First Missionary Journey Commences - Acts 13:1-13

We'll be looking at Acts chapter 13, so please open your Bibles or your phones or your tablets or whatever you're using.

1 of my interests, 1 of my hobbies, which my wife did not understand, is collecting and looking at ancient letters, letters that were written perhaps at the time of our Lord between merchants and their wives as they traveled and between different individuals which had nothing to do with the

Bible which perhaps show the culture, the way people lived back in those days.

recently came across a letter written to the Apostle Paul, which is not in the Bible, from a mission society to which he had applied.

the Apostle Paul applied to be a member of a mission society.

I would like to read to you some experts from that letter as we consider Acts 13 where Paul becomes the center of Luke's story of the early church where the Holy Spirit is spreading the gospel throughout the world.

Written to the Reverend Saul Paul, Independent Missionary in Corinth in Greece.

Paul, we recently received an application from you for service under our board.

It is our policy to be as frank and as open-minded as possible with all our applicants.

We have made an exhaustive survey of your case.

To be clear, we are surprised that you have been able to pass as a real missionary.

We are told that you were afflicted with severe eye problems.

That is certainly to be a real handicap to effective ministry.

At Antioch we learned that you dared to oppose Dr.

Simon Peter, an esteemed denominational secretary.

You actually rebuked him openly and publicly.

You stirred up so much trouble in Antioch that a special board meeting had to be convened in Jerusalem.

Certain brethren have told us that you did 2 years' time in Caesarea and that you were imprisoned at Rome.

You made such trouble for businessmen in Ephesus that they referred to you as the man who turned the world upside down.

Sensationalism in missions is uncalled for.

We also deplore the over-the-wall in basket episode in Damascus.

In 1 of your letters you refer to yourself as Paul the Aged.

Our mission policies do not allow for old recipients.

were given to fantasies and designed dreams.

And another time, you were caught up into the third heaven and even claimed that the Lord stood by you.

You opposed the Honorable Woman at Berea and the leaders of your own nationality in Jerusalem.

If you can't get along with your own people, how can you serve foreigners?

We learned that you were a steak handler.

You picked up a steak that bit you and did not suffer harm.

We know that you had a bitter quarrel with fellow missionary Barnabas.

You've written letters to churches and you accused a church member of living with his father's wife and caused the whole church to feel badly, and the poor person was expelled.

book of Acts as we've been studying is that it tells us the story of King Jesus.

It shows God as King, as he establishes kingdom, and we see the coming of the Holy Spirit.

He enables and he insists Jesus, assists Jesus followers to embrace the Father's mandate, which is to testify to Jews and non-Jews from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth about Jesus' salvation through his death and resurrection.

Last night at 10 o'clock I finally wrote my big idea.

I told some of the gentlemen yesterday morning that I was struggling with that.

The big idea of today's passage, I think, is that this is next step in God's plan for missions.

So far, the Holy Spirit has been working in Jerusalem and Judea among the Jewish people mostly.

Now the Holy Spirit moves the large multi-ethnic church in Antioch to send out the first missionaries to the Roman Empire.

We're going to see first of all leadership, and we're going to see missions, and we're going to see opposition and conversion and disappointment, and we're going to draw some applications.

A brief application, we are now in the second part of the Book of Acts.

And we move from Jerusalem to Antioch as the center of Luke's emphasis.

And we're leaving Peter as the leader of the first church to Paul.

The emphasis is changing from Jewish evangelism to non-Jewish, Gentile evangelism, and from Palestine to the Mediterranean world.

We're going to read verse 1 of Acts chapter

Now that we're in the church of Antioch, prophets and teachers.

Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene,

Manan, a lifelong friend of Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul.

Let's think of this Church of Antioch, let's think about these leaders.

First of all, there was a plurality of leaders, not 1 senior guy that ran the whole show.

Biblical, the church has to be led by elders, by a group of leaders, and you can have an elder who's

a full-time working in the church, but he's part of a group of leaders.

And the plurality of leaders here gives strength to this local church.

Secondly, as you read this passage, it's clear that there were leaders who prioritized prayer and intercession.

When I first became an elder in the church in Capitol Madeleine,

I was impressed by the fact that every elders meeting twice a month, we spent 1 hour with the list of the members of the church and we each prayed for 1 page.

So that over a period of 3 months the elders played for every family in the church.

At that time there were 500 people in that church, several couple hundred families and intercession And sometimes at first I thought to myself, this is a waste of time.

We've got some important things to talk about.

I soon learned that the Lord worked as the elders prayed.

Thirdly, these elders listened to the Lord's teaching,

They were listening to what the Lord was saying.

Lots of movements and the way churches should be run today, about every 5 years a new book comes out,

and I'm in book publishing, and we read them, and about once every 30 years we find 1 that's worth translating, we translate it into French.

These people are going to the Lord for leading.

These are leaders whose vision extended beyond their local needs.

They didn't have, what do you call those things that horses wear.

They saw that we're leaving the whole world not the local church.

And there are leaders who knew and knew how to teach God's Word.

Now, a group of leaders needs different types of people.

It needs someone who knows how to run a meeting.

Nothing worse than a group of leaders that get together, and they're all over the place, and there's no organization in the meeting, and nobody knows where they're going.

Having someone who can run a meeting is an important thing.

But more than anything, leaders who know how to teach the Word of God.

And there were prophets and there were teachers.

We often think that prophets are people that foretell the future.

But if you read the Old Testament, which the Old Testament is full of prophets, the whole second part of the Old Testament is prophets.

If you read the Old Testament, you'll see that prophets are about 90% forth telling, and maybe 5 or 10% foretelling the future.

If you read the minor prophets and the major prophets, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and you get into Malachi and Zechariah, the smaller prophets, you'll find that they're taking the Old Testament, particularly the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Bible, and especially the book of Deuteronomy.

Recently I've been really studying the book of Deuteronomy for my own culture, and it's interesting how the prophets of the Old Testament took the truths, the teaching of God, God's standards for his people in Deuteronomy, and they look at the way people are living and ministering and acting around them in their time and they make that comparison to the people and they try to correct the way they are living.

They're applying God's Word which has already been revealed by God to the way people were living at that time.

Teachers had a different type of ministry.

They expounded the Old Testament and the traditions about the life and teachings of Jesus as handed down in the church.

They didn't have the New Testament as we do, but there was an oral tradition which is very, very clear.

There are quotes from Jesus' ministry in the New Testament.

An emphasis on pedagogy, on systematic teaching, rather than on proclamation, and a clear understanding of discernment of biblical truth.

Other prophets today, I certainly believe we need

a prophetic ministry whereby we're applying God's words to people's lives.

And perhaps you might differ somewhat, some of us, on that idea of prophets today.

But I'd like to suggest to you a principle which I think is helpful.

The New Testament is very clear that when someone teaches or someone says they're prophesying, that we have the responsibility to look at what they're saying, compare to God's Word, and decide if it's right or wrong.

Testament, if someone predicted the future and it didn't come to pass, you know what they did?

You don't want to be a false prophet in the Old Testament.

It might be helpful to stone some people today, I'm not sure.

Every 3 or 4 years, someone decides that they know when Jesus is coming back.

And some of them are well known, and some of them are good men, and trying to figure out why they became such idiots when they

And yet we know the Bible, and we know that Jesus himself says that no man knows when I'm coming back.

And who are these guys to decide that they know when Jesus said that

So if someone's telling you that they know when the Lord's coming back, don't go up on a hill and quit your job.

a church about 6 or 7 years ago in the city where I live, where he said the Lord's coming back at that date.

And he went on television, the local television station, he said, I've taken on 8 credit cards and I've filled them up.

I fixed my house up, but I'm not going to have to pay back because the Lord's coming back in 3 months.

He didn't pay his debts, I'll tell you that much.

We might disagree a little bit on something, but let's not disagree on that.

Our responsibility is to use our discernment when it comes to tongues and prophecy and miracles and

all those things, good common sense discernment.

We read that these leaders were involved in worshipping, ministering to the Lord.

Their service was, yes, to the people, but first of all, to the Lord.

If I'm going to do something in the Lord's work, I need to remember that first of all, I'm serving

Serving the people is important, but it's secondary.

The word worshipping here is the word that gives us in English liturgy.

It was used in the Old Testament to describe the work of the priests in the Septuagint, particularly in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which was made perhaps 200 years before the birth of our Lord.

The work of the priests in the temple was called liturgy.

Fasting is an urgent desire as we seek the Lord.

Now there was lots of work left to do in Antioch.

It was the third biggest city in the Roman Empire.

Probably 500, 000 people or perhaps more.

And certainly the Church of Antioch had not, it was a big church, but they had not evangelized the whole city.

There was a lot to do there, but These leaders looked beyond their doors, beyond their city.

Interesting that it was a multi-ethnic group of leaders in a multi-ethnic church.

And Barnabas was the person who had went and found and introduced Paul to the church.

It's interesting as we read through these first 13 verses that at the beginning in chapter 1 and chapter 2, Barnabas is mentioned first, but by the end of chapter 13, we read Paul and his companions.

can eclipse themselves in circumstances or with time when someone else becomes a more important leader than themselves.

It takes a certain humility, it takes a certain spirituality.

We have a person here called Simon, Simon called Niger, Almost certainly a man of color from Africa.

And there are those who believe that he was a person who carried Jesus' cross, maybe, that's just speculation.

There's a man called Lucius, He was from Surin, certainly a man of color again.

There are those who say that Lucius was Luke who wrote the gospel, the gospel of Luke in

He was raised in the home of the Herod who killed John the Baptist.

The word that is called friend here probably should be translated adopted brother.

Adopting somebody to be a companion for our son was a common occurrence in that culture.

And so he was a man who was raised in wealth, in prestige.

Interesting that the man who killed John the Baptist

and whom Jesus, to whom Jesus refused to speak at his trial, his son became 1 of the leaders of the church in Antioch.

We learn good things from our parents, but we don't have to follow every sin that our parents committed.

And there was Saul, an educated Jew from Tarsus.

And we read when it was Herod the Tetrarch.

When Herod the Great died, the Romans were tired of the way the Herods ruled, and they divided the territory into 4, and Herod Tetrarch became ruler of the fourth of the kingdom of his father.

We'll find them all for the Book of Acts.

Talper, talphys, we say in French, like father, like son.

Herod the Great was the 1 who killed the babies when Jesus died because he's afraid that someone might take his place.

His son, Herod Antipas, is Herod the Tertiary.

Going down to the left, Herod Agrippa I was the 1 who killed James.

And if you go down below that you'll find Herod Agrippa II and Bernice and Drusillia, who are descendants who kept Paul in prison in Caesarea because they wanted to be bribed.

So that gives you a chance of seeing who all these different herods are.

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

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

So being sent out by the Holy Spirit they went down to Seleucia and from there they sailed to Cyprus.

When they arrived at Salamis they proclaimed the Word of God in the synagogues of the Jews and they had John to assist them.

In the Old Testament, the priest would sacrifice an animal for the sins of the people.

He would lay his hands on the head of the animal before killing it and would confess the sins of the people.

More than transition of power, it's confirmation, unity, identification that's involved here.

that These missionaries were sent by the local church.

The advent, the creation, the coming of faith missions, mostly in the 18th century, 19th century, was a wonderful thing.

And faith missions have done great work and have helped the missionary movement throughout the world over the last few hundred years.

fear that today they have replaced the local church.

Missions should be first of all the ministry of the local church.

And I believe in accountability to the local church.

Paul, Barnabas, Silas, their workers regularly,

you'll see as we go through the Book of Acts, they come back to their sending church to report, receive approval for their ministry.

I remember we had a young lady with her husband that were in South America way up 13, 000 feet Living in a mud hut with no floor With no furniture and almost no furniture and she was after 5 years She was breaking down.

She was from our church in 3 Rivers, he was from a church in St.

John, New Brunswick where the pastor was 1 of

We got together and we called the faith mission and said this isn't going well, we have to do something, we're gonna collect some money and we're gonna build them a house and buy them some furniture and and and we're gonna take have them 3 months take 3 months off and because she's gonna burn she's just about burned out here We were told to

And we told them, we're the local churches they're from.

If you're not happy, they'll change missions.

I just want to say that to say missions should be local church oriented.

They're led by the Holy Spirit, wonderful thing.

And I want to suggest to you that the local church must reclaim its central place in world missions.

They went down to Seleucia, which is the port city of Antioch.

It's 16 miles away on the mouth of the Orontes River.

People travel by a little by ship at that time.

So they went down to the port city and they went to Salamis which is in the northeast of Cyprus and then from Salamis they went it's the biggest It's 1 of the biggest cities there.

The mission outreach of the Vucabacs started with the large cities and spread out from there.

I've been a missionary for 55 years, I guess it is, yes, working with the Brethren Assemblies in French Canada.

If I look at the ministry of the French Brethren, you know, I mean, 45 churches were founded in Quebec

But I think if 1 mistake was made, is that we started churches in every little village of Quebec and neglected the cities.

the Book of Acts, you'll find out that Paul went to the cities, founded strong churches, and from those cities, the outreach went to the areas around.

Cyprus is the third largest island in the Mediterranean.

It's about 60 miles from Syria where Paul was living in Antioch and it was actually visible on a clear day from Syria.

Perhaps you don't realize that Cyprus, which is the third largest island in

the Mediterranean, it's about 100 miles by 60 miles, is very important in Canadian history.

and there was a Turkish area and the Turks sent soldiers in and there a battle started and Canada sent soldiers.

That's important to me because my father was involved in that.

HMCS Bonaventure, which was Canada's last aircraft carrier, was my father's ship at that time.

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Rosemount Bible Church - September 3, 2023