And rest assured, I'm not going to talk for an hour and 45 minutes.

Turn to the book of the apostles, chapter

And in our study this morning, this paragraph draws us just 1 more step closer to the end of the first section of the book which is chapters 1 to

But there are changes that are happening.

So you'll remember last week that we saw that a seismic change took place in chapter 10 and the first part of 11.

A change that everybody should have known was coming because it was rooted in the covenant going all the way back to Genesis chapter 12.

But as we saw last week a big change took place because God shows no favoritism.

Now there's another change that's going to take place in our passage today.

It's not as seismic but it's important because the center of gravity of the early church is now going to move from Jerusalem to Antioch and that change is going to elicit both controversy, but ultimately spiritual vindication.

This morning, I wanna look at each of the 4, what I'm gonna call vignettes in the passage.

And that looking at the 4, that will create a context to do both a personal as well as a corporate application.

But let's read the vignettes beginning in chapter

Now the conjunction here is really important.

And so the now links us to the previous verse where the dissidents challenged Peter on what had happened in Caesarea, but now they were able to say then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.

And so now we get a description of what that actually means.

Those who were scattered because of the persecution that took place over Stephen traveled to, okay the text says Phoenicia, that's Lebanon, Cyprus and Antioch.

Now Luke's not going to deal either with Lebanon or with Cyprus in this passage.

But among them were some people of Cyprus and Cyrene, who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Hellenists, also proclaiming the Lord.

The hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number became believers and turned to the Lord.

news of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem and they sent Barnabas to Antioch and when he came and saw the grace of God he rejoiced and exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord and steadfast for he was a good man full of the Holy Spirit and full of faith and great many people were brought to the Lord.

Then verse 25, Barnabas came went to Tarsus and looked for Saul and when he had found him he brought him to Antioch.

So it was it was that for an entire year that they were in the church and taught a great many people.

And it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians.

Prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch, 1 of them named Agabus stood up and predicted by the Spirit that there would be a severe famine during the reign of Claudius.

The disciples determined that according to their ability and each would send relief to the believers living in Judea.

And they did, sending it to the elders by Barnabas and Paul.

But remember, that's going to lead to both personal application, but also a corporate application.

Now, let's before we get into the first vignette, which I'm just entitling, the center of gravity changed.

Let me create a little parenthesis here for just a minute.

Some of you know that I have a deep love and affection for cities.

And so whenever I'm studying texts of scripture, I'm fascinated by what was going on, particularly in the New Testament and in urban centers of the Roman Empire.

And back in the late 90s, I was on a sabbatical from my work at Christian Direction, and I did a postdoctoral year with some people that had a real expertise in the Gospel of Matthew.

They all say, don't you realize that there's 25 other books in the New Testament?

I said, I fully recognize the canon of scripture is just I haven't finished with Matthew yet.

So when I finish with Matthew, I'll move on.

But it didn't take long in studying the gospel of Matthew to recognize that after the ascension of Jesus, Matthew gravitated north out of Palestine and settled in the city of Antioch and he probably became, if not 1 of the pastors in the house churches in Antioch, he probably even became the elder of the churches in Antioch.

And so I was really intrigued as to the city.

Now, in this sidebar, I was down in New Jersey with Sandy on vacation, and I was reading an article in the New York Times about a special exposition that was gonna take place in all places in the Worcestershire Fine Arts Museum in Worcestershire, Massachusetts on what?

And I said, San, When we go back to Montreal, we're going to go through Worcester.

You see, Antioch was probably the third or

the Roman Empire at the time of Matthew and at the time that Luke is recording here.

It was an incredible city because it had been established as an outpost for the Roman army before they actually built their headquarters further east in Constantinople.

At the time, it was a city of probably 300, 000 to 500, 000 people.

So small by modern standards, but after Rome and Alexandria, this was a thriving metropolitan area.

So there was this great big boulevard down the middle of the city that was probably 3 kilometers wide, 3 kilometers long, very large.

It had colonnade posts built of marble and the army would always come down that street.

It was a large economic area because it was a day's walk from the Mediterranean, so It was a very fertile area and agriculture drove the economics, which made it then a very commercial city.

People were attracted to this city because it was both a beautiful city, an outpost, but also created for commercial exchanges.

It was then, as I said, a political place, but it became the birth to a cultural center.

And it's here that many of the great rhetorical schools in Latin had their roots and blossomed.

Now, what's interesting about this city of some 300, 000 people is that better than 2 3rds of the urban space was occupied by infrastructure, whether it be the pools, whether it be the theaters, whether it be the colonnade posts, whether it be the circuses.

So that means you had to put 300, 000 people into a very densely populated center.

It also means that when you do the comparisons, so we know today that for example Calcutta in India is the most densely populated city in the world.

Antioch easily did pass even Calcutta in its density.

If you throw your garbage into the river that went through the city, you were polluting the water.

If you burned it, you were polluting the air.

So think about the hygienic issues that goes into a city, and archaeologists to this very day have never found a sewer system in that city.

The level of infant mortality must have been huge.

1 archaeologist has found, now this was discovered at the end of

the 19th century, so read it in that context.

He said that we have been able through archaeological studies to find that there are 18 tribes that lived in this city.

Now we would call them ethnic groups, but the city was actually constructed ethnically so that the Syrians were on 1 side of the city, the Greeks were on the other, and if you studied antiquity, you understand there was no love lost between the Syrians and the Greeks.

The Romans were in the more luxurious part of the city.

of a sudden, when you begin to read the Gospel of Matthew, some things begin to make sense.

Why does Matthew have the largest concentration of healings in the gospel?

Because Matthew would have easily figured out if people are gonna follow Jesus, we've got so many diseases here, we better be able to prove to them that this Jesus deals with health issues.

No other gospel talks about children as much as Matthew's gospel.

Because think about how children would have suffered in both the waterborne diseases and the airborne diseases in that city.

But Think about the other thing that Matthew does in his gospel.

make disciples, patnata etne, amongst all the ethnic groups in the world.

And I can imagine Matthew muttering under his breath and they

This was a city where Christianity was going to take root and flourish.

Now, in the first vignette in verses 9 to 19, okay, end of the parentheses, that's Aneon.

It's interesting that 2 huge initiatives now take place with this change in the center of gravity.

There's the geographical progression of the good news from Jerusalem and Samaria and Jerusalem, and now it's going to move to Lebanon, to Cyprus, and now to Antioch.

So there is a geographical expansion that's at hand.

But I want you to notice it's not the geographical expansion that interests Luke in telling this vignette.

He says that there were some people from Cyprus and Cyrene, so these would have been the Jews of the Diaspora.

They get to Antioch and Luke says, and they began to talk to the Hellenists.

Now these weren't just Greeks who had converted to Judaism and then were now gonna become Christians.

These were, by using the term Hellenists, these are the Greek-speaking mixed population pagans.

And these people had figured out if the Holy Spirit and repentance unto life goes to the Jews and it goes to the Greeks who became Jews and now get the Holy Spirit, then why can't the Spirit just do an end run around the whole thing, and even reach out to these Greek speaking pagans.

And Luke captures that with this word, the Hellenists.

geographical expansion, we get a cultural expansion of the gospel.

Up till this point in Acts, the disciples and the followers of the disciples were communicating the good news to Jews, or to converted Jews, and they were talking about the Messiah.

But what happens when these Cyprians and Cyrenians reach out to the Hellenists?

a sudden the message is shaped for the mindset and the worldview and the social imaginary of these people who were very different in the ethnic diversity of Antioch.

But, Luke's really clear, but you've still gotta repent.

And so the text says, they turned to the Lord.

Now, it's somewhat easy to say that Jerusalem decided to send the troops in to make sure everything was kosher.

If they were planning on that, they didn't send the right person.

So, was Barnabas sent because he knew the people from Cyprus that had evangelized, because we know from Acts chapter 4 that Barnabas was a Cyprian, he was from Cyprus.

So it created a relationship for this cultural expansion of the church?

Did he know, Barnabas, about the cultural diversity of this city and was at home with it?

For sure, he was a logical choice because he was a Jew, but a Jew who had grown up in the diaspora.

So he understood what it was to live as a follower of God when you're not the majority, when you're a real minority.

And so he becomes the logical choice to find out what's going on.

And the portrait of Barnabas is now becoming clear.

You'll remember in Acts chapter 4, he was from Cyprus, but he was a Levite.

So he understood the Levitical code, but he was a man of means.

And remember in chapter 4, he took his means and he laid the benefits at the feet of the apostles to be used for kingdom work.

In chapter 9, he's the 1 that gets Saul, takes him actually to the elders in Jerusalem to plead his case.

But when he saw what was happening, It was Barnabas who took him down to the coast, probably to Joppa, put him on a boat and said goodbye.

It's not safe for you to be hanging out in these parts.

And so now, Barnabas becomes the 1 who saw the grace of God, the 1 who encouraged people, but why not?

He was full of trust in God and he was an evangelist.

And he enters into this cultural expansion of the church and the text says a great many people were brought to the Lord.

And this is a favorite expression of Luke now.

This is now the fourth time where he talks about and many people were brought to the Lord or were added to the Lord.

Cultural expansion, and numerical expansion.

And so, was Luke's presence, was Barnabas' presence in Antioch controversial?

Was the Spirit vindicated by what was going on in this change in the geographical center of the world?

Now, the question comes in the third vignette, starting in verse

You've got this huge shift going on, you get this growth going on, Barnabas the evangelist, but the good man, full of Holy Spirit, full of faith, he's obviously got to be asking the question, how do you manage this?

And right away the text says, then, then, he thought about Saul.

And so he goes from Antioch up to Tarsus and the sense of the word is that Saul would have been somewhat reticent to make a move but Barnabas convinces him and so he comes back and the text says, for a year Barnabas and Saul

A great many people had been brought to the Lord.

Now Barnabas and Saul for a whole year teach a great many people.

Because of all this cultural expansion, numerical expansion, all of

a sudden the people in the city sense that something's going on and so for the first time it says

Now, the word here is really a Latin term.

This was what the Romans, through the Latin language, loved to do.

They loved to pick a group of people, stick a label on them, and then they said, now we understand them.

Okay, so they did this with the Herodians, a group of Jews who were faithful to Herod the Great, so we're gonna call them Herodians, okay?

The Greek-speaking pagans, they're the Hellenists, okay?

These disciples, Luke had already referred to them as people of the way, Believers, saints, but for the first time, the Romans stick a label on them and

this is not in the text, so this is free.

It's gonna take 50 years for this label to stick.

It would appear that the early Christians didn't like the label.

I mean, the worst thing that you can accuse somebody in the new Democratic Party of Canada, you're nothing but a socialist.

You notice they fly from that like a pest.

So if you say to somebody in the Liberal Party of Quebec, oh, you're a separatist, you know, they fly from it.

People don't like other people giving them a label.

And we have to wait until the writings of Ignatius, Ignace, of Antioch, to begin to use this description of the Christians.

It meant that you were a follower of Jesus.

And then all of a sudden in the second century,

the church began to use this all the time.

But isn't it interesting that the label came from the others?

Didn't stick at first, but eventually it became the label that now describes better than

The geographical center of the church moves north.

the cultural and numeric expansion is vindicated.

It's vindicated through a good man, Barnabas.

So he goes gets Saul, and together over the course of the year, they help to teach and to manage the growth of the church.

Now, here's where the growth of the church in this third vignette will take us.

When you get to the fourth century of the early church,

the pastor, the elder, the bishop in Antioch was John Christeson, and He talks in his writings of better than 400, 000 people in Antioch being Christians.

Don't despise small beginnings, as Zechariah likes to tell us in his small little book

Now, the fourth vignette is quite interesting.

It's almost like it's an add-on into the story.

And now, the reader is invited to understand the place of prophecy in the church.

So with this geographical, cultural, and numeric expansion, prophets, probably from Jerusalem, certainly from Palestine, begin to come to the city.

Now, prophecy became so big in those early communities that Paul actually devotes a chapter to it in 1 Corinthians 15 to talk about how to use this gift of the Spirit properly.

The mistake we make is that we often think that prophecy is predictive.

But less than 2% of the prophecies in the whole Bible talk about the future.

So it's just as easy to say that the gift of prophecy might just be the gift of preaching, the gift of proclamation in the community.

So it's 1 of those examples of the 2% that I was talking about.

He talks about a famine, and we probably have some hyperbole here he says over all the earth or over all the world now critics like to get it what we know there wasn't a famine over all the earth at the time when Claudius was the emperor of the Roman Empire.

Probably Agabus is talking in his prophecy about a famine of great import.

Because when we look at the historical record, when Claudius was the emperor of Rome, there were terrible harvests in Judea.

There was sporadic famine that took place in different areas across the Roman Empire including in Jerusalem.

And it's this little prophecy is going to have a huge impact on Paul's ministry.

Because you'll remember in Galatians chapter 2 when Paul And Barnabas, his name changes now, Paul and Barnabas become, are sent by the church in Jerusalem to work with the Greeks and the Hellenists.

The church in Jerusalem said, don't forget the poor.

And Paul writes in Galatians chapter 2, which is exactly what we wanted to do.

And so in 1 Corinthians 16, in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, and in Romans chapter 15, he solicits money from the churches in Asia Minor and then actually in the great capital.

He solicits funds to take care of those that have been affected by the famine and it all has its roots in the prophetic word, the proclamation, the prompting of the Holy Spirit in Agabus' life and in his mouth.

They determined, according to their ability, each 1 is going to send relief and they sent it by Barnabas and Saul to the elders of the church in Jerusalem.

And this is exactly what Paul was going to teach subsequently.

Go to 2 Corinthians chapter 9 and verse 6.

Everybody has to decide according to their own means how to give and to give cheerfully.

There are a couple of pieces of news that really struck me this week.

Many of you know that Sandy and I have done many years of teaching and formation in Haiti.

In the first 8 months of this year, 2400 people have been killed in the city of Port-au-Prince.

So that means a lot of our sisters and brothers of Jesus have

been killed in the chaos and the anarchy that's going on in that city.

So what do I as a Christian in Montreal do?

I determine in my own soul with my wife, according to what we have, we prepare a gift

and We send it to our partner churches in Haiti Because we want to be involved in relief now There's other things that Sandy and I do with our money, but we keep a certain percentage of it available for relief, okay?

Fires break out and yellow knife is evacuated This morning if you listen to the news, West Kelowna has been, West Kelowna doesn't exist anymore.

My friends, our sisters and brothers in Jesus are affected by fires.

Now all of us complained back earlier in the summer when we were all suffering from the effects of the smoke.

And those of us that have asthma, you know, we just, we made sure that our ventolin was readily available.

Okay, but in situations of emergency, the church is called, Everybody determines, according to

their means, they give for relief and they send it to the church.

This is our solidarity as a global movement.

And this is all prefaced, It's all located in how Agabus sensitized the church and the church in Antioch took it seriously to help the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem and then this becomes a global movement that Paul's a part of.

Believe it and it's right there in 4 short vignettes.

Here's 2 things that really struck me this week.

I think that it's worth your time this coming week and then particularly once we begin chapter 13 to look at the church in Antioch.

So we've got this passage, we've got chapter 13, particularly the first 5 verses, when the elders in this multi-ethnic church send Saul and Barnabas on what is called the first missionary journey.

And then when they come back in chapter 14, there's some fascinating descriptors of this church.

I made a list of 10 of them, But here's 2 that stand out in this passage, so let's just stay

Here's a church that takes its context seriously.

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