A Church To Become Like (Acts 11:19-30)

Intro

There’s a saying: you are what you eat. When I heard that as a kid, it made zero sense to me. None. Because kids are literalistic, right? And I must have thought adults were the most ridiculous and foolish people because obviously I was not a pizza pop. But even as an adult, I think there’s a statement that’s much truer, although just as subject to literalistic misinterpretation: you are what you watch. Or maybe even more: you are who you watch. You become like the person you give the most attention to. Even though you want to avoid idolizing people or worshiping them, it’s crucial to have people in your life that you want to emulate.

A constant in my life in this regard is my grandfather. He has spent almost the entirety of his adult life as a pastor, Bible teacher, and author. He is now well into his 80s, and he’s still doing it! He is still preaching, still writing, still reading and learning. And he regularly checks in and listens to his son, son-in-law, and me, his grandson, as we preach as well. For 15 years, I have said that when I am my grandfather’s age, I want to be as sharp and as active and as thirsty for greater knowledge as he is. He’s setting the bar pretty high!

It’s important to have role models as individuals, but it’s also important to have role models as a church. Collectively, as The Bridge Church, what kind of church do we want to be like? Who do we want to emulate and learn from? Like as individuals, it won’t be just one model. It will probably be a montage of a bunch of churches. But this morning we get to spend time in the book of Acts with a church that I believe is an especially important example for us. We’ve talked a lot about the early church in Jerusalem, which is the focus in the first chapters of Acts. There’s a lot about that church that we want to emulate. But Jerusalem was a very unique city, obviously different from our setting. The entirely Jewish setting of that church is also very different from our day. Antioch, on the other hand, is a whole other story.

Antioch was a city in what is now modern Turkey- the city is still there, with the name Antakya. It was the third biggest city in the Roman Empire at about 500,000 people. As a major city near the Mediterranean coast, it was a very diverse, multicultural city. It was quite a religious city with a number of different shrines and temples. It was a morally loose city, including and especially in the realm of sexual morality. Maybe North Vancouver or Metro Vancouver doesn’t check every one of those boxes, but you can recognize some similarities. And in Acts 11, we meet the church that emerged in that city. It’s an inspiring church. We’ll see later that it became a sending church, a church that God used extensively in the expansion of the Gospel in the first century. May that be true of The Bridge Church in the 21st century! And what we’ll look at today are seven characteristics of this church that made it such an effective instrument for the Gospel.

¹⁹ Now those who had been scattered by the persecution that broke out when Stephen was killed traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, spreading the word only among Jews.²⁰ Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus. ²¹ The Lord’s hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord. ²² News of this reached the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. ²³ When he arrived and saw what the grace of God had done, he was glad and encouraged them all to remain true to the Lord with all their hearts. ²⁴ He was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith, and a great number of people were brought to the Lord. ²⁵ Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, ²⁶ and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch. ²⁷ During this time some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. ²⁸ One of them, named Agabus, stood up and through the Spirit predicted that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world. (This happened during the reign of Claudius.) ²⁹ The disciples, as each one was able, decided to provide help for the brothers and sisters living in Judea. ³⁰ This they did, sending their gift to the elders by Barnabas and Saul.

Acts 11:19-30

1. An evangelistic church

Here’s the first thing you see about this church: it was fuelled by evangelism. It was characterized by the desire to share the good news of Jesus with others. This came about in two waves. The first was made up of people who had been forced to flee from Jerusalem (v.19). Something had happened there, referred to as “the persecution that took place over Stephen”. We talked about this a few months ago. Stephen was a leader in the Jerusalem church who seemed to have special success sharing about Jesus with Hellenistic Jews, who were a bit like second generation immigrants today. They were able to bridge the gap between the culture of their ancestors and a foreign culture. But some of these Hellenistic Jews, perhaps determined to prove themselves as authentically Jewish, rose up against Stephen. Led by Saul, another Hellenistic Jew, they stoned Stephen to death. This had sparked further persecution of Christians in Jerusalem, forcing many of the Hellenistic Jewish believers to flee the city.

And notice what those believers did. I know I made this point a few months ago, but let’s be honest, you forget most of what I say by 11:30am, and if you remember it, it’s probably worth repeating anyway. They got in trouble for talking about Jesus. They were forced to flee their home for talking about Jesus. They have reason to fear for their lives for talking about Jesus. And what do they do as they’re on the run? They talk about Jesus. Why? It must be because they were that grateful, passionate, and compelled by the Holy Spirit to do it. And yet today, some of us shy away from talking about Jesus. Is it because someone might stone us to death or force us to flee our homes? No, but someone might look at us weird! And how do you come back from that? No, but seriously, I do understand that. I’m sensitive to social ostracism and get anxious about that too. But if that keeps us from talking about Jesus, it probably says something about our need to understand the Gospel more deeply and more personally, and to become more filled with the Holy Spirit. 

The second wave of evangelism for the church comes in verse 20, with a new group of people from Cyprus and Cyrene. Cyrene had probably received the Gospel early on. Not only is it listed among the places represented at Pentecost in Acts 2 (the outpouring of the Spirit), but it was where Simon was from, the man who carried the cross of Jesus when Jesus was no longer physically able. Men from these regions immigrated to Antioch and carry the Gospel one step further than the first wave. They don’t just tell Jews, they tell Gentiles as well. That was something that had been opened up in the Peter-Cornelius episode of Acts 10, but not to this kind of extent or initiative. 

As I’ve said often recently, we take this for granted, but understand that for Jewish believers, Jesus was primarily good news for Jews. He was their Savior, their Messiah, the fulfillment of their Scriptures. So it wasn’t just that they saw Gentiles as unclean and shied away from contact with them. It was that it would have seemed extremely unlikely that a Gentile would even care. They wouldn’t have expected a Gentile to even be interested. But these Jewish believers tell them about Jesus anyway.

Who are the unlikely people in our city or in your life who you just assume would be uninterested or untouched by the Gospel? What if that is exactly the place or the people God will bless your witness about Him? I was in Victoria recently with some other pastors from our denomination. One shared about a number of LGBT-identifying individuals who’d connected with his church in the previous year. Those are people most churches wouldn’t consider receptive to the Gospel. This church had loved these people and welcomed them in, even while teaching clearly about their beliefs about biblical marriage. Ultimately, these visitors became believers in Jesus and in the process became convicted about their way of life and God’s call to repentance. Another example, just to invoke everything possibly controversial, was the trucker convoy in Ottawa. I know some Christians wrote off anyone involved, but there were chaplains who shared the good news to others in the protest and saw a number come to faith in Jesus. Again, do we shy away from certain groups of people because we are already convinced that they will be resistant to the Gospel?

May we, like the Antioch church, be an evangelistic church. May we be willing to cross social and cultural barriers to share about Jesus with others. May we be driven forward by the vision to make disciples of Jesus. May we be driven by our love for Him, driven by the filling of the Spirit, and driven by our own gratitude for what He has done for us.

2. A culturally diverse church

Here’s a second characteristic of the Antioch church: it was a culturally diverse church. Some people who came to Antioch crossed the Jew-Gentile barrier with the Gospel. They probably would have had to do this literally. Ancient Antioch was divided into different “quarters” for various ethnic groups. There was a Jewish quarter, where most of the roughly 25,000 Antiochene Jews would have lived and conducted business. If you were in Antioch, you may have lived in the same city as other cultures, but you didn’t have to interact much with them. But these Jewish believers seek out the Gentiles. They share the good news, and the Gentiles believe. Verse 21: “The hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord.” And every indication in this text is that the church that emerges from all of this evangelistic activity is not a divided church, with Jewish believers worshiping in the Jewish quarter and the Greek believers worshiping in their own quarter. They’re together. 

How do I know? Because in Galatians 2, Paul confronts Peter in Antioch because Peter is slipping back into old divisions. Paul says that Peter used to eat with the Gentiles in Antioch, but after certain Jewish believers visited and pressured him to be separate, he stopped. So the default in Antioch was that the believers ate and worshiped together, despite their massive cultural differences. This is the first church in Acts where we see this happening. They are the pioneering multicultural church. In a metropolitan, diverse and yet divided city, the church in Antioch brought together people from vastly different backgrounds through a common bond in the Holy Spirit.

I know there’s a saying out there that the most segregated hour in America- and I realize we’re in Canada, it’s just that nobody ever says anything memorable about Canada- is 11am on Sunday morning. I think MLK said that. But I want to push back against that. I actually think that a Christian worship service is one of the most diverse hours in any given city. Where else do you find people spanning from infants to seniors, with no biological relation, people who are from all over the world, who speak all kinds of mother tongues, doing something together? It’s incredible! And we see it right here at The Bridge Church.

This is something I love about pastoring a church in Metro Vancouver. We get to see firsthand the way the Gospel unites people from vastly different backgrounds and cultures in one body– not a bunch of groups worshiping the same Lord but separated from one another. One church body worshiping one Lord because of their bond by one Spirit. As we see in the Galatians 2 example of Peter in Antioch, it’s always tempting to slide back into our cultural silos. But may we continue to be a culturally diverse church united by Christ, just as the church in Antioch was.

3. An encouraging church

The third thing is that the Antioch church was an encouraging church. In this case, we see it more through an individual leader, Barnabas. However, when a church’s leaders are encouraging, the whole church is blessed and takes on that characteristic.

When we last met Barnabas, it was in Acts 9. Saul, who we know of as Paul, had been struck by a blinding light on the road to Damascus. He met the resurrected Jesus and his life was changed forever. He began telling everyone about Jesus- man, it’s almost like people who meet Jesus want other people to meet him too or something! But some people, especially in Jerusalem, didn’t believe it. They thought Saul might be a super sly double agent or mole of some kind, just pretending to be a Christian to slither his way in. That’s because Saul had been the biggest persecutor of the church. He had devoted all his energy to arresting believers and stamping out this Jesus thing. But Barnabas stuck his neck out for him, vouched for him, and helped him find his place in the church there. We also hear about Barnabas in Acts 4 as someone who sold his property and gave the proceeds to be distributed to the poor. He was a generous man, a gracious man, willing to do what it took to lift other people up. And that’s what he’s doing again in Acts 11. 

Barnabas is sent by the Jerusalem church, which is still the default HQ, to check out what’s happening in Antioch. It’s out of control, Gentiles and Jews are worshiping together! But Barnabas immediately sees that this is of the Lord. And so instead of asserting control out of fear, which, if you haven’t noticed, is something of a default human response- he encourages them in the right direction. He probably recognizes some potential for the church to deviate off course. We don’t know what that might have been, but it’s likely why he needs to remind them to remain true to the Lord (v.23). There’s some possibility that they won’t. See, encouragement isn’t the opposite of warning. It’s the opposite of discouraging, of tearing down. Encouragement is all about building up, both through words of praise as well as caution. Barnabas recognizes that something good, something God-glorifying, something Gospel-spreading is happening. And his words serve to spur that on. This is what encouragement does: it cultivates growth. It leads to the spread of the Gospel. Because of Barnabas’ character and the way God used his words in Antioch, “a great number of people were brought to the Lord.” (11:24)

Not only that, encouragement is actually part of God’s own character. The word for “encourage” in verse 23 comes from the same word as the one Jesus uses to refer to the Holy Spirit in the John 14:26- “the paraclete”. The Holy Spirit is an encourager. No wonder Barnabas is said to be full of the Holy Spirit. One of the ways you can tell if someone is full of the Spirit is if they are encouraging, if their words build others up. On the other hand, if someone is discouraging, determined to tear down, it makes it clear how little of the Spirit they possess.

When I started out as a preacher, I was not very good. That’s putting it generously. My first sermon at age 19 was largely a 20 minute explanation of the plot of Rocky 3. Unsurprisingly if you’ve seen the movie, the sermon was called The Eye of The Tiger. I have no idea what my Scripture text was. Originally, I had intended to end the sermon by playing a song by Blindside, a Christian screamo heavy metal band. This was in a church made up almost entirely of elderly Mennonites. When I told my grandfather my plans, he gently told me that the point of a sermon was not to shock people. Even without the screamo ending, it was objectively a bad sermon. However, there was an elderly man in the church who had served as a mentor, a man who was so gracious and humble. His name was Henry Dyck. He wrote me a note, telling me what had struck him and how God had spoken to him through it. His note encouraged me to keep going, keep growing, keep taking opportunities to preach. Who knows, if I had received a wave of criticism and discouragement after that first sermon, my life might have taken an entirely different direction! I’d be flippin’ burgers at DQ!

May we, like the Antioch church, be an encouraging church. May we seek to build one another up in the faith and to spur one another on. May our words not tear down and discourage, but empower one another to be faithful to Jesus and serve him.

4. A leader-developing church

That last little illustration in my own life leads to our next point, that the church in Antioch was a leader-developing church. The church in Antioch is growing. The needs for discipleship and instruction are greater than Barnabas can provide on his own. And this is the thing about Barnabas: there’s very little ego involved. He doesn’t need to be the hero. He doesn’t need to have the ball in his hands when the clock ticks down. He’s all about the team. He’s all about doing whatever it takes to see the good news of Jesus get out. So he makes a trip to Tarsus where Saul has been hanging out for about eight years. Some biblical scholarly types think Saul may not have been in a great place personally at this point. They think there are indications that he had been disinherited by his family because of faith in Jesus and cut off from other believers in Judea. You can imagine him still preaching the Gospel, but perhaps lonely and unsure how God wanted to use him.

I’m guessing some people would have suggested to Barnabas that he go back to Jerusalem and ask one of the established, experienced leaders of the church there to help in this new movement in Antioch. Maybe some of the Christians who had fled to Antioch after the Stephen persecution would have chafed at Barnabas’ plan. After all, Saul was the guy who had caused them such hardship. And maybe, if Barnabas was like a lot of us, he would have had a tinge of uncertainty. What if Saul was more gifted than him? What if Saul stole his spotlight? Yes, he might be the right man for the job, but what if his own status took a hit? Or what if Saul stirred up trouble for the Christians in Antioch like he had in Jerusalem and Damascus years before? The guy was a pot-stirrer, a boat-rocker. I won’t use the other common phrase featuring a four letter word! But in the end, none of that mattered. Barnabas knew Saul was the guy and knew that he needed to give him this opportunity.

May we be a church that is continually developing new leaders. For example, it has been so exciting to me that in the last couple of years we have called new elders at The Bridge who have never served in that capacity before. I’ve been able to watch them explore new areas of giftedness and experience new aspects of ministry. It was so exciting at evening services in the fall to see some of our young adults leading worship for the first time. May we, like the church in Antioch, be a church where members of emerging generations have opportunities to grow and serve as leaders, and are encouraged in that.

5. A teaching church

I’m moving a bit more quickly now. The fifth thing we see here about the church of Antioch is that it was a teaching church. It was not a church where the point was to rack up numbers as quickly as possible, to get as many people as possible to say a prayer and fill out a commitment card. They had a lot of people coming to faith, both Jews and Greeks, but the church was determined to teach these new believers. They were determined to help them grow into maturity. That’s what Saul and Barnabas commit themselves to for a full year in verse 26: teaching. That’s what the early church was devoted to, if you remember Acts 2:42. And although the text doesn’t say what they taught, it must have been what we see believers teaching throughout Acts: the right understanding of the Scriptures and how Jesus had fulfilled those Scriptures. 

Their teaching also must have taught on what it meant to be a faithful follower of Jesus, what a life that honored him looked like. Why? Because immediately after we read about their teaching, we read that it was in Antioch that believers were first called Christians. The word means that they were associated with Christ. People looked at them and heard them, they saw how they lived and they thought “Jesus”. That was the association they made. The teaching about the Scriptures in Antioch was transformative.  

We are committed to that same kind of transformative, Christ-centred, biblical teaching at The Bridge Church. Of course we want to be a place where people experience the presence of God. We want it to be a place where hearts are moved. We want it to be a place of passionate worship. We want it to be a place where people cross the line of commitment and give their lives to Jesus. That’s huge for us. But we are absolutely not content to leave it there. We want to be used by God to form minds, to help people know the Scriptures. We want people to understand from the Scriptures who Jesus is and what he’s done for them. We want to help people have their whole lives come into conformity with the word of God. That’s why I teach the way I do: from the Scriptures. It’s why our community groups are centered around the Bible. It’s why we encourage people to be part of discipleship groups. It’s why we have lay teachers like Peter teaching videos on Ephesians. 

May we continue to be a church, like the church in Antioch, that is committed to teaching the Scriptures in a way that grows people into Christian maturity!

6. A Spirit-gift empowering church

Isn’t the church in Antioch and the way the Holy Spirit formed them inspiring? And it keeps getting better! What we see in the last few verses is that this was a Spirit gift-empowering church. The New Testament talks about gifts that are given to us by the Holy Spirit that serve to build up the church. Each follower of Jesus has some of these gifts. We’ve already seen one gift in Antioch with teaching, which is described as a gift of the Holy Spirit in Paul’s letters. We see it with encouragement as well, another Spirit-gift. But those aren’t really a challenge to most churches. Here’s what is: in verse 27, we’ve got prophets in Antioch! One of them, named Agabus, gets up and predicts that there is going to be a widespread famine throughout the whole Roman world. This is in line with what prophecy is. The most basic meaning of prophecy is communicating a message from God. But it can, and sometimes does, involve future events.

One of the reasons we feel uncomfortable with something like prophecy is because it can go really badly, really publicly in a way that misused encouragement doesn’t. I heard about a church years ago where someone stood up and announced that God had revealed that there would be a massive earthquake in the very near future and that people should sell their homes. Some did. There was no earthquake. Embarrassing prophecy fail!

There are biblical guidelines around how we use spiritual gifts. We’re going to spend a couple of months going through 1 Corinthians 12-14 and explore how it teaches about them. And I’ll explain more fully then why I think all these gifts are still in use today. But for now, I want to say that when practiced properly, the gifts of the Spirit, including seemingly scary ones like prophecy and tongues-speaking, build up the church and spread the Gospel. The church in Antioch did not forbid or impede the gifts of the Spirit out of fear or the possibility of misuse. Aided by right teaching, this church empowered the gifts of the Holy Spirit and reaped the blessings. May that be true of us at The Bridge Church!

7. A generous church

Seriously, I wish I could spend more time on each of these, but here’s the last feature of the Antioch church: they were a generous church. They hear about the impending famine, they believe this is of the Lord, and they take up an offering. It’s significant to note where the money goes: it is earmarked for brothers and sisters in Christ in Judea. You’ve got Gentile believers in Antioch sending money to Jews in Jerusalem. This never would have happened previously! There would have been zero motivation to sacrificially give to people who not only didn’t share your ethnicity but actually had once seen you as unclean and inferior. But they do give. They give as they are able, they give generously and eagerly. Because, to go back to one of the first points, they are now unified with these brothers and sisters in the Gospel. That’s what the Gospel does. It changes us. It transforms us. And not just us but our wallets.

I know most of us don’t carry around bankbooks or passbooks anymore. When I was 16 and had my first bank account, my Dad instructed me to keep records of all my deposits and withdrawals and payments in a passbook. I don’t think I’ve used one since I was…16. But this quote from Bruce Milne is so good I’m invoking bankbooks anyway. He says, “when the ‘books are opened’ on the great day of judgment, will we be embarrassed if they include our bankbooks?” How we spend and give our money is not disconnected from our discipleship. It is central to it. It is indicative of how deeply the good news of Jesus has penetrated our hearts. It had penetrated the hearts of believers in Antioch so much that they generously gave to those who had nothing in common with them except Jesus.

May we be a generous church, like the church in Antioch. May we be made up of people who give eagerly and generously of our time, talents, and money, all for the sake of building up the church and spreading the Gospel wherever God leads. May our wallets be as baptized by the Holy Spirit as we are!

Conclusion

The bottom line in all of this is that Jesus saved us. He loved us, redeemed us, formed us as His body and fills us with the Holy Spirit to tell the world about Him. He made us to be Christians, to be people who the world looks at and thinks “Jesus”. So our number one thing is to be the church he wants us to be. We also know that the Scriptures call us to imitate those who have been faithful to the Lord in generations past. Therefore, looking to and learning from the church in Antioch is a great place to be! This is a quote I’ve shared before from Leonard Ravenhill:

“Are we who still have coals of fire on our altars measuring ourselves by the fireless altars of neighbouring churches instead of checking on the praying blaze of our saintly forbears?”

Leonard Ravenhill, Why Revival Tarries

The church of Antioch was a blazing fire, filled with the Holy Spirit and passionately committed to the good news of Jesus, who had rescued them. May we not just look around and say “hey, we’re doing ok as a church”. May we strive to be a church like Antioch. May we be an evangelistic, culturally diverse, encouraging, leadership-developing, teaching, Spirit-gift empowering, and generous church, as the Lord would have us be.