Acts 16:1-15 - Wherever The Spirit Leads

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Don Filcek, Solid Foundations; Acts 16:1-15 - Wherever The Spirit Leads

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You are listening to Recast Church of Mattawong's Podcast. Listen in as our lead pastor,
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Don Sopcich, is in a sermon series entitled Solid Foundation, A Journey Through the
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Book of Acts. So, as I introduced the message this morning, you know my tendency already, those of you who have gotten to know me,
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I don't tend to preach specific messages to on specific days, so this isn't necessarily a
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Father's Day message, but it is a message to fathers. It's also a message to mothers.
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It's a message to children. It's a message to everybody. It's what God wants us to hear, and as we're marching through the
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Book of Acts, we're just kind of taking it chapter by chapter. But I want to ask you a question to start off before we come to worship, to kind of introduce this message and to kind of think it through before the band comes to lead us, and that is the question, how does the
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Spirit guide you? How does the Spirit guide us?
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You know, do you get a little voice in your head? Because if you're anything like me, you've got a lot of voices speaking in your head.
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You know, you deserve a break today or whatever. Yeah, I mean, there's different things going on in your head. Would you agree with that?
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Anybody with me on that, or is that just me? Like, do you have, like, is there a
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God voice, you know, that's a little bit deeper? And it says, Don, you should pray more today.
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Or maybe it's got a little bit of a British accent, I don't know. But do you get what
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I'm asking here? How does God communicate with us? Does everyone who does something that's seemingly crazy and then says,
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I did it because God told me to, do they get a free pass on that one? Like, have you thought about that?
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Because there are some people, would you agree, there are some people who do crazy things and then say, I did it because God told me to.
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And then they think that that washes their hands of any responsibility. How many of you know that everything that somebody does and blames
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God for is not his fault? Would you agree with that? So just saying,
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God told me to do it, isn't sufficient either. What we're going to see in our text this morning, the reason I'm talking about this, is the text is going to lead us into a discussion about how the
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Holy Spirit guides. Because we're going to literally see the Holy Spirit take a hold of a missionary team that's traveling, and he's going to set the agenda.
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And he's literally going to commandeer this group, this posse of people, who are traveling through southern
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Turkey, and he's going to tell them where to go, and he's going to guide them and direct them and say, you're not going here, you're not going here, I want you to go here.
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And that has implications for the way that God interacts with our lives, something that's been challenging to me as I've gone through this.
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It's obvious that not everybody who says God told them to do something gets a free pass.
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But the fact of the matter is, our problem as fallen humans is our inability to stay in the middle of things. We gravitate towards extremes.
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Towards believing that God ought to tell me what to eat for lunch today, on one hand, or God never speaks and guides and directs at all.
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Do you see how we can move towards extremes? Are you guys with me on that?
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Okay, a couple people got it. We're going to see, like I said, the
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Holy Spirit leading and guiding. And we're not going to see a focus in our text on the way that God guides.
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Because God can use any tools He has at His disposal to guide and direct us, right?
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Whether that's a friend, whether that's the Word, whether that is a voice. Can He use whatever
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He wants to communicate with us? Okay, three of you think so. He can use whatever
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He wants. But the fact of the matter in the text is that the Spirit does guide people.
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And I think we're going to see that kind of rise to the surface, to bubble up from this text and be the main point.
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I rejoice that we have a God who shows concern for our daily lives. Would you agree with that? Glad that He has a concern for His people.
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And the fact of the matter is I may not always know which direction I should go every moment of my life.
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If you've been there, you're tentative and you're kind of like, God, I'm going to just step out here because inaction isn't going to work right now.
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I have to take a step of faith, but I'm going to trust You to guide me and direct me in this.
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I might not always know which direction, but the fact of the matter is I do completely trust God's ability to guide me into the things that will work out best for His glory.
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Not always the things that are most comfortable for me, but the things that work out best for His glory.
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So I want you to open your Bibles, please, to Acts chapter 16. That's page 792 in the
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Bible that's in the seat back in front of you. 792. If you don't own a Bible or you don't own an English Standard Version of the
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Bible, you can take that one. That's what I preach out of here. That's page 792.
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Fresh start on a fresh page there, Acts chapter 16. Follow along as I read the first 15 verses of Acts chapter 16, our text for this morning.
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Page 792. Paul came also to Derbe and to Lystra.
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A disciple was there named Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek. He was well spoken of by the brothers at Lystra and Iconium.
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Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him, and he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places where they all knew that his father was a
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Greek. As they went on their way through the cities, they delivered to them for observance the decisions that had been reached by the apostles of the elders who were in Jerusalem.
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So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily. And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the
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Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. And when they had come up to Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the
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Spirit of Jesus did not allow them. So passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas, and a vision appeared to Paul on the night.
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A man of Macedonia was standing there urging him and saying, come over to Macedonia and help us. And when
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Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.
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So setting sail from Troas, we made a direct voyage to Samothrace, and the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is the leading city of the district of Macedonia and a
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Roman colony. We remained in this city some days, and on the Sabbath day we went outside the gate to the riverside, where we supposed there was a place of prayer, and we sat down and spoke to the women who had come together.
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One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God.
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The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul. And after she was baptized, and her household as well, she urged us saying, if you have judged me to be faithful to the
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Lord, come to my house and stay. And she prevailed upon us. Let's pray.
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Kind of a little bit of the setting here. I gave you a little bit of an introduction, but where are we in the book of Acts? Acts 16, 1 -15.
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But last week, if you were here, you remember that the traveling ministry team of Paul and Barnabas, they broke up, and there was some hostility between the two of them.
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It actually was a text that showed the reality, just how real Scripture really is, in that it doesn't just sugarcoat and candy coat these people, the characters, the people in the text, but it actually gives a flavor, a sense of real life.
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And we saw that last week. So where we left them was Barnabas took this dude named
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John Mark and headed for Cyprus. If you want to put the map up there, I'm just going to leave this map up here.
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Hopefully those of you that are in the back can at least get the gist of where Turkey is there, and Greece over here, and then
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Palestine and Syria down there in the southwest. But I'm going to be walking through this because geography is going to matter as we go through this text.
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So I'll just leave that up there. But we saw Barnabas took this dude, John Mark, and headed for Cyprus, where Paul took a new apprentice named
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Silas, and they headed through Syria and Cilicia. You can see Syria in the southeast there, and then
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Cilicia up at the horn there. And so that's the pathway that Paul and that our text is going to follow.
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Paul and Silas heading up there. And five years previously, you see a little cluster right in the center of the screen of churches, of cities, where they planted churches five years previous to the events in our text.
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You see Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, those towns. Paul and Barnabas had traveled to five years previous to our text and had started churches there, proclaiming the gospel of Christ.
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And the gospel had taken a foothold there. They had gone back through after visiting, faced a lot of persecution and a lot of difficulty.
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And so that's kind of the setting of where we're at. And actually, we know so little of their trip that they're literally 200 miles into this journey before we even get them in the text here.
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So they've already traveled from Antioch in the east there, where the star is, up and around the horn.
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They've gone likely through Tarsus, which is Paul's hometown. We don't even hear any accounting of the different places that they stayed along the way, or the stops, or whether they did ministry, which is quite likely, knowing the way that Paul was everywhere he went.
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He was proclaiming the gospel. So we don't hear that until they get over to Derbe and Lystra. And that's where our text is this morning.
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It starts off, Paul came also to Derbe and to Lystra. Now we know he has Silas with him. And in Derbe, the people had responded positively to the good news five years previously, and a church had been established.
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Lystra had been a little bit different. If you remember back, Lystra, some Jews had come from some of the surrounding towns and had stirred up the crowds against Paul and Barnabas to the degree that they picked up stones.
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They picked up rocks and flung them at Paul until he was left for dead.
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Apparently he went unconscious. Possibly, maybe even in the text, maybe he really did die. We don't know.
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He was drug out of the city and left for dead. And miraculously, he was healed and reinstated to ministry.
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The text didn't make a big deal, if you remember, if you were here. The text didn't make a big deal about the miraculous, but it's hard to see anything but a miracle in that context if you can imagine being struck by stone to the degree that you were left unconscious and drug out of the town.
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And then the next day, you embark on a 60 -mile journey to the next town. And I'd mentioned that there was no words airlift or ambulance in the text.
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And so I kind of think there was a miracle that happened in Lystra there with Paul. But in that city, there's a young man named
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Timothy. So Timothy is from Lystra. Now, that's first and second Timothy. We have books of the
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Bible that were written to this same guy that we're talking about here. He's from that town of Lystra where Paul was stoned.
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And he was likely present, if not at least intimately aware of the details of Paul being stoned in his very town, a very small town.
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So very likely he was present. Now, he's a third -generation Christian. How many years ago did the gospel come to Lystra when we get to our text?
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What did I just say? Five years previous. But he's a third -generation Christian in that his grandmother accepted the gospel.
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His mother accepted the gospel. And Timothy has accepted the gospel. Now, we see that not in our text, but we see that in 1
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Timothy as we get to know him a little bit and figure out who he is. So he was likely there.
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We find that he's gained a positive reputation in the church, not just in his hometown, but also in the neighboring town 18 miles north of Iconium.
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So he has a good reputation. We know something else is very significant about Timothy. He's very young.
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As a matter of fact, later on in Paul's life, he's going to write a letter to Timothy, and he's going to say, don't let them look down on you because of your youth.
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And that's years removed from our text. So he's still young, years down the road.
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Some would say he's likely a teenager at the time of our text here. And Paul is going to say,
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I want him to come along with me. He recognized the need for help. He was looking for young men who were eager to go off on an adventure.
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I picture him kind of saying to Timothy, I can't guarantee you're going to come back alive. Do you want to sign up?
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And Timothy's like, yeah, sign me up. I'm excited. But little does he know what's about to come up. It's not just sign up for adventure, but we're going to get into something that's kind of funny and strange here in verse 3.
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Because after all the debate, what has been the debate in Jerusalem in the past couple of weeks as we've been marching through the book of Acts?
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They were debating whether or not a Gentile needs to be circumcised and come under the Old Testament law in order to be saved.
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And what was the conclusion in Jerusalem? What was the conclusion of that council? You do not need to be circumcised.
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You don't need to come under the Old Testament law. Circumcision is just simply being a rite of passage into initiation, into the old covenants, saying
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I will follow the law of Moses. I'm a child of Abraham, and I'm going to follow suit with Abraham.
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And the conclusion was, no, you don't. And after all that debate and all that's worked through in the church,
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Paul takes Timothy and has him circumcised. Anybody kind of scratching their head on that one, saying why?
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Yeah, like why would he do that? Well, the text tells us, gives us a why. It says, because everyone knew that his father was a
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Greek. Now, his mother is Jewish, and it's important to understand that because his mother is Jewish, he would have been
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Jewish in the eyes of all the Jews in that community. Because his mother was. It just had to be one of the parents
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Jewish in order for him to be declared a Jew. But now, in this context, in the understanding of the
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Jews that lived in his community, he was not just a Jew, but he was an apostate Jew, a Jew who had not come underneath the covenant, who had not adopted that role.
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And so he is in a unique situation as an individual who is declared by the community to be a
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Jew, but is not following the covenant and is not under that. So that's part of the reason. But another thing that's interesting to note is that later on down the road,
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Paul's going to have another understudy. He's got this guy named Timothy here. He's going to have another understudy named Titus.
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Titus is not circumcised. And the Jews are saying, he's not saved. He is not in with Christ.
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He doesn't have a proper relationship with Christ because he's not circumcised. And Paul refuses to circumcise him because the
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Jews are demanding it. They're saying, if he's going to be a Christian, a follower of Christ, are you getting that? So Paul, on the one hand, lucky for Titus, unlucky for Timothy.
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But are you getting that? If it was demanded for salvation, then Paul wasn't going to do it.
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So in this case, he's doing it to accommodate in ministry those who they're trying to reach out to.
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It's an accommodation. Paul will later write this, and I think that this is pertinent here. In 1 Corinthians 9 .20,
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he says this, I became like a Jew to the Jews in order to win Jews. Do you get that?
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To the Jews, I became like a Jew to win Jews. It's an accommodation. It's contextualizing the message to those there.
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And we do that all the time, don't we? Isn't that part of the goal? I would encourage you, as you get an opportunity, to not try to pigeonhole your co -workers into a
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Jesus conversation. I talk about this all the time, not dropping the Jesus bomb on people. But as somebody comes to you and says, man,
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I'm going through a messy divorce, and it's just horrible. They're sharing things that are going on in their heart and in their life, and things are just...
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How many of you have that? Once in a while, somebody comes to you with their problems. Does that ever happen to you? Those are natural times to talk with them about hope and purpose and the important things of life.
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Would you agree with that? Rather than just, boom, try to drop it. They're talking about how the tigers did last night, and you're looking for an opportunity to get
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Jesus in there. Don't shoehorn people into this discussion. But I became like a
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Jew to the Jews in order to win the Jews, and that's what's going on here. So Timothy joins the team, and as they travel visiting churches in the area, they spread the decision of the
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Jerusalem Council. So we know that what Paul is doing here with Timothy and having him circumcised is he's actually declaring, you don't need to be circumcised to do this, but we're doing this as accommodation.
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And they're going through and they're sharing that decision from church to church. So if you go back to the map, they also go into this area called
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Phrygia and Galatia. Now you can see the little words. I can't use a laser pointer because there's a screen, but you can see
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Phrygia here and Galatia here. Oh, perfect. Thank you. Antioch and Iconium are actually in that district called
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Phrygia and Galatia. It's a combination of two different districts that come together right there. And things get a little weird here.
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And this is where we first encounter the Holy Spirit in this text. And it says this in verse 6,
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And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.
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See where Asia is? Somewhere along the pathway between Iconium, Antioch, and then where you see
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Troas over here, you see this long line. Somewhere between there they desired to go into Asia and proclaim the word of God.
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Now it's likely, many commentators think that they were probably trying to head for Ephesus. See the big town of Ephesus down here?
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That town is a cultural hub of that day and age.
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It's the chief city of Asia, a very central location. It's going to become central in Scripture later.
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So it's probably likely that they were driving towards that. But the Holy Spirit forbade them from speaking the word of God there.
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So what happened? Did they get laryngitis? Did they run into a force field as they were walking down the road?
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Boom! Holy Spirit, what are you doing? How did the Spirit guide them in this?
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How did they know they weren't supposed to speak there? Did God appear to them and tell them to avoid it?
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Did soldiers meet them with spears on the border of Asia and say, you're not getting in or we're going to spear you? Maybe did they find some mathematical
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Old Testament equation where if you take every 137th letter, you get a message that reads something like, thou shalt not declare the word of the
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Lord in Asia? Probably not. Obviously this verse calls into question the way that God leads us.
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Would you agree with that? Does it challenge you to think about the way that the Spirit of God might lead you? That somehow they are wanting to proclaim the gospel in an area, and God's saying no?
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How many of you would say that seems like a no -brainer? You're kind of going, I want to take the gospel into Waterville, or I want to take the gospel into Chicago, or I want to take the gospel into Seattle, or I want to take it to Phoenix, Arizona, or I want to take the gospel to a place.
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How many of you would assume that God says yes to that kind of thing? Would that be your natural assumption?
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Raise your hand if that's like, yeah. I don't think I'd have to think about that. I'm not going to pray and say, God, do you want the gospel to go there or not?
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So is anybody else struggling with this notion that God's saying no to this area? Or how does
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He say no to that area? I'm going to take the confused looks with confusion, and that's what
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I'm actually thinking, that you should be a little confused right now. We're going to get back to this here later.
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But it calls into question the way that God leads us. How do we expect Him to communicate things to us? But this isn't going to be a text primarily about how the
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Spirit of God guides us, but the fact that He does guide, and we're going to see
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Him basically take the helm. I used the word commandeer earlier. He's going to take the leadership of this missionary team and get them where He wants them to be in this text by the end.
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We don't know how, but knowing that God does lead
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His people is very valuable and important for us. So the map here helps again because they were blocked from speaking the word down in Asia, and it doesn't say that they were barred from entrance into Asia because they're actually going to have to walk across Asia to get to Troas.
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So they weren't blocked from going into Asia, but they were blocked from proclaiming the gospel.
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Like I said, did they get laryngitis? How were they stopped from proclaiming the word there?
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So they walk across there to get to Troas here in a moment, but before they even get to Troas, they actually have designs on another area of the country.
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So they're like, if we can't get down to Asia, we can't get down to this central important city of Ephesus, then let's head north where there's a significant population in this province called
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Bithynia. And you can see that up at the top of the screen, Bithynia and Pontus. So they're like, well, let's head up north then.
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And they are running into another force field. They're told no.
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And this time they're blocked from entrance into the town. They're literally not able to go in there.
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Now to put this in perspective, there are thousands of people who need
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Jesus in Bithynia. The ancient cities of Byzantium, Byzantium, which will eventually become
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Constantinople, which will become Istanbul. Somebody just had a song run through your mind. That major hub of civilization is there.
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Also another major town called Nicopolis is there. I'm sorry,
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Nicomedia. Significant towns, major crossroads of civilization at this time.
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If Christianity could get a hold in those two towns, it would just explode. I mean, just the notion that if the gospel is proclaimed there and people embrace it, they're going to spread from there out throughout the world.
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And apparently God didn't know that if He would let Paul and company in, that everything would just explode, right?
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Boy, we could have just given God a clue there and helped Him out by just saying, we'll just let them in.
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But we're going to see that God has something more in store that's going to have dramatic impacts right down to where we sit here in Matawan today.
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What God is going to do here in the next few verses is something that has directly impacted your life and mine.
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We are the beneficiaries of what's going to happen next in this passage, because the gospel is going to go to Europe.
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How many of you have descendants from Europe? How many of you could probably track the freedom of our faith here to Europe?
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Even if it went through some dark times and some difficulties, and the first people who came over and established our country were running from something there.
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But even if that's the case, it was because religion and Christianity got a foothold there in Europe, and that's what we're going to see
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Him do. So if you're coming from the east, you're blocked from going south, you're blocked from going north, then where are you going to go?
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Go west, young man, right? So they pass Mysia on the south and they head to Troas.
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You can see Mysia up there, head over to Troas. And how would you feel if you were on this trip?
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Anybody be frustrated with what's going on? You've wandered around, you've been told no, you haven't been given any positive guidance yet, you haven't been told where you can go, you've just been told where you can't.
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Now I might be prone to be thinking, okay, are we just wandering around out here? Are we here for a purpose?
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Is there any reason for all of this? Should we maybe just pack up and go home? What's going on?
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And it's quite possible that they were praying for this kind of direction. How many of you would probably be praying for some kind of guidance or direction at this point in this journey?
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God, where do you want us? And it's quite likely that they were praying for direction at some point when Paul woke up in the middle of the night, shakes everybody awake and says,
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I've had a vision, God has told me where we're supposed to go. In this dream, a man from Macedonia was standing in front of me.
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How did they know that the man was from Macedonia? Was he wearing Macedonian clothes? He told them that he was from Macedonia.
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He said, come to Macedonia and help us. It's funny because actually I read some commentaries who were just questioning how could they have known that this guy was from Macedonia.
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And I'm like, it says right there, guys, really. It says that he said, come to Macedonia and help us.
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So in verse 10, they picked up Luke as a traveling companion, the author of this book. Do you see him in there?
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Look at verse 10. Luke doesn't appear, but something shifts in the text that's pretty significant right here in verse 10.
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In verse 10 it says this, and when Paul had seen the vision immediately, we sought to go on into Macedonia.
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We get into this passage where now we're going to see the pronouns change from they to we and us.
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Luke was in Troas. Luke, the author of the book of Acts. And he now joins the team.
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And we see sometimes in Scripture, just if we're paying attention, we see these subtle shifts that clue us into what's going on.
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It's interesting to note that as the author of this book, he did not make a big deal about his own conversion.
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He didn't make a big deal about how he joined the team, but he's satisfied with the words we and us to include himself as the author in the action that goes forward.
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We do know that he was a medical doctor. Maybe there were some health issues on the team that they needed somebody to come along with, but he has now joined the team, and they immediately make preparations to cross into Europe.
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It's important to note to this point, the gospel has been confined to Asia and Africa. That's the extent of the spread of the gospel so far.
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And although crossing this water here of the Aegean Sea is not going to be a significant political shift for them.
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They're going from one Roman territory to another Roman territory. It's going to have dramatic impact on the way that the gospel moves forward, even right down to modern times.
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That we can look back and see God's definitive leading and bringing the gospel to Europe is significant.
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Because again, we can look at how subtle these decisions are and look at what a dramatic impact it's had on our culture and where we come from and the spread of the gospel throughout the whole world.
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Would you agree that what we're seeing here has had a significant impact on where we live? And just these subtle decisions of should we go south?
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Not now. Should we go north? Not now. Where do you want us? I want you in Europe. Subtle guidance, subtle directions.
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Maybe not so subtle in the vision that Paul has, but at the same time just these what seem like insignificant decisions can amount to significant transformation and change.
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We see that down in the pages of history. So they join a ship. They're sailing for Neapolis.
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Luke is in love with nautical detail. We see that later in the book of Acts, but right here he talks about their journey, a two -day journey.
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They harbor for one night on the island of Samothrace, a secure harbor at night, and then they make for Neapolis the next day.
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Neapolis is a port city. Ten miles inland is a major town called Philippi, and that's where we find them proclaiming the gospel the first time in Europe.
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It's a leading city of the district of Macedonia. It was a Roman colony, which simply just means that it had a Roman structure of governance to it.
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And on the Sabbath day they go outside the city, assuming that there's going to be some Jews gathered together, and Paul's going to give a motivational speech down by the river.
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So he's going to be down there, and the interesting thing to note is it appears that Philippi...
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Did anybody get that, by the way? I'm just going to brush over it, because if you didn't get it, you didn't get it. He had a van down by the river.
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I don't know if he had a van down by the river or not. That's a Saturday Night Live skit. I'm sorry. It appears that Philippi did not have a synagogue, because you had to have ten guys to have a synagogue.
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And so we see these women are going to gather together for prayer, and it was customary for Jews without a synagogue on the
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Sabbath to go outside the city to the closest water source, because they had ritual cleansing that they had to do before they went to prayer.
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And so they would gather there, so Paul and the team naturally says, well, let's go to the closest water source. There's likely going to be some people there praying, some
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Jews, that we can sit down and talk with. So there are no men in this gathering.
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The text tells us that. But one woman is singled out as being particularly attentive.
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There's one person who is significantly paying attention, just like that over there. Lydia was a seller of purple stuff.
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Now I kind of wonder if that's not the career that God has chosen for my daughter, that at some point she's going to be a seller of purple stuff, because she loved all things purple.
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But I don't know what kind of a storefront did Lydia have, everything purple, or what was the name of it,
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I don't know. But she's from this area called Thyatira, which is actually back, so they're now in Philippi, up in Greece.
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But about where the word Asia is, is the area of a district called Lydia, about right where Asia is on the map, the word
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Asia. A district called Lydia in Thyatira is a town within that district. And up until the 1800s, the late 1800s, when we developed synthetic dyes, that area was the world's primary producer of purple dye.
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So up to modern times. I mean, this is verifiable. And it's interesting just to note how historically accurate the word of God is, to be able to go back and say purple dye was produced in that area until we developed synthetic dyes.
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Just kind of interesting to note, just over centuries and centuries, even a couple of millennia, that's where we got purple.
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Lydia was a God -fearer. She was not a complete convert to Judaism, according to the text, but she worshipped
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God, and she wanted to go outside and pray with the Jews, together with them. And if you look at verse 14,
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Paul gave such a great message. He offered a song and dance. He used a sense of humor.
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He threw in a PowerPoint presentation that was just riveting. He told emotionally passionate, personal stories.
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He had these mad oratory skills, and he captured her heart for Christ. Do you see that in the text?
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Actually, I love what the text actually says. It says in verse 14, the
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Lord opened her heart, and it doesn't even say the Lord opened her heart to believe.
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What does it say the Lord opened her heart to do? To pay attention. How much are we dependent upon God to even just keep our attention focused on His Word?
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Are we even dependent on Him for that? I'm glad for that, because I certainly, it would be, if I felt like it was completely up to me to keep your attention on God's Word, whoa.
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I don't tap dance. I'm not a great actor. This would be rough.
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But the fact of the matter is, if you walk out of here this morning with anything positive, if there is learning that happens, if there is a change in your motivation, if there is a deeper faith or a better understanding of who
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God is, if you end up with a conviction to change or to embrace
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Christ in a deeper way, it has been God working in you to keep your attention here, focused on His Word.
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The result of God guiding this team is that the first converts to Christianity come to faith in Europe.
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A woman believes and is baptized, and her whole household follows her in faith and baptism. And immediately she desires to show her newfound faith by one of the things that's the greatest indicator of faith, and that is a desire to serve in the cause of Christ right away.
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So she says, come and stay with my house. And notice it's a conditional clause at the very end of our text. If you have judged me to be faithful to the
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Lord, then come to my house and stay. And they stayed with her, showing that they saw her as a faithful person who had genuinely been transformed by the love of Christ.
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If we go back to this text, so I've walked us through the text, we've kind of gone through the flow and where things have gone and all that, but the thing that has stuck with me this week, and the thing that I personally have had to struggle through, is the way that God worked in this entire text, guiding and directing this missionary team.
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Because so often I have seen the guidance of God primarily being just guiding us into a deeper relationship with Him, guiding us into holiness, but that's not the kind of thing that He's guiding them in here.
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What kind of things is He guiding them in in this text? A geographical location, like where they ought to go, where they can go and where they can't go, and some very specific decisions that I would kind of tend to think
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God leaves up to me, and then the other things, the deeper things, those are the things that He guides us in.
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So I'm excited and enthusiastic about the results, the first converts in Europe, but I wonder about the guidance of the
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Holy Spirit in the text. And so I've asked myself some questions that I want to bring before you.
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Do you ever long for God to give you directions in a clear and concise way? Do you long for that?
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Do you want that? How many of you have made some major decisions in life and you would have liked to have, you know, maybe just a letter in the mailbox from heaven?
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Or at least an email or a text or, you know, maybe a chat with God? I heard the story of a man that dropped out of school to move to Florida because God told him to.
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Because there was a healing ministry that was going on in Florida and he was like, God is at work there. And the question kind of remains, was
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God at work in Kalamazoo? But God told him he had to go do this thing.
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Or worse yet, I knew some guys in college that would be quick to say to their girlfriend, God told me that you're the one
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I'm supposed to marry. Creepy. Like what if God wasn't telling her the same thing?
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Could God be mistaken on that one? I'm sorry, I mean maybe some of you said that to your wives and well, hey, come and confront me afterwards.
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I guess what it all comes down to is how do I know that a leading is from God?
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How do I know that this is Him? You get what I'm saying? Anybody rustled through that?
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How do I know that it's not just that I had a bad kielbasa last night and it's kind of unsettling me or something?
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I mean, you know what? How did Paul and company know they were not supposed to speak in Asia?
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How did they know they were not supposed to go into Bithynia? The text does not give us the means that God used so we're left to guess about the means.
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Did Silas, who's present with them throughout the text, earlier in the text called a prophet, one who receives revelation from God, did he receive a direct revelation that told them not to speak in Asia?
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Don't know. Was there a miraculous vision? Well, we do know there was at least one that's recorded in the text.
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Maybe there was another one that wasn't. But regardless of how God revealed it, the point is that God did guide
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His people. He was able to communicate to them with enough force that they were convinced they were following Him and not just following their own desires.
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And it's on that point that I've been convicted personally as your pastor. I've been convicted this week on that point.
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You see, because I see the potential for two sides to this equation of the guidance of the Spirit of God in our lives, and I see very little room in the
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American church for middle ground. This is an area that divides the church significantly on a regular basis and divides whole churches on this area of how does the
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Spirit guide us. We have on the one side those who look down on education, those who look down on using human logic and reason.
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They might even say things like this. I've heard these kinds of statements. I'm paraphrasing, but I've heard things like this.
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You've got a decision facing you, and somebody speaks up and says this pathway makes less sense.
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Human reason says this way won't work, so this must be the way that God wants us to go.
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Can you imagine that kind of reasoning? Some might hear in this room lean in that direction, like education would be wrong or would be unhelpful, as if God never uses human logic, wisdom, or education to accomplish
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His goals. These would be people that would be opposed to plans, agendas, and careful thoughts.
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I have a friend who joined an international ministry when he was fresh out of college. He sat down at the very first meeting of his team, and he said, well, we've got a lot of things we need to cover, so let's get this down.
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They said, no, no, that's not how we run here. We pray, and we ask God what we're supposed to talk about today.
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To some people that might have an appeal, and I kind of understand that, but no agenda, no direction.
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There's things that need to be done and things that need to be accomplished. How many of you can sense a tension in that? In one sense, it's good to depend on the
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Holy Spirit, isn't it? It's also good to kind of have a plan and to use wisdom and logic and education and all those things.
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Are you sensing the tension? Are you getting this difference here? The other side of the equation is one that I've often adopted, and I would say
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I've gone to the extreme, to my detriment, so listen carefully. I'm the kind of person who treasures education.
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I like having a plan. I like to be able to verify decisions. I'm into empiricism. I like to have it proved and to test it and to make sure that it works.
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I would say, sure, I follow the Holy Spirit because I read the Bible and I try to live according to it, like as if this is the only way that God can communicate to me.
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Is this the primary way that God communicates to us? Thank you, yes, three of you.
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No, I think there was four. This is the primary way, but the notion that God might be leading me or calling me to do something has been kind of out there to me.
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Can any of you relate to that side? Are you seeing the differences here? Are you seeing the two sides clear enough, two different opposing views?
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I've had the growing conviction over the past week that both of these views are very misguided. You see, whichever side you consider yourself on, whether you're over here that God speaks to me directly, telling me what
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I'm supposed to eat for lunch, or God only speaks to me through the Bible and that's it, both are primarily about me and my decisions.
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If you're the person who works through decisions by asking God to write it in the clouds, you're always looking for a sign from God, or if you're on the other side and you just say,
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I will use my logic and reason to come to conclusions and trust that God has guided in that process. Either way,
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God is ultimately serving our reputation, our decisions. God's role in our lives can amount to nothing more than validation of our decisions, and we can find ourselves either abusing
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God's word to validate yourself, or requiring Him to speak directly to validate yourself.
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But either one is just using God as a tool. You see what I'm saying? Does that make any sense?
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What if we took a different approach to God? Let me explain this to you. I'll use an illustration to kind of explain what
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I'm encouraging as a way forward for us in breaking this tension between either being way extreme over here or being way extreme over here.
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When I was 19 years old, I met the woman of my dreams. And yes, it was Linda. We were both camp counselors.
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And I knew, and I say this with all honesty, I knew two weeks into meeting her, spending two solid weeks of intense ministry together, we were training to become counselors that summer, and I knew
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I was going to ask her to marry me if I didn't die before I got the chance.
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I was like, she's the one. And I know that. And some of you guys maybe had that experience with your wives. Maybe some of you, there's totally a different way that it worked, or it took a while, or she grew on you, or whatever.
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It wasn't that way with Linda. It was just like I knew. Now, I could have honestly, two weeks into that relationship, have walked up to her and said,
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I think God wants me to marry you. Man, that would have been creepy.
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Would that have been creepy? Yeah, probably creepy. As a matter of fact,
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I think it would have been capital S scary to her. Do you see what I'm getting at? But the fact that it would have been creepy, the fact that it would have been scary, would have made it no less true.
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Did I have conviction in my heart that she was the one for me? Absolutely. Did I believe that God had brought us together?
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Absolutely. Did I have to say it? Absolutely not. Do you see the difference between thinking it, believing
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God is directing us, and proclaiming it to the world, and implicating
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Him in those things? Do you see the difference in that? Saying, in my heart, did
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I believe it? Absolutely. So what I'm suggesting is that we look for God's leading.
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Be open to God's leading, and be very cautious in broadcasting
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God's leading. Do you hear what I'm saying? Be open to it.
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Be looking for it. Be seeking it. Be searching for it. Be asking, God, show me the pathway forward.
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Show me what you want me to do. But then be very cautious broadcasting that to everybody as a thus saith the
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Lord on your life. Are you getting it? Do you want
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God to guide you? Do you want Him to direct you? Why do you have to speak it? I'm convinced that often we do it to either coerce others, like the
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God told me to marry you, so now if you're going to be on God's side, you have to marry me, or to defend our own reputation so that if things go south, well, at least we can say
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God called us to do it, but it didn't work. Do you see what I'm saying? We can tend to push those things away.
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I think it's very valuable to see God's hand in bringing me and Linda together. You see, after the events have occurred in our text, that's when
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Luke takes a pen in his hand and writes down and says, God kept the team from Asia. God kept the team from Bithynia.
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It's after the fact that we look back and we see God's hand working in our lives. Do you see what
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I'm saying? You see God's divine intervention looking backwards, and you see the way that He has brought your path to the place that you're at today.
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You can trace His hand so that you trust Him better with your future. Do you see that? What I'm pushing for, and I'm wrapping this up, what
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I'm pushing for is to look for God's direction in your life. Be open to Him stopping you from going into Bithynia, or leaving your current job, or even be prepared and open for Him to do some crazy stuff with you.
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Would you trust your reputation with God? That can be a tough thing. He might do some crazy stuff here, like leading you into ministry, or asking you to boldly explain
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Christ to a hurting co -worker. Maybe He would even prompt you to help someone who is broken down on the side of the road.
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Goodness, I hope it doesn't take a significant prompting for that to happen. That itself should be convicting to us that we might depend and expect a special word from the
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Holy Spirit to get us to be kind to one another. Think about that. Or to buy a meal for a homeless person, or to get involved in lives of others.
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Confess, I've not been as open as this passage would recommend in the leading of the Holy Spirit in my daily schedule.
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Emphasis on my. I want you guys to think about that too.
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God can lead us. Are you looking for Him to guide you? Draw close to Him in His Word.
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You can't divorce these conversations with the Holy Spirit from the Word. Did you know that? And that's very important to say.
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Get into the Word. But give your reputation to Him. He may call you to do some weird things. Occasionally, you'll do some weird things on your own.
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But this text this week has left me more open to the leading of the Holy Spirit in the practical everyday things of life.
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Not throwing out planning. Not throwing out logic. But I am one step closer to understanding the passage that Solomon said.
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In one of his Proverbs, he said this in 16 .9, and I think that this pulls it together for me. The heart of a man plans his ways, but the
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Lord establishes his steps. He set an agenda. We have a plan. But as we raise our foot,
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God determines where it lands. Which direction we go, where we end up. It's in His hands.
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Would you join me in this journey with the Spirit day by day? Remain rooted in the Word of God and ask
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God to show you the way forward by His Spirit. Let's pray. Father, we need
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Your guidance. We need Your direction. So often in life, these major decisions come our way, and some here are even trying to decide sell house, keep the house, buy a new car, don't buy a new car, jobs, all different kinds of decisions that are going on.
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So Father, I ask that You would give us guidance, that You would remind us of Your presence with us day in and day out, that we would seek to honor
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You and bring glory to You through our lives. And Father, if there's anybody here who has not understood the amazing gift that is offered by Jesus Christ on the cross for us,
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His immense love that has been poured out on us, God, that You would help them to come to a place of understanding, help them to come to a place of surrender before You, where they would recognize the awesome and amazing love, love that is like a hurricane, like we sang earlier.
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As I think about the hurricane in my life, that Your love comes to me in difficulties and in hardships and in tough times, not just in the things that make me feel good.
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I thank You for Your love that was poured out for us on the cross. I ask that You would help us to walk in You this week.