Our reading today comes from Acts 13 verses 4 through 12. So Barnabas and Saul were sent out by the Holy Spirit. They went down to the seaport of Salutia and they sailed for the island of Cyprus. There in the town of Salimis, they went to the Jewish synagogues and preached the Word of God.
John Mark went with them as their assistant. Afterward, they traveled from town to town across the entire island until finally they reached Paphos where they met a Jewish sorcerer, a false prophet named Bar Jesus. He had attached himself to the governor, Sergio's Paulus, who was an intelligent man. The government invited Barnabas and Saul to visit him for he wanted to hear the Word of God.
But Elimis the sorcerer interfered and urged the governor to pay no attention to what Barnabas and Saul said. He was trying to keep the governor from believing. Saul, also known as Paul, was filled with the Holy Spirit. And he looked the sorcerer in the eye and then he said, You, son of the devil, full of every sort of deceit and fraud and enemy of all that is good.
Will you never stop perverting the true ways of the Lord? Watch now for the Lord has laid his hand of punishment upon you and you will be struck blind. You will not see the sunlight for some time. Instantly, Missed and darkness came over the man's eyes and he began groping around begging for someone to take his hand and lead him.
When the governor saw what had happened, he became a believer. He was astonished at the teaching about the Lord. This is the Word of God. That just shared, we've got a lot of big stuff going on here at the church right now, don't we?
But we've also got a lot of big stuff just like going on in our world and our lives. Does anybody, it's things like particularly easy for anyone right now? You know, like stuff we've got big stuff going on. It's just kind of part of the things and I'm excited about this and we've decided to come into this space about eight or nine weeks ago and say, let's just talk about the big things.
Let's see what it means for us to see and deliver these big things. But also just to look at the space that the church has inhabited before during big things. And what are the ways that we can learn from the church? We can learn the behaviors, see what we need to do, see what we can do, this whole thing.
And so this is our last week that we're taking this time to do this. But what's so much fun though is inside of this summer, we have seen a lot of really cool big stuff happen in our church. We've seen big things happen in the lives of individuals and big things happen just for us. So we've been seeing God move inside of these spaces.
In spite of things that otherwise we might think would be stopping stuff from happening. You know, 30 months ago, we started our campaign for our new building. We called it even greater things. And that comes from John chapter 12 when Jesus said, you will do even greater things than I have.
And when we hear that at first, we think, well, that's just kind of, Jesus, we're not you, this sounds kind of impossible. What does it mean? And he simply just says, well, you'll have the faith to do these things. You will do even greater things than me.
So we've been looking at the book of Acts and really the first half of Acts to see the marks of these movements. Like what does it mean for the early church to just come in and just to take the world by storm and to just rapidly multiply in all of these ways? And this church, these first 10, 11, 12 chapters of Acts, what we find out is that these people are living on the edge of their world but they're also living at the same time on the edge of this spirit. These are all the things that are now possible when they allow the Holy Spirit to come in and for them to see life in this way.
We've heard a lot of cool, fun, great stories throughout all of this. It's honestly left me wanting a little bit more half the time. What we really see inside of this is that this, the truth shows the truth. And that's what we're going to think about today.
We're going to wrap this up. Acts really, about halfway through the book, it changes and it quits becoming the story of all of these different people and it becomes the story of this guy we're familiar with named Paul. Now, we talked about him last week. We talked about him a couple of weeks ago back when we find him at first in the book of Acts called Saul and we're going to talk a little bit about that transition, about what happened when he started going by Paul instead of Saul.
The technicality of it is actually kind of quite boring but the situation where we see his name change in scripture is really the best place for us to kind of end these conversations on. We've got something really fun playing for the next three weeks. I'm going to tell you all about that when I am done about what that's going to look like. But today I just want to talk about this Saul, about Paul and when we find out, you know, what can we learn from his life?
I've got to be really honest with you for a long time in my life. I was actually not that big of a fan of him. I thought he was kind of a jerk and I thought he was a jerk more so because these people I knew that really were really really into him. They were jerks and so kind of applied that across the board.
I'm not going to I'm not just going to think about that. And thankfully after several years I kind of started getting over that but he still seems like we've heard his name before. We're used to this idea of Paul being this figure that we can't come close to touching. We can't understand.
He's just he's so big. He wrote a third of the New Testament. He really began on the entire ministry outside of the Jewish. He seems like this huge unapproachable like super hero type figure.
Early this year I kind of got a wild hair and I had devotionally been reading acts for a few months and I said, you know what, the Paul you find in acts is very different than the Paul I found when I was younger. And so I kind of did a pretty nerdy thing and I decided to read all of half of acts and all of Paul's letters chronologically. That's what I wanted to do and I kind of got some stuff and figured out what that looked like and and I did it like a nine days. But the wild thing about it was when I did that actually discovered his humanity like I've this is what it's like for him to be normal.
Like you see the human side of him and you see how he processes loss. You see how he processes disappointment. You see how he parts processes just like heartache. You see his humanity.
But then you also see how he knows that all of these sacrifices in his life has been how it is just absolutely worth it. Like that part of the story to me was just in rapture. I wanted to know that and to be part of that. So really look at today is his story to a point but is this idea is it while we wait God works while we wait God works.
And again, our scripture force earlier this morning in fact that I want to talk about saw's timeline because it really stretches out. So a big part of the story is a big part of how we can engage in this. We met him in chapter eight. Remember we had the stoning of St.
Stephen. We talked with that a few weeks back and I told this I had our story about how when I was a kid I found like styrofoam rocks in a church catalog for you do stoning lessons in Sunday school. Like that's completely appropriate. Yeah.
So solve for that 20 years old when this happened. Okay. So picture who you were when you were 20. I know we had some people in this room who are 20 years old.
Imagine what that looked like young man up and coming was just trying to to climb the religious ladder as much as he can. So about a year after that we probably had the Damascus road experience like we talked about yesterday and then Paul disappears. Like he tells us things and we can kind of infer some context clues from other letters. We know that he went into the Arabian desert for like three years and just was our hermit.
We know that bar miss came and found him a couple of points in time he brings him to Jerusalem one time and he goes and finds him and toss us he goes back home and like hangs out at home for a while. But he shows back up like 15 years later and Barnabas brings him into Antioch and says, hey, there's this church here. It's growing. We need mature people.
I would really like to have you here with us. And so this is where we meet Paul in the story. Now he's in his mid 30s. I think of the difference in your life between when you were 20 and when you were in mid to late 30s.
Think of the strong difference that that time can mean in your life. And some people are younger. I got I'm 40 now. I've been told I'm part of the problem.
But we think about what happens in that whole like that season of maturity as you go into middle age. That's where Saul is at right now. We find a couple of things in the stories. This is the very beginning of the first missionary journey.
The church in Antioch came in and said, hey, we're going to we're going to see you and Barnabas. You were people who can be trusted. You're full of the Holy Spirit. We're going to send you out on this ministry and this mission and they go to Cyprus.
You know, Paul is still it's all it's still falling Barnabas around. He's still second in command. He's the he's the lackey. It's always Barnabas and Saul Barnabas and Saul.
And for the last 15 years, his life has been characterized by Barnabas coming and getting him and bringing him along. And then they go to Cyprus. That's where Barnabas is from. We talked about Barnabas several weeks ago as well.
Like this is his home turf. Now, if you ever remember when you were younger, you ever go home with a friend for a weekend and it's kind of awkward to be in this space. They're super familiar with and like you're not and it's kind of cool for a while. Then after a little while, like this isn't fun.
Like I don't like the side of the deal. Like imagine what's like Saul that comes into here and things are growing and growing and growing and growing and they've got this situation where things are happening good. But I want to just picture Saul's state of mind. Okay.
So a couple of the things that we can kind of infer. Mike Breen is a British pastor and he talks about about where Saul is this point time of his life. You know, he had been in Jerusalem. His family sent him down to study with his Pharisee named Gamalieliel.
That's a really kind of complicated name to figure out. And essentially Saul was sent down to like the Ivy leagues of being a religious leader. His parents probably either had a tremendous amount of money or had a tremendous sacrifice to send their son from where they lived in Syria down to Jerusalem to study under the leading synagogue teacher of the day. We see him growing fast in the ranks.
We talked about this last week when the whole stoning of Stephen he's there holding their coats. He's not there just being nice. It's actually a formal counting system that he was trustworthy enough to make sure everybody who's supposed to participate participate. We also know from this time that for a young Jewish male to be climbing up the ladder of religious leadership, it was very, very, very, very, very rare that he was not.
He's married already. And if he was married at that point in time already, we can also infer just from Jewish tradition that he probably had children. The scripture doesn't say anything about this, but we look at what was expected of these young men like this in the case. So we know Paul probably had this family.
So here he is with Barnabas 15 years later and you guys think about the difference between his life at 20. He's growing into being a very, very important person and his life in his mid 30s where he's met Jesus. He's made to sacrifices. But for the last 15 years, his life is probably being characterized more by failure than it is success.
He's lost to everything. He's glad to be there. But just imagine what that's like. If you ever been in the space, this is where I think a lot of us can kind of understand what's going on.
Have you ever been in the space where you kind of feel like you got the wrong end of a deal where you think, OK, I have done more work than is necessary. I should have this in the space by now. You add that into the first half of his life has instead been like success, success, success, success, success, and all of a sudden it's not. You know what one commentator wrote about is one thing that people think that where Saul was during this 15 years was he was probably at home trying to evangelize and probably failing the entire time.
In many ways, we can see Barnabas is called, hey, why don't you come to Syria? You want to hang out in Antioch with me for a little while. It's almost like you can tell two good friends. They say, he just needs a chance.
He seems to leg up. It's never really worked out well for me. This all sound kind of familiar in our own life right now. So there we find Saul there.
And this this thing happens right there. They meet this official. He's like the governor of Syria of Cyprus. He's well respected Paul and it's all we know that for the church tells us he was an official citizen of Rome by birth, which is a high honor.
He was also a citizen of his hometown, Tarsis. And now he's thrust into like this realm that he does know. He's like, I understand this. I'm in front of the governor.
I do know what respectfulness looks like. Scripture says that Sergio Paul was intelligent. You know, Paul can can he can follow the decorum of this courtroom. Paul Grouper and fancy stuff most likely here.
He is back in the middle of fancy things. You know, he finds himself in a situation where his previous life of civility, of formality and of intelligence actually matters. You're a step into the spot where you go, wow, I feel like I'm at home. I know what's going on here.
I have an idea of what's going on. And so he launches into this conversation that's going on here. There's this Jewish sorcerer in Scripture says his name is bar Jesus. It's not interrelated to Jesus.
Jesus is the Jewish one of the word of the name Joshua. But a Jewish sorcerer is an oxymoron. A sorcery and magic is deeply forbidden in Jewish faith. So him just trying to do is you can say that this person is has tried to attach himself, this governor, defined power to be his person that tries to declare truth and Saul all of a sudden takes on this tone of authority in this situation and his interaction because this is all about truth with this.
This sorcerer has been trying to keep this governor away from truth. If you're out in Johnson, we're here right now teaching. Alan would have maybe started talking about the Lord of the Rings and like the guy at Rohan that had the creepy thing there. That's what Alan was talking about right here.
I'm not smart enough to do that. Make that that line like Alan can. But this guy's been opposed to the truth and Saul steps in because to us in our world now in the 21st century, if we have to boil down with the average person thinks about Christianity is what was about life after that's going to heaven. That's what it is.
But to Paul and to a Christian in the first century, it's not about heaven. It's not about the afterlife. It's all about who has power. It's all about who has authority.
It's all about who has the ability to actually do things who actually is in control over this world. And we find Saul here spent the last 15 years not changing what he believes about God, but allowing God to expand things for him to come in and to see this new identification saying, Hey, this is a world that's defined by power and it's the power that Jesus has and Jesus has more power than anything we could ever imagine. He's the fulfillment of everything that the Old Testament prophets have said is the common Jesus. So Paul fully in his Jewishness says this is a God who's been declaring he's in control since the foundations of the world and it's now brought to full completion in Jesus Christ of truth always brings in truth.
What he's taking issue is this sorcerer is not talking about truth. He's talking about falsehood and he immediately confronts it in an amazing way. And we find out is that this governor of Cyprus, this Roman governor hears what Paul says sees this interaction sees the tone of authority and truthfulness that Saul is talking about and that he begins to believe in Jesus as the fulfillment of all of these things. For example, we actually see here in many ways is the first success that Saul has had in 15 years.
The first time that everything has become worth it. While we wait God works those 15 years of waiting God had been working in Saul in a transformative way. It says in Scripture that he's filled with the spirit. You know, we can say someone's filled with the spirit.
That's kind of a phrase like a church phrase we roll off our tongue. We've not really thought about it that much. What does that actually mean? More technical definition would be that being filled with the spirit is enabling presence of God towards the completion of a special task.
That sounds kind of clinical, doesn't it? Okay. Yeah, that sounds like a Sony school answer. Good job.
You're a preacher. We put this in a little bit a little bit more everyday terms over the last few weeks. I've been watching a lot of YouTube, but I've been watching this guy. His last name is Fowler.
I came to his first name, but he won season three of alone. See what's watch alone? Okay, don't just nerdy. But anyway, so this guy, he's done this thing.
I think it's pretty cool. And his YouTube channel is all these survival challenges and he decided to build a raft. It's like the size of my living room and to put it on a lake and to see if he can live off of the raft for a week and he made the raft out of rubber made totes. Like the things you put your Christmas decorations in.
He had like 40 of them just screwed to the bottom of this plywood and built a frame out of it. It floated out there for a week and the running conversation all throughout the whole week. While he's trying to live on this raft is water getting into the tubs because I would not imagine that rubber made tub is strong enough the whole air for a week on top of a raft. Would you?
That's the whole thing is like is there water inside of it? Is it getting out being filled with the Holy Spirit is about displacement. It's about one thing being present and then another thing being present in this guy's world. He needed all of those rubber made totes to just stay full of air and not full of water.
Being filled with the Holy Spirit is the spirit of God displacing the spirit of the world and our life. And here's Paul in a unique way for that moment. The presence of God displaced. The presence of the world, the presence of God came in and full truthfulness and displaced the presence of falsehood that was there in that situation.
We get to see this transformation and what's so interesting is right there in the middle of the story Luke quit calling him Saul and starts calling him Paul and for the rest of the book of Acts, he's never called Saul again. He's just called Paul. Now the uninteresting, not very fun kind of boring part of this is if Paul was a Roman citizen and a citizen of Tarsus, he probably had like five names, like all people back then had a lot of names and Paul is just the Greek version of the Jewish name. Saul, I mean, so it'd have been a name.
He'd been carrying his entire life. But with that, we see a couple of things. We see the fact that he now is not identified as the up and coming Jewish religious leader, but instead is this person who's devoted to a ministry towards Gentiles towards Romans towards Greeks towards people who did not come up Jewish faith. Paul was able to expand and change these things as way that he had been defining himself for the first 35 years of his life.
He is now fully devoted to this Gentile mission. The second thing that happens is at this point in time, it's never saw as ever Barnabas and Saul again. It's now Paul and Barnabas. Like we see this transition take place where he now is he is no longer the understudy.
He's no longer like, oh, this is a little buddy who can never kind of get a break. He steps in what we find out is the book of Acts time after time after time after time again, we find a similar scenario where Paul is able to go and talk to people of deep high influence into lead them towards understanding the reality of Jesus being in control. And so many people say, you know, we talk about wanted at the book at the end of Acts, Paul willing to go back to Jerusalem knowing that he's going to be arrested. And many people say now that people say, well, Paul knew that if he did this the right way and he was very calculated person.
If we look at acts and see how he boots things, they're saying this was him trying to literally get in front of Caesar because every single time you put him in front of a Roman official, that Roman official began trusting Paul and believing Paul. So this is where we find this adult version that he had been waiting on for his entire life. This is where we see this happens. We see this transformation take place.
You know, while we wait, God works. We began this series talking about willing to know what does it mean to be a people of eternal consequence. And the story is kind of told just now we share this. We see how Paul made that transition.
And I want to just kind of finish things up just really quickly. Just talk about three ways that we learn from the story of Paul from today, but also just how he is and inside of Acts three ways we can learn. What does it mean to be a person of eternal consequence? The first thing is we learned to wait the very first message that we had in this series of from Acts chapter one where Jesus tells the disciples, hey, go wait.
We talked about the power of waiting. Paul waited for years upon years upon years. Do you think Paul ever doubted that he was not doing the right thing? I think he prayed that quite often.
He was always patient. He waited to waiting means that you're expecting something. Think about that. If we're expecting something to happen, you know, we know Jesus is active.
We know Jesus is alive. We know Jesus is doing things around us. We know that our greatest fulfillment will happen to participate alongside of Jesus in these things. Like we are waiting.
Waiting means expecting. Last night, Mary's and I went out to dinner and the food kind of came out in a wonky way and it took a bit longer than you expected to happen. But mine finally came out after Mary's and I knew it was going to come and you know what it was piping hot ready for me. How many times have you waited 10 minutes for something?
Wait, and it comes to you cold. I got it last night. It was too hot that you had to let it sit there. I knew it was going to come.
I have to ask about it. I have to do a couple things, but it was going to get there eventually. That's what expectation looks like. Many times we don't wait on God.
We don't expect anything. God is going to keep our fingers crossed and we equate a God in the presence of always spirit in our life and just sheer luck. Instead of waiting and expecting. Just putting ourselves in an environment to where we know we will hear.
We can hear and the second thing is this and the inner while we're doing that waiting, we talk about obedience. What does it mean to obey? Obedience is not a popular word, right? Does anybody like the term obedience or obey?
That's not a fun thing to hear. The Old Testament obedience is taking from the same idea of what does it mean to strengthen a wall. That to obey is to protect something. It's to shore up like the perimeter of your city.
It's to realize there's something that you're doing that's protecting. You know, do we ever think that much that our obedience is actually us protecting our environment for us to hear and experience God? That's why the scripture talks about eight of your toes are as quote, it's great. It's our victory in the Christian experience rests upon our obedience.
Our victory in the Christian experience rests upon our obedience. If we're really frustrated that we're not seeing or hearing or experiencing God move, what scripture asks us to do is for us to investigate our obedience. Are we obeying while we're waiting? Are we shoring up those walls?
Are we doing the intentional things that we know we can do to build up faith, to make us patient, to give us peace? Are we doing those things? Are we not doing those things? Obedience really is just about protecting the presence of God that we already have around us.
That's a very different understanding of obey in God, isn't it? You know, for 15 years, Paul was probably just making sure he did not lose his faith. We see where he was brought to. Obedience doesn't happen by fixing a problem.
Obedience happens by fixating on Jesus. Look, if he just says, just keep your eyes on Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith. The third thing we learn from the story of Paul is just about renewal, what renewal is. Leslie Newell began a missionary in India in the 20th century.
He said, this faith is not a terminus, but a starting point by which understanding can begin. You know, for many of us, we see faith as at any point. We've got that. We'll have to be more on this.
Like we think our basic level of us meeting with Jesus is going to be adequate enough for our entire adult life. And that's not the case. So we see our faith is that beginning point. Paul had this amazing encounter on the Damascus Road, but he also probably had to say, you know what?
That's still not good enough for me. I'm still going to be chasing you as much as I can. Our world now insists upon immediate and instant. And that that breaks the biblical pattern of waiting on God.
When you go to about patience, that's about enduring lobbying. It's about obeying. If we want to renew things, renewal does not happen instantly as well, but the ability to renew happens instantly. Are we trusting that God is doing something in our hearts that even we can't see?
That's what renewal looks like. Now we miss out on the power and the activity of God speaking into us. When we just refuse to realize that he is moving us forward, we have to be renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit. Faith is definite, but faith has to be cultivated.
You know, we have to learn to resist the instant while we wait. God works. And then finish this up today, just the same way I finished up the first week is by us looking at that first group of Christians. It was 120, 130 or so they've been waiting on Jesus in Acts chapter one.
And we asked the question that day, like, what would happen if they would not have waited? If they would not have been patient and waited on the presence of God to come to the Epinocost, what would have happened? If Paul had not been willing to be patient, those 15 years, what might have not happened? You know, Paul brought the word of Jesus, the message of the cross to Europe.
In many ways, all of us are spiritual descendants from his ministry. Now think about your life. Who were you when you were 20? I was in the knucklehead and a half.
I was in the knuckleheads. 35, I was 35 when we started Foundry. And when I was 20 years old, my primary view of human flourishing was that shot of Duff Makaygan in the Paradise City video where he's standing in front of the giant banner. He's short like that short.
I've never had short such short. That's what it was. You know, think about who you were when you were 20, 35. The changes.
Now, what if Paul had not been willing to be patient during those 15 years? What if he had turned into the person he was? But let me ask you this. And Jack came up and talked about the prayer consecration, the script-reading consecration.
These are important, important, important things because I want to ask you this question. What is at stake and your family and in our community and in the world right now if we choose to not be people who are patient and who wait? What's at stake? And I imagine we don't even know the people that we've been called to be patient for.
But in every story of every movement of God, every story we find in scripture, we find a story of someone who's saying yes to waiting, who's saying yes to obedience, who's saying yes to a different world. Talking yesterday with somebody and they said that, you know, the phrase I've hated over the last few months is new normal. And they're saying that now that is no longer an adequate enough phrase that the new phrase is new reality. Now, right in front of us in our world, we're about to step into a space to where we can say yes to a living a new way of life.
And as the church, we have a distinct yes inside of that as well. As we wrap this up, I just want to put that in front of you know, who are you saying yes for? Who is going to be affected by our faithfulness together as we step into many, many different new realities as people as a church, all the sorts of things. So next few weeks, I told you we've got something different going on.
I'm not going to speak again until we're in the new building. But we're going to have three people from the church that are going to be sharing their stories, but also talking about their hopes and dreams for our life as a church together. Next week, Reverend Judy Bager of many all know Judy, Judy is a retired methods clergy person. Judy's going to be sharing her story.
I'm excited to hear her bits and pieces of her story, but to hear that from her. You know, the week after that Nicole West is going to be sharing and then after that Alan Martin's going to be sharing them, we're in the new building. But friends, our faithfulness doesn't just belong to ourselves. Our faithfulness belongs to each other.
It's not just my faithfulness, but every one of our faithfulness belongs to everyone else for call together as God's people. And while we wait, God works, let's pray together. Father, as we are in just this amazing, fun, special, unique time together, where we also realize that we need to hear from you and God, we need to hear from you because we want to follow you. Where we spent the next, we spent the last seven or eight weeks just talking about people's willingness to be patient, willingness to be used by you.
Lord, and what we pray this morning is we're wrapping this up. God is for us just to have the bravery to be there, for us to see the ways that you're moving and working and for us to be able to say yes to that. God for us to have the dispositions of heart. God to obey.
To realize that your call in our life is simply a lot bigger than yeses and noes and rules, but instead of saying this is a better way. And this better way aligns me to ride on top of the cares and the troubles of this world. So what do we offer ourselves to you fully and completely with hopeful expectation? God, because we know you are doing things.
God says in the book of Isaiah, let us be watchmen on the wall. Lord, when we see you coming, we send out shouts of just acclamation, enjoy and happiness. God, let us be as Elijah was, where even he's in a moment of just anxiety and depression and fear. He kept sending out his servant while he was praying to say, go outside and tell him if you see a rain cloud yet.
God, when he finally did see it, it wasn't big, it wasn't huge, it was a dot in the sky that was coming towards it more. God, so let us be people who watch and wait expect it. But Jesus also let us be people who say yes. Who say yes, because we are looking for you to continue and be calling us to do even greater things than you.