When the Gospel is Preached

Welcome to the Enduring Grace Sermons Podcast.

This is the home for the weekly teaching and ministry of Pastor Ben Hill.

Our mission is to share the timeless truth of God's Word with a world in need of hope.

For more resources, articles, and updates, visit us online at enduringgrace.com.

And now, here is this week's message.

Amen, amen.

Thank you, choir.

Thank you, Clay.

What a wonderful time of worship we've already had this morning.

And we're going to continue to worship in the book of Acts.

So if you have your Bibles, please go ahead and turn to Acts chapter 11.

Acts 11 · chapter mention

And as you turn there, I would like to pray for us as we get started.

Father God, I just want to thank you, Lord, that you're a God who loves us, that you are our strength, that you are our life.

That we can lean in on you, we can rely on you to be not just our God, but our Savior and our hope.

The very reason we live.

So Lord, I pray that as we dive into your word, that we would be encouraged this morning to see how the gospel, when it is preached, changes the world.

For your glory and praise.

We love you, Lord.

Be with us as we study your word.

And in your name we pray.

Amen.

If you and I were transported to the events of Acts chapter 7, and we were able to watch as the church is ravaged after Stephen's stoning, we probably would have a single thought.

Acts 7 · chapter mention

And that thought would be: this is a crisis.

This is a catastrophe.

That this that is unfolding as the church is persecuted is the worst thing that could ever happen in this moment because Christ has gone and risen into heaven.

He's ascended before our very eyes.

The church is on its very cusp of having its big breakthrough.

Wow.

Satan really doesn't want you to know this.

Let's see.

Are we good?

No.

You know what?

I'm gonna turn it off.

Testing one, two?

Let's let's try this one instead of my mic.

That's much better.

Alright, so let's uh just re rewind just a bit and go back to where Stephen was, okay?

So Stephen stoned, and what we see with Stephen stoning is simply this.

The church is ravaged, it's persecuted, and it probably many of them thought it was a crisis, and they are scattered abroad.

Put your really your minds in their position.

How could good come out of evil?

How could good come out of the persecution of the church?

How could good lead to some redemptive purpose in God's redemptive plan?

What people did not realize may maybe in that very moment is that God's intention of the persecution was to disperse the church for the purpose of distributing them through the world.

We have seen how that persecution led to Philip going and sharing with an Ethiopian and sharing as he went about his life.

We see that God uses Jesus, the son, to save Saul, who is the persecutor of the church on the road to Damascus.

We see how Saul continues to be faithful in the preaching and the ministry.

Then we were introduced to how Peter is told by God, do not call what I call clean, unclean, in reference to Gentiles being saved.

And so Peter goes and he gives a report, and what we end up seeing unfold is that that report is received well.

But it is in the midst of all of this that we see a large city.

In fact, the third largest city in the Roman Empire, Antioch, come on the scene.

And when it comes on the scene, Satan really doesn't want us to have church this morning, apparently.

Perfect.

Now I don't have to scream and you're going, huh?

What'd he say?

Let's have church.

So basically, what happens is the Gentiles are getting saved.

Antioch is introduced, the third largest city in the Roman Empire.

And here Christians come, the Jewish Christians come, and what we see in Acts chapter 11, verse 19, and if you found your place, I'm going to ask you to say word is simply this.

Acts 11:19

That when they arrived, they began speaking the word to no one except the Jews.

They were arrive in Antioch, these Jewish Christians, they stay in what they consider their normal sphere of influence.

They stay comfortable.

They talk to other Jews.

But we don't know who these people are.

We don't know if they're who their names are.

We don't know anything about them other than they are Christians that were dispersed as part of that persecution.

And they find their self placed right there in the city of Antioch.

And they begin doing what they've been doing, sharing Jesus with Jews.

But God moves in the heart of some of them.

Look at verse 20.

But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Serene, who, on coming to Antioch, spoke to the Hellenists also.

Hellenists is the Greeks, the non-Jews, preaching the Lord Jesus.

This morning, church and family, I want you to understand one simple truth.

That when the gospel is preached by the common person in the pew, the world is changed.

It is not the responsibility of simply pastors, evangelists, worship leaders to share the gospel.

It is the common person in the pew who changes and turns the world upside down for Jesus.

So this morning, if anything you take away from the message is that God has commissioned you as the church, the feet of Jesus, to preach the word to every person that you come across.

Because when the gospel is preached, the gospel ultimately expands.

The gospel expands.

Look at what happens.

They begin preaching the news of Jesus to the Jews, and they some respond, but also when they start preaching to the Gentiles, the Greeks, the Hellenists, it says that they too began to respond in saving faith.

Verse 21, and the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord.

It was your nobodies.

And the only reason why we call them nobodies is because we don't have a name.

But the nobodies who were being faithful in preaching God's word and taking it to people who were not like them, that leads to Greeks receiving the gospel, the good news in Antioch.

Now, the things that we need to know about Antioch is simple.

It is, yes, the third largest city in the Roman Empire.

It is affluent, it has a great culture, it's a place that people wanted to live, and they did trade, and it also was filled with pagans.

Idolatry was everywhere.

And yet, here, these Jewish Christians in this weird culture take the gospel to Greeks who were probably not as familiar with Jesus or the concept of Messiah as anyone born in the South.

And they hear about this man named Jesus who came and died and bore the sins of the world and rose from the grave so that they might have eternal life.

It was a new message, a new truth, a new hope.

And here's the thing, church, they responded, some responded in saving faith.

You and I have no responsibility over whether a person responds to the gospel in saving faith or not.

Our job is to be messengers.

The only person that's actually in the saving business is God.

Are you in that messenger camp?

Are you sharing the gospel so that the gospel can expand?

The gospel is simple.

If you're a Christian, you know the gospel.

Jesus died because I'm a sinner.

He rose from the grave, defeating sin and death so that I might believe and have faith, saving faith in Christ so that I might have eternal life.

It is simple.

Children learn it in Sunday school.

And so when we preach the gospel, what ends up happening is it expands the gospel reach.

People respond, some reject it, some receive it.

But they cannot receive it, and they can't reject it if they do not hear it.

We've been called to proclaim the gospel, to take the gospel to people all across our spheres of influence, but also beyond ourselves.

And what we see also is that the word, the hand of the Lord, is important.

We want the hand of the Lord with us because in the Old Testament and in the New, it signifies that God's favor and power is with them.

We see this in Exodus 15, 6.

It says, Your right hand, O Lord, glorious empower.

Your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.

Think about that.

That the Lord is on our side as Christians.

You don't have to wonder where you stand with God.

You don't have to wonder.

You can have a good relationship with Jesus if you simply repent and believe.

That's the good news of the gospel.

That's what we preach.

That if you repent and believe, you will receive good news.

And as believers, if we truly believe it, then we should be preaching it because we know that others will receive it and it will expand the kingdom of God.

Are you helping God's kingdom expand?

Are you in the trenches of faith?

Are you simply on the outskirts watching from the sidelines?

Are you intimately involved in what God is doing?

Or are you more preoccupied with simply enjoying life as it is?

You know, we hire people to do landscape work unless we are passionate about landscape on our homes.

We spend a whole lot of time making our flower beds look nice, our yards look pristine, we might even have some water irrigation systems put in so the grass can stay green in the hot summer months.

We spend a lot of money on that.

But you know what always amazes me when I go traveling, especially in Texas, where it is very dry, uh when you drive across the state of Texas, it takes almost an eternity.

But what you see in all these fields, especially in the spring, is wildflowers.

Absolutely beautiful wildflowers, filling just these empty fields where no one's touched them.

God's design for the gospel is much like that wildflower field.

It is that as we are going about our day, that we're scattering the seed of the gospel so that it might fall into soil that is good, so people might respond in saving faith.

Like a bird who dropped seed as it carried that branch for its nest.

But oftentimes we look at church as more of the programs are what saves people.

Not saying programs are bad.

Programs are good, they're necessary, but programs are not the primary mode for gospel evangelism.

The primary mode for the gospel is through firsthand testimonials of the person in the pew.

We need to be more like wildflower fields than great design, perfectly aligned gardens and landscapes.

We also have another reality when the gospel is preached.

When the gospel is preached, it not only expands, it also encourages.

Look at verse 22.

The report of this, of what God was doing in this city, came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch.

They send the encourager to this group of people who are receiving Jesus.

They get the report, they're like, hey, that sounds like good.

And like any good badness, they sent people to find out if it was true.

And so they send Barnabas.

Barnabas gets there, and when he came, he saw the grace of God.

When he got there, he saw God's hand at work in the people.

And he was glad.

He was glad.

He rejoices.

He sees that God is at work, he's moving amongst these Gentiles, and he goes, Praise God, because God has showed up with these Gentiles.

He showed up in Antioch, this major city.

God has showed up.

And so what we see for us today is that when we hear of good things that God is doing, whether it be overseas or our fellow Christian church down the street, and God is saving people, we should celebrate and say, praise God that He is moving, that people are being saved.

It's the reason why one of my favorite times of the Southern Baptist Convention is during the commissioning of all of our missionaries, and they also give reports of our international missionaries of how God is moving over there.

It is incredible because you get to celebrate how God is using our church funds that we send to the cooperative program to make the IMP possible and the Annie Armstrong's and the Lottie Moon offerings that we do for the purpose of missions, that people's lives are being changed.

It's incredible.

But we should also celebrate how lives are being changed within our own church.

And I think that this is probably the area that we struggle the most in the modern church today.

We don't spend time in our services celebrating what God is doing amongst the brothers and sisters of Christ.

Which is the reason why that as Clay and I have been praying through and planning what services need to look like, eventually, later this year, you're going to see that we're going to have a time of celebration and commissioning in our services every Sunday morning.

And that celebration is what God is doing and how you can be a part of what God is doing.

Because it's important.

You might formerly know it as announcements.

Guess what?

Announcements is a terrible name for it because it's not just an announcement.

It's how you can partner in the ministry of what God is doing.

It's a time of celebration because it means our church is alive.

And so we need to be celebrating because what God is doing is a reason to rejoice.

It's an act of worship because we're seeing the hand of God move.

So, church family, I want to encourage you.

Please never find yourself critical of when lives are being changed for salvation in Christ alone.

It is so easy to become critical.

It is so easy to slip into, well, that's not how I like it.

It could have been very easy for Barnabas to get in there and go, hold up, hold up.

This church is filled with non-Jews.

What's the problem here?

But that wasn't the case.

He saw the Jews and the Hellenists worshiping together, the Creator God, Jesus Christ, who died and paid the price for their sin.

Worshiping together in unity.

May we be a church that celebrates our Savior together in unity.

Always.

Because we find encouragement in the testimony of what God is doing.

But it also has this element that when salvation happens, that encourages us, but there's something that also needs to be there.

Look at what Barnabas does.

In verse 23, he says, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose.

Now, this word for steadfast purpose has the indication of really not losing a hold of.

It means to remain faithful to, to stay strong in the faith.

If you want an encouragement, Hebrews 12, 1 and 2 probably sums this up really well as far as what Barnabas was probably teaching them, in that it says, Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which cleans so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Christianity, the saving faith in Christ, does not end at the moment you receive Jesus.

It is only the starting line to a life that is pursuing Christ.

Paul explains it in Philippians 3, 13 through 14 this way.

He says, Before our brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own.

Talking about salvation.

But one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward toward what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal of the prize of the upper call of God in Christ Jesus.

So he's talking about salvation.

He had a salvation, he has not received perfection, and but he is striving towards the goal of the upward call of Christ, where he will be perfected.

Christianity, saving faith, is only the first step of the Christian's life.

It requires a journey.

It is a journey of endurance.

It's one that requires faithfulness.

In 1983, a great story about endurance comes from a man that was 61 years old.

He was an old potato farmer.

His name?

Cliff Young.

Now, Cliff entered the first Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra.

Marathon.

Now, if you don't know how long that race is, it's a 544-mile race approximately.

Let me just tell you, that sounds miserable.

I don't know why a 61-year-old man would decide to do that, but he did.

He gets out there and he's with all these professional athletes who have trained for this.

They've been training for this type of race basically their entire life.

And you know what?

They're dressed up in the best gear.

They're ready to run.

They're trained.

You know how Cliff shows up?

He shows up, as the story is reported, with overalls and boots.

Don't know about you, but I don't run well in boots.

I can't imagine walking or running, let alone 544 miles in boots.

But he shows up because that's what he's used to.

He gets on the starting line and they start.

And you know what the professional runners do?

They run.

They do what they do.

And Cliff, in fact, they named it after him.

It was called the Young Shuffle, which he just kind of shuffled along slowly but surely, one step at a time.

But what made Cliff so different was these professional runners, they ran for basically right at 18 hours and then slept for six.

And then they get up and go again.

Cliff never stopped.

Cliff walked continually, day after day, and took him about five days, a little over five days, to complete the race.

And he won.

Because he took one step at a time.

The Christian life is simply this: taking one step at a time.

It is being faithful one moment after another.

It is a race of endurance.

It's not a sprint, guys.

You want to know how you can become a great gospel sharer?

It is taking that first step of obedience, of saying, I'm going to share that I love Jesus with this person today.

And then the next opportunity, you do it again.

And then you do it again.

And over time, you become more and more comfortable in preaching the gospel, which leads to the expansion of the gospel.

It also leads to encouraging others because we will get to hear the testimonies of how God is changing lives, because you will be bringing them to church.

And they'll be telling the whole church through baptism that I have trusted in Christ alone.

Because of the faithfulness of the person in the pew.

But not only does it encourage us and expand, another element that we see when the gospel's preach is that it also equips.

The gospel equips.

See, Barnabas encouraged them to remain faithful, but then he recognized that there was a need.

So he goes and he gets Saul in Tarsus, where he was presiding at the time.

And when he found him, he brings them to the church in Antioch.

Verse 26 says, For a whole year they met with the church and taught a great many people.

Could you imagine having Saul in your church teaching you for a whole year straight?

That would be incredible.

But not only that, you could also have the encourager also in Barnabas.

And what I love about Barnabas is not only is he an encourager, he's also humble, and he's described in the text as a good man.

He's humble enough to go and say, hey, I don't have all the answers on how to make sure that we equip you the way that we need to, so I'm going to go get another person that can help come alongside and equip.

He was humble enough to say, I don't care who gets credit.

In leadership, one of the things that is commonly quoted is a quote from Harry Truman.

Harry Truman's famous for saying, It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

That's true leadership.

It's not a matter of who does it or who gets the credit.

It's a matter of whether or not you're being faithful and getting it done for the Lord's glory.

If you're waiting for a position or a place of authority to do something, then you're not the right person for that spot.

Leadership comes way before the position.

The position is a result of faithfulness.

God used Saul because he was a faithful man.

He uses Barnabas, and we have him by name because he was a humble man.

He relied on the Lord.

He knew his strength came from God and God alone.

We need to be all about equipping the church, which is the reason why we are very passionate about Sunday school here.

If you're not involved in Sunday school, that is one of the best ways to be equipped with the gospel.

If you're not involved in Sunday school, get involved.

Be a part of a Bible study group.

Get plugged in with other believers.

I know that we have several men that get together on a regular basis and they just get together to encourage one another.

Find people that can encourage you in your faith that you can be discipled by so that you can be sharpened for the purpose of being used by God.

We have been called for the purpose of serving God with the tools that He has given us to preach the Word so that the gospel can expand.

And it takes time.

You might not be comfortable sharing your faith right now, but that means that you need to be equipped.

You need to find somebody that is and ask them to help you, to encourage you, to guide you, to disciple you.

Maybe you're new to the Christian walk.

You need to be involved in as many opportunities to dive into God's word as possible.

Are you committed to being poured into and spending the time necessary when you're not being poured into, being poured into by God's word in your own personal quiet time?

It is not about just winning people to Jesus.

It's about winning people to Jesus and teaching them the ways of Jesus.

Oftentimes we remember Matthew 28, 19, which is go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

But then we forget to remember verse 20, the very first phrase, which is also teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.

We have been called to teach one another the truth of God's word, so that they can also teach.

Not just win them and then leave them.

We have called them to respond to the gospel, and now we want to take them on the journey of walking faithfully with Jesus.

Are you walking with others on how to walk with Jesus with the purpose and intention of them being able to do the same?

In the world of aviation, you can study aerodynamics, you can study how to look like a pilot, you can dress like a pilot, you can even sit in cockpits that aren't in the air and pretend you're a pilot.

But with the FAA, you better not lift off that ground.

You are not certified to leave that ground.

You know what's required for you to get your pilot's license?

You have to spend hours with an instructor who's going to teach you and give you the how-tos of liftoff and landing and what to do in emergency situations so that you are prepared for every scenario possible that they can muster.

If we take that much care for the safety of people that go up in the air, should we not take much more care for the spiritual eternity of the soul of people and spend time training and equipping believers in right theology and right doctrine?

If you want to know the reason why you see churches in decline and you want to know why we see so many people leave the faith after they graduate high school, it's because we forgot to equip them with the biblical truth of what is right.

It's a discipleship issue.

And far too many churches are closing their doors each and every year because we haven't trained pastors, we haven't stuck to sound doctrine, and so they close their doors because when liberalism comes in, eventually the church dies.

Just look at the UK.

Look at the mainline Protestants that have accepted liberalism and is in the sharpest decline of any denominational group in the world.

We've been entrusted with the gospel to preach it and to equip others because it is the good news that leads to salvation and it also leads to the gospel being extended.

The gospel extends.

When a church is preaching the gospel, when the church is focused on the gospel, it is a natural extension of the church to then take the gospel outside of themselves.

It doesn't stay inside these walls.

It unfolds here as a messenger from Jerusalem comes in Agabas, and he tells them in Antioch that there's a great famine that's coming all over the world.

And the church listens.

And you know what the church does?

They send relief.

They send relief to Jerusalem.

Look at verse 29.

So the disciples determined every one according to his ability to send relief to the brothers living in Judea.

And they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul.

When we receive the gospel, we understand it rightly because we've been taught it.

We see that everything about the gospel is more important than this world.

And it leads to a generous heart.

Notice that they didn't have a set amount each person was supposed to give, but as they could, it was by their ability, according to his ability.

Every person in this room has a different ability to be generous.

But every person in this room should be generous.

Because we have been generously given the love of God through saving grace, through faith in Christ alone.

Is your heart overflowing with generosity because of the experience that you've had with the salvation that you have received through Christ Jesus?

Are you partnering with the church to take the gospel to the world?

I explained this a little bit more on Wednesday night, but very briefly, one of the things that I love about this cooperative program, which we're a part of as a church, is when it works well, we plant churches, we plant missionaries.

But not only that, we also have a wonderful ministry called Sin Relief.

Sin relief is, you might know it if you've ever experienced it.

But when there's a hurricane, such as when we had the hurricane come through the South and actually somehow managed to get all the way to Augusta, Georgia, we had sin relief help come and support our efforts in ministry there, bringing water and chainsaws and needs.

We send missionaries.

I've been part of churches that send missionary men who are great with their hands, that go and help in sin relief locations to help rebuild construction sites and help make sure that people have trees off their homes.

That program gives us an opportunity to share the gospel in ways that is unique.

And this is what I'll tell you is that when the church is serving in that way, people ask why.

And that gives us the end to be able to share the gospel.

It's all for the gospel purpose.

And when you tithe, when you partner in ministry here and you give, you're giving to those efforts too.

In addition to the efforts of reaching our own community for Christ.

It's wonderful.

And it's the way God intended the church to operate.

One fun little thing about this church in Antioch is that they took their faith so seriously, if you look back at verse 26, it says, and in Antioch, the disciples were first called Christians.

We see this unfold even today.

That when someone really takes their faith seriously, someone who is not in the church will often say something like this.

Or you go to church somewhere, don't you?

When was the last time?

This morning, I I really want us to sit with really three things as Christians.

The first is maybe your life right now looks like a crisis, like the church could have looked at the persecution that they were experiencing, and that's distracting you from being a testimony in your context of where God has you right now.

Would you ask God to take your crisis, whether it's health, finances, maybe it's a work environment that is toxic, that God would use you to be a testimony of the goodness of God so that you can share the gospel in the midst of your crisis.

Because some of you, that's where you are today.

You're hurting, you're in crisis.

But God doesn't want to waste your crisis.

He has allowed your crisis for the purpose of his glory and praise so that you can testify of the goodness of God.

For others, maybe even this group, you really need to look at life from the lens of the encouragement that God is faithful and that he is acting through the church and that he is moving all across the world, even when we don't see it.

And so you need to ask the Lord to give you that heart of encouragement that Barnabas displays.

And then others, you need to get committed to either equipping others or being equipped for the purpose of being in the church.

Will you take your faith to the next level by investing time with being a part of discipleship?

Because there is nothing more valuable to your walk than discipleship.

That's part of that endurance race that we're a part of.

Yet for any of that to matter, maybe this morning this is you.

You need that walk with Jesus, and you've never given your life to him.

You've never received the gift of salvation.

Will you this morning say yes to trusting in the work and believing in the work of Jesus, repenting of your sin and following Him with your life?

We're about to enter a time of worship.

And during this time of worship, what I want you to do, whether it's in your pew, down at the altar, or coming and talking to a pastor, is will you ask God to move in your life as He has laid it upon your heart this morning, as you try to pursue Him with all of who you are.

With every head bowed and eye closed this morning,