Some of the decisions we make without God are staggering when you step back and take a look at them. When I was working at a church in Florida, my pastor had a bunch of kids, like a lot of kids. I think he's got twelve right now. And he asked me one day, he said, how many kids are you guys hoping to have, Jeff? And I told him we were planning on three.
And then he said, have you asked the Lord how many he wants you to have? And I realized that like 99.99% of Christian couples, the thought had Peter. even crossed my mind. We think about the number of brothers and sisters we had growing up. We think about how many kids we think we could handle or afford, or how many could fit into the kind of house that we could afford. But almost nobody thinks to ask God how many kids he wants us to have.
That's a huge life decision. And almost no Christians bring it to the Lord. For us. It turned out the number was more than three, and I'm so glad it was.
Young people, are you seeking the Lord's guidance as to what career path you should pursue? Are you seeking wise counsel from mature believers who have walked with Jesus faithfully for a long time? Or are you just making your own plans based on what seems good to you, what you want to do, and what you feel like doing? Does God get to have an opinion on what you do with the rest of your life? What about buying an apartment or a house?
What about moving? What about moving to another city or another job or another career? Buying a new vehicle? How do we spend our money? Do we bring these kinds of decisions to the Lord proactively?
Do we seek out wise counsel? Do we pray? Do we fast about decisions that have enormous ramifications for our lives? Do we seek his will upfront? Or do we just do what seems best to us and then come back to God if our plans don't work out and be like, Where were you? He's like, I was right here. You just didn't ask. I would have told you. That's a really dumb idea. Don't do that.
Our brother James would echo the wise perspective of Paul, saying, "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.' Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring, what your life will be. For you are like a vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes." Those who belong to the Lord belong to the Lord. They know their lives are in the hands of their Savior, and they trust that his will is always good.
When you know the goodness of God, you will trust the will of God. You will want his will to be done in every area of your life because you will finally understand that God's will for you is always better than your plans for yourself. God has perfect knowledge. God sees all things. He actually perceives eternity.
We cannot fathom anything without a beginning or an end. We can't. You can lie and say you do, but you can't. You have no reference point. Your mind can't conceive of that.
But out of love, god's plans for us are based on his perspective that includes both this life and eternity. And from that perspective, he does what is best from a perspective we do not have and cannot possess. So, Paul, humbly and wisely says, I'll come back to you again if God wills. I love you, but being in the Lord's will is what's most important to me. So, write this down those who love the Lord trust the Lord and so desire to be always in his will.
Those who love the Lord want to be in the will of God. There was a man who could share his plans without the preface if God wills, our Lord said to his disciples, if I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, you may be also. He didn't need to say if God wills, because he is God, therefore if he wills it, it will be done. Verse 22 on landing at Caesarea. Now, Caesarea was a beautiful port city in Israel that was always busy because it was the closest port to Jerusalem.
It's weird, I know we can't pretend it's not right, but it was a thing in Hebrew culture. That's what they did, which makes me a very spiritual person because I could have a full hair of flowing, beautiful hair. I'm just so spiritual. So, I forsake that. And while it might seem odd to see Paul, the champion of grace and the champion of not being under the law, engaging in Old Covenant Hebrew customs, we should remember that while Paul was a Christian, he was a Jewish Christian.
And Jewish Christians were not required to give up their customs and traditions to become Christians. They were simply required to recognize that they had no bearing on their salvation, as salvation was by faith in Jesus and not by works. But if they really liked washing their hands in the Jewish customary way, that was okay. They just needed to recognize that that didn't make them spiritually clean or impress God in any way. So, for Paul, this was just a way in his Hebrew culture of expressing gratitude to God.
And that was fine. Verse 19 when they reached Ephesus, he that's Paul left them that's Priscilla and Aquila there. Paul needed trustworthy, men and women to anchor the church that he would plant in the important city of Ephesus. And so, after training them for months over conversations in Corinth, Paul was able to leave Aquila and Priscilla there in Ephesus, where they established a business and hosted the church in their home. But he himself that's Paul entered the synagogue and debated with the Jews, as was his custom whenever he entered a new city or town.
Verse 20 when they, the Jews in Ephesus, asked him to stay for a longer time. He declined, but he said farewell and added, I'll come back to you again, if God wills. Underline those three words, if God wills, then he set sail from Ephesus, as in Berea. Paul is received favorably by the Jews in Ephesus, and normally Paul would be thrilled to stay and minister further. But Paul has made this vow, and he's made it to the Lord, and so he takes it seriously.
He needs to get to Jerusalem to make his offering at the temple and fulfill his vow. So, Paul says, I'll come back to you again, if God wills. And it will turn out that God does indeed will Paul to return. He'll come back later and spend three years in Ephesus as God builds a great church there. Those who belong to the Lord belong to the Lord.
And I know you're like Jeff. That's the kind of deep teaching I come here for. That's right. Paul would later tell the Corinthians, you were bought at a price, the price of the life of Jesus. Practically, that means that God has full rights over our life, not just in the final sense, not just in terms of our final destination, but in the day-to-day sense, too.
Now we have a choice to submit our lives to God, or not moment to moment and day by day, but those who love the Lord desire to be in his will, moment by moment and day by day. That's what Paul was alluding to when he said, I'll come back to you again if God wills. He wasn't saying, I'd love to, but sometimes God messes up my awesome plans. He was saying, I want to be in the will of God, and if he allows me to return and see you again, I would love that. But wherever God's will wants me to be, that's where I want to be.
And most of the time we are so good at bringing our problems to God when our plans don't work out. And most of the time we are so bad at bringing our plans to God before we move ahead with them. I'm going to say that one more time because it's so important. Most of the time we are so good at bringing our problems to God when our plans don't work out. And most of the time we are so bad at bringing our plans to God before we move forward with them.
The Eloquent Apollos Date:7/30/23 Series: Acts...Passage: Acts 18:18-28...Speaker: Jeff Thompson
As Paul heads home to Antioch to end his second missionary journey, we are reminded to submit our daily lives, decisions, and plans to the Lord’s will.
And as we pick up our study, Paul has been enjoying a fruitful season of ministry in the city of Corinth. He has been there for a year and a half, possibly longer, and seen a large church birthed through the mighty and sustained work of God in the city. Paul has been ministered to by Jesus directly, as well as through brothers and sisters like Aquila and Priscilla, who have become some of his dearest friends, Paul has been refreshed, rejuvenated, and allowed to recover, regaining his physical, emotional, and spiritual strength. And so, we read in verse 18.
After staying for some time in Corinth, Paul said farewell to the brothers and sisters and sailed away to Syria. That's where Antioch Paul's Homes church is accompanied by Priscilla and Aquila. So, Paul begins his journey back home, accompanied by his dear friends that he's made in Corinth, Aquila and Priscilla, and they come with him to serve wherever needed. They pack up their business and their life to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit. We don't know how old they were, but for whatever reason, there are no children in their lives at this time.
And so, they serve as a wonderful example of how to use one's flexibility in that stage of life. They don't check out and start building a life focused on their own leisure and pleasure. They make themselves available to the Lord as his servants in a greater way than they ever have before, as is afforded them by the stage of life they are in. There's nothing sadder to me than the general concept of retirement in our culture. Oh, I can't wait to turn 65 so I can just check out and do nothing for the rest of my life.
That's just a really nice way of saying wait to die for 20 to 30 years. But you need to know that there is no concept of retirement in the Christian faith, only having more time to serve the Lord and be available to our master Jesus. That's how the Christian views that. And that's why the Christian should be excited about retirement - because it means more time to be available to the Lord Jesus. That Aquila and Priscilla could leave tells us that other leaders had emerged in the Corinthian church, such as Gaius Stephanus and the former synagogue leader Crispus.
And Sosthenes it's possible Paul also left behind Silas and Timothy to help lead the fledgling church. Then we go on, and it says he that's Paul shaved his head at Cenchreae because of a vow he had taken. Now, Cenchreae is so close to Corinth, I couldn't even mark it on the map for you. But whereas Corinth is a port city that goes out to the west coast of Greece and the Ionian Sea, Cenchreae is the port that goes out to the east coast of Greece and the Aegean Sea. So, Paul traveled the short distance overland between Corinth and Cenchreae because he wanted to travel east back to Syria.
Now, we don't know exactly what this vow was that Paul had taken, why he took it, or when he took it. There are several popular suggestions, such as the Nazareth vow, but it's uncertain for reasons that are much too boring for me to share right now. All we know for sure is that this vow included not cutting his hair until this specific time. The most likely explanation is that this was some sort of thank offering to the Lord for preserving Paul's life through his second missionary journey. And when a man who was Jewish had cut his hair for any kind of vow, he would put it in a bag journey to Jerusalem, and burn it there as a sacrifice to God at the temple.
Christ will be glorified, idols will be torn down, and the powers of darkness will rage. Expect it. You live for Christ. Expect opposition. But don't fear opposition, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.
Christian will build his church and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. He will never leave you nor forsake you. He's with you to the end of the age. Let's pray. Would you bow your head and close your eyes?
Jesus. Thank you for your Word. And thank you for how plain and how honest you have been with us in Your Word that we should expect opposition. And Lord, we see our dear brothers who went before us like Paul, not flinching when they experienced opposition because he expected it, but not being intimidated for even a second, because he was assured of the greatness and goodness and power of the God in whom he had believed. And so, Jesus, we thank You that we can be as assured of Your greatness, goodness, and power as Paul was.
You're the same yesterday, today, and forever, and you're as much with us as you were with Him. And so, Lord, we thank you that we don't have to fear, but Lord, we pray for eyes to see and to recognize and discern where we're experiencing spiritual opposition. Lord, I pray for discernment so that we would not rage against people, that we would not mistake what is a spiritual attack for a personal attack or a relational attack, but that, Lord, we would see clearly that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but in the spiritual realm. And so, Lord, help us to come to you to seek Your power, Your wisdom, Jesus, Your help, Your power that works so powerfully in us. And so, Lord, I pray right now for any of my brothers and sisters who are experiencing spiritual opposition in any area of their life.
Lord, I pray for confident assurance that you are with them, for hope and peace from knowing you are with them. And, Lord, for eyes to see and recognize what is truly going on. And thank You, Lord, that the ending is assured. Christ is victorious. We reign with you forever.
And that no matter what our circumstances are in this life, we can experience victory in you because we can have peace and life and hope and joy regardless of our circumstances. So, Lord, let that be real. Help us to appropriate that. Help us to receive it. Help us to cast our cares upon You and to receive all those good things that You do. Always have to be available for us. Jesus, we love you. We bless you. In Your name, we pray. Amen.
They don't like it when it happens in a city like Ephesus. They don't like it when it happens in a church. They don't like it when it happens in a family or in a marriage or in an individual. So, if you get serious about repenting and following Christ, you should expect spiritual opposition. What Ephesus shows us is while the forces of darkness may create opposition, they cannot triumph over the power of Christ.
One man filled with the power of Christ preaching the word of Christ can stand against all the powers of darkness in existence because Christ is greater. Paul stated it to the Corinthians like this. He said, I fought wild beasts in Ephesus as a mere man, but we must understand this. We must understand this. When we destroy the idols in our lives, we are destroying idols that many people worship. When we turn from lesser gods, calling them worthless, and turn to the living God, we are insulting the gods that many people worship.
Write this down and take it in. When we turn from idols, lesser gods, and sins, we turn from the things the world loves and worships, offending and angering the world.
When our actions call Christ worthy and everything else worthless, we should not be surprised when people get offended and angry. They love and worship those things. They've devoted their lives to those things. They've placed their hope in them. They've built their identity on them.
And when we turn to Christ, it disrupts the mob mentality that we've been living in and that they are living in. Here's what I mean by that. We live in families, we live in communities, we have coworkers, we have fellow students, we have a social circle. And when we turn to Christ by the simple act of turning to Him and turning from all other gods, we create problems for the social dynamic. Because we used to be part of a group that said, this is okay, it's fine to do that, it's fine to live like this.
And we suddenly do a 180 and turn to Christ and bear witness that that is sin, and we are sinners, and we need a savior. It's as though there's a riot, a store is being looted, and suddenly in the middle of that going on, someone stands up and says, this is wrong, this is theft. We should not be doing this. We need to stop. What's the reaction going to be to that?
You're probably going to get punched, you're probably going to get shouted down, and people are going to get angry with you. And that's what happens. When we turn to Christ, we disrupt the mob mentality of a world in the grips of sin and death. Jesus called his church to be salt and light, and salt stings when it's rubbed in wounds. And light reveals the evil deeds done in darkness, and both can provoke a hostile reaction.
We see this as well in the trans community today. They hate Christians because we preach the truth that God created men and women, and there's nothing anyone can do to become the other. But there's one group they hate even more than Christians, and it's detransitioners those who were transitioning but have since abandoned it after seeing the light of the truth. Now, why the hate? Because the detrans community destroys the idols of the trans community.
It calls their gods worthless. It says they cannot save, they cannot heal, they cannot help. And that doesn't go over really well. This is one of the reasons Jesus said to count the cost before you commit to follow him. It's because your community, your social circle, your people group, your family, as Jesus said, may very well hate you if you disavow their gods and destroy the idols they worship.
Expect it, is what Jesus said because we are calling the things they love and treasure worthless because it's true. But they don't want to hear it. They don't want to hear it. I'm going to ask the worship team to come up. Wherever the gospel is preached.
But this status was a privilege, and it only remained if the city's officials could collect the mandated taxes for Rome and keep the peace. And something like a mob that starts to riot could put Ephesus's status as a free city in jeopardy. Additionally, the Romans could come in and break up any troublemaking, trade guilds. When Rome felt like it needed to drop the hammer on a rowdy city, it did not play around. And that's what his city official is going to base his appeal to the mob on.
He said, People of Ephesus, what person is there who doesn't know that the city of the Ephesians is the temple guardian of the great Artemis and of the image that fell from heaven? You see, hidden inside the temple of Artemis out of public view was allegedly a rock that traditions said fell from the sky. And the people of Ephesus had become convinced that his rock was in the likeness of a woman whom they decided was the goddess Artemis. You see, in their thinking at that time, objects that fell from the sky were from the gods. They were from the heavens.
Interestingly, there were books that we have that were written in the second century by some Christians who went around debunking the origins of some of the pagan gods in the Roman empires. They would do things like interview tradesmen who were multigenerational tradesmen, whose great-great grandparents were also tradesmen et Peter. And one of the places they went was Ephesus. And what their research revealed was that his rock of Artemis was in fact wood that had been made by craftsmen and that's why it wasn't put on public display. So, it was literally a scam to try and create a business and a tourist industry in the city and turn it into a legend.
That's what he's referring to here, this savvy and secular public official. He placates the crowd by telling them, relax, relax. Everybody knows. Everybody knows the gods have visited Ephesus in the form of the Artemis Rock. Everybody knows how special this city is, and nothing can change that.
Although the man was sincere, he was tragically mistaken, for today, nobody worships Artemis, but hundreds of millions of people worship Jesus Christ. Verse 36 therefore, since these things are undeniable, you must keep calm and not do anything rash, for you have brought these men here who are not temple robbers or blasphemers of our goddess. So, if Demetrius and the craftsmen who are with them have a case against anyone, the courts are in session and there are proconsuls. Let them bring charges against one another. But if you seek anything further, it must be decided in a legal assembly.
In fact, we run a risk of being charged with rioting for what happened today, since there's no justification that we can give as a reason for this disturbance. After saying this, he dismissed the assembly. It's a good pitch. This official says, let's not be hasty and incur the wrath of Rome. We're not savages.
We have courts, we have laws. If there's an accusation to be made, let a charge be brought legally through the justice system and it'll be dealt with. But right now, we're on the verge of a riot that could endanger our whole city. So cut it out. And they did. For now.
Last week, we saw Ephesians turning to Christ and burning their occultic books in a powerful and practical demonstration of repentance. And we ended in verse 20, where it told us the word of the Lord spread and prevailed. Wherever the word of the Lord spreads, wherever it takes root, wherever it leads people to Christ, who then respond by turning from their sins and turning from their idols and turning to Christ, there will be a response from the powers of darkness. Always. When their power and authority are stripped by Christ, they don't like it.
Classic Paul. For not the first time in his travels, the Lord had to speak through brothers and sisters who told Paul, to read the room. These people want to kill you. You won't even get the chance to say anything. That some of Paul's friends were provincial officials of Asia is another reminder of just how widespread the impact of Paul's ministry in Asia.
He reached people in every city, directly or through those who heard his message, and in every class of society, even rulers of the province. And based on the time it would have taken Paul to get word of what was happening, for people to warn him, and for people not with Paul to send words of warning to him, the mob must have been in the amphitheater for hours before the next developments unfold in the narrative. Verse 32. Some in the amphitheater were shouting one thing and comes another because the assembly was in confusion and most of them did not know why they had come together. This is how mobs work.
People just get caught up in intense emotions and just want to be part of whatever is happening. They're interested because other people seem to be interested. There was no social media, so everyone in the city is just saying, what's going on? What's all this shouting about? What's happening in the amphitheater?
And so, thousands of people come streaming into that amphitheater. Reminded me of a YouTube video I saw, which cracked me up, where a random guy just dressed up in a hoodie with sunglasses. He hired a couple of security guards and a couple of photographers and then walked through a mall having the photographers take pictures of him and the security guards pushing people out of the way. And it wasn't long before there were hundreds of people following him, trying to take pictures with him. Even though nobody knew who he was.
He wasn't anybody at all. That's how mobs work. People just want to be a part of whatever is happening. Verse 33. Some Jews in the crowd gave instructions to Alexander after they pushed him to the front.
You see, the Jews in Ephesus knew that whenever things start going wrong, when the economy is in danger when people's livelihoods are on the line, the Jews often get blamed. Fearing a riot that might turn into violence against the Hebrew community, they pushed forward Alexander, who was a prominent and eloquent Jew, to make their defense and assure the Gentile Ephesians that they had nothing to do with Paul or the Christians or anything like that. It says motioning with his hand. He was part Italian. Alexander wanted to make his defense to the people.
But when they recognized that he was a Jew, they all shouted in unison for about 2 hours great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Jews were also known for being against idolatry, but they didn't had any impact on the city of Ephesus. As soon as the crowd realized Alexander was a Jew, they had no interest in anything he had to say. And they shouted him down with chants of Great is Artemis of the Ephesians.
This is the fervor. This is the frenzy that I was talking about for 2 hours. The crowd shouted in unison, great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Verses 35. When the city clerk had calmed the crowd down, a city official finally got involved and tried to just calm the situation.
Ephesus was a free city in the Roman Empire. It was a status given to cities that allowed them to essentially govern themselves while still abiding by Roman law. It was a very special privilege. They would not have Roman officials ruling over their city. They would have some of their own citizens as leaders.
Jesus said, what does it benefit someone to gain the whole world and yet lose their life? Hell will be filled with people who loved money more than God. Verses 28 when they had heard this, when they heard everything Demetrius had said, they were filled with rage and began to cry out great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Great as Artemis of the Ephesians. As we will see, what Luke is describing to us is people in the psychological state of a mob frenzy.
Emotions are soaring and reason is plummeting. People do terrible things when they get into a mob frenzy. This is a scary truth about the world we live in. People do terrible things when they get into a mob frenzy because most people don't have a moral tether. Most people don't have a moral anchor.
They derive their morality from their surroundings. They look at the culture around them and how most people around them are behaving. And from that they determine right and wrong. And the consequences of this can be horrific. We saw this in German society during the Holocaust or Mao's Communist China, but it can take place in much smaller settings.
If there's a protest going on, emotions are soaring, reason is plummeting, and someone smashes a store window and begins looting a store. A few people follow and before you know it, people are thinking this must be okay because everyone else is doing it. You see, they have no moral tether, no transcendent moral law that they're submitted to. Their morality is flexible based on what everybody else is doing at any given moment in time. Added to this are things like demonic activity.
This crowd was full of people who were worshiping pagan gods and who led them into dark sins. They worshiped money. They worshiped lust and greed and didn't really believe in self-control. So, there was a lot of opportunity for demons to stir up anger and rage in a place like Ephesus. I'm sure all of us have seen people who get into a mob frenzy state.
You've seen Muslim extremists chanting Allah Akbar for hours and hours and hours. And closer to home, you can see this phenomenon at many LGBTQ-related protests. You can go and watch the videos online. Middle-aged men dressed as women who have no children, crazy eyes screaming at the top of their heads, demanding that children be given puberty blockers. And they're just incapable of reason.
They're just screaming and yelling at people, completely out of control, completely given over to their emotions and their lust for sin. They're in a mob frenzy. Verse 29, it says so the city was filled with confusion, and they rushed all together into the amphitheater, dragging along Gaius and Aristarchus, Macedonians who were Paul's traveling companions. Now, the amphitheater was a logical place to head as city-wide civil matters were often handled there. It also provided a venue where everyone could see what was going on and hear from the city leaders.
I've actually got a photo to show you, if you can put that up, Randy, of this amphitheater because incredibly, it's still standing. It's still there. That's the one that these events were taking place at almost 2000 years ago and they still occasionally hold concerts there. Paul was understandably viewed as the man at the Peter of the expanding Christian church in Ephesus. It seems they couldn't find Paul, though, so they grabbed two of his assistants, Gaius and Aristarchus.
Verse 30. Although Paul wanted to go in before the people, the disciples did not let him. Even some of the provincial officials of Asia who were his friends sent word to him, ending with him not to venture into the amphitheater. Though the mob couldn't find him, Paul was in the city somewhere, and when he heard about what was happening, he was concerned for the safety of his friends and felt the need to defend the gospel. In Ephesus, Paul was ready to charge into an amphitheater filled with thousands of men who wanted to see him dead.
Then we read in verse 25, when he, Demetrius, had assembled them, the craftsmen he employed as well as the workers engaged in this type of business.
That would be salespeople, silver traders, et cetera. So, Demetrius calls a union meeting. That's what he does. He said, men, you know that our prosperity is derived from this business. Uh oh, Paul's ministry was touching that most sensitive part of a man his wallet.
Verse 26. You see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia, this man Paul has persuaded and misled a considerable number of people by saying that gods made by hand are not gods. Now, the belief at the time was not that these little idols were gods. The belief was that an idol of a god would summon that god to partially take up residence in that idol, thereby allowing you to keep that god and their benefits close to you. Paul's preaching was, yeah, but if you can boss a god around by making a little statue of them, how great can that God be?
Paul never denied the reality of those gods. On the contrary, he called people to turn from those lesser gods to the living god who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and everything in them. Paul did what the Old Testament prophets did. He mocked the lesser gods, calling them worthless things compared to the glory, goodness, power, and greatness of Christ. He pointed out the real test of a god is whether it can do anything.
Paul's God was working undeniable miracles, and he was not like other gods. He couldn't be summoned by an incantation or a spell, and he wouldn't show up just because you made a little idol of him. Nothing could contain him. And so, to Paul's reasonable preaching and argumentation, the men who got rich by making gods with their hands said blasphemy. Verse 27 not only do we run a risk that our business may be discredited, heaven forbid, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be despised, and her magnificence come to the verge of ruin, the very one all of Asia and the world worship.
In other words, where does it end? Brothers, these Christians may damage the reputation of Artemis so much that we not only lose our business, but people stop caring about her magnificent temple. And Ephesus loses her place of prestige in the empire. Paul is going to destroy the economy. Christianity is going to be the ruin of us all.
It can happen. Because of the Welsh revival between 1904 and 19 six, there was a time when not a single bar or tavern could be found in the entire country of Wales. They had all been closed due to lack of business. And guess how many sermons they preached against drunkenness? None. None.
Just as Paul did not tell the Ephesians to burn their occultic books, it was simply the conviction of the Holy Spirit moving upon people who had genuinely turned to Christ. They intrinsically understood that turning to Christ meant turning from their sins and all other gods. But these men cared nothing that the men women and children who were being set free by Jesus were finding new life, joy and peace, and hope in his name. All they cared about is how it affected what they cared about, which was money. Remember the medium girl back in Acts 16 whom Paul cast a demon out of?
Remember why her owners got so upset? It was because they were making a living off her. They didn't care about her soul. All they cared about was money. Jesus spoke against such thinking with one of the most haunting rhetorical questions of all time comparing earthly wealth to our eternal destinations.
So, Paul stays in Ephesus a few months longer but sends two of his assistants ahead of him Timothy, his pastoral protege, and Erastus. And their job was to make preparations for Paul's arrival and help administrate the offering that was being collected for the Jerusalem church. Now, the rest of today's study will require us to know of a goddess named Artemis or Diana in the Greek pantheon. Ephesus was a city, you may recall, that embraced pretty much any and every god. We know of at least 50 gods who were worshiped in the city.
But the most popular, and she was wildly popular, was Artemis. Her glorious temple was considered so spectacular that it appeared in Antipater of Sidon's list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was about four times the size of the Parthenon in Athens and was richly decorated with the works of the greatest painters and sculptors of the age. Artemis was most famous, you may recall, for the specific form of worship she allegedly required. If you were an Ephesian man who desired to worship the city's protective mother, you would enter her temple and meet in private with one of the women who was employed there as a sacred employee, and you would worship with her.
You would pay the temple for her priestly services and that money would go into the temple coffers. As I shared in an earlier message, it was a stunningly effective form of fundraising and resulted in most of the city's men becoming highly devoted worshippers of Artemis. But her popularity extended far beyond Ephesus. Archeology knows of at least 33 shrines to Artemis throughout the Roman Empire, making hers perhaps the most popular cult of all. Other than the imperial cult.
There was an annual festival held in her honor in Ephesus and it would pack the city with pilgrims and generate huge sales of Artemis paraphernalia. It was Artemis Palooza, basically, and historians tell us it was likely during one of these festivals that the events in today's study took place. So, with that context in mind, the rest of our study will be narrative. It's going to detail one event. There's not a ton of practical application in it.
And so, I'm going to walk us through the event in a way that will hopefully help us understand it. Then I'm going to wrap it up by just sharing one main observation that we can learn from this event and how it can impact our lives, and we'll trust the Lord to speak through his word as always. Verse 23. It says, about that time, there was a major disturbance about the way. You may recall that the way was an early term for Christianity.
A person named Demetrius, a silversmith who made silver shrines of Artemis provided a great deal of business for the craftsmen. So, the silversmith named Demetrius was running a wildly successful business making little silver shrines that had little silver statues of Artemis inside them. Remember, Ephesus was a major port city, and so people were always coming and going and passing through. And if you wanted to add a god to the collection of gods you worshiped, you would want a small idol of them, a small statue of them that you could take with you. And that's exactly what Demetrius provided.
It seemed he had something of a monopoly on the trade, as he provided a great deal of business for the craftsmen. But we learn here that Demetrius had an issue with the presence of Christians in Ephesus, resulting in a major disturbance we're going to read about. When he learned that people were burning their occultic books, he must have thought, oh, man, tons of people are turning to Jesus, this Jesus that Paul keeps talking about, and when they do, they're turning their backs on all other gods. Christianity just killed the magic book business in Ephesus, and my silver business could be next.
After Christianity cripples the occultic book business in Ephesus, craftsmen worry their miniature silver idol's business could be next. The result is a mob stirred up into a frenzy, which teaches us about the response turning to Christ can produce in those who still love the world.
As we pick up our study, we are in the city of Ephesus, where Paul has been enjoying some of the most fruitful years of his ministry. The entire province of Asia, modern-day Turkey, had heard the gospel through Paul's preaching or through those who had turned to Christ through Paul's preaching. God had been working mighty miracles through Paul in the city and as a result, many people were turning to Christ and turning from their old gods and idols. Just last week, we saw many people burning their occultic books as they left their old lives to embrace new life in Christ. The impact of Paul's ministry in Asia was astonishing.
People came to Christ in every city and every class of society. So, let's jump in. In Acts chapter 19, verse 21, it says after these events, Paul resolved by the Spirit to pass through Macedonia and Achaia and to go to Jerusalem. After I've been there, he said, it is necessary for me to see Rome as well. The spirit was stirring within Paul.
He had spent almost three years in Ephesus. The church was established, thriving, and had solid leaders. They were more than ready to stand on their own two feet. Paul desired to visit existing churches in Macedonia and Achaia before heading to Jerusalem. And that might seem strange as Macedonia and Achaia are in the opposite direction to Jerusalem based on Paul's location at this time.
But Paul desired to visit the churches in those provinces that he had established to collect an offering from them to take to the poor in the Jerusalem church. Remember, Christians in Jerusalem had been excommunicated from Jewish life, and I don't know if you know this, but Jerusalem was super Jewish like super Jewish, and many believers therefore could not find employment. And they faced significant financial challenges. By having Gentile churches give to support the first church, the Jewish Church in Jerusalem, Paul would provide an opportunity to the uppercase-C Church to demonstrate unity in a practical and beautiful way. Achaia was also where Corinth was located and Paul had heard that the church in Corinth needed a little bit of guidance and correction, to put it mildly.
Now, Rose, on the other hand, was something completely new. It was in keeping with Paul's strategy of targeting influential regions and cities. Rome had a thriving church that had been started by the Jews who lived there, had traveled to Jerusalem for a feast, heard the Gospel there, got saved, and then taken the gospel back to Rome with them. So, Paul longed to visit that church in Rome and strengthen it and help them start more churches out of it. And incredibly, Rome was not even Paul's final goal.
He would later write in his letter to the Romans that we have in our Bibles that while he was on his way to Jerusalem, he wrote them a letter and he said in Romans 15 that his final goal was to stop in Rome on his way to Spain, a highly influential region in the western Roman Empire. As we shall learn later in the Book of Acts, Paul will never make it to Spain. From this point to the end of the Book of Acts, Paul's focus will be on getting to Rome, which he will just not in the way he expected to. He'll be going, all expenses paid, and we'll talk about that later. Verse 22, says, that after sending to Macedonia two of those who assisted him, Timothy and Erastus, he himself stayed in Asia for a while.
The ordinances of the Lord are reliable and altogether righteous. They are more desirable than gold than an abundance of pure gold, and sweeter than honey dripping from a honeycomb. In addition, your servant is warned by them, and in keeping them, there is an abundant reward. Let's pray. Would you bow your head and close your eyes?
Jesus'. Thank you so much for your Word. Thank you for the wisdom that is found in the counsel of Your Word. And thank you just for the privilege of living in a place and in a time where Your Word is so accessible to us, we can open it up whenever we want. And there you are speaking to us from our Word.
Lord, it's our desire as individuals and collectively to be men and women who are mighty in the Scriptures. Not so that we can be smart or know more than anybody else, but that we might be made more like Christ. That as we know You in the Word, we might have a clear picture of who You are trying to make us into, who You are calling us to be, so that as Your Spirit works on us and sanctifies us day by day, we can be people who say, yes, Lord. Yes, Lord. I see that in your Word.
Do that in me. Make me more like Jesus. Please. Lord, may we be people who open Your Word with a predetermination that we will obey, a predetermination that You are going to speak to us and that everything You speak and everything You do is for our good. Thank you that you're alive.
Thank you that you're active in our lives. Jesus and Father, I pray that as your spirit fills us up and as your spirit wells up within us day by day we would not be comfortable in Babylon. That we would not feel at home in Sodom and Gomorrah that we would be troubled by all that is wrong with the world and that from that discontent we would pray with greater urgency and sincerity than ever before. Lord, Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. That's what we long for.
Lord, protect us from being desensitized by the culture that we live in. Protect our conscience, lord, do not let us grow dull to Your Spirit and Your voice. And, Lord, may our righteous discontent spur us to pray for those who are lost, for those who are given over to sin, for those who are given over willingly, for those who have been deceived. Lord, may Your heart in us fill us with an urgency to pray and to intercede and to beg for boldness that we might speak and preach the truth faithfully. Lord, so we ask now, even now, Lord, would you fill us with Your Spirit would you fill us with boldness loved?
Would you allow the James and faces of those you have put in our lives who do not know you to stay with us, Lord, to be on our minds and on our hearts daily? That we might pray for them? Because we know each of us is only part of the Kingdom because someone was praying for us; because someone was not okay that we were not part of the Kingdom. And so, Jesus, give us that heart. Give us Your heart for those who do not know you.
Give us our urgency, Jesus. Fill us with your spirit. Anoint us with your boldness. We pray, Lord. May our will be done in our lives. Jesus, we love you. It's in your precious name we pray. Amen.
And so, what does he do? He takes action and he moves into ministry mode, even though he's flying. Solo says in verse 17, so he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with those who worship God as well as in the marketplace every day with those who happen to be there. Paul returns to his go-to, heading to the city's synagogue on what would have been the Sabbath. The rest of the week, he's heading to the city's marketplace, the famous agora of Athens.
The city's agora was its center for commerce and trade, sharing ideas and settling civil affairs with the city's rulers. When Socrates was alive, it is said that he would hang out in the agora in the marketplace, available every day to discuss ideas and philosophy with anyone willing to converse. Some scholars have suggested that Luke is intentionally framing Paul's actions in the same way by pointing out that essentially like Socrates, Paul went into the agora to begin teaching and discussing the philosophy of the Gospel with anyone willing to engage him. My prayer today is that as we are made more and more like Christ, as we are progressively sanctified by the Holy Spirit, we will have more and more of God's heart. We would feel more and more of what God feels.
We would see more and more with the eyes of Christ, hear with the ears of Christ, and I pray we would be disturbed and righteously angered and vexed by the wickedness of our culture, as Paul was in Athens and Lott was in Sodom. And I pray that, like Paul, we would feel compelled to act. Not to rant on social media, but to act, to pray with urgency for the lost and to pray for boldness, to preach the gospel to those the Lord who has placed in our lives chosen the Lord has placed in our lives who are on course to spend an eternity apart from Christ. It is not righteous anger. It is not a discontent coming from the Lord.
If by experiencing it, you can simply turn your back on those who are headed to hell, the righteous anger of God speaks with clarity and with boldness and prays and intercedes with urgency for those who do not know the Lord. If you are not someone who is regularly in the word of God as part of your daily practice of living, I must urge and exhort you to become someone who is. This is not a spiritual gift. Oh, they've got the spiritual gift of studying. There's no spiritual gift of reading.
We also live in the age that even if you literally can't read, there are apps that can play the Bible for you on your phone. There's no excuse to not be a person of the word. If you get up early and go to work, you can listen to sermons on your way to and from work. It's not hard. It just takes desire and intentionality.
Hear me on this. No genuinely mature man or Romans of God is not also a man or woman of the scriptures. There is no genuinely spiritually mature Christian who is not a student of the scriptures. I don't really know what the Bible says, but it's just always seemed to me that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's not a thing among Christians.
There's no one who's just like lucked out and most of their own thoughts just happen to line up with the Bible. Mature men and women of Christ are men and women of the Scriptures. So, it's very simple. If you want to be a mature man or woman of God, you must be a man or woman of the Scriptures. I'm going to invite the worship team to come up and I'm going to end with a few verses from Psalm 19 that speak of the word of God.
It says, The instruction of the Lord is perfect, renewing one's life. The testimony of the Lord is trustworthy, making the inexperienced wise. The precepts of the Lord are right making the heart glad. The command of the Lord is radiant, making the eyes light up. The fear of the loved one is pure, enduring forever.
So, Paul doesn't jump into his immediate pattern of ministry, which would have been to head immediately to the city's synagogue. Remember, he doesn't have any of his companions with him at this time. They served as vital assistance to him. He wasn't planning on being in Athens at this time. He'd been forced to flee from Macedonia due to persecution.
And so, Paul takes a few days to settle in, and he's just walking around the city of Athens, taking its spiritual and cultural temperature along with its academic and philosophical prestige, Athens could rightly be considered the center of religion in the empire. Petronius, a Roman writer of the day, sarcastically quipped that it was easier to find a god in Athens than a man. So proliferated was the city with shrines, altars, statues, and buildings dedicated to thousands of gods. And as Paul sees all this, as he walks the streets of Athens, his spirit is vexed within him. The phrase translated as deeply distressed in our Bibles is the Greek word "paroxysm."
It means to irritate, to provoke, to arouse, to anger. The Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, regularly uses this word to describe God's reaction to idolatry. Because Paul was a man filled with the Holy Spirit, he felt God's righteous anger within himself as he observed one of the world's leading cities filled with men and women made in the image of God to know, worship, serve, and love him. Instead, worship and debase themselves between fault before false gods and demons, giving them the glory and honor that belong to the living and true God. In Two Peter, we are told that Lot was distressed by the depraved behavior of the sexually immoral men and women of Sodom.
It says, for as that righteous man lived among them day by day, his righteous soul was tormented by the lawless deeds he saw and heard. Now, if you're not familiar with the book of Genesis, Lot is not a great dude. He was selfish. He was short-sighted. He chose to live among men and women who hated God because it was the best place to do business.
Lots was not filled with the Holy Spirit, and yet. He knew God. He was a worshipper of Yahweh, kind of. And even Lott's soul was deeply disturbed by the wickedness he observed in the culture around him every day. And I just want to ask you, are you disturbed by the wickedness that you see around you daily in our culture?
Because we are just as pagan as Athens, and we are just as sexually depraved as Sodom and Gomorrah. And if the Holy Spirit is in you, these things should disturb you. They should trouble you. And more than any other issue, the believer's first concern should be for the glory of God. There should be grief over the glory and worship that flows to false gods and demons in our culture.
There should be righteous anger over the wickedness of the culture and its commitment to training children in it. And by the way, when I talk about righteous anger, I'm talking about what Paul experienced, which is an anger that flows from the Spirit within you. And that anger is based on jealousy for the glory of God that should be directed to him. You're not righteously angry if you look at the culture and your reaction is, oh, the liberals are so stupid. The Democrats are so stupid.
That's not righteous anger. Righteous anger is concerned with the glory of God and is disturbed when it looks at a world that was created to know and love and worship and experience fellowship with God, doing the exact opposite. That's what righteous anger is. That's what Paul was experiencing. We're not supposed to feel comfortable in Babylon.
We're not supposed to feel comfortable in Sodom and Gomorrah, for we are citizens of heaven filled with the Holy Spirit. Paul was disturbed. He was righteously angry. He was provoked. He saw a city of men and women wasting their lives, slaves to sin, and doomed to an eternity apart from Christ.
They didn't know if the Jews were going to try and put someone on the boat to assassinate Paul. And they just felt we got to be with him and get him safely down to Athens. They might also have said that we want to get some more teaching from Paul. And so as we're going down on this trip to Athens by sea, we can have some more time together and get some teaching from Paul, it says. And after receiving instructions for Silas and Timothy to come to him as quickly as possible, they departed.
And as the brothers head back to Berea after dropping Paul off, he tells them, "Tell Silas and Timothy to get down here ASAP." Now, like Philippi, Athens was at this time a free city under the Roman Empire. That meant she could essentially govern herself under her own cultural and civil practices while collecting taxes for Rome, maintaining law and order and allegiance to Rome. To call the history of Athens prestigious would be an understatement. In the fifth and fourth centuries BC, she was the greatest city on earth, producing unparalleled sculptors, literature, and philosophy.
She was the hometown of Socrates and his brilliant student Plato, and the adopted home of Plato's student Aristotle, as well as Epicurus and Xeno, the founders of the Epicurean and Stoic schools of philosophy. Athens was the birthplace of the definitive dialect of classical Greek Koine and was considered the foremost city of learning in the world. By Paul's day, Corinth had surpassed Athens as the political and commercial center of Greece. But Athens remained its philosophical and academic center and was therefore still highly esteemed by the Romans. Remember, the Romans built their culture on the Greek Hellenistic culture.
They didn't try to tear it down. They tried to build upon its foundation. That's why all of the gods in Roman mythology are the Greek gods under different names. The myths are exactly the same. It's Greek mythology.
While we don't know much about Paul's upbringing, we know that he possessed Roman citizenship. And so, it's almost certain that Paul's father was a Hellenized Jew. That means a Jew who grew up in a city with Greek culture rather than Hebrew culture, which means Paul would have been familiar with Greek culture, Greek arts, and Greek philosophy. Verse 16. While Paul was waiting for them, while he's waiting for Timothy and Silas in Athens, he was deeply distressed when he saw that the city was full of idols.
So, when I meet someone who describes themselves as a spiritual seeker, I always ask, in what ways specifically are you seeking? Because the word "seek" is a verb. Most people who describe themselves as seekers are not actually doing anything. They're not studying, they're not researching, they're not reading. They're simply using the term seeker as cover for never reaching a conclusion on anything and therefore never becoming accountable for any meaningful knowledge.
When you know the Gospel, when you've seen the truth, you are now accountable for that knowledge. And most people simply do not want that. There are consequences to learning certain truths about the nature of reality. So if you're a seeker of truth and you happen to be wondering, well, what's that one book that you recommend for people? It's the story of reality by a guy named Greg Koukl.
And if you're here and you're not yet a Christian and you want to read that book, please come find me after the service. I'll gladly hook you up with a free copy. It's only about this thick. Not that thick. This thick.
You can do it. And it's worth reading to unlock the secrets of the nature of true reality. Well, among the many who believed were a number of the prominent Greek Romans as well as Men. And so, these Greek Gentiles were likely God-fearers who were attending the synagogue in Berea to explore Judaism. Verse 13.
But when the Jews from Thessalonica found out that the word of God had been proclaimed by Paul at Berea, they came to agitate and upset the crowds. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. To be honest. Just as the Jewish religious leaders from Pisidian, Antioch, and Iconium followed Paul to Lystra and stirred up trouble, so too did the Jewish leaders from Thessalonica follow Paul to Berea to stir up trouble there.
They have nothing better to do than make the 45-mile journey for the sole purpose of opposing Paul's gospel preaching. That's what jealousy will do to you. It's irrational. Verse 14. Then the brothers and sisters immediately sent Paul away to go to the coast, but Silas and Timothy stayed there.
This is another pattern we see in the Book of Acts - Paul only seems to leave a place when he's being persecuted and when brothers and sisters in the faith tell him that he needs to go, and they beg him to go. It doesn't say that Paul left. It says the brothers and sisters sent him away. We love you. We don't want to see you murdered.
As we said earlier. But Silas and Timothy stick around in Berea for a while to presumably nurture and encourage the new believers in the newly formed church. Apparently, they were not being targeted in quite the same way that Paul was, likely because Paul was the one doing the public preaching. Verse 15. Those who escorted Paul brought him as far as Athens.
Let's throw up our map again. So, the hatred of these Jewish religious leaders toward Paul was so intense that the brothers and sisters in Berea apparently felt that Paul would not be safe anywhere in Macedonia. If he just goes on to the next town, they're just going to follow him and persecute him there. So, they decided to send him all the way south down to Athens, which was about 222 miles, 357 km away. The men who escorted Paul likely did so because the threat against his life was so severe.
Consequently. In other words, because they had listened with open hearts and minds, and because they had tested what Paul had taught against the Scriptures because of those things. Here's the result many of them believed if you test the Gospels against the Old Testament Scriptures with a sincere heart, you will find it to be true. Jesus told the Jewish religious leaders, you pour over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, and yet they testify about me. He later added, if you believed Moses, you would believe me, because he wrote about me.
Speaking of his heavenly Father, Jesus' said, if anyone wants to do his will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own. In other words, if you sincerely desire to know the truth about God and you are willing to respond to that truth, God will make sure you find Him. Following his resurrection, Jesus' used the Old Testament Scriptures to help his disciples understand why he had had to suffer and die. Luke's Gospel tells us Jesus said how foolish you are and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Wasn't it necessary for the Messiah to suffer these things and enter into his glory?
Then, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted them for them sorry he interpreted for them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures. If you test the Gospels and all of Scripture against logic, reason, history, and reality, you will find it to be true. If you are sincerely interested in the truth, and if you study Christianity with an open heart and mind, you will end up believing. And I say that with confidence because Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. And there is, quite simply, no other worldview that comes close to the explanatory power of Christianity.
Christianity answers every significant existential question that exists. Christianity explains where everything that exists came from, why we're here, and why there's something instead of nothing. Christianity explains what has gone wrong with the world, and why evil exists. Christianity explains the solution to the problem of evil. Christianity explains the meaning of life.
Christianity explains what the future holds for humanity how the world ends and what happens next. And Christianity's answers for each of these key existential questions are vastly superior to any other worldview. They align with reality, history, reason, logic, and science. But do not miss this vital lesson from the Bereans. If you want to find the truth.
You will need to do some studying. You will need to do some research. You will need to do some reading. That's right. It might take a little bit of effort to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
How much effort? Come on. It's tragic how often I encounter someone who claims to be interested in truth or spirituality, and yet when I say, listen, just read this one book, this will explain Christianity to you, one of the world's largest religions over a billion people, okay, they're not interested. They claim they want the truth, but they're not even willing to read one book. I think that reading one book and potentially discovering the meaning of life and the nature of true reality is a pretty reasonable trait, I think.
I'm going to get into the scriptures. And if you do that, you will be astounded by the results. You will not be the same person a year from now that you are today. But if there's no plan, no intentionality, you do not have any reason to expect that you're going to be someone different a year from now. You cannot expect growth with no plan to generate growth.
Thirdly, study the Word to obey the Word. Our brother James exhorts us with these words. Be doers of the Word and not hearers only deceiving yourselves. I've said it before, and I'll say it Again. One of the greatest dangers that a church that loves the Word of God faces is losing touch with the difference between hearing the Word and doing the Word, falling into the trap of thinking that just because we know something, we must be doing it.
We must be practicing. It is not true. Not even close to true. The ultimate goal of the Christian is not to be smarter; it's to be more like Jesus. We study the scriptures. To be changed, to be sanctified. To be made more like Christ. Remember that God gives revelation to those who respond to it. So, if you want God to continue growing your knowledge and revelation of Him, you must be committed to responding to the knowledge and revelation that he's already given you when He calls you to repent. As we said, do it. When he calls you to obey, do it. You can't just ignore God when he speaks to you clearly and continue growing in him. You'll have head knowledge, but no real wisdom.
You won't actually grow we can't say, well, let God speak to me and reveal some truths to me and then I'll decide if I want to obey or not. That's not how it works. And by the way, that is an unbelievably cavalier and dishonoring attitude to take toward the Almighty God. Speak from heaven to me, God. And I will, Jude.
Really? Really. If we want greater revelation from God, our posture must be I will obey you, Lord, if you reveal anything new to me that requires obedience. I may not know how I'm going to obey, but I want to. I am determined to.
And I believe that by your spirit you will give me the power to obey. And yes, that should be your attitude even before the Lord has revealed what it is - a predetermination to obey Christ. The Christian who desires to be mighty in the Scriptures must study the Word with a clean conscience, consistently. And to obey the Word. A great way to retain what you learn is to talk about it or share it with someone else.
Teach it to a child in our kid's ministry. Teach it to your children. Share it in your home group. Talk about it with a brother or sister in Christ or with your spouse. If home groups are on a break, like, right now, grab coffee with someone or multiple people.
Invite people over for dinner or dessert and talk about the Lord. Some people don't know you can get together without the church's permission. Like you just call up someone else in the church and have coffee with them. There's no form to fill out or anything like that. You can have people over for dinner.
You could open the Bible. I know it's like, wild, but you could just do it. It's a free market economy, baby. That's Right. The Old Testament priest and scribe Ezra is a wonderful example for us.
This is why I have a kid named Ezra. By the way, it's this verse Ezra, 7:10, tells us Ezra had determined in his heart to study the law of the Lord, obey it, and teach its statutes and ordinances in Israel. He had determined in his heart to study and to obey anything he learned; he would obey. Now, note what it says next in verse twelve. It says consequently underline that word.
Here are three building blocks for that. Number one, study the Word with a clean conscience. With a clean conscience, severely neglected and underrated point Hebrew. If there is sin in our lives that we are aware of but we are refusing to deal with, our study of Scripture is going to be limited. It's not going to be anywhere near as profitable as it could be.
Why? Because we're trying to pretend that we can just ignore our sin and just move on down the road with our relationship with Jesus and becoming more like Jesus. But Jesus doesn't play that game. Jesus says, we're not going anywhere until you deal with this. And so what you'll find is you can just keep taking in facts and information, adding head knowledge, but nothing's actually going to change in here.
You're not actually going to grow. You're not going to become any more like Christ, because God is not into playing games when he says, you need to change this, Jeff. You need to repent of this. You need to go make this thing right. If I just say, I'm not going to do that, let's just move on, god says, no, we're not just going to move on.
Next time you come here, I'm going to be saying the same thing. You can pretend I'm not, but I'm going to be saying it. You can keep reading and adding head knowledge and lie to yourself and pretend that you've just moved on. But nothing is moving on. Paul told believers, rid yourselves of all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all slander like newborn infants desire the pure milk of the Word, so that by it you may grow up into your salvation.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught this if you are offering your gift on the altar and there you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar first. Go and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Does it sound like God is okay with us just ignoring an issue and saying, well, we'll just move on? In the meantime, he says, "I don't care if you're at church. Go make it right and come back."
If we know there's something we need to do, something we need to repent of, something we need to make right, we should not think we can set it aside, ignore it, and have God bless our devotional time with Him. We're not fooling God, even though we may be fooling ourselves. Secondly, and write this down, study the Word consistently. Study the word consistently. If you want to become good at anything of importance, you're going to have to work at it consistently.
For the Christian, that means having a plan for how and when you're going to study the Word. Each day, imagine trying to get in shape and saying, I'm going to work out. When are you going to do it? When it happens, it happens. It doesn't just happen.
You're never like, oh, man, I don't know how it happened. I'm just here working out. I just stumbled into this gym and now I'm sweating and giving 110%. Never going to happen. Never, ever going to happen.
Doesn't happen. If you look across the room and just see the dumbbells over there on the side and you're like, thinking about you, you got to actually walk over and put in some work. And the same is true with the Word of God. You have to have a plan so that you can develop a consistent pattern of study in your life. Now, if you can't seem to find the time to get into the Word, but you sincerely want to, and you're serious, I want to challenge you with the words of Job, who said of the scriptures, I have treasured the words from his mouth more than my daily food.
And so here's the challenge. If you can't seem to find time to get into the Word, take a year and make this commitment. When I wake up, I'm not going to eat. I'm not going to go online, I'm not going to look at my phone till I've taken in the Word of God, till I fed my soul, you'll remember to do it. Your stomach will remind you and just say, no matter what, I'm going to wake up.
And then I also see the folks who have their Bible. They have their outline; they have their pen. Some even have an extra notebook, and they're just dialed in. They are expecting God to speak through his word. They are receiving the Word with eagerness.
Lord, I'm hungry for the truth. Speak it to me in Matthew chapter nine, two blind men chase down Jesus and ask him to heal them. And Jesus says to them, do you believe that I can do this? They said to him, yes, Lord. Then he touched their eyes, saying, let it be done for you according to your faith.
And their eyes were opened. My observation in my life and in the lives of others is that the measure we are blessed by the teaching of God's Word works in a similar way. What we receive from God's Word is generally proportionate to the faith we exercise by receiving the Word with eagerness, or not. And here's what I can promise you those who come to the Word of God in faith with eagerness will not be disappointed. So, if you need to change your attitude toward the teaching of God's Word, do so repent, and you will begin to experience the rich blessings of God's Word like never before.
Make a note of this those who receive the Word with eagerness will always be ministered to by it. Those who receive the Word with eagerness will always be ministered to by it. I promise. Even if me or BJ don't do a great job one day, if you show up in faith with that attitude, you'll hear from God. You'll be blessed.
That's just the power of the Word. And I want you to know how blessed I consider myself to teach in a church where there are men and women who receive the Word with eagerness. I am deeply grateful for those of you who pray faithfully and consistently for God's presence and power to be upon the preaching ministry of Gospel City. I'm deeply thankful for that. I experienced the blessings of that.
And so, if that's you, thank you so much for doing that. Truly. As Spurgeon said, great preachers are produced by congregations that receive the Word with eagerness. Now, I suggest there are three building blocks for anyone who wants to become a person mighty in the Scriptures, and these are basic, foundational, elemental things. But you might not have had anybody ever tell you this if you say, I want to become a student of the Scriptures, I want to become mighty in the Word, know my way around the Bible, and know the Lord's Word.
The best protection a church can have against false teaching is a congregation that are students of the Scriptures. False teaching is easy to get away with in a church where people don't study the Word for themselves.
It's easy to get away with in a church where the pastor's word is treated as gospel. And that's why you generally find false teaching and false Gospels flourishing in churches that do not have a culture of studying the Scriptures. Gospel City is a church that loves the Word of God, and we're doing all that we can to help each other grow in the knowledge of the Word and know how to study it more deeply, collectively and individually. So, make a note of this. All believers are called to be students of the Scriptures and test what they hear against the Scriptures.
That's God's design for the church. The pastor starts teaching heresy, he gets called out by the people of the church. He won't repent, and the church leaves. And I want to point this out. I know there are so many people who lament the number of false teachers that are in the church around the world today.
But equally, we need to lament the number of people who line up to hear what they have to say. Those churches would not exist if there were not thousands and thousands of people who wanted to hear that false teaching, because they prefer that message to the truth. And so the solution is for pastors to be students of the Scriptures, and for men and women who are part of the church to be students of the Scriptures, too, protects the church. All genuine Christians are under the authority of the Scriptures. This is important.
I really want us to notice that Paul, the super apostle, the greatest pastor who ever lived, was not offended, that people didn't blindly believe what he taught. Paul didn't say, "What do you mean you need to investigate further? No, you don't. Do you have any idea who I am? I'm Paul. I'm kind of a big deal. These letters I'm writing to you, they're going to be in the Bible, okay? Do not disrespect me. You don't need to test what I'm teaching. I'm Paul." He doesn't do that. He doesn't do that. On the contrary, Paul rejoiced that they took his teaching seriously enough to search the Scriptures and test it. And I've seen too many churches where a question on a sermon, a question based on Scripture, is received by the pastor with an attitude of how dare you?
How dare you question me? Just notice that is not how Paul responded. Note that it says they received the Word with eagerness. With eagerness. What posture do you take before the Word of God, corporately and privately, do you show up to hear the teaching of the Word with a heart that is prepared and eager?
I've said it many times. I could usually look out and I can pick out the people who are going to be ministered to by the Word, and I can pick out some of the people who aren't. I can see the folks who don't have a Bible, don't have an outline, don't have a pen, and they're just chillin' and they're not expecting to hear from God. They're not expecting that God is going to reveal anything worth writing down to remember and reflect on later.
And then I also see the folks who have their Bible. They have their outline; they have their pen. Some even have an extra notebook, and they're just dialed in. They are expecting God to speak through his word. They are receiving the Word with eagerness.
The Berean Benchmark....Date:6/25/23...Series: Acts
Passage: Acts 17:10-17........Speaker: Jeff Thompson
After being forced to flee Thessalonica due to persecution, Paul moves on to Berea, where he encounters a synagogue of “noble” men and women who receive the Gospel “with eagerness”.
As we rejoin the Apostle Paul's second missionary journey. He is in the present-day Greek city of Thessaloniki, then known as Thessalonica. Some of the leading Jews in the city became jealous of Paul and the power of his ministry hired some thugs and stirred up a mob that demanded the city's leaders force Paul and Silas to leave. If they stayed, they would likely be murdered. And that's why we read in Acts chapter 17, verse ten.
As soon as it was night, the brothers and sisters sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. This is something that happens multiple times in Paul's ministry. He would never look to leave. He would never be afraid. But brothers and sisters who cared about him would sometimes have to say, Paul, you're loving to be murdered tomorrow if you don't leave tonight, we love you.
We'll catch up later. And there are other people who need to hear the Gospel, so you need to go. And that's the idea here. The church in Thessalonica would go on to take root and grow strong in the Lord. When we reach Acts chapter 20, we'll learn that two men from the Thessalonian church joined Paul to minister for a season.
And when Paul later writes to the Thessalonians, he commends them with these words it's on your outlines. The word of the Lord rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia but in every place that your faith in God has gone out. They took advantage of their location on the Ignatian way to preach the Gospel, evangelize their region, and grow into a mighty church. Let's go ahead and put our map up on the screen so you can see that what they did is they sent Paul west around the top left corner there from Thessalonica to Berea, which was about 45 miles or 72 km away. It was a much less important town than Thessalonica and was described by Cicero as being off the beaten track.
Then it says, upon arrival, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. As was Paul's custom when arriving in a new city or town. The people here in Berea were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica since they received the Word with eagerness and examined or asked about the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. We know the message that Paul was preaching in synagogues. Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Messiah.
He has fulfilled the law, suffered and died for our sins, risen in victory over death, and through faith in Him our sins are forgiven and we can be brought into the kingdom of God regardless of our ethnicity. The response that Paul received from the Jews in Berea differed greatly from that of Thessalonica or most places he had preached. Instead of encountering closed-minded men and women who cared more about their traditions and prejudices than the truth, Paul found a synagogue full of open minds who were hungry for truth and seriously devoted to the Scriptures. Accordingly, their legacy, forever in the Word of God, is that they were of noble character. Do not mistake their open-mindedness for naivety or simple-mindedness.
On the contrary, they put Paul's teachings to the test, cross-examining them so to sea against the testimony of the Scriptures. And obviously, when they did, they determined that Paul was indeed preaching the truth. This is a model for how all believers should respond to all preaching and teaching. It should always be put to the test against the Word of God. This is why you will sometimes hear me say something along the lines of "Don't believe anything you hear me say simply because you hear me say it. Get into the Word of God for yourself. Test what I teach against the word of God. Make sure that it's true."
With that said, I'm going to call Jeff and Maureen to come up. I'm going to get ready to lead us in worship and I'm going to close this message and this whole series with our definition for church membership one last time. Church membership is a covenant of union between a particular church and a Christian that consists of the church's affirmation of the Christian's gospel profession. The church's promise to give oversight to the Christian and the Christian's promise to gather with the church and submit to its oversight. May the Lord Jesus Christ give us the grace that we need to be the kind of church that he died for us to experience.
Amen. Amen. Let's pray. Jesus, I just thank you. I thank you every week. I thank you every day that you are the Lord of your church. You promise to build your church. You tell us what your church is. It is people sinners saved radically by our grace that you made available when you went to the cross, died on the cross, went into the ground, and rose three days later. The gospel message, the good news of what you did to purchase a people to yourself is the only reason that your church exists.
I thank you for the church that exists in his room. Believers, brothers, and sisters who have received your grace and applied it to their lives and have been brought into your people filled with your spirit. And now we live for you. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus, that we don't have to guess about the purpose of our church and what we're supposed to do as your distinct people.
You give us your word? And I pray, Lord, that you'd increase our zeal to know Your word and even increase our zeal even more to not just know it, but to do it in every area of our life, and not just individually. As Christians, Lord, we want to be a collective, a church, a people that is sold out to know you, to love you, and to do Your will in our lives and in this city. Teach us that and empower us to do that. Jesus, build your church around the world.
Build it in India as we prayed earlier. Build it here. Port Coquitlam. We pray and use Gospel City to that end. I ask all those things, Jesus, in your sweet and your powerful name.
Or you can check off the circle on your connect card that says, I want to become a member of Gospel City Church, and one of us will connect with you sometime during this week. This first step is just that.
It's a first step. You're not making any final decision at this point. You're simply letting us know that you're interested in learning some more and pursuing the potential of becoming a member. And this lets us begin a conversation with you. Second, join our online membership path.
We've created content online formatted in a step-by-step process that takes you through everything you need to know about becoming a member of Gospel City Church. There's no deadline to have this online content completed, so you can go at your own pace. If you're not very familiar with using the Internet, please let us know and we can convert the online content into a hard copy for you. We'd be happy to do that. Now, this online path exists to help you understand and answer some of the following questions:
What is the church? What is the gospel? What is a Christian? What is Baptism? What do the elders of Gospel City commit to do for the members of the church? What do the members of the church commit to do for one another? What do we believe as a church? What is our statement of faith? What are our distinctiveness as a church? What do we believe in Gospel City? That may not be what every other local church believes.
We have people go through this online content because it addresses some of the things that we need to know about a person who wants to join our church. These questions will help us discern if someone has already become a follower of Christ or if they are still on a journey toward becoming one. They'll let us know if a person has been baptized, which is something a person needs to go through if they're going to be a member of Jesus' Church. Remember, Jesus calls believers to get baptized. If a person is already baptized, great.
If they haven't been yet, we can walk that process out with them. The online content also helps us describe to the potential new member how we're going to provide oversight to their discipleship if they end up wanting that. We don't want anyone to be surprised about what they're signing up to be a part of when they become a member of the church. We don't want anybody coming to the realization six weeks after they've become a member of the church and they say, Whoa, wait a second. You guys mean to tell me that you tried to obey Jesus in literally everything?
If I had known that I don't think I would have become a member here. See, we want those who are becoming members to join the church with eyes wide open, knowing ahead of time what they can expect once they've become members. We don't want anyone to have any surprises later on. You may get to this point in the process of going through the online content and you realize you might not want to experience the kind of life that you're reading about. Your initial zeal for becoming a member of the church may have subsided after going through the stuff online, but maybe you finish this online portion, and you realize that there's nothing more you'd rather have than to be a part of a people who live for Jesus together the way that you've just read about.
And if that's you, then you move on to the third step, which is to meet with the elders and we'll walk with you through the answers that you've submitted online. We'll take you at your word when you share your answers to the questions that we ask and barring any obvious reason that would keep us from moving forward, we will affirm you as a new member of Gospel City Church. And that's it. That's it. There's an unofficial step.
And because this is an ongoing step, for as long as you are a part of Gospel City church, you will get to enjoy all the blessings and benefits that God has for you that are found in formally belonging to his church.
Church membership remedies this because it makes a way for us to obey commands like the one found in Ephesians chapter five, verse 21. It creates opportunities for us to live in a local community of God's people, where we can submit to one another with a clear conscience. And so, to recap, we've just looked at three examples where church membership needs to be in place so that obedience to Jesus can be possible. Church membership needs to be practiced so that the elders can identify who they're called to pastor. It needs to be in place so that Christians can identify who their elders are so that they can obey them and submit to their teaching in real and tangible ways.
And it needs to be in place so that we can obey commands in the Bible like the one found in Ephesians 5:21. We need to know who the other members in the church are before we can fully give ourselves to doing the one another commands with them and towards them. Add these to all the other things that we've observed about church membership in this series that God has always made a distinction between his people and not his people, and that distinction is seen today when a local church practices church membership. Formal membership has always been practiced by God's people. We can see the pattern of it play out in how Israel practiced membership in the Old Testament and how church practices formal membership in those new, Jesus prescribed the practice of church membership when he told us the Great Commission.
He gave us the Great Commission to do when we looked at that last week, how that is a call to practice church membership at the local church level. And again, church membership is a prerequisite to obeying some commands in the Bible. I hope all these arguments have landed for you. I hope they've led you to appreciate what church membership is more than you did before the series started. If you agree with the arguments that you've heard in this series and you're not a member of a local church yet, the next logical step is to become one.
And I'll show you how you can do that here in Gospel City if that's where the Lord is calling you, to be. We'll look at that in just a minute. But what if you're here and you're still on the fence about it? What if you're still posting against the concept of church membership even after hearing a four-part series arguing for it? If that's you, here's what I invite you to do wrestle with the arguments that I've made in this series.
Engage with them, think through them, and develop a counterargument to them. If you don't agree, write it down and show me. Show me from the Bible how the practice of church membership isn't biblical. This will take you intellectual time and energy to complete, but it will be profitable for you to engage with the Bible like this on your own. Don't just say, Nah, I've heard what he said about it, but I still don't like the idea of membership.
I still don't think it's biblical. And someone says to you, oh, that's interesting. Why don't you think it's biblical? Don't respond with, I don't really have an argument against it. I just don't like the way it sounds.
I don't like the way it makes me feel. Now, you're free to respond that way if you want to. You're free to respond however you like. I would call you to more, that's all. And I would be happy to have conversations with you about the wrestles that you're having with it.
Now, for those of you who want to lean into church membership, now that you've heard the arguments for it and you feel compelled to become a member here at Gospel City, let me walk you through how we go about affirming new members in the church. 'First thing you need to do, if that's you, let Jeff or me know that you are interested in becoming a member of the church, you can come up to either of us after the service and just tell us. You can email, text, or call us during the week.
Now, you don't need to be a member of a church to do these commands. You can love other Christians humbly, gently, and patiently, regardless of what church you or they belong to. You can speak truthfully to them. You can be kind and compassionate to them and forgive them. You can even speak to them in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
If the opportunity to do that ever presents itself, you can obey the commands found in these four verses in Ephesians without the prerequisite of church membership in place. Let me read this next one for you. It's also on your outline. Ephesians, chapter five, verse 21 says, submitting to one another in the fear of Christ. You could technically do this command even if both of you, you and the other believer are not members of the same church.
You could submit to another Christian you don't know. But are you ever going to honestly think about this command with me? And let's put aside for the moment that the Apostle Paul is writing to a specific church in the city of Ephesus. Although the truths found in this letter to the Ephesians can and should be applied to believers everywhere, he's not writing to the global church. He is writing to members of those churches in Ephesus, and he's giving them specific commands to do towards -get this - literally one another in their church.
When they received this letter from the Apostle Paul, they were likely all together with one another when it was read, and they would have had a good idea of how this letter was to be applied among them. They do the things in the letter to one another. But let's forget about that for a second. Let's come back to this one verse. Elders aren't the only ones who can call another believer to obey one of the commands that Christ has given us in His Word.
Other saints can call you to obey what Christ plainly commands, but are you going to submit to another person calling you to obey Christ if that person isn't a Christian? Are you going to submit to someone who hasn't submitted themselves first to Jesus and then to his church? Are you required to submit to them if you don't know their life, their character, their love for Jesus, or even if they are saved, how are you going to be able to take anything they call you to do in the name of Jesus seriously? If we're being honest, you're not going to submit to anything that they call you to do. And I wouldn't blame you because I probably wouldn't submit to that kind of person either if I knew nothing of a person other than that they claim to be a follower of Jesus, but they haven't submitted to the will of Jesus by becoming a member of his church where their submission to him can actually be fleshed out.
I'd have a hard time taking what they say about the Bible seriously. But on the other hand, if I know the one who is speaking God's Word into my life and I see their life, I know that they've been incorporated into the same body of Christ as I've been. They are submitting to the same Jesus that I am. They are submitting to the same elders I am. They are submitting to the same church I am.
Then I will be much more comfortable listening to them share the Word of God with me and even call me to obey the Word of God in my life. There's nothing more beautiful to me than a community of God's people who know, love, and minister to each other like that. And that's what we should be growing up into as a church. So, you can technically submit to another professing Christian if they exercise the authority of the Word of God in your life.
You can technically do that. But are you likely to? If you know nothing about their faithfulness in submitting to a local church themselves? You probably won't. And that would be a problem because the Word of God commands us to submit to one another.
The elders at church number two also announce that they too are feeling compelled by the loved to lead their church to pursue an equally good but different biblical initiative. Each church's vision requires the members to get on board, and that will require their time energy resources, and effort. And it quickly becomes clear that it would be impossible to give yourself to both initiatives at the same time and in the same way. Now, what would you do in this scenario? Do you give yourself halfway to each one because you can't be in two places at the same time?
Do you say yes to one church and no to another? How would either of these kinds of responses reflect the command in Hebrews 13 to obey your leaders and submit to them if you need to disobey one set of elders from one church so that you can partially obey the others or vice versa? In this scenario, you cannot obey either team of elders fully. So that means you are disobeying both of them and therefore you are not obeying the command in Scripture found in Hebrews 1317. Now, what's the only way that you can avoid this hypothetical scenario from even having the possibility of happening?
Well, the answer is you're a member of one particular local church where you can give yourself to following the lead of the elders there, so long as they are leading you to accomplish the Lord's will in the life of the church. I would argue that the only way you can make sure you have a chance to obey Hebrews chapter 13, verse 17 in your life in any kind of regular and meaningful way is to be a member of a local church where you are counted among the flock. This way the elders know that they have the responsibility to shepherd you and that you know you have the responsibility to give yourself to being led by them. And you do that by obeying and submitting to them as they call you to obey Christ. Local church membership is the only way to ensure everyone is on the same page concerning this special sheep-shepherd relationship.
This brings us to number three, and this is going to be the next fill-in on your outline. Church membership needs to be in place so that Christians can submit to one another. Biblically, it needs to be in place so that Christians can submit to each other. Biblically formal church membership not only defines the relationship that Christians have with their elders and the elders with them, but it also defines the relationship they are meant to experience with their fellow members. The New Testament is filled with commands that we call one another commands.
They're called that because the command has us fulfill a particular task toward other Christians. Not all the commands in the Bible require a person to be a member of a local church before they can obey them. Many could be done in the absence of church membership being in place, but I would argue that some of the one another commands can't be obeyed in any kind of meaningful way apart from both parties belonging formally to the same church. I'll show you what I mean by taking a look at the other commands found in Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Those first four don't necessarily require church membership, and I've put them down on your outline.
Ephesians, chapter four, verse two. Paul says with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love. Ephesians 4/25 says, therefore putting away loving, speak the truth, each one to his neighbor because we are members of one another. Ephesians 4:32 says and be kind and compassionate to one another forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ. Ephesians 5:19 says, speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making music with your heart to the Lord.
Do you think Jeff and I would be honoring people's boundaries? Well, if we tried to impose our pastoral care upon people, if they don't want to be pastored by us, if they've never indicated to us that they want that kind of relationship from us? More importantly, do you think God will hold Jeff and me accountable for not pastoring a person who doesn't want to be pastored? One Peter five says shepherd the flock of God among you. And that implies that there is a way to identify who is a part of the flock that is among us and who isn't.
And when we can identify those who are in the flock, those who want to receive pastoral care from us, we can then move on to do the hard work of actually shepherding them. But not before that. As we've seen so far in this series, the practice of church membership draws a line of distinction around a certain group of people that formally makes up the local church, aka the Flock of God among us. And the people inside the line have raised their hands, so to speak, indicating to the elders of the church and to everyone else that they want to be pastored in the kind of way that you've heard described in this message. They welcome it, they want it, and they expect it as they should.
And that is exactly who Jeff and I and any future elders of Gospel City Church will pastor. We will pastor them like we're going to have to give an account to God for them, but we have to know who the sheep are before we shepherd them. That is what the biblical prerequisite of church membership allows us to do identify the sheep. Number two, church membership needs to be in place so that Christians can relate to their elders biblically. This is just the other side of the same coin.
Elders can't shepherd the flock among them biblically unless they know who is part of their flock. And the flock can't relate to their elders in a biblical way unless they have elders over them in the Lord. Take a look at Hebrew 1317 one more time. The author writes to his audience obey your leaders and submit to them, since they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account, so that they can do this with joy and not with grief, for that would be unprofitable for you. The command is simple and straightforward, obey your leaders and submit to them.
But how is it possible to obey your leaders and submit to them if you don't have any leaders to obey or submit to? How are you going to obey the command in Hebrews 13 if you are not formally recognized and identified as a member of a local church that has elders over you? In the Lord, there is no shortage of leaders. Biblically qualified elders exist all over the world. You can find elders in local churches in almost every country.
How are you going to decide which ones you're going to submit to and obey as your elders? Forget that there are elders all over the world. There are a bunch of different pastors who shepherd local churches right here in the city of Port Coquitlam. How are you going to decide which ones you're going to submit to and obey as your elders from among all of them? Well, what if someone says that they don't need to become a member of a local church because they are a member of the universal body of Christ?
And because of that, they can loosely attend multiple different local churches without ever formally joining any of them. And that means, in their eyes, they can have pastors from various local churches. I'll answer that using a hypothetical scenario. Imagine you attend two different churches, each with its own team of elders that pastor the church. The elders at church number one announce that they are calling the church to pursue a particular biblical initiative, that they feel the Lord is calling their church to.
But our pipeline discipleship course is for members who want to be disciplined by the elders of the church. Pipeline, which is optional and never mandatory, is a three-year curriculum designed to train disciples and how they are to go make disciples. Right now, I'm in the middle of taking a group of us through level three of this program for the very first time. It's really exciting.
I view Pipeline the same way I view Jesus modeling discipleship for us. When he trained up his disciples, he had twelve of them, and he disciplined all of them perfectly, but there were three that he spent more time with on a regular basis. You could read about them in the Gospels. Peter, James, and John. The elders of Gospel City give themselves to disciplining all of the members of the church.
But Pipeline affords us the opportunity to spend individual time with a smaller group of our members who want to be personally discipled even more. So, what does church membership have to do with all of this? Why does church membership need to be in place first as a prerequisite for the elders to pastor the church like this? Well, because of what it takes for elders to actually do these things. We pour our lives out to do these things, and we cannot do this special kind of posting for everyone who simply attends a Gospel City service.
It would be literally impossible to do. I'm not exaggerating. There are not enough hours in the week to pastor everyone who simply attends here on a Sunday night. And impossibility aside, we can't do these things for people who don't want it or expect it. What I'm about to say next might be news to some of you, but not everyone who comes to a Sunday service wants to be shepherded the way that the Bible calls them to be.
No matter how big or small the Sunday church gathering might be, everyone who attends will fall into one of six categories. And if you like using pictures, you can imagine this diagrammed on a pie chart in your mind in a Sunday worship service like the one we're all in right now, there can be one - Christians who are members of the church. Two - Christians who are members of another local church and they're just visiting. Three - Christians who are not members of any church. Four - unbelievers who are genuinely seeking Jesus and are here because they want to learn more about him. Five - unbelievers who are not genuinely seeking the Lord but are here for maybe other okay reasons. And then six - unbelievers who are not genuinely seeking the Lord and are here for bad reasons. Can you imagine Jeff and I giving ourselves to pastoring someone who attends on a Sunday and they're like... and the person that we're trying to pastor... and they're like, what are you doing? Why are you calling me all the time? Why are you trying to invite me out to lunch and talk about my life?
Why are you asking me those questions? I don't want or need this kind of stuff from you. All I want to do is show up on the Sundays that I feel like maybe sing a song or two if I happen to like the song. Never serve, never give, and take things from the message that I like and leave the stuff that I don't. The only email I ever want from you is the one letting me know when the next potluck is happening.
What Makes Jesus Unique? No one else made the claims that He did, He is alive...............
Some of the decisions we make without God are staggering when you step back and take a look at them. When I was working at a church in Florida, my pastor had a bunch of kids, like a lot of kids. I think he's got twelve right now. And he asked me one day, he said, how many kids are you guys hoping to have, Jeff? And I told him we were planning on three.And then he said, have you asked the Lord how many he wants you to have? And I realized that like 99.99% of Christian couples, the thought had Peter. even crossed my mind. We think about the number of brothers and sisters we had growing up. We think about how many kids we think we could handle or afford, or how many could fit into the kind of house that we could afford. But almost nobody thinks to ask God how many kids he wants us to have.
That's a huge life decision. And almost no Christians bring it to the Lord. For us. It turned out the number was more than three, and I'm so glad it was.
Young people, are you seeking the Lord's guidance as to what career path you should pursue? Are you seeking wise counsel from mature believers who have walked with Jesus faithfully for a long time? Or are you just making your own plans based on what seems good to you, what you want to do, and what you feel like doing? Does God get to have an opinion on what you do with the rest of your life? What about buying an apartment or a house?
What about moving? What about moving to another city or another job or another career? Buying a new vehicle? How do we spend our money? Do we bring these kinds of decisions to the Lord proactively?
Do we seek out wise counsel? Do we pray? Do we fast about decisions that have enormous ramifications for our lives? Do we seek his will upfront? Or do we just do what seems best to us and then come back to God if our plans don't work out and be like, Where were you?
He's like, I was right here. You just didn't ask. I would have told you. That's a really dumb idea. Don't do that.
Our brother James would echo the wise perspective of Paul, saying, "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.' Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring, what your life will be. For you are like a vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes." Those who belong to the Lord belong to the Lord. They know their lives are in the hands of their Savior, and they trust that his will is always good.
When you know the goodness of God, you will trust the will of God. You will want his will to be done in every area of your life because you will finally understand that God's will for you is always better than your plans for yourself. God has perfect knowledge. God sees all things. He actually perceives eternity.
We cannot fathom anything without a beginning or an end. We can't. You can lie and say you do, but you can't. You have no reference point. Your mind can't conceive of that.
But out of love, god's plans for us are based on his perspective that includes both this life and eternity. And from that perspective, he does what is best from a perspective we do not have and cannot possess. So, Paul, humbly and wisely says, I'll come back to you again if God wills. I love you, but being in the Lord's will is what's most important to me. So, write this down those who love the Lord trust the Lord and so desire to be always in his will.
Those who love the Lord want to be in the will of God. There was a man who could share his plans without the preface if God wills, our Lord said to his disciples, if I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, you may be also. He didn't need to say if God wills, because he is God, therefore if he wills it, it will be done. Verse 22 on landing at Caesarea. Now, Caesarea was a beautiful port city in Israel that was always busy because it was the closest port to Jerusalem.