's uh Bible uh in the United States, and you see that Benjamin Franklin had cut out all of the supernatural parts.

Because he's an enlightenment figure, figure that is prioritizing reason and he's going, do you know what?

There's there's good ethics here, there's good morality here, but all of the stuff about feeding five thousands or or or resurrections and things like that, you can't possibly believe the miracles.

I would say, well, if you've got that far, it's not an awful lot further to go.

Because the Bible is telling us of a God who is there, who stands behind all of the laws and mechanisms of nature, that He is the lawgiver, He is the one who has created all of the ways that our world works.

And what is a miracle?

A miracle is a tinkering with the laws of nature.

If there is a God who is there, who is powerful, then he has both the power and prerogative to tinker with those laws, and that's all a miracle is.

If you've gone to the point of, well, I believe there's a God, but I don't accept miracles.

I would maybe encourage you to go a little bit further.

Christians are by nature supernaturalists.

You cannot be a Christian and believe and not believe that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead in history and that that actually happened.

We are by nature supernaturalists.

We believe that that's not a metaphor, that that's not a legend, that that's actually a historical, verifiable reality.

We are supernaturalists.

That's the kind of potted history or summary of the Bible and some of the key objections.

Can I encourage you, if you want to do a bit more of a dive, you can pick up this book.

It's a yellow book called Can I Really Trust the Bible?

It looks at more of the objections and more of the reasons why you can trust the Bible.

It is very short.

It is, let me tell you exactly, uh, it's got lots of notes in the back.

It's 81 pages long, and you can pick it up from Becky Candler, who's right down here in the front.

There you go, just give us a wave.

Uh, she is the founder and owner of Gospel Books Ireland, and so you can log on to her website or go and talk to her.

And uh, you have some in stock, Bex?

She has some in stock.

Um, and so you can pick up one of those from her as well.

All that to say we at City Church have confidence in the Bible.

We think that it is reasonable to have confidence in the scriptures.

We believe that the Bible is God's self-disclosure to humanity.

And now the question is: with all of those things being true, how does the Bible shape our life together?

Paul, in the passage that G.

Day read, was leaving this church that he had spent two years with in Ephesus in modern-day Turkey.

And as he is departing, he is speaking to the church leadership and reminding them of his ministry among them and commending them to the same model of ministry.

He's saying, What I did, let me describe that to you.

Now you go and do that too.

That needs to shape your life in ministry.

What was his ministry?

What is he commending to the church?

Well, here's the summary it is the biblical confidence, confidence in the Bible, births in us biblical courage and creates a culture of biblical care.

Confidence in the scriptures begets courage to declare the scriptures and creates in us a culture where we care for one another with the scriptures.

Biblical confidence and courage is shown to us twice in the passage that G.

Day read in Acts chapter 20, where twice Paul says, once in verse 20 and once in verse 27, that he did not shrink.

Acts 20 · chapter mention

He did not shrink from declaring to the church the gospel of God.

He didn't pull back.

He declared to them all that was profitable.

Uh, let me read verse 20 to you, how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable and teaching you in public and from house to house.

So he's got confidence in the Bible, that is giving him courage, courage to do what?

To not shrink back, but to declare the gospel of God.

And where did he do it?

And where did he do it?

In multiple contexts.

Do you see that?

He said, I did it in public and from house to house.

That is why our rhythm of Sunday, this is public.

Anybody can walk in and in the week from house to house, doing what?

Declaring the gospel of God.

It's why community groups are not just social clubs.

It's great to hang out, to share meals together.

It's necessary to do that.

Breaking bread is showing our friendship, our familiarity, our family bonds.

But if we only ever do that and we never gossip the gospel to one another, if the Bible is never opened, then there's nothing actually distinctive about our community.

Paul declares the word of God from public and from house to house.

He does so in different times and in different seasons.

He does so through trials and through tears.

One of the things that we spoke over, Gustavo, was Paul's words to Timothy, when he says to preach the word in season and out of season.

What does that mean?

That we are to be people of the book who have confidence in the scriptures, who have courage to declare it when we want to and when we don't.

When the sun's shining down on us, when the fruit of our ministry is readily seen, and when the ground is desperately hard.

Paul's saying you do the same thing.

You continue to have confidence, even when you're in that out season, even when you are dry.

And it looks like nobody wants to listen in season and out of season.

And that creates among us a culture of care for one another that arises out of the Bible.

Paul says that he wanted to teach them anything that was profitable.

He goes on in verse 27 to say that he declared to them the whole council of God.

All of those genres.

It's not that I'm just a, you know, as a pastor, I sit there on a Monday morning and think, hmm, what would I like to say to people on Sunday?

It's not about me.

It's not about my thoughts, it's about God's thoughts.

And what's more, the Bible doesn't just shape our Sunday pulpit.

That's what this is.

I know it looks like a music stand, but it's a pulpit for the declaration of the gospel.

It doesn't just shape our Sunday pulpit ministry, it shapes all of our life, it shapes our pastoral care.

You come to us with a need, with something that you're struggling with.

I believe that the best thing for you is to hear God speak to you.

Words of comfort and encouragement, maybe words of admonition and correction, words of grace and mercy.

We don't do our counseling by saying, okay, uh, I know I'm a Christian, but I'm gonna park everything that I view as authoritative, and I'm just gonna do CBT with you.

CBT is remarkably effective, it's a wonderful tool to be used by the uh by the church, but we want to be counseling people not just as Christians, but from a Christian worldview.

Because you are made as image bearers of God, and so we want to bring God's voice into a situation.

The Bible shaped Paul's ministry, and now he commends it to the church that it might shape theirs.

I have gone over time, and so I'm simply going to say, How is it that it shapes ours?

How does the Bible, how does the scriptures, the message of who Jesus is and of what he has done, that he is the one who has purchased us?

It's a wonderful phrase here, where Paul says to the elders that God purchased the church with his own blood.

You, believer in the Lord Jesus, are blood bought, but the blood of God himself, he has bought you and made you his own.

You could not know that by looking at nature.

You could not know that by discerning your own reason.

It is only when God declares to you who you are, your need of him, and what he has done for you that hearts come alive by the Spirit of God.

How are we shaped by it?

We are shaped by it here on a Sunday morning.

We're shaped by it by the by the songs that we sing.

We want them to be saturated by the scriptures.

It shapes our community life, it shapes the city life group that we're starting in a couple of weeks' time, but also all of those things, all of those things are just us clearing the deck, preparing the grind.

Because the real win, do you want to know the real win?

It's not just that you guys sign up for programs.

They're as great as that is.

It's not just that you sign up for programs and that you come along on a Sunday morning.

It is that those programs become part of the soil in which organic relationships of care, of speaking the gospel to one another, of praying in line with God's heart with one another, of inviting people into your home, testifying to God's goodness, sharing your struggles and how you're wrestling with God, the questions that you have, that's the win.

The programs are the baseline.

The programs are us just arranging the deck for you guys to flourish.

We're creating the trellis.

You guys are the vine.

The vine grows when it is rooted in the scriptures.

That's what Jesus says.

If you abide in me and my words abide in you, you will bear much fruit and fruit that will last.

If city is to flourish and to bear gospel fruit, we cannot forget where we began nine years ago.

With the Bible open, hearing God's voice, allowing him to speak and to shape and to fashion us into his likeness.

The Bible is unashamedly, unapologetically, part of who we are.

It excites us and moves us, it intrigues us and bewilders us.

To be part of City Church into this next year is to be someone who desires to hear God speak through his word by the power of his Holy Spirit.

That is our second foundation.

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