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Category: Traditional Worship
The Core 4: Bless the World
Dr. Ron Scates
11/08/2009
Scripture: Acts 14: 19-22
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© Dr. Ronald W. Scates
“For God so loved the world,” last week we saw the Apostle Peter preach that message and crowds came to Christ—3,000 individuals, to be exact. And this morning, we’re going to watch the Apostle Paul, probably the greatest missionary ever, preach that same message and get executed.
This morning brings to an end our sermon series on our Core 4; those 4 essentials of discipleship that Highland Park Presbyterian Church has adopted. We believe that a healthy, biblical faithful balanced life of discipleship will contain these 4 Core elements. Now the sermon series is coming to an end today but something else is beginning today. And that’s for you and me to put to memory those Core 4 essentials: to worship God, to grow in Christ, to build community, bless the world, put those things as parameters, as markers, as guideposts up against our lives because the Holy Spirit wants to use those 4 things to mold and shape you and me more and more into the men and women, boys and girls that God is calling us to be.
This morning, our 4th Core essential is: Bless the World. And to bless the world is the logical, the theological outcome of what happens when you and I intentionally and passionately worship God and pursue growing in Christ and work hard to build community. In fact, when you and I do those things, act those things out in our lives, what the Holy Spirit does is He revs up what you might call a spiritual centrifugal force that propels you and me outside of ourselves, out beyond this sanctuary, out of our comfort zones, out of our parochial arenas and into this world that Christ so loves and actually died for.
You can tell the health of an individual disciple and the health of a church by which way the arrows are pointing in their lives. Are they pointing inward or outward?
You know, to bless the world is not to think nice thoughts about the world or to wish the world well, whatever should come. No, to bless the world as disciples of Jesus Christ is to live our lives in such a way, really to have a world vision out beyond just ourselves, with an intent to bring the Kingdom of God and the gospel of grace into contact with people throughout the world.
Now some of you are pulling back right now; I just know and you’re saying, “Hey, Ron, let me level with you. I really don’t look good in a pith helmet with a machete and mosquito net accessories.”
Well, relax. Relax!
God only calls a tiny, tiny percentage of Christians to ever leave their families, their jobs, their country and go overseas. Now, that could be you. I hope it is but it’s probably not. God calls you and me and all Christians though to bless the world from right where we are. You know, there’s a mission fair going on next door, our Urban Mission Fair and I encourage you to go visit that after worship today and see how Highland Park Presbyterian Church is partnering with over 35 ministries to bring the life-transformational gospel of Jesus Christ into particularly West and South Dallas. I dare you to go over there and pray, “Holy Spirit, if you want me to be a part of one of these, then make it clear,” cause that just could happen.Or you don’t have to bless the world by going overseas or even in the inner city of Dallas. I would encourage you, just as you go through your normal day, wherever you are, shopping the grocery store or whatever, listen for accents. I’m not talking about a Southern drawl or a West Texas whatever, I’m talking about accents that tell you the person you’re dealing with or you’re hearing comes from another nation. You see, we don’t have to go overseas today. God has brought the world right here to Dallas. You know, I’m always encouraging you to invite un-churched friends to come and worship. And oftentimes you say, “I do, but my friends are so cynical.” I guarantee you, when you hear a person with an accent; they’re not cynical about the church. They’re not cynical about the faith, even if they’re not Christians. They will probably accept your invitation and come here. The ways to bless the world are right here under our noses.
This morning I’ve chosen a text to help us to get into this idea of blessing the world. It’s a text that involves a church; it’s the early church, a church that understood that to be a church was to be a missionary society at worship. It’s a text that involves two individuals, two disciples, Paul and Barnabas, a missionary team that understood that to bless the world meant turning their backs on comfort and convenience. It meant taking this gospel of the saving grace of Christ sometimes to a world that’s very cruel and hostile.
I invite you to turn in your bibles, with me now, to the Book of Acts, the 14th chapter, as we look this morning at verses 19 through 22. Please pray with me before we read.
Holy Spirit, open our hearts and minds now to Your Word that we might clearly understand it, that we might gratefully receive it and that we might faithfully apply it to our lives. For Jesus’ sake! Amen.
And now, if you’re able, please stand for the reading of our New Testament lesson this morning, beginning at the 19th verse of Acts, chapter 14. This is the Word of God:Then some Jews came from Antioch and Iconium, and won the crowd over. They stoned Paul and dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead. But after the disciples had gathered around him, he got up and went back into the city. The next day he and Barnabas left for Derbe.
They preached the good news in that city and won a large number of disciples. Then they returned to Lystra, Iconium and Antioch, strengthening the disciples and encouraging them to remain true to the faith. “We must go through many hardships to enter into the kingdom of God,” they said.
Please pray with me again. And now Father, as my words are true to Your Word may they be taken to heart but as my words should stray from Your Word, may they be quickly forgotten. Through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.Please be seated.
Wherever I go around the world, I inevitably come in contact with the influence and the impact of Highland Park Presbyterian Church. Take for instance, the Jesus film. More people have come to Christ through viewing the Jesus film than all of the other evangelistic efforts combined over the past 2,000 years. Do you know where that Jesus film came from?
It was launched and resourced out of this congregation. When I travel around the globe, I can generally come into contact with pastors, missionaries, lay people who were at one time interns or members or on our staff here at Highland Park Presbyterian Church. And they are world-impactors now wherever they are. I constantly see the fingerprints of grace all over this planet left by literally hundreds of mission teams that have been populated by just ordinary Highland Park Presbyterian folk who have gone around the globe.
Clinics—schools—hospitals exist around the world because this congregation has been invested in blessing the world. I continually come into contact with a legacy of world missions, a legacy of world vision that has been left by my predecessors, Bill Elliot and Clayton Bell. And this congregation is committed to remaining a global-impact church, a world-changing church. But that’s only going to happen, that’s only going to continue when you and I understand that to be Highland Park Presbyterian Church is not about having a nice, happy, well-appointed, affluent local congregation where we can kind of get together like a club. But it’s a church on mission. A mission, a call by God to get out beyond these walls and to bless the world, to bring the world, everyone in this world into contact with the kingdom of God and the saving gospel of grace—the gospel of Christ crucified.
Our text this morning finds Paul and Barnabas in the city of Lystra. They’re on a mission to bless the world and what they’ve been doing is they’ve been planting and cultivating churches in Mediterranean towns like Iconium and Antioch and Derbe.
But you know what they’ve discovered? In their mission to bless the world, they’ve found that a lot of the world doesn’t want to be blessed. In fact, much of the world perceives God’s blessing as a curse.
My friends, to bless the world is to face opposition. It’s to take the rugged tough road instead of settling for being Christians in a church that circles the wagons and practices a safe predictable anemic churchianity.
Paul and Barnabas have nothing to do with that. God is calling this church to have nothing to do with that but to be a global-changing church for Jesus Christ. We are and we will continue to do that.
And in the text before us this morning, I see Paul and Barnabas doing some things that give us some clues, at least 4 clues, on how we are to be a church that really is a world-changer in this 21st Century situation we find ourselves in.
By the way, do you know how much God hates nominal Christianity? You might think, “Ron, you’re being a little over-the-top here. That’s an exaggeration.” Read Revelation 3: 14-22. God is calling all of us to get out of ourselves, out of our comfort zones, to be intentional and passionate about blessing this very needy dark lost world for the sake of the gospel. And the first thing this text reveals to you and me, that if we’re going to bless the world that means we’ve got to go against the grain of the surrounding popular culture.
Look at verse 19. Paul and Barnabas find themselves in the city of Lystra, up against a hostile crowd. Jews have come from Antioch and Iconium. And have whipped up this crowd into an anti-gospel frenzy to the point where they want to kill Paul. You see, these Jews that came into town that day didn’t get God’s original promise to Abraham.
Remember God’s promise to Abraham? He said, “Abraham, I’m going to set you apart. I’m going to bless you and all of your descendents—the nation of Israel.” Now these Jews from Iconium and Antioch, they got that part of the promise and they liked that part of the promise.
But they missed the second part. When God said to Abraham, “But Abraham, My blessing upon you is so that you and your descendents will be a blessing to the entire world.” This is the part those Jews had missed.
They find Paul preaching the gospel that says that any who will come can find salvation in Jesus Christ. Even if you’re not a Jew! To those Jewish ears that was blasphemy. “The promise was reserved for only us,” they thought. So what Paul was preaching to their ears was blasphemy—a crime punishable by death.
Folks, if we’re faithful about blessing the world, we will face opposition.
Today is the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. Around the world today, many Christians have not had the privilege you and I have had of just easily comfortably coming, sitting, in a sanctuary and openly praising and worshipping the only God that can save. Instead, not just today but every day of their lives, these 100+ million Christians are faced with deprivation and oppression and persecution and even martyrdom because they refuse to have an ultimate allegiance to anyone or anything other than Jesus Christ. Which reminds us that a second reality of what it means to bless the world is that that’s not going to happen through our lives unless we are willing to lay down our lives for the sake of the gospel.
Look at verse 19 again. The crowd decides to kill Paul. They begin to stone him and they stone him to death. Now some of you are thinking, “I’m not sure Paul was really killed in this passage.” Well, I believe he was. And the reason I believe that is because I did some research on stoning. Did you know that stoning is the oldest method of execution known to human beings? Stoning was never ever for punishment. It was solely for execution. In the 1st Century, a typical stoning meant you put somebody down in a pit or you buried them from the waist down and then you invited the crowd to pick up, not pebbles—stones, rocks, and just pelt that person until the crowd was convinced that they were dead. But to make sure, the final thing was the big guys came with the boulders, skull-crushing boulders, to make sure that the job was done. This crowd in Lystra is convinced Paul is dead. They drag his dead corpse out of the city and leave it there.
Have you discovered in your own life that not only to bless the world means you’ve got to swim upstream but have you discovered that, well, you and I will never really come to life until we’ve found that one thing that we are willing to die for?
Paul and Barnabas knew that the greatest thing in the world to die for was the advancement of the kingdom of God. So they’re willing to lay down their lives for this.
And you and I will never really understand what it means to bless the world until we realize and accept the fact that this really is a life and death matter. But when you and I are faithful to blessing the world, do you know what happens? Miracles happen!
I believe verse 20, take a look, is nothing less than a description of a resuscitation miracle. Why do I believe that? Because I believe Paul was dead. I believe he was stoned to death. But in verse 20, we see the disciples gather around him and suddenly he pops up to life. And the Greek verb that’s used there is the verb anistas. Track that verb through the New Testament and you find that it’s always translated, “raised up,” or “resurrected” from the dead. This is not a resurrection, only Christ has been resurrected. It is a resuscitation on par with I believe Jesus’ resuscitation of Lazarus, who was dead for 4 days in the tomb.
Talk to people who are blessing the world, particularly missionaries in the majority world and you will hear stories of the miraculous. To bring that home, let me remind you of one of our own Kenya mission teams. Just two years ago, 2007, one of our Kenya mission teams was returning to the place where they were staying, late one night on a remote jungle road. Suddenly they were ambushed by robbers, the two vans forced over to the side of the road, the robbers with guns and machetes told all the people to get out of the vans and to lay down on the ground. Now 12 of the 13 people that were laying on the ground could not understand what the robbers were saying but one of them could. One of our team spoke Swahili—Cyprian and Cyprian knew that they were saying, “If they don’t give us everything that they have, we’ll kill them.” They said to Cyprian, “Tell your friends, give us everything or you die.” Cyprian got that message to everybody but what happened was the group, the robbers got angrier and angrier as people would turn over their watches, their jewelry, cameras, cell phones, but then they would discover another one of those things on somebody or in the van. Well, they had pretty much robbed everybody of everything and there was only one thing left for the robbers to do and that was to kill our folks. The people I talked to that were laying there on the ground were convinced they were going to die. They had made their peace with the Lord and many of them told me that the Holy Spirit began to prompt them to pray for deliverance. For deliverance! Well, the robbers were about to do whatever it is that they were finally going to do when all of the sudden headlights came over the hill. Now what in the world was a vehicle doing out on a remote jungle road, somewhere around 11:00 p.m. at night. But those lights were enough to scare the robbers. They scattered into the jungle. Our folks jumped up. The keys were missing in one of the vans. One of the vans did have keys. Everybody piled into that one tiny van and as they got ready to pull out of there, this truck came driving down the road. A nondescript panel truck and as it went by there was one word on the side of that truck—Delivery. That’s enough to shake your faith in Richard Dawkins. Which reminds us of one more thing about what it means to bless the world. That when you and I as individual Christians and as a congregation take God’s call seriously to bless the world, our lives often begin to display what you might call a crazy counterintuitive courage.
In January of 2008, I pulled Cyprian, our African pastor aside and I said, “Look, Cyprian, you need to understand; the almost execution of our Kenya mission team, including yourself and the violent blow up of Kenya last month during the presidential election has pretty much killed our Kenya ministry. Now, don’t lose heart, in a couple of years, we’ll try to resurrect this thing after things have settled down. I mean, Cyprian, even if we offered a Kenya mission trip this year, no one would be that nutty, that crazy, at Highland Park Pres. to sign up for it.” He was chagrined but he agreed and so that was it.
Imagine my amazement, my thrill, my surprise, as, I believe it was March of 2008, I was walking down the hall near my office, two people were conversing and I thought I heard them say something about Kenya mission teams that summer. I wheeled around and I said, “What are you all talking about?” They said, “Oh, we were just talking about the 3 teams that are going to Kenya this summer that are full.” I said, “What!” “Oh yeah, Ron, we’ve got 3 teams and there’s a waiting list,” and boy, did I ever underestimate the passion and courage of Highland Park folks to bless the world. And you know what, those Kenya teams were populated by many of those same folks that lay on the ground waiting to be executed.Look at verses 20 through 22 of your text. What does Paul do? He’s been stoned to death in Lystra, his body dragged out of the city, I believe there was a resuscitation miracle and what does he do? He goes right back into Lystra. And then what does the text tell us? He goes from there to Derbe where he preaches the gospel and many come to Christ. But then he goes to Iconium and Antioch; that’s where those folks that stirred up the crowd had originally come from.
Is Paul absolutely nuts? As nutty as John Knox! Back during the Reformation, Mary, Queen of Scots said to reformer John Knox, as she was committing him to a ship where he would be down in a galley as a slave pulling an oar, she said, “This time you’re going to be a galley slave. You ever set foot in Scotland again and I will have you beheaded.” Well, Knox spends a number of years pulling an oar as a slave. He does his time. He’s released in France. Where does John Knox go? (Ron speaks to a man named Jack who is in the sanctuary that he sitting right there beside the window of John Knox.) Where does he go? Back to Scotland! “Give me Scotland or I die,” becomes John Knox’s motto. And it’s Mary, Queen of Scots who loses her head, not John. And the whole church of Scotland goes Presbyterian and you and I are sitting here in these pews this morning simply because we are direct descendents of that crazily courageous Presbyterian reformer.
“For God so loved the world.” For you and I to understand what that really means, means that you and I will focus our lives on doing whatever it takes to answer God’s call to connect people here and around the globe with the kingdom of God and the gospel of Christ crucified. The late Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, once said that the church of Jesus Christ is the one institution in society that exists primarily for the sake of its non-members.My friends, when you and I get that then we bless the world. When we understand that God’s promise to us is that He’s blessing us in order to be a blessing then we get the Christian faith.
I firmly believe that every disciple of Jesus Christ, I don’t care who you are, what color you are, how much money you make, I believe every disciple and every congregation is gifted, blessed by God with everything, spiritual gifts, talents, resources, money, everything totally necessary to carry out whatever God’s call is upon that individual or congregation. I believe that firmly but in 30 years of ministry, I have yet to find one congregation, including this one, that’s firing on eight in that area. God is calling Highland Park Presbyterian Church to be a world-changer, a global-impacting congregation. We are and that’s our call into the future.But we’re hamstrung; this economy has hamstrung us. Not that the resources aren’t here; they are. My friends, on the church calendar in most churches, today is Stewardship Sunday. That’s when everybody comes and commits their pledge cards; after having sat through a month of sermons that have cajoled people to give to the kingdom of God and a high-powered stewardship program.
When I came here, we got rid of all that. We have no stewardship season. We have no pledge cards. We have a faith-based budget. But when it comes to moments like this, when our calling is to be a world-impacting church and we find ourselves hamstrung then as your Senior Pastor, in line with the text, I’ve got to get up here and say, “We’ve got to forward, folks.” We bless the world when we’re faithful to the Word of God. And there’s no way getting around it but I wish we could; no way of getting around the fact that you and I will begin to bless the world when we begin to tithe as the starting point of how we invest in what God is already doing around the world. You know, He doesn’t need your money. He doesn’t need mine. He doesn’t need us to go overseas or into West Dallas. But God is so gracious that He decides to give us the joy and the privilege of working in and through our lives and our resources as you heard Chris Smith say earlier in the day, where lives are transformed and lights go on and people come to Christ and then are a blessing to others. God has blessed this church with affluence, influence, bodies, bucks and buildings, not to be a complacent circle-the-wagons, inward-focused, nice club. He’s gifted all of that to us, blessed us with that because He has mighty, mind-boggling plans for how this church can transform this planet for Jesus Christ.
For God so loved the world! The only question left for you and me to answer as we leave here today is this one: Will we allow God to love and bless the world through us? I know what your answer is.
Thanks be to God.
Let’s pray. Lord God, thank You that you don’t call us to sit around and just look at each other and be focused on what’s comfortable and convenient. But You call us to a mission. You call us to take the rugged road. You call us to partner with You in a very lost and needy world to the point where we can see how our lives make a difference. And so Lord, fill us with Your Holy Spirit this morning, rev up that spiritual centrifugal force that throws us out of here into this world where we can be Your hands and feet, where we can be little Christs. And know the joy of a world that’s transformed by the only One that can save. Even Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.