Acts: An Unfinished Story

I invite you to resume our studies together in the book of Acts. We will look at the twelfth chapter -- a very exciting passage. I am sure that you had not been a Christian for very long before you discovered that the enemy with whom we wrestle has a very disconcerting way of striking when everything seems to be going well. Just when you think the path has smoothed out and that you are having a great time in the Lord, with nothing but blessing ahead -- then everything seems to fall apart at once. That is confirmation of what the Bible tells us is the truth: We are not wrestling against flesh and blood, but we are engaged in a life-or-death struggle against principalities and powers and wicked spirits in high places, who are able to unleash a vicious, lashing attack against us -- just when we think things are going well.

The missionary call of Barnabas and Saul, recorded in the thirteenth chapter of the book of Acts is replete with practical helps in a problem that bothers many Christians: How to recognize the guidance of God, how to know the directions of life, and to find the will of the Holy Spirit in these matters.

We will look this morning, in Acts 13, at the first recorded sermon of the Apostle Paul. This man has changed the course of world history by the power of his ministry in the Spirit of Christ. He did so by the preaching of the word of truth, and here we have a good example of how he did it. Paul had preached many messages before, but this is the first of which we have a record. It was a very powerful and shattering message. It was preached in a synagogue on a Sabbath morning and it shook a whole city -- so much so that in Verse 44 of this account we read, "The next sabbath almost the whole city gathered together to hear the word of God."

When Paul and Barnabas left Antioch to go out on their first missionary journey, they started a new movement in the book of Acts. They began the last phase of our Lord's great commission. They started to go out to "the uttermost parts of the earth..." (Acts 1:8b KJV). So this constitutes a separate section of this book. We call this series of messages "The Pattern Setters" because, in this section of Acts, you find the pattern for all Christian witness in any age.

We are all very concerned about events now taking place in the Middle East. God has always made that the focal point of history and of current events. With the intensification of developments there the circle has now come full term, because this is where Christianity began, where the explosion of the gospel first occurred. We have been tracing in the book of Acts the wonderful story of how this radical gospel began to break out upon a decadent, pagan society, to capture the interest and the hearts of men, to waken hope again in a hopeless world, and to change lives by a radical transformation of behavior and outlook.

We are seeing so much of practical help in some of the problems of Christian life as we follow the pattern set by the apostles and the early Christians in the book of Acts. I hope you are realizing, more and more as we go through this book, that here is a description of normal Christianity. This is the way the church could have been, and should have been, in any age. Unless the church is living in the atmosphere of the book of Acts, it is missing out on its heritage.

We are studying the section of the book of Acts which sets before us the account of the early church in operation and which outlines for us the pattern of normal Christianity. We must remember that this book is intended to describe Christianity as it ought to be in every age. When the principles set forth in Acts are followed, the church is always going to be as vital as it was then.

Let's resume our study of how the most revolutionary message the world has ever heard moved into Europe and thus affected the history of Western civilization for some 2000 years. We began, you remember, in the sixteenth chapter of Acts with the story of Paul, Silas, Luke, and Timothy in the city of Philippi, and of the great earthquake that released them from prison with dramatic impact, and of how God used four distinct methods to break through the entrenched evil of that city and to implant a church there. This is what God is always doing in human history. He establishes a bridgehead in the midst of entrenched evil, with its resultant violence and disaster, and, by that bridgehead, he begins to propagate the gospel and thus to clear up the situation. The story moves on in Chapter 17, as Paul and Silas move west, leaving Luke and Timothy behind in Philippi for the time being.

At the time of Paul's visit to Athens, that city was no longer important as a political seat; Corinth was the commercial and political center of Greece under the Roman Caesars. But Athens was still the university center of the world. It was the heir of the great philosophers, the city of Pericles and Demosthenes, of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides -- these men who established patterns of thought that have affected human learning for centuries. Almost all philosophies follow, in some degree, the teachings of these men. But Athens was long past its zenith when Paul visited it. It was now four hundred years after the golden age of Greece, and, though Athens was still a center of art, beauty, culture, and knowledge, the city had lost all political importance.

As we continue our study of Acts into the eighteenth chapter we see the Apostle Paul leaving Athens, the intellectual capital of the Roman world, and coming into Corinth, the center of sensuality. These two cities are symbols of the twin evils which, in every day and every generation, trap and enslave the hearts of people: intellectual pride and sensual lust.