In December I really appreciated Jonathan’s and Andy’s messages on Success.  I wanted to build off of those and take a look at how at the individual level we can position ourselves so that Cornerstone can be successful.  How can you and I be the types of disciples that glorify God through Cornerstone?  I am glad you asked.

Slide 2 Our passage today highlights important practices that are powerful, but not new.  Prayer, Love, Hospitality, and Exercising Your Spiritual Gifts.  Each of these would merit individual sermons, but I wanted to highlight these and focus a little on Spiritual Gifts.  I have been really blessed and encouraged by what I have seen and experienced at Cornerstone by the way I have seen these things practiced by you.  So I hope you hear the words today in a loving challenge to meet you where you’re at so that we can individually and collectively improve and reflect our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ even better.  What I’m sharing are not new insights in any way.  They are old truths that sometimes we may take for granted, but it is good to reflect how we are doing in light of God’s commandments.  And be open to Holy Spirit’s movement in our life in one or multiple of these areas.  In preparing for this sermon and looking in the mirror, I know I certainly have room for growth.

Slide 3  V7 – The end of all things is near. Therefore be alert and of sober mind so that you may pray.   Peter calls us to have a clear and focused prayer life.  I don’t want us to get distracted by the “end of all things portion.”  In multiple places throughout the NT, the writers talk about Jesus’s return being imminent.  The way to understand this is that in terms of the events of Salvation History series of events for the unfolding of God’s redemptive story, Jesus’s return in judgement is the next event to occur.  Our prayers should be focused in this time because our enemy is focused on distracting the church and the individual from faithful and committed following of Christ.  If we are emotionally tossed back and forth by the news and events around us or if we try to dull the pain of brokenness around us through too much drink or the balm of material goods, then we are distracted and our prayer life is not rooted and grounded in the reality and abundance of God.  In Ephesians 6 when Paul is talking about the armor of God, he tells us that our enemies aren’t one another or someone with a different view point or allegiance.  11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  In talking of the armor of God, Paul concludes by saying And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.  In light of the battle we face, I think our prayers for one another need to be more than for the infirmities we face, but for the battles we face to stay faithful.  I don’t discourage praying for each other in sickness, because sometimes those are part of the battle.  Let’s pray with clarity and focus for one another to remain faithful.

Slide 4  V8 – Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.  Love each other Cornerstone Above all.  If we can’t love one another, then these other things won’t matter.  Chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians is often read at weddings because of its focus on the importance of love.  4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

However, in context Chapter 13 is talking ab

We’re going back to Acts! We actually started our series in Acts, Outward Church, a year ago. I want to take a moment to look back, because it helps us look forward. When Jesus left his disciples and ascended into heaven he gave believers a special mission, which becomes a roadmap for Acts.

Acts 1:8 (ESV)

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” 

God is going to fill the believers to be his witnesses; first in Jerusalem, then cross-culturally in Samaria, and then to the Gentiles. We see the believers witness to those in Jerusalem as soon as the very next chapter. At pentecost the Holy Spirit descends on the believers as tongues of fire, fills them with his power, Jesus’ disciple Peter preaches the gospel and 3,000 repent and believe in Jesus. Then for the next couple chapters Peter and John get in trouble in Jerusalem as they perform miracles and preach the gospel. The gospel is spreading out from the core 12 disciples to the city and the religious powers in the city don’t like it.

Something terrible happens in Acts 7. One of their early leaders, a man named Stephen, get’s stoned to death by an angry religious mob. And here we encounter one of our first obstacles. Will Christianity come to a screeching halt, or will it persist? Can you imagine if those early believers had all been snuffed out? Would Christianity even be around today? What can keep the gospel moving forward?

Jesus actually uses the persecution itself to fulfill his plan in Acts 1:8. Persecution pushes the gospel beyond Jerusalem outward to Samaria and the ends of the earth, the Gentiles. In Acts 8, the Samaritans start coming to faith. But in order for the gospel message to make it across cultural barriers to the ends of the earth, the lands of the Gentiles, God is going to have to do something special. 

First, God takes someone who is persecuting Christians and brings him to Christ—that’s Saul, or who we call Paul. God is going to use Paul to be a missionary to the Gentiles, the non-Jews. Second, God gives Peter a vision that confirms that the Gentiles are also a part of the family of God. From here the mission really starts to accelerate as the church at Antioch in Syria, sends out Barnabas and Paul, on the first missionary journey throughout the Gentile regions of Cyprus and Galatia. Many give their hearts to Christ.

At the end of Acts 14, Paul and Barnabas return from the mission field, reporting all the amazing things God has done among the Gentiles. Yes they faced trial and hardship, but God used it for good. And things just keep going more and more amazing from there. Ministry get’s easier and the mission goes smoothly. Wrong! That brings us to Acts chapter 15, the battle of the believers. The church’s leaders fight over what it takes to become a Christian. Do you have to be a Christian like me? Do you have to become Jewish to be saved?

Have you ever seen a boxing match? I’ve seen a couple on TV, but never in person. I did watch The Fighter a couple years ago, the boxing movie about Lowell’s Micky Ward. Our own Caiti and her sister Becky were extras in the Fighter for one of the fights. They filmed it at the Tsongas Center in Lowell. Someone recently told me (I think it was my dentist) that they filmed all the fight scenes over several days, and that the real boxers they hired were really sore afterwards. I don’t know if that’s true but it’s a fun story. In a boxing match, each boxer has their own corner and stool where they can rest between rounds and yell, “Cut me, Mick!” In the early church we have two corners.

Corner #1: Believing Pharisees – To be a Christian you have to become Jewish and obey the law.

Paul calls them the “Circumcision party” in Galatians. They are a group of Jews who say that to be a Christian you have to become Jewish. You have to get circumcised. Circumcision is removing some skin from newborn boys’ priv

I love Christmas lights. After Thanksgiving my wife and I decorated our front yard with Christmas lights. We actually got into a bit of a contest. She decorated the bushes on one side of the house, and I decorated the other side. Which side you think is better? That’s right. The right side! My side. Now which house do you think is better? Our house? Or this house in Wilmington that won $50,000 for their Christmas lights display? They won ABC’s “The Great Christmas Light Fight.” Tim Keller says (you guys know I like Tim Keller, right?), “[Christmas] lights are not just decorative; they are symbolic.” What do these lights symbolize? What do they tell us about Christmas?

Lights being symbolic of Christmas actually pre-dates the birth of Jesus. 700 years before the birth of Jesus, the Old Testament prophet Isaiah said God was going to send his light into the darkness.

Isaiah 9:2 (ESV)

The people who walked in darkness

     have seen a great light;

those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,

     on them has light shone.

What does this mean? What does it mean that the people were “walking in darkness”? 

Humankind lived in a state of darkness. (Isaiah 8:19-22)

The people Isaiah prophesied to were living in a state of darkness and alienation from God. They were blinded by their sin, but they didn’t realize it. It was like they were colorblind, but they didn’t know it. They couldn’t see God’s truth. They only saw their truth, which wasn’t truth at all. Isaiah says of the people:

Isaiah 8:19-20 (ESV)

19 And when they say to you, “Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,” should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living? 20 To the teaching and to the testimony! If they will not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn.

If the light is symbolic of Christ, the darkness is symbolic of control, emptiness and anger.

1. Control

The people in Isaiah’s time had access to God. They could go to the temple and pray and offer sacrifices, but instead they choose to go to “mediums and the necromancers.” They’d rather talk to the dead instead of the living God. It’s because they don’t want to hear what God has to say. They don’t want to submit themselves to “the teaching and the testimony.” If they go to God, they have to do it God’s way. It’s much easier to try and get control over the spirit world, and do life on their terms. Whenever we approach God to get what we want out of him, whenever we think we can bend God to our will, we confirm that we’re living in darkness.

For some of you, that’s really hard to hear. You want to be in control of your life. You want to be in charge. Have you ever seen those commercials that say something like, “Give the gift of health this Christmas?” Maybe it’s for the newest Fitbit or Peloton or filtered water-bottle. You know what those commercials are really saying, “You’re fat but we can help with that.” That could be Peloton’s slogan, “You’re fat but we can help with that.” Or… you could take charge of your fitness by ignoring gyms for the rest of your life and never going to your doctor’s office. Isn’t that what we kind of do with God? I don’t want to know if I’m spiritually unhealthy, so I won’t go to church, or if I do, I won’t really let the Spirit move. I’ll get in and get out before he can catch me. That’s living in a state of darkness. When we ignore God’s teachings so that we can live in the outer-regions of our spirituality, we’re lost. That will leave us empty and angry.

Isaiah 8:21-22 (ESV)

21 They will pass through the land, greatly distressed and hungry. And when they are hungry, they will be enraged and will speak contemptuously against their king and their God, and turn their faces upward. 22 And they will look to the earth, but behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish. And they will be thrust into thick darkness.

The darkness is symbolic of control, but also emptiness.

2. Emptiness

Those walking

Sermon Acts 2:46-47 | Outward Church: What is a Successful Church?

46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

The unit of thought starts at verse 42 or perhaps back at the beginning of the chapter/book.

Subject: What is a Successful Church

Compliment: The Church is people committed to community, worship, and mission together.

Homiletical Idea: Being the church requires commitment and participation.

Introduction

I’ve been thinking, reading, listening, and praying about something for a long time. Years. Over this time, I will occasionally share something with Jonathan or one of the elders, and several weeks ago I did just that when Jonathan called me to talk about something else. When I mentioned this to him, he asked me if I would want to preach on that in December, that it would probably fit in the Acts series. It takes a lot of faith and trust in me, and in God, to hand over the pulpit without any preview of what I am going to say. Especially so given the topic. I was not eager to preach this sermon, but I was willing. So, I agreed. I know God’s been teaching me things, but I wasn’t certain that the message he was giving me was for the church as a whole. Now, I am more certain that there is a good chance God has given me this message to share with the church. Last week’s sermon by Jonathan helped me feel more confident as he prepared the way for this sermon without even knowing it.

Last week, Jonathan’s sermon was titled, what is a successful mission? Today’s sermon is titled, what is a successful church? During that sermon he touched on what he called the three B’s used to measure church success by many people. Can anyone remember what the three B’s are? Buildings, Budgets, and Bottoms. I agree with Jonathan that those are not the best metrics to measure the success of a mission or a church. They are probably really good metrics if you are measuring a business, a university, a theater group, etc… What is a successful church? I think it is impossible to define the success of something until you define the thing itself. So, what is the church? Not a church, but the church. We all know the big white building with a steeple in the center of a quaint New England town is a called a church regardless of the last time it housed the church. So, what is the church? I don’t mean the universal church, the bridge of Christ, that is made up of all believers of all places and all times. So, what is the local church? What makes it a church? What makes it different from other groups of people?

Anyone have any thoughts?

Acts 2:46-47 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Look at those verses on the screen or in your Bible. Do those two verses about the early believers give more insight into what it means to be the church?

Sometimes it is helpful to define things by looking at what they are not.

If we strip away all the things that are not essential to the church, what are we left with? What are the things that if we removed them, would cause us to no longer be a church? Brian Sanders calls this the irreducible minimum of the church and defines it as this: worship, community, and mission. There is a fourth thing that isn’t in the list, but implied; commitment.

If we look at the verses, we see that every day they continued… that is a commitment. Every day. What were they doing every day? …meeting together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together… that is community. Next it says they were praising God – worship. And finally, it tells us that God was adding to their n

My friend got hired at a retail company to work in their software department. This company does most of their retail online and they use a very specific software to sell their products. My friend has a lot of experience in software and about six months in he recognized that there was a serious problem with this company’s software. The software worked fine, but it had a fatal flaw that left its users personal data vulnerable to theft. The only problem was that the problem was so ingrained in the software that they would have to rebuild it from the ground up, costing the company millions of dollars.

When my friend approached management about this issue they agreed it was a problem, but when they took it to their company executives, they ignored the problem. Pretty soon he began to hear rumors that upper management was not pleased with him and his work. Pretty soon some of his coworkers began to give him the cold shoulder for fear of losing their own jobs. Some of his coworkers recognized the problem, and wanted to address it, but before he could do anything the executives fired him.

But the executives didn’t stop there. When my friend got to his next company, things seemed to go really well for him. The company really liked him. They even celebrated his expertise. But then the executives at his last company sent his new employers false reports; and the rumors started happening again. He got fired from this company too. He thought about suing his employers, but decided as a Christian, he didn’t want to do that. So now he’s out of a job, but for some reason it doesn’t bother him. Instead, he celebrates what he was able to accomplish at both jobs, and how he was able to help make some changes. He trusts God will take care of both situations.

What do you think? Was he a success? Or a failure? By most external factors, he was a failure. He got fired and chased out of multiple companies. His reputation was sunk. But he spoke the truth and tried to do what was right. If you haven’t guessed it by now, my friend is a loose allegory of the Apostle Paul. This is a creative re-telling of Acts 14 in the modern world. No, Paul wasn’t a software engineer, but he did speak the gospel truth and get cast out of town because of it.

At the beginning of Acts 14 Paul and Barnabas go into a city. They preach the gospel—the message of forgiveness and grace through Christ Jesus. They even performs signs and wonders. But the Gentile and Jewish leaders mistreat them, throw rocks at them, and they flee to the next city. But then those same people track Paul and Barnabas down in Lystra and convince the locals to stone Paul and drag him out of the city. Paul did the right thing. He preached the gospel message. And he nearly lost it all. 

So my big question today is, “What is a successful mission?” By all outward factors, Paul seems like a bit of a failure here. He’s chased out of the cities where he’s supposed to be starting churches, and yet, at the end of the chapter Barnabas and Paul throw a party to celebrate what God has accomplished. They go back to Antioch where it all started in Acts 13:1-3 and it says this:

Acts 14:27 And when they arrived and gathered the church together, they declared all that God had done with them, and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. (ESV)

I think if we can understand what makes their missionary effort a success, it will help us assess how we are doing as a church to reach our mission. Our mission is “to make, mature, and multiply followers of Jesus” and our vision is to “change lives” with the gospel in Westford. I don’t want to assume we’re successful or not successful. Rather, I want to better understand what can make our mission a success. We find that out by going back to see what happened in Paul and Barnabas’s first missionary journey. Here’s the big events:

Acts 13:4-12 | On Cyprus Paul confronts a magician, blinds him, and a local government leader believes.

Paul performs a miracle and someone in powe

Elijah loves Dora the Explorer. When he goes to bed, he almost always asks for a “Dora story.” So I sit down and I tell Elijah a story about Dora going on an adventure. There’s only one problem. Although I’ve been telling Dora stories for months, up until last Tuesday, I’d never actually watched an episode of Dora the Explorer. So everything I told Elijah was based on what I’d heard Monica tell him, what I’d seen here or there in snippets, or what I just made up. I didn’t understand Dora because I didn’t understand her story.

So in a typical Dora story (I know this because I just watched one), Dora has to travel to a far off destination, and has to go through a couple obstacles or landmarks to get there. Along with her best friend Boots the monkey (he wears red boots), she usually encounters old friends and new. She runs into Tico, the purple squirrel who speaks fluent Spanish. She talks to Benny the accident prone bull. And she talks to Isa, the green iguana who loves to garden. The antagonist is a fox named Swiper who loves to steal things and cause trouble. When Boots and Dora spot Swiper, they tell, “Swiper no swiping!” And there’s also this massive red chicken called Big Red Chicken.

The only problem is, I didn’t know most of this until recently. We got a Dora book from the library and that really helped fill out my Dora knowledge base. So when I’ve been telling Elijah Dora stories, I’ve told him anything I wanted. I told him about Dora’s mom and dad taking her on road trips with Boots the monkey. One time I left out boots and Elijah asked if Boots was there too. So I don’t leave Boots out, ever. Dora and Boots have gone to the grocery store and the car repair shop. Recently, and I was especially proud of this one. Dora and Boots built a spaceship out of card board boxes and flew to the moon in their imaginations. It was almost a Dora Daniel Tiger crossover. Sometimes when Monica is telling a Dora story and I’m walking by, a dragon flies up, but Elijah corrects me that dragons can’t fly. We have a lot of fun with Dora the Explorer, or at least the Dora we’ve created. This week Elijah and I actually watched an episode together. Dora went through the alligator pond and over the wall to the treehouse. I finally got the story.

Today I want to talk about another story, including your story. The Apostle Paul understood the story. He understood Israel’s story, the salvation story, and peoples’ own individual stories. So today I want to talk about the importance of knowing other peoples’ stories, of knowing the salvation story, knowing our own individual stories, and knowing how they all fit together. First, we need to know…

Their story (v13-25)

We need to take the time to hear other peoples’ stories. We need to really know other people’s history, context, and experiences. As Christians, we have a great message to tell, but we also have something to gain from hearing what others have gone through. Paul models knowing others stories in Acts 13. 

v13-15 “Now Paul and his companions set sail from Paphos and came to Perga in Pamphylia. And John left them and returned to Jerusalem, but they went on from Perga and came to Antioch in Pisidia. And on the Sabbath day they went into the synagogue and sat down. After the reading from the Law and the Prophets, the rulers of the synagogue sent a message to them, saying, ‘Brothers, if you have any word of encouragement for the people, say it.’”

Paul and Barnabas set sail from the island of Cyprus and head 150 miles north to Perga in Pamphylia, modern day Murtina, Turkey. This is where John Mark leaves them, which will lead to Paul and Barnabas’s fight and them going separate ways in Acts 15:36-41. We don’t know why John leaves, but after he does they head 100 miles north to Pisidian Antioch, located in ancient Galatia. The Christians in Galatia are those to whom Paul writes the letter to the Galatians. This first missionary journey lasted from about AD 46-48 and he probably wrote Galatians not

I used to work the opening shift at Indian Village in Estes Park, Colorado. I’d get down to the store by 9am, unlock the front doors, turn on the lights, uncover the register and jewelry cabinets, and turn on the neon red and blue “open” sign. We used to just have a cardboard sign that we would flip from closed to open, but we upgraded to an LED sign. That sign stayed bright all day and it was one of the things that attracted people to our store in the evening. They could see we were open and would come in.

There were some great things about having an open sign. Customers, sales, money. The money I earned there helped me buy a car, pay for gas, and even buy a ring for Monica. Being open really helped. But there were a lot of negatives to being open as well. Being open created dirty floors, noisy customers, empty shelves, and messy t-shirts. Over the ten summers I worked there I estimate I folded at least 50,000 t-shirts, if not a lot more. I’ll have to ask the Lord when I get to heaven. 

Being open is good, but it’s messy. You don’t know what will happen when you open yourself up. It’s much safer to close yourself off. So here’s my question for you today….

Do you have an open or closed heart to Jesus?

Is your heart open to Jesus or closed to him? Is the door of your heart lit-up with a bright red and blue LED “open” sign? Or is a cardboard “closed” sign hanging in the window? I imagine most of us assume our hearts are open, but how do we really know? How can you tell? There’s no LED implant over our hearts that blinks “open,” at least not yet. 

Paul and Barnabas have headed off on the early church’s first recorded missionary journey. They’ve left Antioch north of Jerusalem. They travel 15 miles to the coastal city of Seleucia, and then they sail another 75 miles to Salamis on the Island of Cyprus. Modern day Cyprus is gorgeous. I think if we said, “Hey, we’re doing a missions trip to Cyprus, everyone would sign up.”

Acts 13:4-6a (ESV)

4 So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus. 5 When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews. And they had John to assist them. 6 When they had gone through the whole island as far as Paphos…

As soon as Paul and Barnabas arrive in Salamis, they go to the Jewish synagogue. We’ll see this pattern throughout Acts. Although Paul was uniquely gifted to preach to the Gentiles, he believed the gospel was first for the Jew. Paul puts into practice what he preaches in Romans 9-11; Christ first for the Jews, and also the Gentiles.

Paul and Barnabas make their way across Cyprus. From tip to tip Cyprus is 140 miles long and at it’s greatest width it’s 60 miles wide. Here John Mark assists them in their travels. Maybe he carried food, scrolls, supplies, or took care of their animals. What we do know is John is going to leave them a short time later. Here the author of Acts, the good doctor Luke, is setting up the narrative. John is still with them.

Do you know which early Christian from the New Testament is from Cyprus? Barnabas is from Cyprus; “Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas…” (Acts 4:36a). This is Barnabas’s home turf. So they probably stopped at friends’ and relatives’ houses all across the island. This goes to show that you don’t have to travel to the other side of the world to be a missionary. Sometime God calls you to the place you call home to be a missionary. Today’s question is also for you. If Jesus called you to your neighborhood to be a missionary, would you answer? I believe he already has. That doesn’t mean it will be easy. They face opposition: 

Acts 13:6-8 (ESV)

6 When they had gone through the whole island as far as Paphos, they came upon a certain magician, a Jewish false prophet named Bar-Jesus. 7 He was with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, a man of intelligence, who summoned Barnabas and Saul and sought to hear the word of God. 8 But Elymas the magicia

Is God calling you to ministry? Do you ever sense God might want you to serve him in church ministry or in missions? I’m not talking about frontline ministry today—serving God at your normal everyday job. That’s really important; but today’s passage is about something else. Todays passage is the launch of a global missionary effort that changed the world. I’m wondering if God is calling you to be part of it.

I was around twelve years old when my friend walked into Sunday school and told us God told him he was going to become a pastor one day. Reflecting on it I was like, “Wow. That’s so cool, but I could never do that.” I used to sit in the pews imagining what it would be like to preach and be a pastor. If you’re thinking those thoughts, or something similar, God might be doing something in you.

When I was a little bit older I remember one of the first times I tried coming up with a sermon illustration. I was on a hike with my brother and dad. The trail was going up and down and winding up and down the hill. I told my brother I thought the Christian life was a bit like our trail, with ups and downs with our walk with God. He wasn’t impressed.

I tried to run away from Jesus in high school but like Jonah I ended up back where God wanted me. In college I began to promote my future self. One day I’ll help out with Sunday school, then I’ll serve as a Deacon, and finally an Elder. It wasn’t till my college pastor said, “Hey, you should go to seminary” that someone voiced what my heart wanted. My heart leapt at the idea. I wanted to do that. If someone told you, “Hey, you should go to seminary? or Bible school?” would your heart leap at the idea, or is that just something you’re not interested in. That’s okay if not. But if so, don’t ignore that feeling.

I wasn’t ready yet. I told myself I’d work in the workforce for 10 years, make lots of money, then pay for seminary that way. God had different plans. When I started working for the Farm Credit Administration as an Associate Bank Examiner right out of college, it killed me. Maybe it would have killed you too; but God used that year to call me to church ministry.

That year I began to pray that God would send me to seminary, but with little faith that he would. Be careful what you pray for because he might just answer your prayers no matter your level of faith. Finally, I flew home one weekend and asked my dad what he thought of me becoming a pastor. He said, “If there’s anything else you can do, you should do that…” There’s truth to that. If your heart wants to be an engineer or a teacher or lawyer, go and do that. We need people doing those things as unto the Lord. God calls people to those kinds of jobs. We need people on the frontline finding others for Jesus. But for 1-2 of you, God might be calling you to a different trail, one that is a winding, up and down, walk with God. 

That weekend I was home in Colorado my pastor preached a sermon on Psalm 90. I swear his first words were something like, “If there’s something you’re supposed to do, go and do it.” I was like, “Well okay Lord!” That lead my to seminary at Gordon-Conwell, then Immanuel Church, then starting Cornerstone. Is God calling you to ministry? Do you sense him speaking, him nudging? Don’t ignore him.

The Holy Spirit might be calling you to ministry.

I want to tell you about a church where the Holy Spirit called people and sent them out into the world to start a worldwide Christian movement that’s still growing and multiplying today.

Acts 13:1 Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a lifelong friend of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. (ESV)

Here we find five all-stars the Holy Spirit calls. Here’s what it tells us:

The Holy Spirit can call anyone.

Even you. Let’s look at each one of them. Maybe they’ll remind you of yourself, or who you’re becoming.

Barnabas – Known, trusted, experienced.

We know Barnabas. We met him back in Acts 4 whe

When I was at my Doctorate of Ministry (D.Min) program in October, we talked about preaching. For one assignment we had to take one sermon we’d preached and preach it again in an entirely different form. Same message, different approach. Three of my classmates tried preaching first-person narratives. That’s where you pretend to be a person from the Bible story and preach it from their point-of-view. My cohort mentor challenged us to try new ways of preaching, so today, I’m going to give first-person narrative a try. I’m going to say a prayer for our sermon, and when I finish my prayer, I’ll be back not as Jonathan, but as a character from the Bible. Are you ready? Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, you tell us your word is “living and active” (Heb 4:12) and how it can change not only our minds, but our hearts as well. Lord, I pray that you would make your word come alive for us today and that our time in this story would change both our minds and our hearts. Amen.

[Look at the microphone confused, tap it. Play with face mask. Look around at congregation…]

You are a strange culture… My name is Cephas in Aramaic, but you look more like Greek-speakers so you can call me Peter. I’m one of Rabbi Jesus’ twelve disciples. I don’t know how I got here. My friend Philip told me one time he shared the gospel with an Ethiopian eunuch and the Holy Spirit suddenly carried him away. So maybe this is like that. Maybe the Spirit brought me here to share my story. I have lots of stories to tell, but today I want to tell you the time an angel of the Lord freed me from prison and struck down the king. It taught me there’s…

No king but Jesus.

Maybe that’s a lesson you could learn too. Sometimes earthly kings seem like the ones in charge. King Herod thought he was large and in charge. Ah, Herod Agrippa I. His grandpa was like that too. He was also a Herod, but called himself “Herod the Great,” King of Judea. Herod the Great was pretty awful. A few years after my Rabbi Jesus was born, he tried to kill infant Jesus and ended up murdering a whole bunch of little boys (Matt 2:16-18). He was a bad man. Herod the Great’s son, Herod Antipas (Herod Agrippa I’s uncle), beheaded John the Baptist, Rabbi Jesus’ cousin (Matt 14:1-12). I guess Herod Agrippa thought he had to live-up to the family name because one day he arrested my partner James and killed him.

I loved James. I owned a fishing partnership with the Zebedee boys, James and John. We loved the Sea of Galilee. It’s a beautiful green-ish blue water surrounded by lush green trees and dusty brown hills. Sometimes wind comes gusting down those hills and stirs up the lake. James, John, and I had so many adventures on Galilee. I wish he wasn’t gone, struck down to early, on fire for the Lord. Literally, I remember seeing fire floating over his head at Pentecost (Acts 2). He was going to do great things, but I guess Jesus had other plans. It doesn’t make sense if I didn’t believe God had a plan and could use it for good.

Have you ever had that happen? Something terrible happens, forces you can’t control, and you’re tempted to doubt God? You see the kings of this world do something and you’re afraid? You’re tempted to doubt Rabbi Jesus? I know I have. Like the time I tried to walk on water but doubted him and sank into the waves. So now I try not to doubt my Rabbi, even when earthly kings seem like they’re the ones in charge. They’re not. No king but Rabbi Jesus.

When Herod killed James, he saw that it made the Jewish authorities and religious leaders happy. Herod really cared about what they thought. He even became Jewish to win their favor. I thought he’d come for me. But really, what can Herod do? Crucify me? I would be honored to die like my Lord.

Well, turns out Herod threw me in jail. The week following Passover there’s this 7-day feast called the Festival of Unleavened Bread. Such a great feast. Lots of soft flat bread, fish, fruit, vegetables, but no leaven. Who really wants leaven? The stuff makes you blo

What are the two happiest days in a boat-owner’s life? The day they buy the boat… and the day they sell the boat. Some say a boat owner is happiest the day they sell their boat and buy a bigger boat. I never want to own boat, but I would like to have friends who own boats. I also want a friend with a pool.

Boats require a lot of maintenance. From what I gather, the day you buy a boat is happy because it’s the fulfillment of a dream. Maybe you grew up on your family’s boat and it’s the day you get to return to start new memories. But those romanticized memories are confronted with the actual costs of boat ownership. 

You have to figure out where to dock your boat, maybe at your house, or some sort of rented dock. Then you have to transport it there, so you have to buy a trailer. Once your boat is in the water you have to keep it maintained because there’s nothing like water to damage a boat. But if there’s a storm or the weather get’s cold, you got to take your boat out and figure out where to dock it and cover it with those big white tarps.

And maybe that’s why so many people are so happy the day they finally sell their boat. All that maintenance is finally gone! If you’re a boat owner, I’d love to enjoy the fruit of all your boat maintenance with you. 

A church is a bit like a boat. We set sail on The Good Ship Cornerstone in 2015 into the deep blue sea of Westford. We had a lot of excitement and vision for church planting, for starting a new gospel-preaching church in Westford, but then maintenance mode slowly set in. We realized it’s a lot of work to run a weekly service and to maintain a building. It’s a lot of work just keeping going what we already have. 

We switched from Saturdays to Sunday mornings last fall and added a Christian Education hour. I felt like we were gaining some momentum and then… Covid-19 hit. A global pandemic brought a lot of our ministries and ideas to a grinding halt. Let’s just keep the church afloat. 

During this complex season we have set sail to new places. We ran a Westford food pantry fundraiser and we went from renting our boat to owning it when Immanuel Church sold us the building. We’ve been discussing diversity and racial reconciliation as part of our Race, Class, and the Kingdom of God study series. These are good changes and things we should celebrate.

But I think maybe even if we’re not willing to say it out-loud, we might be thinking, “When Covid-19 is over, that’s when we’ll start ministry back up again…” Some are estimating we won’t have a vaccine and herd immunity until the end of 2021 at the earliest, but even that’s just a guess. No one knows for sure. Are we really going to wait till the end of 2021 to get back on mission? We’ve lost the wind in our sails. We’ve begun to drift. Do you want to get back on mission? I want to ask us this key question:

How can we be on mission and not just in maintenance mode?

Do we just want to keep things going, or do we want to pursue a new season of ministry that looks different and requires us to engage in new and creative ways? Today we’re going back to the book of Acts. When persecution struck, the early believers could have tried to keep things as close to normal as possible, or to trust the Holy Spirit and step out in faith. God, in his providence, pushed his people outward in faith.

The early church had just experienced its first tragedy with the martyrdom of Stephen, one of the church leaders. When you touch a flame, what do you do? You pull back. The flame burns you and you want to withdraw and isolate. But what if God wants to use the flame for good? What if God wants to use the flame of persecution to spread the gospel? That’s what he did in Acts. As I read the Scripture passage in Acts I have a map so you can see where the story is located.

Acts 11:19-21 (ESV) 19 Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except Jews.