Acts: But With God All Things Are Possible (13:1-3, 13-16, 26-52)

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Our New Testament reading is different than what's listed on the screen as well.

Acts chapter 13, verses 14 to 16, and 26 to 39.

Acts 13:14–16

On the Sabbath day, Paul and his companions went into the synagogue and sat down.

After the reading from the law and the prophets, the rulers of the synagogue sent a message to them saying, Brothers, if you have any word of encouragement for the people, say it.

So Paul stood up and motioning with his hand, said, Men of Israel and you who fear God, listen.

Brothers, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to us has been sent the message of this salvation.

For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him nor understand the utterances of the prophets, which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning him.

And though they found him in no guilt worthy of death, they asked Pilate to have him executed.

And when they had carried out all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb.

But God raised him from the dead, and for many days he appeared to those who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people.

And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled to us, their children, by raising Jesus, as also it is written in the second psalm.

You are my son.

Today I have begotten you.

And as for the fact that he raised him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, he has spoken in this way.

I will give you the holy and sure blessings of David.

Therefore, he says also in another psalm, you will not let your holy one see corruption.

For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers and saw corruption.

But he whom God raised up did not see corruption.

Let it be known to you, therefore, brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, and by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Heavenly Father, we now come before you to hear you speak to our hearts, to hear you speak to our minds.

Father, I just pray right now that you would humble our hearts to hear your word.

Father, it is so easy for us to become entangled in pride.

Father, we just pray now that you would just break our hearts, that any distractions from this week, uh whether good or bad, would just fall away, and that you would draw us into yourself, Lord, and that we would hear your voice, not my voice, your voice speak directly to our hearts.

Praise us in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Now I don't know if anyone's noticed, but um if there's an election tomorrow.

Um you see the signs everywhere all over the Durham region, and um I'm sure if we did a poll, people raised their hands in the room, um, there'd be a mix of what of people who who people are choosing to vote for.

There might be some here that would vote for NDP, there might be some here that would vote for liberals, there might be some here that vote for conservatives or even the People's Party.

And another thing in churches, um, especially recently, as of late, when things are become so much more polarized, there's a common assumption that the pastor will come up and tell the congregation who they should vote for.

Or who fit and who or which candidate fits all the Christian boxes who will lead the Christian people into the future.

Well, I'm not gonna do that because I don't think that's my place.

But the Jewish people in the text, the Jewish leaders in the text that we're looking at today that Jonathan read, had the same expectation.

They had this expectation that they knew who the Messiah would look like, that they knew who the Messiah would be like, that they knew who would liberate the Jewish people from the Roman occupation and the other nations around, and who would make them the nation to move forward in complete power, to direct all history moving forward.

But as with most things in the Christian life, God has other plans than ours, other expectations that are ours from ours.

Other things that we plan, God normally goes the other way.

A lot of people say he has a sense of humor.

You'll plan your life to be one direction, thinking that it's gonna go this way, and it goes completely the other way.

So things look different with God, and we see this in this text.

So if you haven't already, please turn to Acts chapter 13.

Acts 13 · chapter mention

It's a big text we're looking at today, so we're gonna be jumping through it, because I'm not gonna read it all.

I'm gonna read a lot of it, but not all of it.

And what's going on here in Acts, just a quick reminder, that the book of Acts is an eyewitness, it's an eye, it's an account of eyewitness, it's a it's a book of eyewitnesses' accounts of the first 30 years of the Christian church forming after Jesus rose and ascended into heaven.

And the thing that's so good about this, that it's an account, is that because it's an account, the people who wrote these stories, Luke, as he wrote this, the people were still alive as this was written.

So they could have looked at it and said that was wrong.

And there's many manuscripts to back it up.

And it's the same way when we look at history in any of historical books, um, whether it's Christian or not, the more manuscripts you have, the more evidence there is that it's true.

So then we come to this with Acts.

Acts has many accounts and many manuscripts that point it to be true.

But we're gonna keep it simple for now, and we're gonna start at verse one.

So chapter 13, verse one.

And there were in the church of at Antioch, this is the Antioch in Syria.

There's two Antiochs, which is kind of confusing a bit.

And at Antioch, prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manion, the lifelong friend of Herod the Tetrach, and Saul.

While they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.

Then after fasting and praying, they laid their hands on them and sent them off.

So what's going on here is we get a glimpse into the early church in Antioch and Syria.

Now, a very common thing that happens in Christianity, that you hear it a lot, that people always romanticize the early church.

That church just needs to go back to the early ways, that how it used to be, where everyone used to get along and sold all their possessions, that when um when they used to just meet in houses, they didn't meet in buildings.

But as with all churches, there's problems.

This is a church of many different cultures, many different kinds of people.

There's a pro there's prophets, there's teachers, so that means there's headstrong people, leadership people coming together.

There would have been clashing.

There's a person from Africa, there's person, there's Jewish people, Jewish Christians, there's people from everywhere, all in this one place, worshiping together.

But the thing that we see here, that's very unique, yes, there would have been problems.

There's no way, everyone's human, there's no way there would have been problems.

But that they're unified in the worshiping and they're unified in the Holy Spirit.

And they come together and they send Barnabas and Paul off.

This is the glimpse that we get into the early church, is that they were unified in their worship.

They were unified in their common doctrine that they came together with.

They may have differences of opinions, they may have got on each other's nerves, but they continued on.

So what happens next?

Now we're going to jump to verse 13.

So now they've been sent off.

Now Paul and his companions set sail from Paphos and came to Perga and Pamphyla.

And John left them and returned to Jerusalem.

Now, just a quick thing, what's going on here?

Um, so something I found very helpful in the sermon prep this week was looking at a map.

A lot of um newer Bibles have maps in them, if you pay a little bit more for them, not the Pew Bibles, just one step up.

That they have they have a map in it, which is extremely helpful for these situations because I live in Canada, I don't live close to the Mediterranean Sea, so it's a very completely different area.

So what's going on here is that now they're leaving the Syria-Antioch area and they're going up across the Mediterranean Sea and they land.

And then you see it says that John Mark leaves.

This isn't John the Apostle, this is John Mark.

And he leaves.

It doesn't say why, but if you go, if you continue on in Acts to chapter 15, verse 38, it says that Paul didn't want Mark to continue on another mission trip with him.

So something happened.

Something went on.

Um it's possible that he backed out last minute because he was nervous to go to this new place and bring the gospel to this new area.

That could be nerve-wracking.

But the thing that's really interesting here is that when you when you read 2 Timothy in chapter 4, verse 11, this is the end of Paul's life.

This is the part where he's talking about, he knows he's gonna die.

He knows that he's meet, he's he's ran his race well, and he's writing to Timothy.

And what he says here is like really unique.

He says, get Mark to come, because he's useful for me in ministry.

See, Paul is not a perfect person either.

And he clearly he forgave Mark, or he forgave himself, his pride, and that's in his own heart, that he couldn't handle Mark backing out.

That's something for us to realize: that we need to always have this, we need to always be checking ourselves, checking our pride, checking, um, do there's your people that we need to forgive.

And we see this in the text.

And then they continue on.

So Mark leaves, and then Barnabas and Paul continue on.

Verse 14.

But they went from on from Perga and came to Antioch in Pistidia.

And on the Sabbath day they went into the synagogue and sat down.

Now, if when you look at the map, they don't go to from, they don't go back onto the Mediterranean Sea and continue on.

They go up.

So, and if you look at the map, a topographical map, it has hills, it has mountains, it has rivers.

So it would have been quite um quite a hard travel where they end up at.

And they end up in this in um at the tip of Galatia.

So they had this hard journey, they cross the sea, and then they go up through mountains, and they go around streams, they go, they do all this like hard trekking to get to this place.

And then what do they do?

Within within a week, you know, it doesn't say how many days, they go to church, they go to the synagogue.

That that would be the last thing on my mind after doing something like that.

And then they go in and they sit down and they're asked to give a word of encouragement.

Now, I don't think these people knew who Paul was at this time.

I don't think they were expecting the message that he gives, but he gives a message and he takes advantage of it.

So now we're gonna jump ahead to verse 26, and this is where we're gonna get into the meat of the sermon.

Verse 26.

And this is Paul standing up after he's motioned with his hands, he looks out into the congregation in the synagogue, and he says, Brothers, sons of family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God.

Now just stopping really quicky quickly here.

Who he's he's addressing the Jewish people, those born in the Jewish faith, the Jewish culture, and then he's also addressing those who are not born Jewish, but they've come to fear God.

They've realized that the true God is in, they worship him in the synagogue.

So that's who he's who he's addressing.

And continuing.

Brothers, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to us has been sent the message of this salvation.

For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they do not recognize him, Jesus, nor understand the utterance of the prophets, which are read every Sabbath, f which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning him.

And though they found in him no guilt worthy of death, they asked Pilate to have him executed.

And when they had carried out all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb.

Now Paul is expounding the scriptures.

He's showing them that the Old Testament, the prophets, all point to Jesus.

And he's showing them this, and he's showing them that the people, the Jewish people in Jerusalem, even though they had no way of knowing, they fulfilled the scripture.

They fulfilled the Old the prophets, they prophesied that there would be a man, the Messiah would be a man of suffering, a man of sorrow.

See, what's going on here is that there is no way that this could have been faked, there's no way that this could have been planned, that this is all through God's planning, because there's no way the Jewish people could have manipulated the Pilate, the Roman official, to do this.

This is prophesied about, this happened.

Now and continuing, when he says cursed by or when he says they he hung on a tree, in Deuteronomy, when it's talking about this, it talks about that whoever is hung on a tree, crucified, is cursed.

So it's saying that Jesus was cursed.

He was cursed on the tree and they took him down.

See, everything appears negative.

Now, this is interesting because everything that was done by humans trying to um squash this man is all in the negative context.

But then in verse 30, it switches, it switches to the positive and it switches away from the view of man and it focuses on God.

Look what it says, verse 30.

But God raised him from the dead, not man, God.

God raised him from the dead, and for many days he appeared to those.

He appeared to those who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people.

And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled to us, to us, their children, by raising Jesus, as also it is written in the second Psalm, you are my son, today I have begotten you.

And as for the fact that he raised them from the dead, no more to return to corruption, he has spoken in this way, I will give you the holy and sure blessing of David.

Therefore he says also in another Psalm, You will not let your holy one see corruption.

For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers and saw corruption.

But he whom God raised up did not see corruption.

Let it be known to you, therefore, brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you.

See what's going on here is that Paul is showing them that through man that they killed the Messiah.

And then but God raised him from the dead.

That is what's going on here.

It's everything is through God.

Man could do nothing.

And this shows Jesus as being the king.

Paul, when Paul is talking about David and he's talking about the throne, um, what's going on here is that God promised David that he would have someone sit on his throne forever.

And then the Jewish people thought that they would, they, as I said at the beginning, that they thought they knew who this Messiah would look like.

But God had a different plan.

They didn't understand it.

See, the thing that's going on here is Jesus is the king, they they thought Jesus is the king they thought they didn't need, but Jesus is the king they never knew they needed.

So what there's two the Jewish people always thought that they had to fulfill the law of Moses to get right with God.

That it was always done through works, that every time they did something wrong, they had to do something to please God.

And that's that's something how we always that, if we think about it, in our culture, in our own lives, we try to do that ourselves.

We try to, we think if we do these things, if I pray a certain way, if I dress a certain way, if I try to live a good life, God will be pleased with me.

But that's not the case.

That's just trying, that's trying to get ourselves, make ourselves better to please God.

But what God does is that he sends his son into the world.

This is the gospel message.

He sends his son into the world to take on our sins to live a perfect life and to die the death that we deserved.

And what goes on here is that the now this this new law comes in, and it's the law of grace.

It is a it takes out the old law and puts in a new law, this law of grace.

That there is nothing that we can do to please God.

We are all we are all far off.

But because of Jesus, God draws us into Himself because He loved us so much.

And this shakes the people in this synagogue that Paul is talking to, he's preaching to them.

It shakes them up.

And we see in the next verses what happens to them as they're shook by this, as it grips them, because they would have been spending their whole lives trying to live up, to measure up, as we so often do, we put these old own our own standards on ourselves to measure up.

They would have been trying to measure up and measure up and get better with God.

It would have been so burdensome on them.

And then they hear that the faith has been given to you, grace is given to you.

This would have been just rattling to them, it would have shocked them.

And we see this in the next verses, verses 42 to 44.

And at and as they went out, as Paul and Barnabas left, the people begged them that these things might be told to them next Sabbath.

And after the meeting of the synagogue broke up, many Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas, who, as they spoke with them, urged them to continue in the grace of God.

The next Sabbath, almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord.

So if we want to have a megachurch, go and tell.

I was just joking.

Um but if you you see it here, that they're so gripped by this message that they are forgiven through grace, that they're forgiven through God's love, that they don't have to do anything to obtain it.

And it grips them and they spread it and becomes contagious through the whole town.

There's a good application here that it's not just me and Creighton that needs to tell you about people about the gospel.

It's all of us need to share the gospel with everyone in our community.

And I know that's sounds hard, it's hard to do.

But it could be as simple as if someone asks you, What did you do on the weekend?

You can say you went to church.

Um that's a hard thing to say to people sometimes.

It's it's sometimes it feels embarrassing.

Sometimes you think someone's gonna laugh at you, but that's okay because Jesus is with us.

Now, if we ended here, this would be a very feel-good kind of sermon.

It would be you're forgiven, go and tell, and the church will grow.

That's that'd be a very nice message to hear.

But there's more to the text, there's more of the stuff that happens in the following verses that we're gonna look at.

And it speaks directly to the human heart, it speaks to our own condition, to everyone's condition, not just certain people's conditions, but everyone's.

So look at verses 45 to 52 with me.

But when the Jews saw the crowds, this is the next Sabbath, saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and began to contradict what was spoken by Paul, reviling him.

And Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly, saying, It was necessary that the word of God be spoken first to you, since you thrust it aside and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life.

Behold, we are turning to the Gentiles.

For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, I have made Made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.

And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, as many as were appointed to eternal life believed.

And the word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region, but the Jews incited the devout women of high standing and the leading men of the city, stirred up persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and drove them out of their district.

But they shook off the dust from their feet against them and went on.

Now what's going on here?

So what's going on here is that there's a huge crowd now in the synagogue.

It's just not it's not just the normal people that would come every week on the Sabbath day to hear the that the Old Testament read to them.

So what's going on here is now there's a big clash of Jewish people and the God fearers and just normal, everyday Gentile people.

Gentiles would have been the people that don't believe in the Jewish God, that they were just pagan people.

And they come to hear this message, to hear this message, message of grace.

And now this, you see it here, it bothers the Jewish leaders.

But why is it bothering them?

It bothers them is because the Jewish people thought that they would have this Messiah that would lead them out and dominate all other nations.

But what's going on here is that what's going on is that they have no use, the Jewish people have no use for a message that puts them on the same terms as the Gentiles.

And they start to change the words of Paul because it bothers them so deeply that they now are being perceived as being level as a pagan person.

Because their whole life, they've always tried to make themselves better.

One of my favorite um BBC video series is Pride and Prejudice, or any of the Jane Austen ones.

Only BBC, though, those are the good ones, not the newer ones.

But um what goes on here?

One of some of my favorite scenes in all these, especially Pride and Prejudice, is the scenes in the churches where you always see the elites or the aristocratic people off in their own pews, in their own sections.

They have these like almost like penalty boxes in the churches where they get to go into, and it's all nicely cushioned, it has nice seating, it looks nice wood.

And then the poor people are always in the back.

And they're always on hard wood, probably straight.

Um, and it and you see this very this huge contrast between the two these two groups of people in the church.

Now here's the thing: this passage speaks directly to our own hearts.

And what I mean by that is that as churches grow, the only way a church will grow, when I sorry, when I say this, when I say this, when churches grow, when the gospel takes shape in the church, when it grips the people in the congregation, it attracts the poor, it attracts the destitute, it entang it attracts the people who are entangled, entangled in addiction, those entangled in sin.

But we're like the rich people in the BBC videos, in the Pride and Prejudice, or like we're like the Jewish leaders.

And what I mean by that, if we really look at our own hearts, if we really reflect on it honestly, we don't like it when people sit in our in our seats that we sit in every week.

Or we don't like it when people want us to play different music or want us to say, want us to do worship in a different way.

It irks us.

Or we don't like it when people that look different from us come to church.

It makes us uncomfortable and we don't want them in the building.

We only want certain people to come to church if we're really honest with ourselves.

Yes, we want the church to grow, but we want it to grow in a certain way and look a certain way.

But that's not a true church.

A true church welcomes everyone through the door.

If someone who makes us uncomfortable and it's hard to deal with comes through those doors, how are we going to react?

See, our hearts can't help, can't help it but be prideful and have a prejudice against people.

It comes, it becomes so deeply within our hearts.

We're all prideful people.

With church growth comes personal growth.

It must follow.

You can't have church growth without personal growth, it must follow.

And one of the biggest reasons that churches don't grow is because the gospel can't flourish in it because of pride and prejudice within the congregation.

See, we all want that king as the Jewish people that enforces laws, that's going to bring us forward into the next, into the future.

But we need a king that lavishes grace on our lives, that draws us to himself, that doesn't impose these hard laws.

And that's impossible for us to follow.

But with God, as in the title of the sermon, with God, all things are possible.

See, the gospel message is that we are so far gone, we are so far gone in trying to live our own lives, make ourselves our own gods, that we are so lost, so far from God.

But in his loving kindness, he sends his son.

That God so loved the world that he sent his son, his only son, his beloved son, to take on our death, to take on the things that we deserve to be punished for.

But in his love he does it.

It's not out of hard feelings to us, he does it because he loves us.

See, we would never darken the door of a church if it wasn't for Jesus working in our lives.

We would never come here.

Why would we come here on a Sunday?

It's the Holy Spirit working through us.

See, we are to judge those, we are not to judge those who come through the doors of this church.

The beauty of the gospel is that it works within us.

The more times we the more we become gripped with it, the more we become like Jesus and the more we can love people, the more that we can that we can show people because we're all beggars showing other beggars where to find bread.

We're not better than anyone.

We're all, as it says in Romans, we're all sinful, we've all fallen short of the glory of God, that it's Jesus that brings us into God, it brings us close to God.

Though we are so flawed, we are so loved.

And it says here in the text that the light to the Gentiles, see, we are Gentile people, we're not Jewish people.

But we're called to be a light to those around us within our community, but we're not called to be dimmer lights.

Sorry, the cheesy analogy, but we're not meant to be dimmer lights, we're not meant to dim around people who bother us or people that we disagree with.

We're meant to shine, we're meant to let the gospel shine through us.

So we always have to think to ourselves, what king are we following?

Is it a king of law of a law that which creates pride and prejudice in our own hearts?

Or is it king of grace that transforms our heart to become more like Jesus?

See, New Song, we need to pray that God will send people to New Song that challenge us.

But for us, but we but for us, we we're not supposed to become weak in our core beliefs.

We're supposed to become more like Christ.

We need to pray for that.

We need to invite people and tell people we go to church and worship the living God, not the dead God, the living God.

We need to pray that the gospel will shape us as a family.

Every family has problems.

It's impossible.

Think of your own family.

I'm sure there's problems in it.

Everyone has problems.

And that's no different for church families.

But we still come together, we still pray together.

But the gospel allows us to work through these things.

Now, if we think back to the first verses, the many verses I read ago, of the church in the um in the church in Syria, the Antioch church there, is that there's such a diverse amount of people, but they're unified in their worship, they're unified in Jesus.

Then we come together and we're unified in Jesus here.

And if you don't have Jesus in your life, if you haven't accepted him as your Lord and Savior, it is something to consider.

And I would challenge anyone here, if they haven't accepted Christ in their life, to really wrestle with the evidence of the resurrection.

Really look into it.

Don't be biased as you look into it.

Really wrestle with it because there is so much evidence.

If you want to have a coffee, I'll gladly talk about it with you.

So new song, let's be a church that goes and tells.

But let's also be a church that welcomes those who maybe would make us feel uncomfortable.

Because in the long run, we'll grow as a church family.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, um, thank you that we can reflect on your word.

Um, thank you that your word is challenging, Lord.

Um, thank you that there is examples in your word that show us um where pride can seep into places, Lord.

Help us to see it in our own lives, in our own hearts.

Um pour out your Holy Spirit within our lives, Lord, because it is only through your word, through your spirit, that we can be more Christ-like, we can be more sharpened by you.

And I praise in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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