Our reading this morning is taken from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 15, and begin to read at verse 36, if you'd like to follow it, you'll find it on page 1,111. Just before I read, may I draw your attention to verse 10 of chapter 16, it's generally accepted of course that St. Luke wrote the Acts of the Apostles as well as his own gospel. And we have evidence in verse 10 of the fact that we have a first-hand account, because you notice that up until that time, Luke has been saying they did this, they did that, they did the other. But in verse 10 we read that after Paul has seen the vision, we got ready. So it seems that the Luke must have joined, that company of followers. So here we are then, verse 36, chapter 15 of the Acts of the Apostles. Some time later Paul said to Barnabas, let us go back and visit the brothers in all the towns where we preach the word of the Lord and see how they're doing. Barnabas wanted to take John also called Mark with them, but Paul did not think it wise to take him because he had deserted them in Pamphilia and had not continued with them in the work. In fact, they had such a sharp agreement to disagreement that they parted company. And Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord. He went through Syria and Silasia, strengthening the churches. He came to Derby and then to Listera where the disciple named Timothy lived, whose mother was a Jewish and a believer, but whose father was a Greek. The brothers at Listera and Iconium spoke well of him. Paul wanted to take him along on the journey so he circumcised him because of the Jews who lived in that area, for they all knew that his father was a Greek. And as they travelled from town to town, they delivered the decisions reached by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem for the people to obey. So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers. Paul and his companions travelled through the region of Frigia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. And when they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Dithinia, but the spirit of Jesus would not allow them to, so they passed to Mysia and went down to Taurus. And during the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him come over to Macedonia and help us. And after Paul has seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. From Taurus we put out to sea and sailed straight to Samathras, and the next day onto Neapolis. From there we travelled to the Philippi, a Roman colony, and the leading city of that district of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days. On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. And one of those listening was a woman named Lydia, a dealer-imperable cloth from the city of Thyatira, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul's message, and when she and the members of her household were baptized she invited us to her home. If you consider me a believer in the Lord she said, come and stay at my house and she persuaded us. This is the word of the Lord. We thank you that your word is truth, and that you lead us into all truth by that same word. And we pray that you speak to us this morning through those words you cause Luke to write, that we may grow as your church in confidence in you and in your mission for us. But we ask it in Jesus name. Amen.
Is that better? Sorry. O-N-O-F-F switch. So yes, okay, sorry I'm still getting a lot of feedback up here but you obviously answered that's fine. Well I guess if you've been following the news in recent weeks you'll know that at the party political scene has, as it were, shifted on. The end of the conference season has happened and the party faithful have returned home from whether it be the Liberal Democrats party or the Labour Party or the Conservative Party conference. Home to prepare for the general election. The battle lines have been drawn and people have got, well a few details of what the message is going to be. And yet I guess as a number of us have read the newspaper reports about those conferences we've been slightly confused about what the real message is. The Liberal Democrats plans to be a leading party and yet rather than being in government the Liberal Democrats are saying well actually we want to be alongside someone in a hung parliament sharing power. The Labour Party their plans are looking slightly odd because they're not quite sure who's going to be leading when and the Conservatives aren't sure what policies to put forward yet. And so I guess if you're a bit like me you're slightly confused as to what's going on. Wondering whether any of them really will be successful when those elections come round. They seem to lack direction, lack planning and focus and leadership. And yet as I say those things which I guess some of you will say are quite harsh. I'm very much aware that those same criticisms could quite easily have been levelled at the church. Indeed our reading from Acts this morning tells us of events that happened immediately after one of their first conferences. If you look down at those verses that we heard just read. Verse 37 we hear about disagreements. If you look on to chapter 16 and verse 4 we hear about Paul and his team going out from town to town delivering the decisions that were made by that conference. They were passing on the message from the party faithful. And I guess in a sense we see in there events that were quite mirrored in some of those party conferences that we've just heard about. You don't of course have to look too far today to see the same thing as happening in our churches whether it's local church here at St Luke's disagreements about one or two things. Disagreements in the national church and of course in the international church. Division over leadership, over direction, division over the church's message and the church's mission. And I think the result can be that we actually end up feeling quite disillusioned. I wonder if you feel disillusioned, wonder whether actually the church is going to be successful in its mission because actually if we're not convinced of that the danger is that we end up like some of the party faithful scratching our heads wondering whether actually the mission we're engaged in is going to be successful. We doubt the message and so we don't tell people what the message is. We also doubt the effectiveness of that message, the ability of the message to achieve the aim and so therefore we don't bother to tell people either. The result is that the church becomes less and less effective or so it would seem. And yet I want us to have a look at these verses that we've got before us this morning versus that tell us about the start of the second missionary journey and we've got lots of detail here about the plans and the preparations that they were being made details about who was going to go with who and about where they might go to. They tell us that as Christians today we can indeed get involved in Christian mission, not because as we look at these verses we see that what Paul does is successful. Not because verse 41 looked down there, verse 41 you see that Paul decides to go off through Syrians, Hylicia strengthening the churches. We hear in verse 5 of chapter 16 that that's exactly what happened. We see that the churches were strengthened in faith and even more than that they grow daily in their numbers. Not because Paul had new initiatives looked down at verses 6 to 10. Initiatives to take the message to places they hadn't been to before and we can't take confidence from these verses either because verses 11 through to 15 Paul seems to successfully get new people into his organization. People join up from Europe, a place where the gospel so far hadn't been taken to. Of course we can learn something from Paul about what he does and where he does it but I think the key thing for us to learn here is not about Paul, not about his sidekick Silas or even that new guy that they add to the team Timothy. Not about Paul's initiatives but about God and God's work. You see in these verses here we have as it were the curtains drawn apart from what's going on so that we can see behind the scenes to see what really is going on as mission happens if you were to go behind the scenes on one of the television programs that we see. We often see a beautifully scripted TV whether it's a drama or even the news but we're only seeing a part of it. What we aren't seeing is the people who are conducting everything behind the scenes and making it actually work. We aren't seeing the directors and the producers who actually give us the polished article. Well the director and the producer of Christian mission is God. He's the one who drives mission and as we look at these verses we'll see that it's God that has got his foot firmly in the driving seat and that gives us as Christians great confidence because as we'll see it's God who drives forward that mission through the message and the messengers. It's God who makes us effective and that gives us confidence in mission today just as it gave Paul confidence all those years ago. So let's look at the God-driven mission and the first thing I want to highlight from these verses is that God provides the message. Look at verse 36. Easy just to let those words just go unnoticed. What does Paul say? He says let us go back and visit the brothers in all the towns where we preached the Word of God. The Word of the Lord was what Paul preached. He wasn't preaching his own party line. He was preaching God's message about himself, the good news of Jesus, the living Word of God. Later on in verse 16, in verse 4 we already heard, I read it earlier about how the message from that council went out into the world. If you like that's the implications of the gospel. If you just cast your minds back to chapter 15 and verse 28 we see that the council has written a letter and it's a letter that's going out to all the churches. It's not a letter of human ideas, it's a letter of God's message. Verse 28 says it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us, not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements which he then states. So it's God's message and it's the implications of God's message which God has revealed to them that Paul is taking out. And so unlike politicians today we don't have to worry about the message changing. God's message stays the same because it is the same message. The message about Jesus doesn't change from year to year. So that if say for example we had a new church leader here, Simon was to leave and I'm not saying he is, he's not, don't get worried. But if Simon was to leave and go elsewhere, the new minister here, it wouldn't be a new message, it would be the same message. And where's Christians going to have absolute confidence in that? You know it's interesting as Paul and Barnabas spit in these opening verses that God graciously brings out of that split, not one missionary journey but two missionary journeys, not two messages but one message carried by two groups. The mission in God's grace gets wider, carried out by more people. Now I guess it's tempting for us to try and learn all sorts of things from these verses. But I think the central message is that it's God's message that we take out. It's the message about Jesus and we don't need to worry whether it's going to change tomorrow. That means when we get up tomorrow, it's the same gospel that we tell people about as we told them today. And so when we talk to people about what it means to be a Christian, we don't need to think about new things to say to them. We can say the same things. We point them to Jesus, God's living Word. Now I know it's tempting, isn't it? Sometimes to when somebody asks you about what it means to be a Christian, to talk immediately about church and talk about St. Luke's. But you know the gospel isn't about St. Luke's, the gospel is about Jesus. It's an important lesson for us to learn, isn't it? When people ask us what the Christian message is, to point them to Jesus, that's what we're going to be doing in the Christianity explored course. And it may well be that if you're not a Christian here this morning that's something you would like to investigate, we will point you to Jesus to God's revelation about Himself. Again, if you're not confident of how to explain that to other people, that may be a course that you want to do because we will be looking at what God has to say about Jesus so that we can understand it and indeed get involved in that message and the mission. So the last the first point is that it's God's message and we can be committed to His mission because we know what the message is, it's not going to change. The second way in which God drives forward His mission is that He empowers the messengers. Often in the church we tend to leave just a few people to take the message to others. We tend to think it's the progative say of those that are on the staff or those that are involved in missionary work overseas. Maybe that you're sitting here this morning wondering how you can possibly be involved in Christian mission. You may feel inadequate. You may consider that you haven't got the gifts of being able to talk to people about Jesus because you just don't know enough or you're not confident enough. We'll look down at verse 40. Again, it may seem a very insignificant part of what happened but verse 40 tells us what happens for Paul and Silas just before they leave. The church that they are leaving pray with them and they commend Paul and Silas to the grace of God after which they leave. The word that Luke uses here is the word that he often uses pointing people to the power that God gives for his mission to go out. And so as Paul and Silas go, what the Christian church are praying is that God will empower his messengers to take the message to the world. We often think that actually when we talk about Jesus to other people that we're alone, I wonder whether you've ever felt that. When you wonder whether you're going to pluck up the courage to speak to that person that's sitting next to you at a dinner or whatever. And you wonder will shallow or shanti and then you feel very alone in that opportunity. And actually the truth is that God is right there with you. He is the one who is empowering you and helping you to do that. Sometimes it feels as if we're walking off the end of a diving board. It feels like we're driving our car on our own for the first time. Feel a bit daunted, even a bit scared. But these verses remind us that we don't go alone. God empowers us for that work. He empowers the messengers to take the message. I love the Asterix, the Gaul series. I don't know whether you've seen it. I guess most of us have heard of it. And I know that a few years back they actually made a film about him. Asterix was a member of a small village living in Gaul in the time of the Romans. And if you don't know what happens in it, basically to set the scene is that this is very small Gaulish village. And everywhere else in Gaul has been conquered by the Romans. And this one village holds out. And the secret to their success is not that they've got better weapons than the Romans they haven't. It's not that they're more numerous than the invaders because they're not. It's because they have a secret magic potion that makes them strong and invincible so that they can push off the Romans as they constantly try to attack them. Well, as Christians we're not invincible. But God does empower us for that one-on-one situation, that opportunity to share the gospel with other people, to extend the mission to the world. It's easy to hide, isn't it, to let others do the work. We think that others are more gifted than ourselves, but they're no more gifted than us because God is the one that empowers them just as much as He empowers us. He's the one that helps us to take the good news of Jesus into our specific situation. You are the only one that worked in the office that you work in who may be a Christian. God's put you there. He will enable you to witness there. It may be in the shop at the weekend. It may be as you're doing your grocery shopping during the week. You're in that situation and God empowers you to take His message as His messenger. So I say take courage from these verses. Pray and ask Him to strengthen you and He will. And then the third way in which God directs His mission and drives His mission forward is that He directs the messengers in their missionary work. If ever you've wondered what God gets up to behind the scenes, then I think that verses 6-3-10 give us a very good idea. Look at verse 6. Paul and his companions travel through the region of Frigia and Galatia. But what happens? The Holy Spirit prevents them or stops them from preaching the word in Asia. They come to the next border. They try to enter Bethinia, but the Spirit of Jesus wouldn't allow them to. So they pass by in Isaiah. They go down to Troas and their God helps Paul to know. Where the next place is that they should visit. It's a momentous incident this one. Again it just sort of flows through the words that are written here. We just could pass over it as incidental. But actually what is happening in these verses is that God is telling Paul to take the gospel to Europe. This is the initiative of bringing the gospel to our continent. Before then Paul had been involved purely in Asia, but this is a new departure. And God wants Paul to know that it's in his mind that the door is now open for the gospel to go there. The application to us. Well it's not that we will have visions necessarily. Of course God could do that, but the point is that the gospel has already reached our parts. There's no new initiative to take, other than initiatives to take the gospel where it hasn't been heard. Parts of our own parish. Parts of places where you work. And it may be difficult for us to know where to go next. Indeed we at St. Luke's have been thinking over these past weeks and months about where we would focus our mission. And we've thought about the over 60s. We've set up our lunch club, and it may well be that God chooses to use that greatly for the advance of the mission. We're pushing on a door just as Paul did. He pushed on the doors to those cities, but the Holy Spirit closed it. So far it seems as though our mission is working and we pray on that God will continue to do that. Likewise our evening service, we believe that it's the right answer to revamp that evening service. And so we're pushing on the door to see whether that is something that God wants us to do. And at the moment it seems that is right. God you see wants us to be pushing on doors to see whether that is the right answer for mission. And to be praying for God to work through those situations. We know that the gospel is to go out. So let us pray hard that God would reveal to us specific places and areas to you individually about those people who you might draw alongside to talk about Jesus. I remember that there was a story about a friend of mine who went on mission and he was standing one day outside a library at the university that he was working in. And one of the guys who recently become a Christian came up to him and said look David I'm really not very sure whether God wants me to talk to a friend of mine about Jesus. I'm not sure whether I should go that way, that way or wherever I should go. And David very simply said to him well look where would you choose to go normally. And he said well I go up that road and turn right. And he said well why don't you go up that road and turn right. Do what you usually do and ask that God would if it's the right opportunity that God will bring you face to face with that person. And if he doesn't bring your face to face with that person maybe he'll bring you face to face with another person with whom you can talk about Jesus. You see sometimes we want to be spoon fed but actually we just have to ask God to help us to empower us and to help us to push the door and speak for him. Well we've seen already that God is the one who gives us the message. He directs the messengers and he also empowers the messengers. Finally fourthly the Lord opens hearts of the message. Look down at verses 11 through to 15. We see that the gospel does indeed get taken across into Europe and Paul goes off into one of the cities. He pushes on a door in that city, decides to go down to this certain place in the city. See whether there's an opportunity to talk about the gospel and what he does is he arrives there and he gets on and speaks about Jesus to the people that are there. Verse 13 he says we sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there and what happens verse 14. One of those listening was a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyra who was a worshipper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul's message. Again might be a detail that we pass over but it shows us the reality of what is happening in mission. Here is Paul taking God's message, trusting in God's power, trusting in God to direct him to the right people and God is the one who opens the hearts of those he's speaking to. You see as Christians we are not responsible for the response to the message. Politicians are, they have to ham it up, they even have to change the message in order for people to vote for them. But as Christians we are just responsible for explaining the message of Jesus very simply and very clearly. That's our work but it's God's work to soften hearts and to open hearts to the message. God is responsible for bringing people to faith not us and that takes a huge pressure off us doesn't it? I mean just imagine if you feel that you've got to go up and convert someone there's a great deal of pressure for you to say the right thing at the right time for you to almost thrust the gospel down people's throats but that's not that's not going to affect it that is not going to affect the power of the message and whether it's a perceived. You see here God is the one that does that work. That's why Christianity explored we make a promise not to ram the truth about Jesus down people's throats because whatever I say on that course however persuasive I try to be not the one that is going to bring about a change of heart of somebody who doesn't know Jesus it's God's work to do that you see Christianity isn't about us gaining recruits it's about us pointing people to Jesus and God changing their hearts God does the work so as I close these verses give us a glimpse behind the beginning of the second missionary journey the message that Paul takes is God's message the power with which Paul goes out is God's power the places that God goes are directed by God the opportunities that opened up by God and God is the one that opens people's hearts to the message and I hope and pray that for us this morning these words will give us confidence to be involved in God's mission you see as Christians we don't as it were get on a rollercoaster and allow God to drive us without stopping to the other end where we just grimly hold on hoping that we'll get there and we go through trials and tribulations we go through difficulties that's not the way it is with the Christian life God is the one who yes drives the mission but he calls us to be a part of that mission he calls us to play our part but trusting in him and I hope that all of us will increasingly get involved in that mission both here as a church and individually remembering that God provides a message for us he empowers us he directs us and opens doors for the gospel and he opens hearts to the gospel let's pray shall we Father God we thank you so much that as your people you have given us a truth that does not change because you do not change and we thank you that you have revealed yourself once and for all time in and through your living word the Lord Jesus that he is the way through which we can come to know you and be right with you and live in relationship with you and we pray that each of us would not only know that good news for ourselves as you have worked in our hearts but that we would allow you to help us enable us to tell others of that great news father there are many people that don't know that news for themselves and we pray that Lord you would use us to be part of the mission that takes that news to them
and we ask this not that we as a church would grow and look great but that if we do grow you would be glorified because more people honor you and allow you to be their Lord and Savior for Jesus