Clough Acts Lesson 31

First Missionary Expedition – Acts 13:1-3

…the answer to that is that, as I said when I went through Acts 10:39, is that Peter is linking the death of Christ with the Old Testament criminal law code which specified that the victim of capital punishment had to have his body hanging by the roadside as a sort of billboard to remind ongoing motorists of the danger of breaking God’s law in those days.

In Acts 11:18 God grants repentance, yet God holds men responsible to repent. Is this not like faith also in that God holds all men responsible to believe, yet men have no faith in and of themselves? Yes it is; depraved limited man by himself does not want to believe in Christ unless God in His grace works on that person.

Under the 10% tax of the Old Testament, was it based on income or capital assets? It was based on income; it was never based on property or capital assets as such; that’s a pagan notion that we’ve inherited in our society, it doesn’t come out of the Scriptures.

Let’s turn to Acts 13 and we start here in a further stage in the development of the Christian church’s mission. We’ve seen in Acts 10 how the Church was led to the third stage of the gospel; it’s not that the Church deliberately thought it through but the Holy Spirit in His sanctifying unconscious way moved the Church into a position where it was operating correctly. We have studied in Acts 11 the incident in verse 19-26 where during that part of time there was massive teaching program by the apostles. The missionary enterprise of the early church was built from start to beginning on teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, and more teaching. The evangelism was not done in the local church assembly. The evangelism was done in the streets and in the local assemblies they were devoted strictly to the teaching process and administration of the ordinances and worship. Then in verses 27-30 we studied the crisis of the Church in meeting the problem of famine and they met it in a very, very wise way and we can still learn a lot of lessons from how the Church met that physical crisis.

Then in Acts 12 last Sunday we showed how the Church met the crisis of a collision with the state, how, when the government intervenes in church affairs, and that doesn’t mean regulating how many bathrooms you have per 100 people, or how many parking spaces you have to have for so much pew footage, it’s not talking about that kind of regulation, which is probably the domain of government, but the regulation of what the Church shall teach and not teach, the curriculum of Christian schools. That is strictly forbidden by the Word of God and that has become the item of contention. That’s what the Ohio State Supreme Court issue is all about and this is what the roll-off controversy in Corpus Christi is all about, shall Austin or shall Jesus Christ discern what shall be the content of Christian organization. And there can be no compromise, there just can be no compromise in this point and we are very, very close in this state of having a civil disobedience situation develop where Christians who run Christian schools are going to have to disobey the state and run them the way they want to or close the schools. It’s just got to that point. So Acts 12 and its message is very contemporary and the conclusion of Acts 12 you saw God’s damnation upon government authorities that intervene in the affairs of the local church.

Now in Acts 13-14 we have the first missionary journey of the book of Acts and we’ll be interested in some of the details of this missionary journey because this was the period during the developing maturity of the Church. You see, at first the Church in Acts 10 just barely evangelized one Gentile, that’s all. And then in Acts 11 you have the Church beginning to evangelize in and around the city of Antioch. Now in Acts 13 and 14 you have missionaries sent out but the local church doesn’t finance the missionaries. The missionaries that we will see sent out on the first missionary journeys were wealthy people who paid their own way; they didn’t ask the local church to pick up the tab. The first time the local church supported missionary activity was in Philippi and that’s mentioned in the epistle to the Philippians but until that point missions were self-supporting.

Now we have many, many lessons to learn as we go through this and as I’ve emphasized time and time again in the book of Acts, for us practically living in the 20^th century one of the great lessons that you can pick up from Acts, it’ll help you out a lot, is to watch how the Holy Spirit guided the Christian. Watch how, in fact, the Christians weren’t looking, really, to do God’s will but yet were guided any way into doing God’s will. And of course that’s the picture of the perfect rebellious sheep.

Now the other thing to notice and this is what I’m going to try to stress beginning this morning is that the guidance that came, may be 95% of it, was common sense, was circumstantial; it was things that you have available to you just like Peter and Paul had available to them. So you’ve got the tools, it’s just a question of becoming skillful in using these tools. Now the book of Acts will point out the supernatural intervention by the Holy Spirit and we’ll mention that but I’m going to try to kind of lean heavy the other way because in the book of Acts you have the open canon of Scripture, you have the situation where the Holy Spirit is leading the apostles in a slightly different way than he’s going to lead you, but to make it as applicable as possible I will deliberately play up the human side of it, I’ll deliberately play up the sociological factors, I’ll deliberately play up the circumstantial evidences that they had to go on, in hope that you’ll begin to see that these Christians didn’t just follow God in a shot out of the blue; they followed the Lord by common sense and we’ll see just how much common sense was involved, even in the apostle’s leading starting in verse 1.

Reading verses 1-3, “Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers, as Barnabas, and Symeon, who was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, who had been brought up with Herod, the tetrarch, and Saul. [2] As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Spirit said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. [3] And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.” There’s the beginning of the first missionary journey.

Now let’s look at some of the details. In verse 1 it says “there were in the church,” the word is kata, a Greek preposition plus the accusative, and it’s a distributive use of kata. That means it was distributed in the Church, two classes of people, prophets and teachers. And though we cannot comment in detail this morning on it, there are such things as spiritual gifts given to the body of Christ. If this morning you are one of those who has trusted in Christ, that means that you have at least one spiritual gift. That means, therefore, as you follow the Lord, as you mature, this gift should surface to your consciousness; you should be acute after a while that hey, you know, I’ve got an area in which I can serve the Lord here. I’ve got a capacity to serve Him; in fact I enjoy serving Him in this area, and other people are blessed by it. It may be in the field of exhortation; we have several people in this congregation that have the gift of exhortation; that means they have the encouragement; it means that not necessarily they can teach a class, maybe they’re not teachers but it means they can sit down and they almost kind of smell you out when you’re depressed and they always have an encouraging word to say to you. Now there is the gift of exhortation actually functioning. Conversely, when these people are out of fellowship they always get in your way. That’s another sign of the gift of exhortation, it can be used in fellowship and out of fellowship; all the gifts can. Then there’s the gift of teaching, the ability to communicate truth and content, and several have this. So we have different people with different gifts. We have people with the gift of helps; we have the gift of management; we need men on the Board who have the ability to manage the Lord’s resources. It’s not up to the pastor to delve into the church finances; that is a job of the deacons and those men with the gift of management and ruling. Then there are other gifts that the New Testament epistles talk about. Many, many different gifts.

It’s ironic and sort of a footnote to this whole thing, that the only gift listed in the New Testament that never obligates you to anything is the gift of tongues, all you have to do is flap it in the breeze. But isn’t it interesting that in our day that is exactly the gift that is supposedly undergoing great revival, great sign of the Spirit’s moving, that we have the tremendous gift of tongues. Now if the Holy Spirit were really involved in a renewal work, isn’t it strange that we don’t see the gift of teaching shown more often? Isn’t it strange we don’t see the gift of giving? Isn’t it strange we don’t see other gifts, the gift of helps? Imagine somebody saying I’m just blessed by God, I’ve got the gift of helps. What would happen? You’d say fine, there are five areas where you can use it right now. God just blessed me, I’ve got the gift of giving. Fine, here’s the plate. So all the gifts would obligate you to some definite area of service except that one and it’s ironic that that is exactly the one that is being emphasized. It shows you a little bit about the psychology, the purely human non-spiritual, non-supernatural factor; said bluntly, laziness, that is operating under the cloak of piety.

So in Acts 13:1 we have two of these classes of people: prophets and teachers. The prophets were men who had apparently the gift of prophecy and exhortation and them who are called teachers may have been pastor-teachers or they just had the gift of teaching itself. But five men are listed after that display and if you have the Greek text, the Greek at this point is more precise than the English text. You see, when we want to list something in the English we have to go through commas, semicolons, ands, both/and, and we have a lot of syntactical gimmicks to break a list up into two categories. The Greeks had a neat way of doing it, they had a particle that looked like this; te and then they’d go for a while and they’d put another te, and then they would have kai, kai, kai, kai inside that; the two te’s would divide the list in half, and sure enough in the list of five men the first three are separated from the second group, number four and five in the list are separated from one, two and three. And that flows with the two nouns, prophets and teachers.

So the first three men here are said to be the prophets; the second two are said to be the teachers. So that means that Symeon, Lucius and Barnabas are classified as prophets, and Manaen and Saul are classified as teachers. So we get the general classification, then it’s broken down into two parts and five men are listed.

Now I promised that as we went through Acts I would give you the human, the sociologically and the natural factors used in divine guidance and here’s where we begin. We’re going to study each of these men and show how they were interrelated and how common sense was used to lead these men into the Lord’s service.

Barnabas; let’s look at Barnabas. Barnabas was a wealthy person; we know that he was wealthy because in the book of Acts a big thing is made out of his holdings and he sold these holdings and gave the money to the Church. So he’s a man of independent means, we would say. He was a man who therefore could go on a missionary enterprise, isn’t he, because Barnabas was a man who had his own financial resources. He did not have to be supported by a local church. He could support himself on the field. He was a Cypriot by nature, so let’s look at these characteristics: wealthy, and he’s a Cypriot, he came from the island of Cyprus. What does that mean? Where did the first missionary journey go to first? The isle of Cyprus. You see, these are the natural factors that operated in the guidance; these people just weren’t looking at lights in the sky, the Holy Spirit leads 15 degrees and then divert and go to 280, there’s none of that stuff in the book of Acts. It’s just natural common sense factors and so Barnabas is a natural for missions because he’s independently wealthy, he can finance it; two they go to Cyprus because that’s where his business contacts are. He has a natural “in” with a group of people there. He is known, he has contacts. So it’s obvious, just like it would be if you were a salesman of a firm, you go where your contacts are. So the first mission went to where the contacts were. They didn’t expect the Holy Spirit to ex nihilo make contacts out of nothing; they used their head: common sense.

What else about Barnabas? Barnabas is the uncle of John Mark, the author of the second Gospel. Barnabas’ sister is Mark’s mother. And it was Barnabas’ sister who owned the house in southwest Jerusalem where probably the last supper was held. Again I want you to notice something else about these first Christians; you see how it ran in the family. You know when you move from one part of the world to another part of the world and you meet somebody that knows your friend and you kind of say gee, it’s a small world. You’re going to see that in the book of Acts again and again; it’s a small world, these people meet each other running and going, they can be in Rome, Antioch, Jerusalem and they’re all related; again and again this happens in the book of Acts and we’ll try to show this, a natural common sense cause/effect operating.

Barnabas’ sister is Mark’s mother and she’s the owner, again wealthy, it shows you this family was well-to-do, she was the wealthy home owner in which the first church building was erected. So now look at wealth for an example. How was wealth used in the first Church. Well, the first building was donated by a wealthy family. The Church depended on wealthy people; that was before they had progressive income tax and destroyed wealth. And so they also had wealth in the first missionary enterprise; it was financed by wealthy people, nothing wrong with wealth. Think of that for a moment, first church building in the history of the Christian given by wealthy people; first mission financed by wealthy people. So wealth has its place and Barnabas is one of those key men.

Now there’s something else. John Mark is his cousin; now who else accompanies Barnabas and Saul on the first mission but John Mark. So obviously there’s a reason for John Mark coming along, the Holy Spirit didn’t say ooh, [can’t understand word], it wasn’t that at all, it was the case that he simply said I need a helper and John Mark likes to hang around and see what’s going on so we’ll take him along. It was just common sense. But there was also another factor; John Mark lived where? He lived in Jerusalem. When did John Mark live in Jerusalem? He lived in Jerusalem at the time that Jesus ministered. So therefore what does John Mark know that Barnabas doesn’t? John has met Jesus face to face.

Turn to Mark for a little interesting episode. Mark 14:51, these are natural factors that just kind of flow, flowed very, very naturally out of the whole situation. These kinds of things God will use in your life to guide you. And don’t think you’re not being led by the Spirit when you use common sense. In verse 50, the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is arrested. “And they all forsook him, and fled. [51] And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body. And the young men laid hold on him. [52] And he left the linen cloth, and fled from the named.” Now Mark had an unforgettable experience. He ran in the nude all the way from the Garden of Gethsemane to southwest Jerusalem where his mother’s house was. He was the first streaker on record in the history of Christian church. So John Mark was an eyewitness evidence of the Lord; he saw Christ crucified, he was there when they were praying, so naturally who was Saul and Barnabas going to take but somebody who’s young, who thinks back, who knew the data of what went on, who could act as an eyewitness interpreter of the events of New Testament history. So this is why, later on when we read in Acts 13 who’s picked but Barnabas, and Saul, and Mark; it’s not some hocus pocus thing, it flows out of the natural sequence of events.

Acts 13:1, we’ve looked at Barnabas, now let’s look at the next man. The next man on the list is Symeon. I want you to get used to seeing these men as normal human beings that have two ears, two eyes, a nose and two legs just like you do. They don’t have to walk sideways through a door to get their halo through; it’s not that kind of person. These people have sin natures just like you, just like me, and God the Holy Spirit can use them. Now who’s this Symeon. He’s listed closely with Lucius of Cyrene. Cyrene is a Greek colony on the North African coast. And it says that Symeon is “called Niger,” which means… it’s the early word for negro, and he’s a black man and it shows you that in the fellowship of the early church one of the leading prophets was a black man, just like in Acts, the black man, the eunuch, that was led to Christ going to Africa. It shows you, therefore, the nature of the fellowship. But more so, we can’t be dogmatic here because the text doesn’t put the word Cyrene with Symeon, it just puts it with Lucius, but if Symeon… if this is the man who is also from Cyrene, as was Lucius, he has the most interesting history.

Turn back to Mark 15:21, the scene of Christ carrying His cross. He goes through the streets, He’s endured the beating at the hands of the Roman soldiers, He’s weak and He drops the cross. And so verse 21, “And they compel one Simon, of Cyrene, who passed by,” to carry the cross. If so, then the Symeon we meet in Acts 13:1, the black man, is the man who carried Christ’s cross for Him. If that’s the case then we also have an interesting fit with another famous passage of Scripture, and that is in Genesis 9 where the three sons of Noah, Ham, Shem and Japheth, each have their part to do in history, and it’s interesting that Ham would be the one who cares for man’s physical needs, and when the men came to minister to Christ it is the black man who cares for Christ’s physical needs by supplying someone to carry the heavy cross up to Golgotha.

Symeon is this man; it also notes in Mark 15:21 that he is “the father of Alexander and Rufus.” Okay, his son is Rufus, it leads to an interesting statement because now we know who Rufus is, he occurs time and time again in the New Testament epistles and Acts, so if you turn to Romans 16:13 a little note is made about Rufus. Think of these people as people that would… some time in the future, when you’re face to face with the Lord, you’ll get a chance to talk to, these aren’t just names in the text, they’re living beings. Paul says, “Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine.” Now isn’t that interesting. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean that it’s literally Paul’s mother but that Symeon’s wife apparently cared a lot for Paul. Paul had been dispossessed from his home in Tarsus because of his dad got mad at him, because the parents sent him down to Jerusalem to go to college, to rabbinic college and he came back a seminary student in the Christian faith; his father blew and he kicked him out of the house. And so he had no home, and none of the social relationships of a family type situation. And so apparently at that time Symeon and his wife lived, not in Cyrene, in North Africa, they came from there, they didn’t live there, they didn’t live in Jerusalem but they lived in Antioch. And when Paul stayed at Antioch he stayed in the house of Symeon and his wife.

Now Symeon and his wife have a son, Rufus, who was led to Christ. Rufus, later on, obviously in Romans 16:13 he’s in Rome now; interestingly while he was in Rome, for those of you of English ancestry this might be a little side note, background of your family tree some where way, way, way, way, way, way, way back, but there was an English King by the name of Caradoc in 52 AD who was imprisoned by the Roman armies, who were at that time invading Britain. This is before the Anglos and the Saxons and so on, this is ancient, ancient Britain. And the Roman armies went up to Britain and they captured this man, Caradoc, and brought him and his family down to Rome. Caradoc had a daughter who was then adopted by Claudius Caesar and renamed Claudia. Claudia fell in love with Rufus and they were married. And Claudia and Rufus were led to Christ by Paul. And so by 52 AD you have the Christians already evangelizing the royal family of Britain… as early as 52 AD. So it shows you that they didn’t have to wait until the Reformation, or it didn’t have to wait until 1200 and Patrick was not the first missionary to Britain. The missionary to Britain and the Word of God got to Britain through the royal family during the apostolic era. So this explains why in many places in Europe you have had (quote) “a high culture.” It is not because the WASP, the White Anglo Saxons, it is not because the WASP is a superior racial stock in history that he has produced a superior civilization, it is only because he has been exposed to the Word of God for about 19 centuries, much longer than other racial stocks. And so the issue is not race; the issue is the length of exposure to the Word of God. That’s a side on Symeon.

Now let’s go to the next name on the list in Acts 13:1. We have Barnabas, wealthy, his sister lived in Jerusalem, his cousin is an eyewitness to the gospel. You have Symeon who himself was an eyewitness to the crucifixion of Christ and directly involved in it. Lucius of Cyrene we don’t know; we’ve lost track of him, there’s not to much Biblical on him so I can’t trace him.

“Manaen, who had been brought up with Herod, the tetrarch,” now Manaen, number four on the list, is the first teacher; the first three are prophets. Now Manaen, let’s look at this one; actually Manaen today is a modern Jewish name; in fact one of the leaders in the minority government in the state of Israel is Manaen Begin who is one of the great leaders in the war of Independence in 1948 and his first name… so it’s a classic Jewish first name and here Manaen is said to be brought up with Herod. Now this is not the Herod Agrippa that died in Acts 12; this is Herod Antipas. Now Herod Antipas was the ruler during Christ’s day in the area of Transjordan, which is now the state of Jordan, that area. He was the one who related to the same Herodian family that was damned that we mentioned last week from old grandfather Herod on down through his sons, but Herod Antipas is the one who bears the name, The Fox. That’s the one that Jesus said, The Fox, it was a term of sarcasm that Jesus Himself used of this particular ruler. But also interestingly, Herod Antipas followed, or inherited the cruelty of the Herodian family at large. Herod had a very vicious wife and he had a daughter, and of course, like mother, like daughter, and his daughter was very vicious, she took after mama. And mama didn’t like the prophets of God and particularly she didn’t like one John the Baptist who got angry at her one day and called her an adulteress and she felt insulted, and so she maneuvered her little daughter one day when the daughter was going to have a birthday party to ask for John the Baptist’s head for a birthday present, wrap it up and present it, so she did. And that’s how Herod was the murderer of John the Baptist.

Now what this verse is telling us is something most interesting in the light of child rearing and human psychology. This man, Manaen was brought up with Herod, meaning they were the same age. You know when you have children, you move into a neighborhood and you wonder what kind of kids they’re going to play with. Well, the royal families in the ancient world had the same problem; what kind of kids are my prince and princesses going to play with. You had to be very careful that whoever it was wouldn’t kidnap them and take off. So what they did to maintain security is they would bring select families that they were sure of, high class cultured families, into the compound of security; the whole family, mama, grandfather, uncles, aunts, and most of all the children would move in so they could have the same sand box and the same swing set and the whole thing, and they would grow up with the prince and princess. So Manaen who was a child who was a member of one of these families and he shared the same sandbox as Herod Antipas when Herod Antipas was a little boy. All right, they grew up together in that environment. Manaen’s grandfather is known in history as the one who predicted Herod the Great would be great. So that’s probably why Manaen, the grandson in the family, was with Herod Antipas.

But now here’s the interesting point, the Holy Spirit never puts a surplus of words in the text. When you read a note like we read here in verse 1 that this man was brought up with Herod, the Holy Spirit means for you to say why? Why is this note put in here? Several reasons, not only does it show you background on Manaen but it demonstrates the principle that the first divine institution prevailed over social environment. Here were two boys that shared the same toys, grew up in the same sandbox, swung in the same swing if they had swings then, slid down the same slides, played football if they had football then, grew up, went to school together and one turns into a murderer of the prophets and the other turns into a teacher of the Christian faith; they came from the same social background. So against the determinate, and against the behaviorist, we have freedom of volition demonstrated in history, where two boys in the same home, one grows up to be a vicious cursed apostate and the other grows up to be a tremendous grace oriented teacher of the Word of God. That’s Manaen’s situation.

So now we add number four to the team of resources. We’ve got Barnabas with his wealth and his contacts in Jerusalem, Symeon with his eyewitness contact; we’ve got Manaen with his direct contact with the hierarchy of government, this guy having grown up in the royal court knew all the government officials, all over the eastern end of the Mediterranean. So these men listed in verse 1 are not small men. They’re not just some Joe Snodgrass that trusted Christ and five minutes later he’s out leading a professional evangelistic campaign. These are men who were invested in high places, trained well, and had great contacts. Now the last one, of course, Saul, who was the theological genius of the five.

Now it says in verse 2 that the men were serving the Lord and fasting. Well, they fast in the early church when there’s a great decision to be made, when prayer is a problem and they have to think clearly the men always fasted. There are several reasons for this. One is that getting a meal in the ancient world was a mess, it took hours and hours to eat, and so forth. That was one thing. The second reason is when your body, GI track is consuming energy, food, it takes that energy away from your mind, and so fasting was a system of freeing your mind for spiritual judgment. It is a definite aid in crisis situations, and the Christians, when they got into a mess and had to make a major decision in their life would get alone with the Word of God, and doctrine, and paper and pencil and fast for a couple of days, just take a glass of water or something with you and live on that for a couple of days; you won’t die, you’ve got enough fat cells in your body to last you for 2-3 weeks so no sweat. So in this situation you would have nothing to do but concentrate on a decision.

Now the very fact that those two verbs are there in verse 2, they were ministering and fasting tells you something about what was happening here. They were already considering the missionary enterprise; it apparently had a source of investigation so that when you suddenly read at the end of verse 2, the Holy Spirit says, “Separate me Barnabas and Saul,” it doesn’t come as a flash of lightening. You know, one day they’re out doing something and all of a sudden they get a call to the mission field. It didn’t happen that way. They apparently had been disturbed, had been agitated, had been confused about this issue of what shall we do here in Antioch, because they had already got together and were considering the question. And as they did so then the Holy Spirit called them forth.

Now we admit that if this is the Holy Spirit sovereignly and supernaturally calling them but lesson; application to our situation today, please notice that of the five men the Holy Spirit picked one teacher and one prophet, He doesn’t pick two prophets, He doesn’t pick two teachers; He picks men of diversified spiritual gifts for His team; common sense reigns. The Holy Spirit okays it, yes, but common sense is involved. The Holy Spirit doesn’t lead in a way just totally foreign to our common sense. He picks one teacher, one prophet.

Look at what else the Holy Spirit does in this verse. He picked one wealthy man who was able to pay his own way and that of Saul; Saul didn’t have any money, apparently Symeon didn’t have any money. So a wealthy man was chosen; common sense, who else is going to do it. Yeah, the Holy Spirit can rain money from the sky but when was the last time He did that. Most of the time it’s through normal means. So a wealthy person is picked, the second piece of common sense in the leading of the Holy Spirit.

The third piece of common sense; of the two teachers, which one is chosen to go west? The one who is the rabbinic student and sharp in his theology. Symeon, Manaen may have been a good teacher but his value to the Church was in the east where he knew all the officials of the government, so why not leave him in Antioch and take Saul, who doesn’t have the contacts in the east, but has contacts in the west and use him on the team that’s going to penetrate into the western area.

So the point I’m making about verse 2 is that when the word “separate” comes don’t think of the eenie, meenie minee moe, who we gonna pick; it’s rather that I think we ought to do it this way and let’s pray and see if the Holy Spirit vindicates that choice. That’s probably the mechanism that was going on here. And that should make it a lot easier for some of you to apply this to your own personal life, to realize that there wasn’t some strange spooky leading going on.

Now notice something else; the Holy Spirit says, separate him “for the work,” “the work,” not works, plural, but “work,” singular. Why is the noun singular? The Holy Spirit has an entire ministry that He’s looking at; He’s not looking at the pieces of the ministry, He’s looking at the overall impact of this ministry. What about that overall impact? Why take a prophet and a teacher? What about this work? What is the work going to be like. We have to stop here and go on some background of words and then a passage of Scripture. So turn first to Ephesians 4:11, we’ll look at one word there and then we’ll develop it a little bit.

Ephesians 4:11, the word “apostle” has two meanings in Scripture. One is a technical meaning, the highly narrow technical meaning when it is used of the twelve plus Paul. Whenever it is used for these men you’ll see it, the twelve, the twelve said this, the twelve were there, or you’ll see something like this in the context, “the apostle” or “apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ” end quote, there’ll be that technical expression somewhere embedded in the context somewhere. So its pretty easy to determine this use of the word “apostle.” These guys are the spiritual dictators of the early Church. But then there’s a second way in which “apostles” is used and that’s the way it’s going to be used in the sense of Acts 12:2-3, Barnabas is called an apostle, he was sent out, but he’s not one of the twelve. This is what we call the lesser, general sense of apostle. And the lesser general sense of apostle means that they are church planters; their job is to penetrate pagan heathen areas, win people to Christ, organize them together into a local church and move on to the next place; win some more people to Christ, organize them into a local church; move on to a third place. These men never stay in one place; they are always roving, always moving.

Now in Ephesians 4:11 you have the ministries divided; there are certain ministries and you can’t mix these ministries. We’ll look at this and I’ll show you where this is being wrong applied today in Christian circles. “He gave some apostles,” now here in this case this is the technical use of the word apostle, that’s all over, prophets are all over, Ephesians 2:20, when the canon closed that ended; these are temporary gifts. But while these gifts were genuine, the apostles and prophets, as well as the third group of people on this list, evangelists, were roving ministries. That means they were not localized at some point. They would move from one area to another area to another area to another area, always on the move, from one area of positive volition to another area; they would not stay in areas of negative volition, they were flexible. So watch the strategy; you have the apostles, the prophets and the evangelists and they’re flexible. They’re like a mobile military force that goes from area to area to area.

Now the next group, “pastors and teachers,” connected by the kai, those are fixed; you can show that by the way they are used in the Bible, the way they’re used in the New Testament. The pastor-teachers will come into an area, pick up one of the local churches organized by these guys and sit there and develop it. The ministry of a pastor-teacher is a different kind of ministry than the evangelist. Now we can cross off apostles and prophets, they’re not functioning today. Let’s just talk about today, 20^th century situation. We’ve still got two classes of men corresponding to the two classes in Acts 13. We’ve got evangelists and we’ve got pastor-teachers. We’ve also got people with the gift of teaching who aren’t pastors and they can float, but the idea is that you’ve got people who are flexible. Now what do we do in all our great human genius in Christian organizations? We structure a very rigid missionary organization, structured for what we call a field of work, Sudan, South Africa, Central America, something like that and we say you’ve been called to the Central American mission field. Now where do you get that from Scripture. There’s not a call geographically for an evangelist; the call is not to a geographical point, the call is to do evangelism, not the place. The place is left unstated because by definition the evangelist moves around picking off the places where people are interested in the Word. They aren’t fixed. And so ironically we’ve taken the evangelist and the church planters and we’ve locked them down to fixed geographical areas, which the New Testament doesn’t say.

Then, if this typical sheep action at work, then we turn around and take the pastor-teachers and what do we do with the pastor-teachers in most denominations every three years? Move them from one church to the next. Do you see what we’re going? We’re actually making the pastor-teachers flexible and the evangelists fixed. And the New Testament passage is exactly reverse to this. In the New Testament it was the evangelists that moved around. I’ll prove it to you, here’s quotation from Eusebius, one of the early church historians. “They,” that is the apostles and evangelists, “They preached the gospel more and more widely and scattered the saving seed of the kingdom of heaven broadly throughout the whole Roman Empire, for indeed most of the disciples of that time, animated by the divine word with a more ardent love for philosophy than ourselves, had already fulfilled the command of the Savior and had distributed their goods to the needy. And then started out on long journeys they performed the office of evangelist, being filled with the desire to preach Christ to those who had not yet heard the word of faith deliver to them the divine gospel,” notice the two things they were doing. They would move in, they would evangelize and what? It says that they would “deliver to them the divine gospel.” What’s that? Give them the Bible to read, that’s what. “And when they had only laid the foundations of the faith in foreign places they then appointed others as pastors and teachers and entrusted them with the nurture of those that had already been brought in, while they themselves went on again to other countries and other nations with a grace and cooperation of God.”

You see how different it was? And what we have done in the 20^th century in almost every denomination, including our own independent circles, we have completely reversed the strategy and then we wonder what’s happening, how come we’re not evangelizing, how come we’re not reaching the world for Christ. It’s very simple, we’re not using the gifts the way they were designed to be used, that’s why. So we’ve got a major strategic problem in our own generation. Pastors cannot have a ministry moving from a local church every three years. Of course you know why that happens? It’s because in seminary they don’t teach them how to study and after three years they’ve run out of sermons, have them all stashed in a drawer some place and there’s 150 sermons, last three years, and then you go through and gee, what do I do now, so they get a call to another church. And so they run through the 150 there and roll on to another one. It’s just a religious game. I know, I’m part of the profession, I know exactly how it operates and don’t think it isn’t, these “calls” to one church or another church is a bunch of bologna. A pastor-teacher is ruining himself by moving from one place to another. In the first place, you cannot get to know a group of people in two years; impossible. The second thing, it’s been my observation in this congregation that it takes from four to five years to get someone firmly planted in the Word, so how can a guy hop, skip and jump around every third or fourth year and have any kind of a spiritual reward for any kind of ministry in people’s lives when it take four to five years to get them grounded? See, it just doesn’t make sense, and yet there are denominational structures today that force a pastor to move every three or four years. They are literally preventing those young men from ever attaining a reward before the throne of grace because the guys have nothing to show for their work. What can you do in two or three years. Can some of you businessmen start a business in two or three years, turn it over to someone else and go some place else and start another business? Would you like to do that the rest of your life? You can’t do that. You can’t do any business this way including the Lord’s business. So it’s wrong and that is a current practice wrong inside our own circles today.

By the way, that also shows you something else, that shows you that the role of the pastor-teacher is not an evangelist. An evangelist’s job is outside the church, not inside the church, therefore we do not have evangelistic meetings in this building. Why would any good unbeliever want to come to this building? You tell me one good reason, he might be curious of what’s inside. But if I were an unbeliever I couldn’t think of one good reason for coming in here, unless there were some pretty looking girls, and of course there are some, and that might be a reason, and we may have some other carnal enticements around the scene but the point is still that that is not the real reason for coming into an evangelistic type situation. Evangelism should be done on the outside, not the inside. So, for some who do not understand why we do not have evangelistic services, that is why, I am not an evangelist.

All right, Acts 113 deals with these men and it says further in verse 3 that they were commissioned. Verse 3 is the commissioning ceremony as they were launched into the mission field. “And when they had fasted and prayed,” that’s the group now, making sure of the decision, notice, there’s a lot of praying that goes into verse 2 and 3. The reason is because they want to be sure that they’ve taken all the data and correlated it to a firm conclusion. Then they “laid their hands on them,” now what’s that supposed to be, laying empty hands on empty heads? What does the laying on of hands do? This is a sign of authority, it would be like the commissioning ceremony, when the ROTC guy gets his commission, he becomes a Second Lieutenant, it’s just a commissioning ceremony. It doesn’t mean that some grace squirts out between your index finger and your thumb and it goes into the scalp of the guy that you’re laying your hands on. That’s not the point, it’s just a service of commission, it delegates authority.

Now we want to see some principles that come out of this delegation of authority and these men as they were promoted into this position. Again, as I promised you I am going to stress the natural, non-supernatural factors in the guidance so that you’ll use these and be alert to these in your life.

The first thing: the idea of commissioning ambassadors did not come from the Christians; it was already there on the part of the pre-Christian Jews. Adolph Harnack, a church historian, pointed out that the apostle concept existed before Christ’s day. There were consecrated people of very high rank sent out throughout the Jews who had been dispersed in the ancient world. That’s called the Jews of the Diaspora, and so that Jerusalem would keep in touch with the Jews scattered all over the Mediterranean and other places, they used to send out envoys, much like the modern state of Israel sends out groups of people through Zionist organizations to gather people together to Alyiah, which is immigration to Israel. And so in those days they did the same thing, and these men would go out to collect tribute, they would carry encyclical letters with them, and notice what the apostles do to the local churches but they carried encyclical letters which we now have in your Bibles, they’re called the epistles. Those are the encyclical letters of the New Testament apostles. Well, that whole operation, the mode, the strategy, the tactics, were all fixed before Christ’s day. These men exerted powers of surveillance, they had authority to deal with dangerous movements. And of course Paul spotted Gnosticism coming down the Lycus Valley in Colossae and wrote the epistle to the Colossians to cut off a Gnostic invasion of the early church. He saw a doctrinal heresy developing and he nipped it in the bud with the epistle to the Colossians. So the first thing we notice about this commissioning is that it’s form, it’s strategy, its tactics are not new at all; it’s an adaptation of something already available to them. And it shows you, yes the Holy Spirit led them, but the Holy Spirit didn’t create from nothing; the Holy Spirit led them using common sense resources at hand.

The second thing about this, who was it that was commissioned? Men like Saul who matured up through the ranks. There was none of this hotshot business if somebody trusted Christ and he takes a six-week basic course and now he’s going to tell pastors how they’re going to run their church. An outside para church group is not to dictate the tactics. That’s not the way it is; that’s like in the military some private comes up and tells the colonel how to do something. I’d like to see a private come up to the colonel I knew that was my CO and tell him how to do something. That guy had the capacity to chew you out for five minutes using four letter words and never repeat himself once. And so no buck private was going to tamper with telling him, the colonel, how to run his show. And the tragedy is, you see, we have pastors who don’t nail these outsiders and tell them listen, you just don’t rank around here, if you want to help fine but the pastors of a city are the ranking officers, not some hotshot from some lone wolf organization. But that’s the way Christianity is, it’s filled with the hotshots today, filled with this group that group, some other little conference, and always short circuiting the local church.

That is not what you see here in Acts 13:3. The men who are commissioned are men who rose through the ranks of the local church. They were men who, as Paul, spent ten years plus getting to this position. Before Paul got his commission he spent over ten years in theological training; that’s how long it took for him to be prepared. When you see Stephen I the book of Acts, you see him in the first place, what is he doing? He’s carrying food to the old ladies; that’s how the guy got his start. And how did he wind up? He wound up as the brilliant theologian that made the initial breakthrough whose theology Paul followed and the first martyr of the Christian church. The great deacon/martyr, Stephen, started out waiting on tables. See, he rose through the ranks.

Now there’s another thing that’s wrong with what’s happening today; we are getting outside para church groups by the ton; your mail box gets filled with requests for funds from this Christian organization and that Christian organization, ask yourself next time you open one of those letters, how many pastors give their assent to this group. Some of you belong to this church, some of you belong to other local churches, when you vote to support someone, ask yourself, what local church do they belong to? I’d like to talk to the pastor of that local church, I want to find out a little bit about this person, how they’ve been ministering and so on. You see, the local church is where it’s at and that’s the hard place and that’s why people avoid it. It’s hard to be a member of a local church, good night, you can’t sit in a pew but you hit at least two sin natures three feet away from you; it’s like being married, you’ve got a sin nature closer than other person; that’s why Luther said if the Pope had been married he’d never have thought of papal infallibility. It always reminds you of your shortcomings, and that’s why marriage is unpopular for lazy people. The same thing applies to Christians, Christians just take the same world attitude, I don’t want to get pinned down to a defined relationship. I don’t want to get locked down to obligations for the rest of my life, I don’t want to get committed, so I won’t be a member of this church, after all, I don’t like the paint on the third window of that church and that’s sufficient for me so I’m not going to be a member of that. Or I don’t like the color of the carpet, or I don’t like so and so who sits in the third pew and I’m not going to be a member of that church because of that, and silly stupid things like that. The city of Lubbock is loaded with these floaters, the church tramps that hop around from one place to another, always looking for a handout. That’s why we call them church tramps, they take, take, take, take, take and I’m not talking about money, they just take everything the church has and then when it comes to ministering back to the church they can’t do that in a church structure, they’ve got to go to some little para church operation, that’s the only place they can minister. And it’s just laziness. And it’s immaturity, and it’s goof-off, that’s what it is.

Now you don’t find that in Acts 13; in Acts 13 you find men, not boys, and you find people who have had to deal with the every day mundane dull problems of the local church, now promoted, commissioned, and become the first evangelistic thrust into the Mediterranean area. The rest of Acts 13 we’ll see what success they had and you’ll see the result of the tremendous amount of training and you’ll also see the result of sin in the lives of the apostles themselves.

Now to carry on with the theme we’ll stand and sing….