In preparation for this sermon, take a moment to read the following statements and evaluate on a scale of 1-10 to what extent you and your family would agree with them:
Our work is meaningful and significant.
We know what we are called to do.
We are confident about the people and the places God has given us to love.
Our friendships and community are flourishing.
We have clear direction as a family.
We know the battles we are facing and engage them with faithful confidence.
As we read the book of Acts, we catch glimpses of how the early church would have responded to these same statements. At times, it seems they had it all sorted out—9s and 10s across the board!—while at others, they wrestled deeply with work, community, meaning.
But what does this life following Jesus look like? This week, we will look at Acts 18 to see a portrait of a group of people in Corinth working out the answer to that question in the midst of a multi-cultural, immoral, affluent city full of strong and varied religious opinions. Sound familiar?
Join us as our One Story continues in the chapter of the Church.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 51:26 — 35.3MB)
Downloads
Notes Transcript Video Audio iTunesGrace Fellowship Church
Jon Stallsmith
Series: One Story: Digging Deeper
April 28, 2013
Church: Paul and Reaching the World
Acts 18
It was interesting, because the first night after Buddy got out of surgery we were all in the waiting area in the ICU. The nurse came out looking for the Hoffmans in the waiting room and called Jody over to give us the update, and she was a Young Life girl from Brookwood. She was saying, “I’m looking for Jody Hoffman,” because she didn’t know who we were at that time.
She said, “I’m looking for Jody…Jody Hoffman.” My wife Amy, who looks great this morning singing, sounds great too (I’m the only one who can say that), goes, “Mallory?” She’s like, “Amy?” They had been together. She was one of Amy’s first Young Life girls over here at Brookwood High School, and to think that now…
Sometimes we have an impact on students or even college students, and they go off into the world, and they do all this stuff. Then every once in awhile, God gives you a glimpse of that extended impact as folks come back around and are even helping to save Buddy’s life. So looking at Tim and Abby and the Young Life team and everything else, this is a massive impact their ministry has, so we bless you guys. Super excited about that.
If you have your Bibles, open them up to Acts 18. If you don’t have a Bible, slip up your hand, and we will give you a Bible. We also have notes sheets that might be handy today. Before we really dig into this passage, we’re going to do a little bit of intro and recap. As you know, we’ve been going through the One Story, journeying through the entire scope of the Scripture, from start all the way to finish.
Buddy’s heart in the One Story is that these stories really become our stories and that we know where they fit in the big picture of what God is doing. My main responsibility here at the church is to oversee the Grace 360, which is our missions department and all the stuff we’re doing, particularly in cross-cultural work.
You guys know that as a church we’re always on mission in a sense, so it’s not just something reserved for overseas work or cross-cultural work, people of other ethnicities and backgrounds, but actually everybody is doing that. But my particular niche is in overseeing that missions piece and specifically with the Muslim community.
We were with Buddy. They tell us if you see Buddy, and we’ve only seen him very briefly, do not talk to him about stuff he’s passionate about. Don’t talk to him about work, because what really needs to happen is everything that was affected by his aortic dissection needs to heal. Buddy is passionate, and so you just start talking just about anything, and he has a strong vision for you and everything.
We went in and we were talking to him and Buddy just looked at me. He said, “Now you know this Muslim stuff is so important.” I was like, “Yeah, Buddy, I know. Yeah, it’s great. We’re doing good,” just kind of like, “Let’s not talk about it too much.” He goes, “No,” and he gives me that look. I don’t know if Buddy has ever given you that look in the eyes. He didn’t say, “Repeat back to me what I just said to you.” That’s when he is like really serious, but he gave me that look. He goes, “No. You know how important this is.” I said, “Yeah, I do. I do.”
So what we’re going to talk about… I mean, we can’t really get through the book of Acts without spending just a little bit of time unearthing the great theme throughout this book that reflects the great theme of the entire One Story, which is the way God has been working through all history, not just to redeem a small little community of people, but actually to draw in folks from all over the world, from all different kinds of backgrounds.
As I was working on this passage, I sent out in the Grace Mail this week (if you get that update) about what the sermon will be about. I was just thinking about some statements, and I was wondering. So let’s just start with a quick self-assessment. I’m going to read those same statements that went out in the Grace Mail. In the Mail, I was like, “Hey, just take a minute and rate yourself 1 to 10.” So 10 would be, “Yes, I totally agree with this,” and 1 is like, “I’m pretty vague, and I’m not really onboard. This doesn’t make sense. It’s not really a part of me.”
It’s not like doctrinal questions; it’s more about just finding your place in the world. Just think about it for a minute. Maybe if you have your note sheet there, you can just jot down a couple of numbers and things like that. Six statements.
1. My work is meaningful and significant? One to ten. “I don’t know why I go to work in the morning,” (that would be like a one) to, “Yes, I can’t wait to get there because I know what I’m supposed to do. I’m right where God has me” (that would be like a ten).
2. I know what I’m called to do. What did you put on that? “I have clarity. I know what I’m called to do.”
3. We are confident about the people and the places God has given us to love. When you look at your neighborhood, you look at your community, “Oh yeah, I know these are some of the people the Lord has brought into my life to love.” One to ten.
4. Our friendships and community are flourishing. So a one would be like, “I live in a teepee by myself,” and a 10 would be, “I am just rich in a network of community.”
5. We have clear direction as a family.
6. We know the battles we are facing, and we are engaging them with confidence.
All those statements are statements that are related to the theme of really finding your place in the world. “Where do I fit?” This is where Buddy would say, “This is rhetorical,” which means don’t raise your hand. As you’re going through those lists, how many of you guys are really eights, nines, and tens up and down? How many of you are fours, fives, and sixes up and down? How many of you guys are ones, twos, and threes up and down?
I know that in my conversations with people in the congregation there’s a broad spectrum. Some folks are just on the ground. They’re running. Others are going, “I don’t know my place. I feel like a puzzle piece and I’m not really sure where I fit.” Buddy tells that amazing story about when he was growing up. It was a rainy day and his mom was like, “You need to work on a puzzle here.” Buddy was like, “I don’t really like puzzles.”
His mother said, “That’s because you don’t know the rules of puzzles. You need to understand how this works. First, you have a box, and that’s the big picture. Then you find all the edge pieces, and you start working on the edges, and you get that border, and you get that big frame in place. Then you start building out the big picture so finally each piece finds its home in the midst of that.”
Growing up, our family grew up in Milwaukee, so we were inside a lot too, because it was snowing and freezing cold. We would have puzzle time also, but we were a super competitive family, so we would always have puzzle races. We would have these puzzles, and they were just like the 60- or 100-piece puzzles, and you would hold them like this. My brother and I would race, and my mom and dad sometimes would play too. We would all hold our same puzzle.
It was great because you could make it age appropriate. Like Daniel was eight years younger, so he could have like a 25-piece puzzle and I’d have like a 100-piece puzzle, and it was about fair, because that was important also in a competitive family. So it’d be like, “One, two, three,” and you’d like flip it over, and then you’d just start putting puzzle pieces in place. You’re trying to find, “Where’s this place? Where does this go? Where does this go?” everything else.
Sometimes we really want to know. We’re in a hurry. We want to find, “What’s my place? Where do I fit? What am I called to? How is my work meaningful? What battles am I facing? How do I mesh in with the community of God’s people?” All these questions are huge questions. As I’ve been praying and just ruminating on those themes, I really feel like remembering the big picture of the One Story will establish a little bit of a frame, show us the box. This is what God is working for. If you’re making a puzzle, this is the box. This is the big picture.
Then we’re going to zero in step by step as we walk through the text a little bit more specifically. But the thing is about the One Story, as far as an introduction is concerned, the One Story is all about God’s mission. It’s the missio Dei, what God has been doing from the very beginning of creation all the way through to the end. This is one way of stating his mission. This is one way of saying this is what God has been up to from the beginning. It is to create a people who will bear his name and extend his reign in all the earth for his glory.
That idea of bearing the name, we’ve talked about covenant a lot in the last month. The idea of that deep connection, network, relationship, love so deep it can’t be broken. This idea of covenant. When you actually enter into a covenant like of marriage, Amy took my last name. She now bears the name of Stallsmith. Wherever we go, we both are representing that name Stallsmith and living from the security of that deep relationship.
The same idea is true when we join God’s family, when we’re part of his people, we’re bearing his name, the name of Jesus, wherever we go, connected in deep covenant. But then we’re also extending his reign. We’re citizens in the kingdom walking forth and announcing the good news and seeing the power of God crash in. There’s this missional movement to it also. It’s for the entire earth. It’s the goal. From the very beginning, it has been for the whole earth to be united in praise and worship, giving glory to God.
So if you just walk through those chapters of the One Story we’ve looked at, you see this mission of God bubbling up over and over and over. I’m going to just whip us through some very quick slides, but I just want you to see this direction. Hopefully, it’ll give you the frame as we move forward into Acts 18.
Genesis 1, even before the fall, this was God’s plan. This was his mission. In Foundations, that first chapter, it says God blessed the man and the woman. He said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. Hey, bear my name. Be fruitful into all the earth. Subdue it. Have dominion. Reign over the fish of the sea and the birds of heaven.”
And so, of course, we know they disobey God, and the Lord initiates this plan of redemption that really begins with Abraham in earnest, and Abraham receives a great promise from God in Genesis 12:3. He says, “I’m going to bless you, Abraham, so you will be a blessing for all the families of the earth.”
Again, you see that same thing. It’s that God is after the whole earth. Then we see as we go forward Abraham has Isaac, Isaac has Jacob, Jacob has 12 sons. They go to Egypt. They’re enslaved there until Moses goes down under the instruction of God to lead the people out of slavery.
This is so interesting. Sometimes we overlook it as we’re talking about the showdown between Pharaoh and Moses, really Pharaoh and God. God tells Moses, “You go to Pharaoh and you tell him this.” Exodus 9: “[Pharaoh,] for this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” (Exodus 9:16)
What was happening at the exodus wasn’t just about Israel. It wasn’t even just about Israel and Pharaoh. It was about the whole earth knowing who God is. You move forward. After the people receive the law, they get the instruction about how to live out, bear the name, extend the reign of the kingdom of God by keeping the law, they come now to the Jordan River, and Joshua is leading the people at this point.
Again, Joshua, reflecting on what happened as the Jordan River is parted and the people pass through into the Promised Land, he says in Joshua 4, “…he dried up for us until we passed over, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty…” (Joshua 4:23-24) All the peoples of the earth. That’s what’s going on even in the Old Testament.
You get forward into now past the judges, and you get to Saul and David and Solomon in that chapter of the Famous Kings. God comes to David. He makes a great promise to David. “I’m going to send the One who will be through your line. He will establish his throne in the earth forever,” 2 Samuel 7, about the promise of the Messiah, the King, the true King who will come.
David’s response when he hears all this from God, he says, “You have spoken also of your servant’s house for a great while to come, and this is instruction for mankind…” (2 Samuel 7:19) This good news of the Messiah is good news for all humanity, all the nations.
Skip forward to the next one. Even after Solomon dies and his son split the kingdom, you have this impulse to all peoples. In fact, part of the tragedy of Israel fighting a civil war within themselves is the people who were called to be a light to all nations actually broke. You guys have seen that sometimes in your light bulb. They have newfangled light bulbs these days, florescent lights and everything else.
But the old fashioned light bulb with like a filament and the two things that stick up, and it looks like a little spiral in the middle like that. All you have to do is shake the light bulb and you can tell if it’s broken. Ting, ting, ting, ting, ting. Ah, the connection has been broken. That’s what happened at the Fractured Kingdom. Israel, that was set up to be a light for the nations, the connection broke and the light…ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting…wasn’t shining anymore.
Yet even during that time, God was at work. He went to Jonah. He said, “Jonah, I want you to go to Nineveh.” “What?” Those were the bad guys. “Those are the guys who are slaughtering our people. Those are the guys who are just killing us, torturing us, carrying us off.” God says, “Should I not love this great city of Nineveh? I’m after them too. It’s for the whole earth.”
Of course, we know after the Fractured Kingdom they get carried off into exile. What does Jeremiah 29 say? Jeremiah prophesying to the people, “Settle here. Seek the peace of this city so as the city thrives you will thrive. Continuing. Don’t get in the midst of this place and go, ‘Oh, I’m in exile. This is terrible.’ No, put down roots so the welfare of the city will bring up the welfare of your own life.”
They come back, Nehemiah and Ezra in the Return. Zechariah, the prophet of that time, is talking about what God is going to do in the return to Israel in Zechariah 2:11. It says, “And many nations shall join themselves to the LORD in that day, and shall be my people.” (Zechariah 2:11) Still God is after the whole earth.
Get over in the New Testament. John the Baptist, in the season of expecting, waiting on the Messiah, anticipating the Messiah, “When is the King going to come?” And he says in Luke 3… He’s quoting Isaiah the prophet, the one who wrote during the time of the Fractured Kingdom. This is about John the Baptist’s ministry.
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough places shall become level ways, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'” (Luke 3:4-6)
Sometimes we fall into the thinking that salvation is just about individual people. That’s true actually. There is a crucial element of God’s salvation coming into each of our hearts. God is summoning people everywhere, “Individuals, come to me. Come to me. Come to me. Come to me.” But in that little individualistic view we can’t lose sight of the major huge scope that from the very beginning God has been after all flesh, all the nations. He wants people from every corner of the globe to be a part of his own people.
Jesus: We know his ministry focused on the Jews, but then also he went into other cultural situations. He went up north into Cana. He went across the Sea of Galilee. Spoke with a Gerasene demoniac. Had conversations with Samaritans over and over again. But then toward the end of his life, before he died on the cross, in Matthew 24:14, he makes this great statement about the vision or direction.
These are our marching orders. This is what God is doing. This is the big mission. He says, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” (Matthew 24:14) Really the best timing verse in the entire Bible if you want to know at what point will the Lord return. We’re not sure exactly when it will happen, but we see here Jesus saying very clearly that at some point that gospel of the good news of the kingdom will have spread throughout the entire earth, and then the end will come. All the nations.
Acts 1:8: We’ve talked about this verse, at the very beginning of the book of Acts, when Jesus is with them and he says, “You guys, wait for the Holy Spirit to fall. You’re going to receive power, and then you will be my witnesses here in Jerusalem, then Judea and Samaria, the suburbs, and then to the very ends of the earth.”
Of course, we’ll talk about this in a couple of weeks when we get to New Creation and we open up the book of Revelation together, but in that final chapter, Revelation 5, we have the saints gathered in glory singing the same words we just sang this morning, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.” They look at them, and they’re from every tribe and language and people and nation.
Sometimes we hear about what God is doing in the world, and people will talk about the Great Commission. Matthew 28: Jesus says, “Hey, go into all nations. Make disciples.” You say, “Oh yeah, that’s good. We need to obey that.” Or maybe they’ll talk about Psalm 67, “Be a blessing to all the nations of the earth.” Quote Acts 1:8. What we have to understand is these are not isolated little proof texts; they are summaries of the entire Bible.
When Jesus says, “Go and make disciples of all nations,” do you know what he’s doing? He’s summarizing the mission of God from Genesis to Revelation. Here’s what God has been doing. “I have fulfilled it and made it possible, and now you guys go out and finish the work.” That’s the frame of the puzzle. That’s the outline of the great story of God.
God going out into all the earth to draw forth a people from every nation who will give him glory by bearing his name and extending his reign. Does that make sense? Are you guys with me on that? I know that’s probably review for some of us, but for others, we’ve heard, “The Bible is primarily a book about holiness.” Yes, it’s crucial. “The Bible is about God. It’s revealing God.” Yes, it’s absolutely crucial. “The Bible is about love.” Yes, it’s in there. “The Bible is about God’s wrath.” Yes, that’s in there.
Here’s the main thrust of the story of the Bible: God is after all the nations, and he’s drawing them in like this. If we’re really going to know our place in that big cosmic, global, international, multiethnic puzzle of God’s work, we cannot possibly begin without understanding just how clear the edges of that puzzle are. We are called into a mission of making disciples in all nations.
Great. That’s cool. My brother just got a job at Google last fall. Some of you guys may know of Google. You may have used their website a couple of times. Sometimes I’m convicted about how quickly I go to Google. Like sometimes it’s a substitute for prayer.
It’s very helpful, and there’s a lot of information you can arrive at through Google, but sometimes it’s like you just want to Google, “How do I love my wife better?” Wait! No, no. “Lord, how do I love my wife?” No, I don’t need to Google that. But really, are there any ideas on here? Maybe the Lord will speak through this website. What? No, that’s not a good idea. Let’s go down to the next thing.
Anyway, my brother just got a job at Google. It’s this massive company, right? They have offices all over the world really. We were up in Seattle, and he came up and joined us. We were doing a training up there. So we had a day off, and we saw the tulips. I showed you guys some pictures of that. But then we got to go visit the Google offices.
You guys might have heard the Google offices are pretty legendary. We had heard about them. My brother had told me how cool they were. So we went and walked around just a little bit to see these offices, and they were amazing. It was really cool. They had like a little latte machine, and you could take a picture with your phone and scan how to make a latte, and it would just bring it right up on your fancy phone. Massage chairs and ping pong tables and all sorts of different things.
They’re doing real work also. They’re working very hard. Here I was. I was walking around in the middle of this massive office. It’s beautiful. It’s just a small little piece actually of this giant international corporation. I was like, “This is amazing. This is really cool. I like what they’re doing here. I wish I could play some of those ping pong games,” but I didn’t have a place there. I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t know where I sat. I didn’t have an office. I didn’t have a desk. I didn’t know what my specific place was.
That’s the question I think that a lot of us wrestle with. “Here’s God doing this great One Story. All nations! Every tribe, nation, tongue. Yes. Great. Awesome. Outline of the frame of the puzzle. Where’s my place in this? How do I connect? I live in Lilburn.” What’s our role here? Acts 18.
Sometimes we think of Paul as a superstar, and he was, right? He was super anointed by God, a clear calling, and everything else. The second half really of the book of Acts follows the journeys of Paul. There’s a transition that happens from Peter to Paul as sort of the main protagonist. We see Paul moving around, missionary journeys.
As we look at Paul, what we see is a guy who is just one person like us, and yet his life was enormously impactful. So we’re just going to look at a few of the things Paul does here and ask a few questions (Why does he do this? Why this? Why this? Why this?), particularly in this passage, and hopefully it will give us not just the frame of the puzzle but maybe give us a few more ideas about where we fit in this great One Story.
We’re just going to do a couple of verses at a time, so we’ll do it in bits and chunks and talk about it. Acts 18:1: “After this Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. And he went to see them…” (Acts 18:1-2) So there you go. Just a couple of verses there. The first question to wrestle with is…
1. Why cities? Acts 18:1: Paul left Athens; went to Corinth. Now you should’ve known we couldn’t have made it through the book of Acts without at least one of these maps. Can we show it? Oh yeah, you know this. It’s in the back of your Bible. There are all sorts of arrows. It’s a bit confusing.
This is sort of a trail of where Paul has been on this particular journey where we pick it up in Acts 18. He was just, in chapter 17, in Athens where he spoke at the Areopagus to the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, and there was the birth of a small church there. Then he went across that little strip of land to Corinth, and Corinth was actually kind of a nasty place as far as cities are concerned.
If you can see right where the arrow connecting Athens to Corinth is, there’s just a little narrow isthmus. I’m just going to say strip of land from here on out. It was just about four miles wide. Sailors who were going to the east from the west and from Rome, during the wintertime especially, if they had to go down south around that chunk near Crete and out into the center of the Mediterranean Sea, the weather was terrible. A lot of ships were shipwrecked during that time. Actually, later in Acts, we see a shipwreck, and Paul is a part of that.
One of the ways around it is that they would go into that little bit of water around to Corinth and land, and then they would roll their boats on logs three or four miles over that little isthmus, and then they would just keep sailing close to land. What you had in Corinth was a sailor town. You had a ton of sailors and trade. You had a huge amount of separation between rich and poor, because you had a handful of merchants who were getting very wealthy on all the big economic drivers, but then you also had a lot of people who were just common laborers.
You had a massive temple to Aphrodite, who is the Greek goddess of love, and so all the things that came with that. If you feel like our culture is saturated in sensuality, and it is… It’s easy. You just watch TV. It’s like there is just all kinds of sensual imagery and lustful direction, all that sort of stuff in our culture. In Corinth, it was perhaps just as bad, maybe even worse, because it was live and in the flesh just out on the streets walking around. It’s not like our culture is that much worse than this.
In fact, they coined a word in Corinth, which was to corinthianize. So through all the empire, for 500 years, that word meant to corrupt or to cause to be really sexually immoral. It’s like, “Oh man, that guy really got corinthianized.” That’s how they would say it. So this is the reputation of the city Paul goes to. Athens to Corinth.
You ask the question…Why? Why does he come here to Corinth? What’s going on in Corinth? Actually, the answer comes back to that big frame we just laid out. Part of the reason is there is a community of very diverse people here. Yeah, there are some deeply dark parts about this city Corinth, but at the same time, it is a melting pot. It’s a gathering point for folks from all different places.
He meets Priscilla and Aquila. Aquila is from Pontus. Pontus is up off the Black Sea in Turkey. He had been in Rome with his wife before the emperor expelled them. What you saw is that this very time in Corinth, it was a city that was full of refugees. People coming over from Rome. People coming from all over different places.
Something that happens in cities that makes them strategic is you have all these different ethnicities, all these different people groups, all sorts of folks from all over the world. They congregate to cities. If you’re really serious about being a part of God’s big picture to engage the entire earth, cities are great places to be. They’re not just nasty places; they’re great places to be.
My mom was telling me… She lives in Charlotte, and they had a pipe break. Kind of a nasty thing. Sewage, everything. Called up the plumber. He’s Burmese. He’d been in the Burmese militia. Of course, some of you guys might know about Burma, now called Myanmar. Adoniram Judson was one of the first really famous Western believers to go there to do mission work. That happened through the nineteenth century.
But then about 1963, I believe, they kicked out everybody, every worker. No Western Christian worker could go into that country to share about Jesus. But what happens? Well, if you’re living in Charlotte, you have a pipe break because you live in a city where all of these cultural distances begin to compress and diversity is really concentrated, you can talk to your Burmese plumber. That’s what my mom did. They just talked about the Lord. They prayed together.
I have another note from a family here at the church talking about their Chinese neighbor. You might know China. That was a place where lots of people were doing all sorts of work, and then as the Communists came to power after World War II, they kicked out all the foreigners. Nobody could get in there. Everybody was wondering, “What’s going to happen in China when there’s no Westerners, no Europeans there? What’s going to happen to the gospel?” When they came back 40 years later, the church had multiplied. It was like a hundred million, so I guess they didn’t need us.
Here’s one of these places that for years it has been so difficult to ever even connect with a Chinese person, yet here this family at Grace writes a letter and says, “Our neighbors speak Chinese. We can’t even really talk to them except with the little electronic translator, so it’s like one and two words at a time, and I just needed to know if the mother is a believer and everything else. I’ve been sharing with her and I asked her some questions, and she said, ‘Yes, I’ve come to faith.'”
Just amazing! Stuff is possible in cities. You have this guy Aquila who’s up in Turkey, then in Rome, and now he’s in Corinth. Paul focuses on cities. This is a theme actually through the book of Acts. In Jerusalem, remember after the Holy Spirit falls at Pentecost, they go out. What do they find? People gathered from all kinds of different cities, and they’re speaking in their own languages, and all these people are connected.
You get up to the little portrait of the church, and there are five leaders who are named in Acts 13 in Antioch. What are they? They’re from all different places. Why? Because Antioch is a diverse place. Corinth is a diverse place. Ephesus is a diverse place. If we want to reach the world, cities are important, and we live in a big one, which is cool. It’s good to live in Atlanta.
I could tell you stories about projects and people who we would have to travel so far to visit just a few years ago, but now they’re just living here. Think about what’s going on in Clarkston. You could this week go down and tutor students from the Middle East. Just help them learn how to do their math. Talk to them about God. We’re going to have literacy programs over the summer. We have the Peace of Thread project. You guys, I’m sure, have seen the bags Iraqi ladies are selling.
We have a myriad of opportunities here. Many of you have come up to me and said, “Hey, I have a neighbor from the Middle East,” or, “I have a friend from Indonesia,” or, “I’ve been working with someone from China for a long time. How do I reach out to these people?” This is a great place to be.
“Where’s my place?” Well, if we’re in a city, this is good. One of the things you see happen in cities is sometimes people move farther and farther out from the center, but actually, the direction, the movement of God is into the city where the concentration of the people really is high.
2. Why tents? So here’s Paul. He’s working in cities, and there’s of course economic activity in cities also. Let me just ask you a question because we read the next couple of verses. Just try to get a picture. In your mind, get a picture of Paul. Just think, “Okay, what do you think Paul looked like? Short? Tall? What were his clothes like?”
Now how many of you in your mind had a picture of a manual laborer? That can be rhetorical also. Or someone who is just working a solid job with their hands. Blue collar. You know, Paul was a blue-collar guy. Even though he had this scholarly background and had been trained up as a Pharisee, he was essentially a blue-collar guy.
How many of you guys as you had that picture in your mind, if you think of a modern-day equivalent, would think, “Man, a guy who is out making landscapes beautiful”? You’re driving along Five Forks, and you see whole teams of folks making landscapes beautiful. I love that. Actually, I love working on my garden. That would be a fun job to me. How many of you guys thought of that when you thought of Paul?
Here, let me read to you about Paul. Verse 3: After he meets up with Priscilla and Aquila, “…because he was of the same trade he stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade. And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks.” (Acts 18:3-4)
Paul is a tentmaker; a leatherworker is specifically what it’s about. Paul grew up in the region of Cilicia, which is well known for how good they were at working on goatskins and tents and things like that. He would’ve made not just like Boy Scout tents but really dwelling places. You think about Corinth being a refuge place for a lot of refugees, you need people who can make temporary housing. They’re sewing together tents like this.
Paul is spending his days in Corinth working on tents, sewing leather with Pricilla and Aquila. There are a few reasons for this. One of them, of course, is livelihood. That matters. He doesn’t really have any income at this point. He has a great skill. But also it goes deeper into his rabbinic roots. The rabbis had jobs.
The most famous rabbis from Galilee and Israel around the time of Jesus, give or take a hundred years, were Hillel and Shammai. Hillel was a woodcutter. Shammai was a carpenter. There was another rabbi I can’t remember from that time, but he did something too. Some Carpenter or something.
The word used to describe Jesus’ profession is tekton, which actually means more specifically builder, maybe even like stonemason, but I think so many people have bumper stickers now, “My Boss is a Jewish Carpenter,” it’d just be too much to try to do, “My Boss is a Jewish Stonemason.” I don’t know if that has the same ring to it.
Well, the rabbis worked jobs even as they led spiritually. It was powerful. It was important. So there’s part of it that it’s his livelihood, but there’s part of it that’s just Paul’s strategy also. He doesn’t just do this here in Corinth; he also does it in Ephesus.
He writes about to the Thessalonians, “Guys, remember how I labored among you? Day and night, I worked double shifts so you didn’t have to pay for me so I could just share with you about Jesus, and you didn’t have to wonder if you were going to pay me or not pay me or whatever. Do you remember how I did that?”
For Paul’s apostolic, evangelistic work, going out into the world, his workplace is one of his primary interfaces strategically to reach people. But not just that. It’s also setting an example. Imagine if someone comes to faith who is in the market… Let’s say Paul is in the tentmaker section here. They say back then in the marketplaces that the guilds would stick together. So there’s probably a row of tentmakers all together.
If you go to parts of the world still today into the markets, it’s this way. You’ll find all the salesmen of a certain kind of good here. All the soap sellers, all the spice sellers are all joined together. So just imagine he’s here. He goes down here just a little ways and he starts talking to somebody who’s selling spices, and that person comes to faith. When that person comes to faith, he’s going to look at Paul and say, “What do I do now that I’ve come to faith? Oh, this guy makes tents. I should keep selling spices.” So he’s selling spices.
He goes down here to the next guy who’s selling soaps. I don’t know if they had a lot of soap back them. Definitely not a Bed, Bath, & Beyond. He goes over. This person comes to faith. “What am I supposed to do now that I’ve come to faith? Oh, you sell spices and that guy is still making tents. That’s great.”
What you have are people staying into the circles, into the groups, into the areas God gave them, and they’re able to support themselves by their trade and at the same time share their faith in the tradition of the great rabbis, including Jesus. This is so crucial, because I think… I even talk to especially men sometimes at the church, and they look at their jobs as barriers to the gospel. “Ah man, I have to spend so much time doing this and doing that, laboring.”
But actually for Paul, his work was a bridge for the gospel. It’s not a barrier. The gospel is moving forward. He is intentionally a tentmaker, supporting himself. Also, that gives him a little team. It’s so important actually. Paul has this little team here of Priscilla and Aquila. If you went to the ancient synagogues, it wasn’t just that the different guilds or tradesmen would sit together in the market; they’d sit together in the synagogues too.
So imagine if we were in a synagogue, say in ancient Alexandria or something, and all of the doctors who are here were sitting there, all of the teachers were sitting there, and all the businessmen were sitting here. It’s just like that. That’s how it would’ve been. When Paul comes in and he finds this couple, Priscilla and Aquila, who end up being enormously influential down the road in Rome and they follow him up to Ephesus and everything else, but he has a little team there.
That’s another piece that’s so important. I was talking to one man. He works for a technology company just up the road here in Atlanta. Really, he wants his life to be missional. He wants it to be impactful. He does. He wants to see his job… He’s working in an office, but he travels a lot. He makes a lot of sales. He’s very good at what he does, but he wants his job to be impactful. He wants it to fit inside that big frame of what God is doing for all nations.
One of the first things he did is he looked around his office. There were a handful of other guys. A couple of them were believers. A couple of them are kind of on their way into the kingdom. Just once every two weeks, they get together and they study the Bible. Just like that. He got a little team together going. Just like Paul and Priscilla and Aquila, they formed this little team.
This is what we need in all of our companies, all of our businesses, all of our schools. You need to know, “Who are the other believers around here? Who are the Pricilla and Aquila here so we can get together? We can at least be praying and then we could do this thing together,” because a team effort is so crucial in the advancement of the gospel.
I was talking about being in Seattle just a little while ago, and while we were there, our team was up there, and we were really presenting stuff just about how we help share our faith with Muslims. There was a young girl who was kind of a typical Seattle woman, just a bit alienated from the church, actually said she was scared of Christians, but she had come with another girl. She was a hairdresser and she just wanted to hear an interfaith dialogue. So she just said, “Okay, well, I’ll come to this training.”
As we were walking through the weekend, everybody was sharing from their different perspectives…Nathan, and Aaron, and Amy, my wife, and I’m teaching. We’re all talking about Jesus and what he’s doing, what the good news of the kingdom is, and what it means to be a part of God’s family? You just see on this girl, it’s like her heart is just getting worked on and worked on and worked on.
I was teaching a certain section in the afternoon. All of a sudden, it started thundering, and I was like, “What? This never happens in Seattle. It rains all the time, but it never thunders.” Everybody in the room is kind of like, “Whoa, what’s going on?” This girl had just talked to Chrissie, Nathan’s wife. She came up to her at the break and said, “Man, this is so good. I was afraid of Christians.” She actually told a bit of her story.
She said, “I was in camp when I was 12 years old, and they gave an invitation to follow Jesus, and I wasn’t ready when I was 12. I said no, and I’ve been living that ever since. I just feel like I rejected Jesus then. He will never have me back. Then my experience with Christians over the years has been very negative, and I just haven’t been interested at all. I came here thinking this was just going to be an interfaith dialogue, and now I’m really beginning to feel my heart stirred to Jesus.”
Chrissie was like, “Oh, that’s wonderful! Maybe we could pray together or something at the break.” So then it starts thundering. This girl goes outside, and then it started hailing, like really big hail, like a lot of hail everywhere. It looked like snow, but falling faster. The streets were covered in white hailstones and everything.
Amy walked out and just saw through the window this girl who had just talked to Chrissie standing out in the hail with her arms wide and her face up to heaven like this. Amy was going, “What’s she doing?” So she tells Chrissie, and the girl comes back in. Chrissie says, “Hey, are you okay?” and the girl says, “Yes, I just said yes to Jesus.” Chrissie says, “Well, let’s just pray together. That’s wonderful.”
They sit down and pray together. This girl comes to faith. Here’s what happened really. There was not one of us who led that girl to the Lord. It was God doing it. It’s his mission, what he’s been involved in. But it was our team, all the different folks sharing and talking, the culture, the relationships, all the different stuff, and some supernatural thunder and hail. It turned out the thunder was really significant to her life and her walk with God, and so God was just getting ahold of her heart, but he used a whole team to do it.
Most often, it’s in our workplaces that we find our teams. Those are the people we are with every day. Those are the people who it’s most easy if there are a handful of other believers to gather around. Those are the people who are most easy to do the life of mission together. Who cares if you don’t go to the same church? You all worship the same Lord. It’s all part of one kingdom. Gather them together. “All right, let’s go. How are we going to impact this place?” Why tents? That’s a number of reasons.
3. Why the synagogue? I feel more and more like Buddy here. I have three more points and two more minutes. I’ll finish this rather swiftly. Why the synagogue? Paul goes here. In verse 4, it says, “And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks. When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia…” Presumably carrying a sum of money from the churches there. “…Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus.
And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, ‘Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.’ And he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God. His house was next door to the synagogue. Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, together with his entire household. And many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized.
And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, ‘Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.’ And he stayed a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them.” (Acts 18:4-11)
Paul goes to the Jews first. This is his pattern. He talks about this in Romans 1. “I go to the Jew and then to the Gentile.” Why? Because Paul knows God’s plan through the entire Old Testament was to call forth this people Israel, the Jews, to be a light to all nations…Isaiah 42; Isaiah 49. “So let’s come in. Let’s see if we can announce the good news in this place so the light can be re-illuminated.” This is what God has been doing.
The problem is there were many at this time, and even to today, from that community, from the Jewish background, who were very resistant to the idea that Jesus is indeed the Messiah. Paul here goes in. He works. He’s laboring Sabbath to Sabbath to Sabbath, in the synagogue in between his weeks working at the tents, and they’re not responsive. There comes a point when Paul says, “Okay, I’ve shared with you, and I need to move on.” This is important for us to see this pattern.
Where’s our place? Paul labors in one place, and after a certain period of time, it’s not to be entered into lightly, but he just says, “Okay, your blood be on your own head. I need to go to the Gentiles. I’m going to go over here to those who are unreached.” It’s interesting because he consistently prioritizes the unreached. As he’s going to the unreached, we read through the rest of the passage, the ruler of the synagogue actually ends up coming to faith. So even though he has left this group as his direct main focus for ministry (and we have to learn how to do this also)…
It’s like, “Man, I’ve been here. I’ve invested here. I’ve shared what I need to share. There’s hardheartedness. Lord, show me the people of peace. Where is the unreached region to go into?” That’s what Paul does. As he’s going to the unreached, the ruler of the synagogue comes to faith. It’s not like you’re abandoning people; you’re just saying, “Okay, Lord, lead me to the next place.” Now he goes to the Gentiles. As he goes out into the Gentile regions, working among the unreached, there’s a great response.
This is something important for us. Right now in the world, about one in eight they say, roughly, is a believer, actively following Jesus. That’s great. That’s great news. Actually, there are churches and there are people working in every geographic nation virtually in the world. So in that sense, if we’re drawing nations by just the outlines on the map, the Great Commission has been fulfilled, but the Lord hasn’t returned yet. Why is that?
Still within those places, within every city, within every country, you have a patchwork of different people groups, ethnicities. When God says, “All the families of the earth are going to be blessed,” or Jesus says, “Go and make disciples of all nations,” what he’s talking about are the people groups, the ethnic clusters of folks who speak the same language, who can communicate easily. What we see historically is that the gospel can move very quickly among a people group.
If your neighbor speaks English and is of the same ethnicity as you are, it’s a lot easier to talk to them than if your neighbor is Chinese and you’re going to sit there with your little one-by-one word translator into Chinese. That’s a lot harder. They found that the gospel doesn’t cross cultures easily.
Here’s the harsh, challenging, difficult, but also encouraging news. Forty percent of the world’s population lives in people groups where no one is working with them. So even though there’s one in eight believers in the whole world (that’s great news), even though there are folks working all over the globe in churches and things like that, 40 percent, billions of people, live in people groups where there’s nobody speaking their language and working with them. There’s no church there.
Paul says in Romans 15, “I’m going to go to places where the gospel hasn’t gone yet.” Here’s the big picture what God is doing. He’s going after all nations, and here we are 2,000 years later, and two-fifths of the world still lives in places that would be considered unreached. The majority of those are Muslim. That’s why we’re doing this.
Sometimes I even hear rumblings of folks who say, “I love Grace. I just wish we didn’t do that Muslim thing.” Maybe you’ve gotten emails forwarded to you from people around the community. “Hey, did you guys know you’re all heretics?” “No, I didn’t know that. I thought we just taught the Bible.” They say, “I really love Grace. I love what we do with kids. I love the teaching of the Bible. I love the worship. I love this stuff. Ah, the Muslim thing doesn’t…”
You should love the church because we’re doing this. This is what we’re doing. We’re going to the unreached. We’re fulfilling the calling of God. This is like the direction of the One Story. Where are the unreached people? That doesn’t mean all of us have to move to the Middle East. It doesn’t mean all of us have to go and make our homes in North Africa.
We live in cities. We have jobs. We have interfaces with the lost, but we are going to look to those who have no access, nobody working with them, people groups where nobody is speaking their language or even taking the time to say, “How can I communicate who Jesus is here?” This is our calling. What’s our place in the world?
We find it within that big frame. God is working among all nations. For Paul here, you think about missions and going and nations and all the rest, a lot of times the call is to go. “Go! Leave everything behind and go. Move to West Palm Beach. Take up your suntan lotion. Move to West Palm.”
Here’s what God says to Paul. He says, “You stay here,” and Paul stays in Corinth for 18 months, one of the longest places he stays other then Ephesus. He stays. Why? Because God is going to fulfill Paul’s calling to take part in the great mission to all nations right where he is. I feel like that’s a good word for some of us who are saying, “What’s my place? What’s my calling? Who am I called to? Where’s my community?” and everything else.
It finds the answers to those questions within that big frame of what God is doing. For many of us, we just need to hear God say, “Hey, stay right here. I have people for you in this city. Let your eyes be opened. There might be warfare. There might be attacks. There might be challenges, but I have more of my people for you and your family to engage with right here.” I’m just going to pray for that, and then we’re going to respond in worship.
God, thank you for loving us enough. Thank you for the way you’ve gathered us from among the peoples of the earth to be a little body, just a one little beachhead of your kingdom. This morning all through Atlanta there are other churches who are worshiping and lifting up your name. Lord, would you just convict our hearts? Open our eyes that we might see those who are unreached and unengaged.
Lord, let us love this great city of Atlanta we’re in. Lord, let us see the folks from other places who are all around us who you’re calling us toward. Let us recognize the strategic value of the work for which you’ve created us. Lord, let us just find our place. Lord, I pray right now by the power of your Spirit that you would speak to our hearts like you spoke to Paul here and let us know what the plans are.
Do you want us to stay here, Lord? I know many of us, we would go if you told us. Lord, would you just tell us? Tell us where to go. Show us what our place is, what each of us in our own way is called to do and to be in the midst of that great One Story. Lord, come work and keep moving us forward into engaging the things you’ve called us to. In Jesus’ name, amen.