Scattered With Purpose | Ecclesia: The Church Can Change the World - Week 3

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Today's talk comes from Pastor Chris Ball.

So today is the third week of something we're calling ecclesia.

God bless you, it sounds like.

And so the very first week we talked about uh why did he pick that word?

And the reason he chose that word was because it means the governing authority that has the power, that has the ability to instill heaven's reality onto the earth.

Rather than using the word synagogue or something that a early person, uh early church person would have understood up to that point, Jesus kind of wanted to reframe it and say, you're actually the ones who have been empowered, um, qualified to bring heaven to earth.

And so Antioch Church is a great model for that.

Uh the Jerusalem church was slower in getting it.

Emmaus really never did get it.

They were a village church all the way.

Then the second week, last week, kind of turned the corner and said that the uh there's a revolution of the ordinary man.

And that Ephesians 4.13 says that people noticed that the people that were actually running with this and heeding Jesus' word to make disciples were ordinary people.

And actually, the the word translated there's almost it's a little graphic, uh, idiots.

These guys were just the village idiots.

They were out on a boat fishing.

How can they be the ones to carry the mission of God?

And the and the only answer they could come up with, and this is a big takeaway point, is that they realized they've been with Jesus.

And therein lies the whole resume you need to be a carrier of the mission of God is to be somebody who has been with Jesus.

Ordinary people are the ones Jesus is sending.

So today we turn kind of again in the corner and want to talk about the idea of being scattered with purpose.

Glorious disruption in your life.

Uh the idea is that disruption might be the clearest setup God ever gives you to become a mission carrier.

As you likely know, if you don't have disruption of sort in your life, it's hard to move and go anywhere because it's it's comfortable.

And we aren't great at moving with whatever, the spirit, the leading of God, if we're just so comfortable.

I I even think of, I don't know about you, but like whenever your body gets used to the hot shower, praise the Lord, we have hot showers around this part of the world, and you're in it and you realize, okay, I'm clean.

I'm done.

The shower is over.

I need to get out.

Sometimes it's like, it feels so good in the hot water, I don't want to get out.

And it's like, I gotta get on with the day here.

And maybe it's just me, but I'm like, sometimes I feel like I do my best thinking in a hot shower, and I realize, huh, we got a water bill to pay here, and I got a day to get on with.

It's comfortable, it feels nice, it's comfortable.

I don't want to move.

But a cold shower, it's like the what hot water heater went out that happened to us for the first time a couple months ago, and I think it was Beckham, our thirdborn, who was like, the water ain't getting hot.

Do something about it.

And we had to put in a water heater.

And on we actually got back from an out-of-town trip from like two weeks, and that night we're putting a water heater in.

So um, God bless us.

But the cold shower is easy to get in and get right out of because it's like, oh, that was a disruption.

A cold shower is a disruption if it wasn't if you're not cold plunging or something.

So, anyway, telling you something that you probably already know is that disruptions can be God's secret weapon for actually getting you to move.

And that's the idea of the Great Commission is movement.

Go and make disciples, go disciple the nations.

And so comfortability can fly in the face conflicting with what God's actually up to.

So that's actually kind of what we see here.

And I'd like to say right off the bat this morning that this is not a message to explain away the pain of life, to say that, well, there was, you know, there's good reason that you are in trauma or something.

Um, I don't believe that the persecution that Acts 8 describes was God's plan A, actually.

But he used it significantly.

Um the word picture that I thought of was a dandelion flower.

I don't know, maybe it's a weed.

Uh we'll call it a flower.

Dandelion.

You know the dandelions.

If you ever saw um Ice Age, you saw Sid the Sloth, you know, he's like, oh, the dandelion, last one of the sea, anyway.

Or maybe that was the pine cone.

That does not matter.

Um a dandelion is the thing with the globe of soft little petals on it.

And I remember being a kid, I don't know that we see a lot of dandelions around.

I guess you gotta look in the right field.

Are they all over the place?

Good, I need to open my eyes.

They're weeds.

Okay, it's official, they're a weed.

They're the coolest weed going, though.

So you got a dandelion in your hand, and I remember having like a crisis as about a five-year-old thinking, how am I gonna get all these guys off of here?

I got two options.

I can either blow on it and watch all of the dandelion seeds scatter, and that was pretty satisfying.

Or you could put it between your hands and you could do the old and watch that thing spin around and all of those little dandelion petals come off of there, and it was about the highlight of the day for a five-year-old.

The truth is, a dandelion that grows is meant to spread its seed when the wind blows and breaks the seed head apart and scatters it all over the place.

If the dandelion never has the violent act of the wind hitting it, it isn't never going to reproduce a dandelion.

And so it's the power of the seed falling, right?

It's the picture of Christ dying for our sins, actually, and the great seed of God being buried, and then of course, new life springs forth from it, and resurrection happens, and that's the case all over creation, by the way.

And so uh the picture behind our text this week is that very thing.

Um, the Greek word Luke uses for what happened to the Jerusalem church in Acts 8 is the diaspora.

And so you're getting smarter here.

Um, it's a farming term that actually means scattered seed.

So Luke could have again, I mean, this is just insightful stuff, I think, as we're looking at the church and its birth and its formation and what God was up to and everything, to realize that Luke chose the word uh diaspora, a farming agricultural term, to say it's the scattering of seed to talk about the persecution of the church.

And again, not caused by God.

I don't believe, now you could have your opinion, I don't believe that God's best plan was to say, I'm going to send persecution on my church so that they go.

But persecution happened.

And yes, God allowed it.

He allows a lot of things on this earth that maybe we would scratch our head at, actually.

But he's in it.

Even if he's not the caus of the storm, he's always in the storm, and there's great purpose in it.

And so here's the first big idea is that God doesn't waste disruption.

Never waste disruption.

In fact, I'll say this to you: nothing is ever wasted with God.

There's not an experience you've been through that was a waste.

But he uses it all.

Acts 7, we're told of the killing of Stephen.

Stephen was a good man, full of the Spirit, it says, doing nothing but good.

And he gets stoned to death, and it opens up the floodgates of persecution of the church.

And so the church has started, everybody's excited until this day.

And now the excitement has dropped, and there's fear, and there's running for your life.

Um we'll read it here, verse 1, Acts 8.

It says, And Saul approved of their killing him.

Interestingly, this is the player in the story.

Talk about redemption.

This would become Paul, who writes most of the New Testament.

On that day, a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria.

Godly men buried Stephen, so there's a funeral, and mourned deeply for him.

But Saul began to destroy the church, and going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison.

And it's possible that the disruption that this is describing sparks something in your own mind, in your own life, disruption-wise.

Um a divorce that happens.

Whether it's between you and your spouse, or you're on the kid end of that, that's a disruption.

Or the loss of life, timely or untimely, um, is a disruption in your life.

Um and so don't hear that God orchestrated your pain to teach you a lesson.

That's not what's going on.

That's not the theology of this text, and it's certainly not the character of God.

But what is true and sits right alongside of those verses that we just read is verse 4.

Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went.

And so verse 4 says, those who had been scattered, so they weren't missionaries, they weren't commissioned by a church to go, they weren't somebody who says, you know what, I really dig ministry, I'm gonna look for some opportunities electively.

No, this was a cause and effect, and the cause was the persecution running for their lives.

This was a tragic event.

This was a sad thing that happened.

Lives were broken up, houses were lost, businesses were lost, everything that they had been up to and excited about and planned for, now turned upside down, their world has changed, and they're on the run.

But while they're on the run, they had the foresight, the thought.

Why?

Because they had been with Jesus.

It was the whole uh Ephesians 4.13 explanation.

They'd been with Jesus to the tune that while they're on the run, even though they're not clear on the compass of where they're even heading, they're gonna preach the word and they're gonna do it everywhere that they went.

So they preached, by the way, that word preach simply means they were announcers of the good news of Jesus.

So if you hear this and you're saying, okay, I get the obvious application that I'm putting myself in the shoes here of maybe I'm not been the persecuted church, but there's been disruption in my life, or maybe I have been part of the persecuted church, but there's still takeaway from it personally, and you're you're wanting me to preach?

Yes.

But the word preach just means to announce the good news of Jesus.

And you don't have to have a table or a microphone or a building or a platform to preach.

You preach all the time, by the way.

You're constantly preaching, you're talking about the newest, latest, greatest autumn moon latte that you just had, or whatever it is.

And you will, man, this will knock your socks off, and it's only this much, or hey, it's this much, but it's worth it.

And you you preach, you announce, you're an announcer of the good things that you know of.

And so what these people are doing is they're preaching, they're announcing the goodness of God.

And uh verse 4 also says, wherever they went, they did this.

So this is why the mission of God is so incredibly practical, because it's everywhere and it never takes a day off.

It never has to.

It's always relevant in any scenario, in every situation that you're in.

I remember last year when one of the Hayes football receivers broke his foot in the first game, um, trying to score a touchdown, and so sad, first game, and Cohen walks over there.

Uh, Cohen's my oldest son sitting right here, and he had a broken leg himself, so it was like the infirmary right there.

And they bring him over there, and Cohen lays a hand on him and starts praying for the power of God to touch uh D-Rock's foot.

And D-Rock's dad texted me later that night and said, uh, I was so thankful to see Cohen lay a hand on my son in his time of need and pray.

And I didn't know his dad was even watching it.

I didn't even see it happen.

I had I was told about it.

But it's an example of everywhere you go, you preach the word of God.

Preaching can look like praying for somebody in a moment, announcing the good news.

Hey, you have a need.

I know an answer.

Let me bring the answer forth.

You can do it through conversation, you can do it through releasing power like we just did for anybody that is in need in here and needs the manna, fresh for today, or the wind of the spirit, and you just release it, preaching the word everywhere you go.

So it's all over.

That's why it's so practical, is because it's it's everywhere all the time.

And in one of the biggest pinch points of the church history, the scattering of persecution, they were doing this.

And this is worth taking note of.

They just carry Jesus with them, even though they were cloudy on where they were headed.

And I just can't make this, and I know it's what we talked about last night, but I'll just say it for re-saying its sake, your only qualification is to have been with Jesus.

So build a lifestyle of being with Jesus.

Make that a regular part of your life and watch what comes out of it.

In fact, the more you do that, then the more history with God you're gonna establish, the more testimonies of his goodness and his grace you're gonna experience, and you're gonna have a lot to say, a lot to preach with.

Watch how it builds.

But it's not, I gotta get all this experience before I can start.

No, it's just I'm being with Jesus, and an outflow of that is this life with God.

So a little history for you.

Um, 1871, there was the Great Chicago Fire.

Anybody familiar with this in your in your history readings?

Um The thing about the Great Chicago Fire was it really did burn the city center down because so much of it was made of wood and close together and started in a barn, it sounds like.

Uh, they pretty much think they know where, which barn, but don't know exactly how.

Was it a lantern kicked over?

Was it something else?

Not sure on that, but sure that it started there and it burned the city center down and it killed 300 people, it displaced uh 10,000 people from their homes, and uh it was leveled.

But what rose out of the ash was not a lesser Chicago, it was a greater Chicago.

In fact, it was so great that it became the uh insight into how to build to build um steel structures, skyscrapers.

In fact, because you asked, you didn't ask, Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham uh were the architects who said, we got nothing to lose because look at this place, it's nothing but rubble.

So let's try some stuff.

And so it's like the wind of the spirit that we were just praying for this morning, that what was locked inside, the seed that God had put in there, released through the middle of the disruption of the fire, and then they realized these metal building skyscrapers are heavy and they'll sink into the soggy Chicago ground.

So, guess what they designed and built and where this started?

A cement slab, the foundation, so that the weight would actually disperse and displace itself balanced across the whole ground and carry the weight.

So that began.

So you get skyscrapers, you get metal buildings, not things made of wood only, you get the cement pad foundation laid, and by the time the world's Columbian Exposition in 1893 comes along, the population had skyracketed past a million people in Chicago, cementing its legacy as the city that is risen from the ashes.

An incredible example of a kingdom principle that's alive in the earth today, was then, is now, will be on into eternity, that God uses disruptions for incredible development and building of the kingdom and of his purposes.

So he does not waste disruption, and I just want us to hear that today.

Another big idea is that God allows scattering where he intends to multiply.

He's a multiplying God, loves multiplication over addition.

You didn't know God was such a mathematician, did you?

He is meticulous, and he loves multiplying because it moves with great pace.

It accomplishes the mission of God to make disciples of nations.

And so making something out of seemingly nothing, or perhaps a setback, worse, isn't just a one-off in Acts chapter 8 that we see with like, oh, dodged a bullet, there was great persecution, and thankfully, in this one case, something great was made out of it.

Acts 8 · chapter mention

The Antioch Church was planted, and they got the idea of going and making disciples.

It's it's it's all throughout the course.

It's systemic in creation, it's everywhere.

Genesis 37 through 50, I'll draw your attention to Joseph and the effects of being sold by his own brothers.

He was trafficked into slavery, falsely accused, and then forgotten about in prison, two years of being forgotten about after doing somebody a favor.

Every single stage of Joseph's life before Genesis 41 is a disruption.

I mean a disruption after disruption after disruption.

And maybe you can feel like you can relate a little bit and you say, Man, I feel like every time the calendar changes years, I've got a new disruption I've got to deal with.

Well, Joseph knows your pain.

Some of it was his own fault, some of it wasn't his own fault.

Sometimes disruptions in life are our own doing.

Sometimes disruptions in life aren't our own doing, and they they happen to us.

But either case, there is the providence of God to be found and experienced in the disruption, and the providence is the multiplication factor of what can happen.

So Joseph's own spoken summary, decades later, um, to his brothers who wronged him was this, verse 20.

You guys meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive.

And notice he doesn't say that the evil was good.

He says that God is skilled enough to work inside the evil without having to be the author of it.

That's God.

And you also can't think about disruption in the story of God and humanity and not recount Israel's captivity to Babylon.

I mean, I'm telling you, and you knew this, I guess, there's disruption all throughout the course of God's interaction with humanity.

It's just, it's just every place.

So we can spend our life, like Graham Cook says, you know, trying to dodge the disruptions of life.

And sometimes God's like, are you kidding me?

It took me six months to allow you to get to this place of feeling the effects.

I'm not about to cause you to dodge it.

There is power in it.

There's an allowance sovereignly from God.

Doesn't mean you're like, well, man, you feel like you're talking in circles.

There is a little mystery here.

God doesn't have to send the disruption.

Now there can be disruptions that God is the author of.

He's like, hey, I'm gonna hang on for a minute here rather than bringing this thing to full fruition because I've got a secret.

I've got a gift to give you here before this thing happens.

There's those times.

There's other times the disruption happens because we live on a fallen planet broken by sin still, and there's a day of reckoning fully coming still that will come, but God is in those moments, in those disruption places at every turn.

And so Israel's captive in Babylon, and it's a national catastrophe.

Can you imagine if the nation of the United States was somehow captured and we were exiled to live someplace we've never lived?

We're talking a thousand miles away from their home.

So you want to talk about Acts chapter 8 and the early church getting disrupted.

Acts 8 · chapter mention

Well, this was in their past, in their history too, with their ancestors, with the Israelites.

Once they got captured by Babylon, the temple crashed.

Their way of worshiping collapsed.

That's why we talked a few weeks back ago about the power of the table and how really the new temple became the home, and the priest was now the father, and it's the power of welcoming people into your home and eating with them and generosity and hospitality and all that.

And so it's the exile that scattered Jewish communities and synagogues all across the ancient world, from Babylon to Rome to Ethiopia to Asia Minor, that looked like judgment in the moment.

But 500 years later, when Paul shows up on his missionary journeys to all these other places, guess where's the first place Paul would always go when he came to a new city?

The synagogues.

The places of worship.

His first stop, that's where he was headed.

And the reason there was a place to go was because of the Babylonian captivity that scattered Israel all over the place, all over the place.

Do you see how this was even before Jesus ever released the Great Commission in the plan, in the heart of God, to set up what would become the hubs of all the spokes that would eventually come out of them in all of these different regions that Paul years later, 500 years later, would actually go to.

It's amazing the synchronicity of the plan of God over the long arc of time.

And then how about this one?

Paul's a prisoner in chains on a ship, caught in a storm, so violent that Acts 27, verse 20 reads like this.

Acts 27:20

And the storm continued raging.

So can you imagine?

Maybe it was a hurricane that just sat on top of them, I don't know, but it was cloudy and rainy and stormy.

It says, We finally gave up all hope of being saved.

It's like this is how we end.

We've been on this ship for this long, and it's not changing.

We die here.

In fact, it did tear the ship.

Apart, broke, and people either swam or floated on wreckage to the island of Malta, which, as far as we know, had never even heard the name Jesus ever uttered before at this point.

And the disruption of a shipwreck lends itself to Paul being there.

He stays there for the whole winter.

And he, by the time he leaves, there's a church we think on Malta.

Not only is like people getting told that, hey, there's a God, his name's Jesus, he really loves you, he's died, he's now risen, and our lives are spent telling everybody about it, but they actually started a church so that anybody that might be on the island who didn't hear the message can now know and be sent themselves.

All because of the disruption of a storm, a natural storm in the water, and lightning that breaks a ship apart, and everywhere he went, everywhere they went, they preached the good news of Jesus.

What an invitation for our lives.

And then Paul gets to Rome.

He's still a prisoner, and the book of Acts actually ends with him preaching.

It says quite openly and unhindered.

So how about that for the favor of God?

He's a prisoner.

He gets to Rome as a prisoner.

By the way, he got to the very place he always wanted to get to, Rome.

That was actually like the gold of my destination.

If I could just get back to Rome, the the ep the epicenter of it all, and speak about Jesus there, that would be the win of all wins.

And he does, on a government-funded trip.

Because he's a prisoner.

Didn't have to pay to get there.

Winds up there and it says he preached openly and unhindered, even though he's a prisoner, in the very heart of the empire, having gotten a free one-way trip there.

Disruption scatters what was settled.

Settled things don't reach new places.

Only scattered things do.

If your life stays settled and comfortable, then you will be the Emmaus church.

A village church who never goes anywhere and just says, well, at least we got it.

At least we're good.

And so we don't pray for disruptions, because right now disruptions exist in all kinds of forms.

But we do pray that we would have the eyes of heaven to see the opportunities that are unique in the disruption, that we wouldn't miss it.

Oh, pass me not, O gentle Savior.

Don't waste it.

Don't let it go by.

If I'm going through the disruption, God, bring the explosion of heaven into it.

And let's use it.

And God's promises are in the disruptions of life.

To sustain you, to care for you, to provide for you, to nurture you, to build you, to equip you.

They go on and on and on and on and they keep going on, the promises of God do in the disruptions of life.

And you say, well, does it have to be a disruption to reach a new territory?

In theory, you can of course go without a disruption.

I just know, like you know, that we're not very good at it.

And if God's given help, I'll take help.

But what I know about us is that we um yeah, our our nature, when nothing is disrupted, we we stay put.

There's a progression in the kingdom, and it looks like this: gathered, scattered, sent, and reproduced.

And then gathered again, and then there's a scattering, and the people of God realize, oh, it's ascending in disguise, and then a reproduce.

And I look at my own life, and maybe you look at yours too, um, and have this progression in it, but I think about my experience as a freshman in college.

I graduated from uh high school in North Austin and was pretty certain that I didn't want to stay in North Austin, that it's college time, it's time to spread your wings a little bit and gain a little independence and maybe not go out of state because that's expensive, but maybe stay in state, but maybe a little further.

So I chose Denton, Texas, University of North Texas.

And I had a brother up in the grapevine area and thought, okay, this is where I'm headed.

And so I applied late, whoops, and ended up getting a roommate who was tough.

He went to an all-guy Catholic school, Dallas, Jesuit, and he'd never gone to school with girls.

So now he's in college with girls.

And the dorm that we're in, because I registered late, was an old holiday inn made of cinder block walls that they turned into a dorm.

So there was no separate rooms, there was no like suite mates, it was me and him in our own corners of the ring.

His bed, my bed, catacornered, and there was about 11 feet that separated us.

And I spent more nights with girls in his bed than I wish I would have.

I would go to class and put a piece of scotch tape, no lie, on the outside of the door, which was the outside of the world, by the way, because it was not like a hallway that the outside, it was the holiday inn.

So, like if there's a balcony outside, if it's hailing or something, the door's hitting the hail and you hear the hail on your metal door.

Um, this is what you get for registering late, kids.

Register early.

Apply early.

And so I would tape the door in the frame of the door, so that when I came back from class, if the tape had been broken, just to know to enter with caution.

Because on the other side of that door might not be something my virgin eyes needed to see.

I'm not making this up.

And so this went on for a year, and besides that, I didn't have any friends.

And I was trying to make them.

And up to this point, I was pretty good at it.

But now this year, I'm like, I I can't find a crowd.

I'm trying and I can't.

And so I just, God bless you, if you're like, I'm in that season right now.

That's the worst season to be in.

Loneliness is despairing, and that's not God's best for you.

That's why you have family, and that's why a church is supposed to be a family, so that you can find a place to belong, doggone it.

And so here I am, lonely and isolated.

And now I'll say this: it's a precious year that I spent in the desert, I call it the desert, because I really did discover Jesus as a friend and not just as a Lord or a savior or a provider or all the things that you know he is also.

But I needed to discover him as a friend, and I did that year.

But when the opportunity to hightail out of there came, I took it.

But just thinking, okay, the gathering of the progress in the kingdom happened there.

University of North Texas, lots of students, lots of musician, international students around me.

I wasn't either one of those, and so had a hard time fitting in, but there was a gathering.

And then I realized this isn't working.

And I missed her.

She was a sophomore in high school, by the way.

And um, oh come on, Cohen.

You wouldn't be here.

We won't go into that right now.

Yes, we had an early origin time.

She was a freshman, I was a senior.

So uh my I heartache, and I experienced a scattering of this isn't where I'm supposed to be.

I don't know where I'm supposed to be.

I'm displaced, I don't have any friends right now, I'm not liking life here.

Where do I need to be?

And so I ended up coming back to Central Texas, um, got a job with my old youth pastor.

I say job, it was about a 500 a month job, but it's a job.

And and so I'm the youth pastor now and and the janitor and and a few other things, um, and that was good.

And what it did for me was I realized, oh, there's an opportunity in my life that I actually can get on board with helping lead the church.

And that was the that was the born place of that.

There were some other hints along the way, I think, but it wasn't until I was scattered from my UNT college experience back home, almost feeling like it failed, and I failed.

And so here I am, I slung shot out in the world to go make something of myself, and I boomeranged right back.

Like, well, that didn't work.

But what it did as the disruption happened was give me vision for the rest of my life.

So now I shifted from being scattered to realizing, oh, I'm sent.

I'm a sent one.

I have purpose now, and I have think I have some clarity and some vision for my life.

And I look at where I'm at today, now years later, and realize that there's an opportunity for reproduction now, to reproduce that whole progress progression and pattern in my own life and others' lives.

And to facilitate that and to teach that, to coach that, to help that along, and to realize it's not failure.

It's actually a progression in the kingdom.

For gathering and then scattering, which is actually what we're doing right this second.

We've gathered, and then we're gonna scatter on a Sunday afternoon and go into our places.

When Jesus says go, he's talking about the as you go, wherever it is you're going.

Your social circles, your job, your sports team, your grocery store, all the going that you do is the scattering that we're doing, but in the scattering we live with the mission of I'm sent.

I am sent to do what?

To keep my head on a swivel and to pay attention to the opportunities that God brings around me to be God's person on the spot, and there's lots of spots, and there's lots of options and lots of opportunities.

And you live your life with that pattern in such a way that it's contagious and others catch it.

Whether it's spoken directly or caught indirectly, it's a there's a reproduction of it that happens.

And this is what you see that God allows the disruption because he's into multiplication.

This is the mission of God.

This is what the ecclesia, the church, is actually meant to be.

And here's the last big idea for us is that God sends what's been scattered.

He absolutely sends whatever's been scattered every time it's been scattered.

Every time it's been disrupted, he says, I'm here.

I'm on the spot.

In fact, I've been in the spot, and I am sending you with purpose in the middle of this disruption, in the middle of the scattering.

We have the opportunity to search the heart of God, to ask him, and he's not a withholder of good things, he's a revealer of his good plan every time.

He's not a jigsaw puzzle to have to be figured out.

He wants you to know his heart.

And he's made it possible by putting himself in you as a believer in Jesus, to know him, to know his ways, to know his voice.

So Acts 11 is where we've been gaining a lot of ground here, talking about the Ecclesia.

Here's verse 19 again for you, I think for the third week in a row.

Now those who had been scattered by the persecution that broke out when Stephen was killed, that was Acts 7, traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and ding-ding-ding, Antioch, spreading the word at the time, only among the Jews.

Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, who were, this is what we talked about last week, unnamed, went to Antioch and began to speak, here it is, to Greeks also.

Do you realize that Antioch was a very affluent and important town?

In fact, if you were a Roman official or a somebody, a who's who in Rome, and you retired from your job, you very likely moved from the city center of Rome to Antioch.

This was a retirement community that had a lot of money, a lot of influence, and a lot of the Greek way in it, by the way.

And so there, you know, it it was a god, the right god, godless place.

It had a lot of the mythology and everything else going on.

I mean, Antioch was was not a small scene.

And so that's why it gained so much steam when it did, was because there was so much influence already rooted in the structures in Antioch.

And so when they got the truth in them, it was able to really go because it was conditioned for it.

So they began to speak to these Greeks, to these retired Roman citizens, essentially, and anybody else who would listen, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus.

Doesn't that just have a wonderful ring to it?

The Lord's hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord.

The church, Antioch, that we've spent the last two weeks really celebrating because it really is the role model of what the church mission really is to be was the birthplace of the whole Gentile mission, would not exist without Stephen's murder.

It wouldn't.

They wound up there because they were running for their lives.

I just don't want to run past that too fast today.

To realize that what was so tragic on the front led to the model church that we have today in the year we're in.

And the same thing is true about every disruption of our life, that there is resurrection power on the other side of it.

And if we can keep that in mind, I believe we can weather and walk through the disruptions of life in a whole new light and way.

By being aware, people.

I'm aware that God's in this and that there is resurrection life and power and opportunity in it.

And I'm gonna look for it and I'm gonna be a part of it.

That'll change the way you handle a disruption, I believe.

And the revolution of the ordinary man and the scattering of the church are actually the same event.

It's the same thing happening in history right there that have, it's just loaded with purpose.

Ordinary people don't usually leave home voluntarily.

It often takes disruption to move them.

But once moved, they carry what they have, which is, as we said last week, not a title, it's not a resume, it's a history of having been with God.

And that's the qualifier.

The Jerusalem church, remember they never voluntarily obeyed the Judea, Samaria, and ends of the earth part of the Great Commission?

It took a funeral and a manhunt to get them moving.

Took Stephen's funeral and it took Saul's manhunt going door to door, saying, Are you a Christian?

Are you a or they actually Christian came from the Antioch church, so he wasn't calling them Christians yet.

Are you a follower of Jesus?

Are you preaching Jesus?

If you are, you're going to jail.

So they're on the run.

The manhunt was on.

And you can recount your own life just like I can.

Um, that's led you to where you're at today.

And it might be a a decent exercise, not necessarily pain plowing up the pain of your past unnecessarily, but just taking some inventory and realizing, oh God, that was a course change, that was a course direction, that was a disruption that you actually were were to be found in.

And it's actually led me here.

Now, where do we go from here?

What do I have?

What am I carrying, and where am I going with what I'm carrying?

That really is the question that's on the table to ask today.

And I want to tell you, I'll give you a hint, you're carrying the power of heaven in you.

And the assignment, huh, it's like the wind.

In fact, it's described that way, the wind of God is that it blows where it blows.

We don't know where it comes from and we don't know where it goes, but he's in it all.

And if you're up for an adventure, sign up for the ride because it's there.

Um, one of my favorite examples, and I'll kind of close with this, of God's pattern of using disruption uh was not too long ago, it was in 2017.

And I don't know if you've heard the term the uh Cajun Navy before.

The Cajun Navy.

2017 uh Hurricane Harvey blasted through.

It even canceled school here in Austin before it was supposed to start on whatever day it was supposed to start, and it was delayed because Harvey came inland as much as it did, and and maybe it was precautionary for us, but it wasn't precautionary for Houston, and Houston was underwater, and there were people on their roofs and swimming and trying to fight for their lives.

And before organized, you know, um ADRN or anybody else could come in and help uh rescue, the Cajun Navy was ordinary men, there's our term, Louisianans, citizens, who likely had been through Katrina a decade previous and knew what it was to be stranded on your roof.

So if they had a boat, they drove through Louisiana, drove through Texas, landed in Houston, and they were the first responders.

And they were known as the Cajun Navy, who came and they saved lots of lives by firing up their boats in the flood waters and going and rescuing people all over the place.

The disruption of the storm didn't wait for the professionals to be ready.

It got met by ordinary people who happened to own a boat and perhaps could relate to the pain of the disruption that their neighbor was in.

And as we talk about God redeeming disruption, because it's often a part of the kingdom progression, I just want to remind us today that Jesus is the ultimate example of disruption, that the cross of Jesus is the disruption of all disruptions, that right in the middle of the pain of sin and the curse of it, and the breakdown in humanity and the separation from God, Jesus on a cross, dying for our sin, starting new covenant reality, was the disruption that has led us all to life forever, once and for all.

And from the disciples' perspective, Jesus was dead.

The movement they had given their lives for was the and the Messiah that so many had waited for had now been rejected seemingly, and their plan had collapsed, and they were people that were displaced, gasping, what do we do now?

And then the resurrection happens, and if you want to know what God does with disruption, we look at the cross, the greatest evil humanity ever committed became the very place that God accomplished the greatest salvation that humanity had ever seen and will ever see again.

And for that, we're thankful and we're transformed, and our lives take on a different direction.

From that revelation, from that encounter of the cross, from receiving it and the life through faith that that's for us changes everything about the way we live as new covenant creation people forever, from here on out.

And if God can take a cross and turn it into resurrection, he can take what feels like the end of our story and put resurrection on the other side of it.

Every time he can do that.

And that's the gospel, that's the good news.

We follow a crucified and risen king named Jesus who specializes in resurrection and redemption, and he's all about doing that in your life.

So we thank you for that.

Um yeah, worship team.

Um Addy, if you're around, are you around?

Yeah, could you jump up here?

Um so if you're here listening to this and thinking about disruption and being scattered, um thinking about your own life, relationships, um, just your past that's brought you to here.

Uh I would say this: don't rush to explain why it happened.

I think a better question is to say what's in me and what is the opportunity for assignment that God's up to with me in it.

If it's fresh, then there's grieving that needs to happen.

If there's a disruption that has taken you by storm.

And so, why don't you um do a little reflection here?

Uh bow your head and kind of create maybe an air of privacy here for a minute.

And just ask the Lord the simple question of God, what are you up to with my disruption right now?

Holy Spirit, where are you that I haven't seen you in it yet?

Lord, would you reveal to us a picture of what you're doing?

And what invitation is on the table?

It's actually probably an invitation that's in your hand.

Yeah.

Brad, Deanna, maybe some of you guys, why don't you come up?

Yeah, and if you worship, uh, excuse me, a few prayer team of people um up here.

I want to pray for you as you're hearing from the Lord.

Lord, we receive what you're showing us.

Realize that we always have an opportunity and an option to receive the revelation that comes our way.

But that that's our option, that's our that's our move is to receive what you show us.

And so thank you for pulling the curtain wide this morning and speaking to our hearts and allowing light to hit disruptions in a way it hasn't hit before, we hadn't seen it before, because we want to see it through your perspective, and we want to be a part of the mission of God in the middle of the scattering of our life.

And Lord, we we we receive the provision of heaven so that we can operate sent and not discombobulated in our scattering, but that we can actually have what we need to be sent.

You're the God of more than enough.

We remind ourselves of that truth and we receive what you're giving.

Wisdom and revelation come.

Thank you, Jesus.

Why don't you stand?

How do you would you lead us in that lesson?

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