Acts: God's Sovereignty Empowers Our Gospel-Sharing (16:6-15)

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This next lesson is from Acts 16, 6 to 15.

And Paul, Silas, and Timothy went through the region of Syria and Galatia.

And having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia, and when they had come up to Mysia, they attempted to go into Blythia, but the spirit of Jesus did not allow them.

So passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas.

And a vision appeared to Paul in the night.

A man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, Come over to Macedonia and help us.

And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

So setting sail from Troas, we made a direct voyage to Samatris, and the following day to Neaphos, and from there to Philippi, which is the leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony.

We remained in this city some days, and on the Sabbath day we went outside the gate to the riverside, where we supposed there was a place of prayer, and we sat down and spoke to the women who had come together.

One who heard us was a woman named Lydia from the city of Phiatra, a seller of purple goods who was a worshipper of God.

The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.

And after she was baptized and her household as well, she urged us, saying, If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay.

And she prevailed upon us.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks, be to God.

When Paul had seen this vision immediately, we sought to go into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

Let's pray.

Lord, we pray, create in us clean hearts.

Renew right spirits within us.

Cast us not away from your presence.

Take not your Holy Spirit from us.

And give us the comfort of your help again.

And sustain us with your Holy Spirit.

Lord, did you illumine this word to us in the book of Acts by your Holy Spirit?

Show us Jesus, Lord.

It's in his name we pray.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, it's um it's one of my favorite uh preachers named Tim Keller who contrasts uh two mythical figures to help us understand how we relate ourselves to kind of a sovereign power, a higher power than ourselves that kind of orders the universe, so to speak.

Uh the first mythical figure uh is named Oedipus.

You might uh know the name Oedipus from uh, I don't know, maybe you've read Freud or something, you've heard the Oedipus complex.

That's just part of the story.

But the tragedy of Oedipus was uh uh episode of Greek mythology where Oedipus receives uh a prophecy from the oracle of Delphi, tells him he's going to end up murdering his father and marrying his mother.

And the long and short of the story of Oedipus is no matter what he does to escape his fate, he ends up doing all the things that lead him to do exactly that murder his father, marry his mother.

And the tragedy is something like we live in this fatalistic universe where once something is set and set, there's nothing we can do to avoid it.

So one way we can relate ourselves with a sovereign power that orders the universe, maybe we call it fate, uh, is that fate is absolute.

It's fatalism, right?

The other mythical figure is named Marty McFly.

And you might recognize the name Marty McFly from the Back to the Future movies.

Now, the first Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies.

That's where they go back to 1955, right?

And the second movie they go forward in time to 2015, where they have hoverboards, etc.

And I felt really short-changed when we got to 2015 and we didn't have hoverboards like that.

Uh, the third movie is the movie I have in mind in particular, this is that they go back to, I think, 1885, but it's the Wild West, right?

Anyway, after three movies of um struggling against what seems like a predetermined fate, Marty McFly finally wins the day, and the final line spoken to him by his kind of mentor figure Doc Brown, as Doc Brown takes off in this steam engine that's been turned into a time machine, he says to Marty, he says, the future is what you make it.

Which is to say, Marty, you've got complete autonomy in what comes next.

There's no such there's no fatalism, there's no nothing predetermined for you.

Make of your life what you want it to be.

So here we have two mythical figures that help us, that give us pictures of how we relate to a higher power, that sovereign higher power that kind of orders the universe, right?

The fatalism of Oedipus or the autonomy of Marty McFly.

And if you're like me, you prefer the latter to the former very, very much, very considerably, because that sense of autonomy, that sense of I get to determine my own life really speaks to our kind of Western individualistic mindset, right?

I don't like the idea that my life would just be predetermined, preset.

I want to make what it is that I want to make out of my life.

So the question is, how do we relate our human agency to a sovereign higher power, to God's sovereignty?

And if you're a student of scripture, probably at one point or another you've come up against that question.

How is it that my willfulness, my human agency, relates to God sovereignly ordering the universe?

Is it like Oedipus?

It doesn't really matter what I do.

God's just predetermined the future and it's set on the track, and there's just nothing I can do to deviate it, because that seems to undermine any meaningful choice or agency we would have, right?

Or is it complete autonomy?

You know, the future is what I make it, right?

So uh really that is to say, uh at the end of the day, I'm sovereign over my own life, right?

I get to determine what happens next.

I'm gonna make out of life what I want it to be.

How do we relate our human agency to God's sovereignty, to God's reign and rule, uh, his ordering of the whole universe towards his purposes?

How do we relate these two?

Does one have to collapse into the other?

Biblically speaking, we have this interesting tension, this interesting antinomy, two seemingly contradictory things that seem both to be true at the same time.

God is sovereign over all of creation, in the big picture and in the smallest details, and he calls us to be willful agents in the universe that he's created.

It's human willfulness and God's sovereignty.

Somehow it's not one or the other.

And in Acts 16, we start to get a picture of what that looks like.

Acts 16, we see Paul's missionary journey.

We've been tracking with the book of Acts up to now, right?

In the last couple of weeks, we've seen the church gather in Acts 15 to recognize that the gospel, uh, which they're called to be witnesses of, is going out past cultural boundaries and barriers, and now it's drawing insiders into the life of the church and forming one family of faith.

We've seen that in Acts 15, and now Paul and his companions are going out bringing good news of God's saving sovereign work through Jesus to all of the surrounding cultures, all of the Greek-speaking cultures, the non-Jewish cultures around them.

Now, I've got a quick map I want to put up on the No, we don't.

That's okay.

If you've got if if you want to see a small map on my phone, I can pull that up.

Or you can flip to the back of your Bible if you've got a Bible with maps in it.

You might be able to see Paul's missionary journey there.

But just giving you a sense of what it is we're talking about here, Paul has been making his rounds, doing his uh uh uh evangelization, his gospel sharing around the Mediterranean here.

Now, is it the case for Paul that as he proclaims the gospel, he's proclaiming a sort of fatalism, a sort of here, God has ordered this, and it's absolutely this way, and there's nothing you can do to thwart it one way or another, or is he going out and proclaiming the future is what you make it?

See, what we see in Acts 16 should really strike us.

What we see in Acts 16 is this God's sovereignty empowers our gospel sharing.

God's sovereignty empowers our gospel sharing.

It doesn't undermine it, it doesn't negate it, it empowers it.

Somehow our human agency and God's sovereignty work together, not against one another.

And we see that in at least three ways in our passage.

God's sovereignty prevents, God's sovereignty points, and God's sovereignty prevails.

So, new song, if we want to be a gospel-centered church, if we want to proclaim the good news that God has saved us by his sovereign will in Christ, and if we want to understand what it means to be a gospel-sharing church, we need to understand what it is to be empowered for that mission by God's sovereignty.

Not sitting idly by and letting God work out his sovereign will, but being active participants, taking the field, as it were.

Because we have the noble privilege of partnering with God in his mission in the world.

That's the opportunity in front of us.

So, would you open up your Bibles to Acts 16?

Let's have a look at these three things.

God's sovereignty empowers our gospel sharing.

Let's start at verse six.

Our sovereign God sometimes prevents our good plans.

Our sovereign God sometimes prevents our good plans.

Verse 6.

And they, that is, Paul and his uh company, went through the region of Phrygia, Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.

And when they had come up to Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.

Very interesting.

Twice here, the Holy Spirit doesn't allow them to do something that seems to make a lot of sense.

It's as if they're saying Paul and his company kind of arrived in the GTA and they plan to make their way downtown, but suddenly the Holy Spirit said, nope, you're going to Connecticut.

Like that's the idea here.

It's just completely the opposite direction, completely a change of plans here.

And so we see that the Holy Spirit sometimes prevents good plans.

How did they know that the Holy Spirit prevented them?

This is a question I'd really love to ask Paul.

Is it a deep sense of inner confirmation?

Is it a prophetic word that maybe Silas or someone else in the company spoke?

We don't know, but we do know that the Holy Spirit made it clear that you're going this way and not that way.

Sometimes it's clear to us, isn't it, that the Holy Spirit has closed a door, even a door that seemed to make perfect sense to us at the time.

And notice, by the way, that Paul and his company are making good plans, not bad plans.

They're not saying, you know, we're in the GTA doing some evangelization, and then we decided to go down to Vegas and try our, you know, hand at the slots or something, right?

It's like, no, these are good plans.

We want to go into the next area and we want to share the gospel there.

And yet the Holy Spirit, all the same, seems to have shut that door and prevented them.

Sometimes it seems that God says no even to our good plans.

But that's not necessarily a punishment.

So in my own life, I think I've shared this before, uh, before I met Rachel, I was previously engaged to another lovely young woman.

And uh things didn't work out, by the way.

Um But you know, for those for those of us who've been engaged, who've been in relationships, you know that you're visualizing the whole future to come, right?

You're not just visualizing the wedding day, you're visualizing the decades after that.

And so there's a very clear vision in my life for where it's all going.

And yet the door was shut and things broke down and they didn't wait work out, and you know, I moved back to Ottawa after college, and now I'm on my own, and I'm just thinking, God, what are you doing?

This made so much sense.

These weren't bad plans, these were good plans.

Why would you shut the door on them?

Have we been there before?

These were good plans I had in mind.

Lord, why did you shut the door on that?

Now, in my own case, I get to look back and be so thankful that God shut that door.

Because, well, we've all met Rachel, right?

Better plan.

Better plan, that's right.

Amen to that.

But at the time we're confused, we're discouraged, we don't know what's going on, and I gotta think Paul and company are feeling that way too.

We've come this far.

We're on the precipice of where we want to go and proclaim the gospel, and yet you're shutting the door there.

See, it's in these moments that God's sovereignty, his reign and rule, his ordering of all things should be an antidote to despair, because it's easy to despair in those moments where the door is shut, isn't it?

It's easy to feel like I've done something wrong here.

I'm on the wrong track.

And yet, if God is sovereignly ordering all things, if we are in trust and in faith, submitting ourselves to him, then God's sovereignty reminds us, no, God knows the plan here.

He knows the better plan here.

And so if I can trust God in this moment, it can be an antidote for me from despair, it can keep me from that.

There's an opportunity here, and I can choose to trust that things have not spun out of control, spiraled out of control.

Our sovereign our sovereign God sometimes prevents even our good plans.

But our sovereign God sometimes points us towards his better plans.

Verse 9.

And a vision appeared to Paul, pardon me, verse 8.

Passing into Mysia, they went down to Troas.

They're going the other direction.

And the vision appeared to Paul in the night.

A man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, Come over to Macedonia and help us.

And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

Paul received a vision in the night of a Macedonian man, a man across the from the other side of the Roman world, pleading with Paul, come and help us.

And this word help is, you could also just as well translate it, come and rescue us.

And we want to say rescue you from what?

Well, bring the gospel with you.

The gospel is our rescue, isn't it?

The gospel is our salvation.

It's declaring that God has definitively broken the power of our sin and rescued us from condemnation and brought us into his own family, brought us to himself.

Would you come and rescue us with this good news?

That's what this Macedonian man is pleading with Paul in his vision.

But notice, even while Paul receives a vision from the Lord, he still practices careful discernment with his companions.

Verse 10 When Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go into Macedonia.

We concluded that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

That means Paul and his companions got in a circle together and say, What do we make of this?

What are we going to do next?

It seems like the Lord has spoken.

Does this make sense to us?

See, sometimes God says no to our plans, but points us towards his better plans, plans that accord with his word in scripture, plans that are carefully discerned sometimes, but nevertheless he points us towards his purposes, not only not only ours.

So today's St.

Patrick's Day, right?

And we're all, I'm sure, going to go home and have a nice cool Guinness to celebrate.

Do we know anything about St.

Patrick?

There's a lot of myths that surround St.

Patrick.

But what we know about St.

Patrick is this: at age 16, he grew up living in the Roman province of Brittany in about the Britannia in the fifth century or so.

At age 16, St.

Patrick was kidnapped by Irish traders.

And he was brought back to Ireland, and he worked as a slave in the fields for about six years or so.

And during that time, Saint Patrick heard the gospel and put his faith in the Lord Jesus.

And after six years, he had the opportunity to go back to his family, and so he took it.

And he got back to his family, but not one without hearing the gospel and responding to it, and two without developing a heart for the people of Ireland.

So that years later, when Saint Patrick received a vision, he was prepared for it.

Sounds strangely like the Apostle Paul, if you ask me.

Here's what St.

Patrick writes I saw in the night the vision of a man coming, as it were, from Ireland with countless letters.

He gave me one of them, and I read the opening words of the letter, which were the voice of the Irish.

The voice of the Irish.

Sorry, I'm not going to do that.

And as I read the beginning of the letter, I thought that at that moment I heard their voice.

There were those besides the wood of Vuklat, which is near the western sea, that's where he was.

And there did they cry out as with one mouth, We ask thee, boy, come and walk among us once more.

Which is to say, Come and bring the gospel to us.

Proclaim the news of God's rescue in Jesus.

You see, I gotta think when Saint Patrick heard the gospel for the first time, put his trust in Jesus, there had to be that part of him going, But Lord, why did you close that door?

I did not envision my life apart from my family like this.

This does not make sense.

And yet we can see looking back exactly what the Lord was doing the whole time.

He was setting up the evangelization of Ireland.

He was preparing someone to serve as a bishop for this distant part of the Roman world.

And God is often works this way, it seems, in the history of world missions, where we make plans, God points us in his direction.

John Stott lists a couple of them.

He says David Livingston tried to go to China, but God sent him to Africa instead.

Before him, William Carey planned to go to Polynesia and the South Seas, but God guided him to India.

Adenairam Judson, which is a fantastic name, went to India first, but he was driven on to Burma.

And then he concludes we too in our day need to trust God for guidance and rejoice equally in his restraints and constraints.

Sometimes when God closes a door, it's an opportunity for us to see where he points us next.

So if we're in a season right now where we are waiting for God to point, here's at least three things we can devote ourselves to.

Number one is praying.

We need to go to the Lord in consistent, constant prayer.

Lord, would you confirm your will for this?

Number two, we need to listen.

We need to listen to how the Lord speaks the word.

Through his word, primarily, does this accord with Scripture?

And we need to listen to the witness of the Holy Spirit to us.

And number three, we like Paul and his companions, need to discern together with otherwise Christians.

If it is God's will, it will be confirmed.

And so we trust other Christians to speak into it.

Our sovereign God sometimes points us away from our good plans and towards his better plans.

So here's Paul and his companions off to Macedonia, off to Philippi in verses 11 to 12.

What we see next is this our sovereign God always prevails in his good purpose.

Verse 13.

They're in Philippi, which is kind of the leading city of Macedonia.

By the way, you'll notice that the pronouns here have changed from kind of Paul in the third person to we.

I think it's the case that Luke has joined, uh Luke the author of Acts, has joined this company in Troas.

I think he's heard of Paul and Paul's reputation.

He's gone to meet him, and now he's joining in for the rest of the trip here.

So setting sail from Troas, they've arrived in Philippi, which Luke said is the leading city of the district of Macedonia.

And I suspect Luke himself is from Philippi and he's bragging a little bit about a city here, which you know he's wont to do, I suppose.

But here they are, they're in Philippi, they're in a metropolitan capital, but there's no synagogue in Philippi.

And Paul's missionary strategy when he proclaims the gospel in a new place is he first goes to the synagogue to kind of s solidify a base of operations, so to speak.

He wants to proclaim the gospel first to the Jewish people, and then from there to uh to other peoples.

But there's no synagogue in Philippi, so what do they do?

They they hear about a place of prayer.

On the Sabbath day we went outside the gate to the riverside, where we supposed there was a place of prayer, and we sat down and spoke to the women who had come together.

So obviously there's a crowd of at least some non-Jewish women who are getting together to pray.

One who heard us was a woman named Lydia from the city of Theatira, a seller of purple goods.

That means purple goods were were like luxury commodities, let's put it that way.

So she is a high-end businesswoman here, a mover and a shaker.

She was a worshiper of God, so she's a God fearer.

She's not a Jew, but she worships the God of Israel.

And the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.

And after she was baptized, and her household as well, she urged us, saying, If you judge me faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my house, and she prevailed upon us.

Sometimes the best hospitality is a sort that prevails upon us, isn't it?

We start to see the Lord's purpose prevail here, don't we?

Paul had good plans in mind to go and proclaim the gospel over here.

God sent them all the way over there.

But why?

Because the Lord opened Lydia's heart to the gospel.

Because the Lord was pursuing Lydia this whole time.

And because the Lord was opening up an opportunity, a window for the gospel to move forward.

The thing we need to recognize about Lydia is Lydia is the very first convert we read about in Scripture who is from Europe.

The very first European convert.

Suddenly that starts to take on real significance, doesn't it?

Because Europe will become the center, the hub for world mission, won't it?

From Europe, the gospel goes to Africa and South America and to our own continent, North America, doesn't it?

Without Lydia as the link in the chain, who knows how we would have heard the gospel?

But we trace our spiritual heritage through Lydia's faith.

We start to see what the Lord's been doing this whole time.

Paul and his company start to see what God's been doing this whole time.

His purposes have prevailed here.

Sometimes we get to see it, sometimes we don't get to see it, but we get to trust that God's purpose is good and he is working his goodwill in the world.

And the most solid proof we can have for that fact is our Lord Jesus Himself, because we see God's sovereign purpose prevail ultimately in Jesus.

All the way back in Acts chapter 2, Peter is preaching a sermon to the public who's very confused about what the church is up to on the day of Pentecost.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And Peter says this: he says, This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, that's God's sovereignty, you crucified, and killed by the hands of lawless men, that's human agency.

It's a very negative example, isn't it?

It's the negative example.

But we see God's sovereignty and human agency put side by side here, and Peter doesn't say it's one or the other.

He doesn't say this is Oedipus or Marty McFly.

He seems to say these two things God has been working like parallel tracks of a train to move his purposes forward.

And ultimately his purposes have culminated in Christ, in the cross, and in our salvation, in his resurrection, and our hope for new life.

This is how the Lord has been working this whole time.

It's a little bit like, and this is a very imperfect illustration, it's a little bit like a conductor's relationship with the orchestra.

Because we wrestle as it Oedipus, is it Marty McFly?

It's a little bit like a conductor's relationship with an orchestra.

Is the conductor in control?

Well, yeah.

But the conductor being in control, does that make the music happen?

Not exactly, does it?

We still have instruments to play.

There's a partnership between the two, and God is God, don't get me wrong.

God can do whatever he wants, however he wants, and yet, throughout scripture, he chooses to partner with human agents to see his purposes move forward in the way that a conductor chooses to partner with musicians.

So the question, new song, is do we want to pick up our instruments and play?

Do we want to play our part?

Do we trust our conductor?

Are we ready to play the tune?

Because God's sovereignty doesn't diminish or undermine our gospel sharing, it empowers it.

Here's what J.I.

Packer writes.

He says, So far from inhibiting evangelism, faith in the sovereignty of God's government and grace is the only thing that can sustain it.

For it is the only thing that can give us the resilience that we need if we are to evangelize boldly and persistently and not be daunted by temporary setbacks.

When we hit the closed door, when God prevents, we don't despair.

We wait for him to point us in the direction he's calling us to go.

And we anticipate his will ultimately prevailing for his good purposes in his world through Christ.

We have the noble privilege of partnering with God in his mission in the world, in witnessing to the good news of Jesus.

We've been empowered by our sovereign God to be witnesses right here in Port Perry, in this community that needs to know its Savior, doesn't it?

Our sovereign God has called us to preach the gospel to exactly the place that He's pointed us.

Right here.

So the question, friends, is are we ready to evangelize boldly, to share the gospel boldly and persistently and not be daunted by temporary setbacks?

Friends, God's sovereignty empowers our gospel sharing.

Let's do this together.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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