Advertise on podcast: Acts: The Kingdom on Mission

We live in an era of distraction. Just one tiny example: in my 11 years reviewing books for WORLD magazine, the length of a typical book review has gone from 300 words to 125. Why? Because that is the attention span of the typical reader. This morning, Paul urges us to fight back against that trend toward the vanishing attention span. He tells us to pay attention, translated "take heed" or "watch yourselves," or even "be on guard for yourselves." I preach this morning to the elders among us, including myself. Men, I believe that God is calling some of you to be elders. Women, pray for your man, whether he is presently an elder or not. Everyone here, including myself — listen to the great apostle's charge to the elders. We have some major watching out to do. We need to pay attention. We need to pay attention to ourselves and to the flock because, Paul says, Jesus bought that flock for God by means of His own blood.

This passage is a mini-summary of Paul's ministry work. He highlights for us seven facets of his work, to set an example to all elders and to emphasize that the Christian message is true. After all, if someone is preaching love and obedience to God, but his own life is characterized by hatred and disobedience to God, that discredits his message. Paul, though, brings credit on his message by emphasizing how righteously he proclaimed it. So let's look at his example of kingdom-building work, for it is an example of what true ministry ought to be. One note: All of us are ministers in the Kingdom. Yes, some are formally ordained "ministers of the gospel," but most of the things Paul describes here are things that every Christian is called on to do at one level or another. We don't all build the Kingdom like Paul did — we are not all wise master builders. But we all have some place of obedience to Jesus' rule, and that is our ministry. Wherever your place, whatever your calling, you need to imitate Paul's example according to your place and calling.

This the only speech in Acts that's delivered to those who are already Christians. The others are sermons preached to non-Christian audiences, if you can believe it. Surely that tells us something about how receptive first-century audiences were compared to audiences in the contemporary West! But though there is much to lament about our culture these days, the reason we're here is not to lament the decline of the West. We are here to hear from the living God, who is not in decline. Today we are going to look at Paul's speech to the Ephesian elders as a whole; over the next three weeks, we will proceed to look at each part of it in detail. What the speech as a whole says is that though Paul is leaving the stage, the Kingdom of God is not leaving the stage. Paul is steadily moving toward Jerusalem; like his Savior, he has to go and confront the cross there. But though he is going to die, not necessarily in Jerusalem but definitely at some point, and likely soon, his speech, and the frame in which Luke has put it, make it abundantly clear that God's will is not going away, and His plan is not going to be frustrated. The Kingdom is still coming, even though Paul is going.

Luke famously told us in Acts 2:42 that they continued in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers. That same fourfold foundation of the church recurs in the text before us this morning. We have the apostle's teaching; we see fellowship, the breaking of bread, and — the resurrection. The parallels between this incident and the crossing of the Red Sea are archetypal and profound. Israel, as prototype of her Lord, died and rose again at the Red Sea. Eutychus died and rose again after Easter and before Pentecost. Luke is showing us how to encourage the community of the resurrection. Why did Luke swap in resurrection for prayer? Because the life of the risen Lord Jesus is what powers and encourages the church. Eutychus was, in a certain sense, actually killed by the apostle's teaching and fellowship and the breaking of bread. But even that couldn't stop the disciples' encouragement, for it is founded on the power of the God who raises the dead. Thus, Luke brackets this passage with references to the encouragement, and in between, he tells us about the apostle's teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread, and the resurrection.

Luke has compressed the events of three years into just over a single page of written material. He is not telling us everything that happened in Ephesus; he is telling us six notable things that happened there, six ways in which Paul's apostleship was demonstrated and confirmed. Notice also that here again is one of Luke's handful of direct mentions of the Kingdom of God. In addition to being the agent of the Kingdom's coming, Paul directly taught about the Kingdom in the synagogue of Ephesus.We've come a long way from the Spirit's instructions in ch. 16 that Paul's team was not supposed to go into Asia; now, they make such an impact that all Asia hears the word of the Lord. Brothers and sisters, as we'll see next week, the Kingdom comes through weakness and suffering — but as Luke shows us in the text before us, it also comes through the powerful work and proclamation of the apostles, and specifically of Paul. We can be certain of what we've been taught about the Kingdom; just look at the six powerful Kingdom things Paul did in Ephesus.

On this glorious Easter Sunday we are going to step back from our verse-by-verse march through the book of Acts, and we are going to look at some of the key points Luke makes about the resurrection in this book. The Christian faith has many unique teachings, and certainly the Incarnation and the Trinity are without parallel in other religions. But I would argue that another doctrine that really sets our faith apart from the rest is its teaching on the resurrection of the dead. We believe that Jesus was really killed and that He really rose from the dead. But the resurrection means more than that Jesus is alive, as important as that is. As we will see from various statements in Acts today, the resurrection is the ultimate sign of Christ's power. It means that we too will rise from the dead, that we too have hope that this world will be set right and death vanquished, that we can share God's Holy Spirit, and that the kingdom of darkness is losing as the light of Christ shines forth.

Luke is going to show here, in the second part of ch. 18, what ministry without Paul looks like. He's showing us ministry that actually looks more like what we usually do, showing us people whose abilities and giftings more in line with what's still found in the church rather than the off-the-charts gifts of Paul. Luke's point: The kingdom, connected to its roots in the Bible and Jerusalem, continues to grow not only through Paul's labors but also through the work of other faithful Christians.

Paul's ministry is expanding, not only in a new place (something we've gotten quite used to by this point) but also with new friends, new ministry patterns, new encouragement from the Lord, and a new judgment by the local proconsul in the church's favor — or at least, not in opposition to it. The Kingdom is continuing to rescue people from Satan's dominion, and it's consolidating its strength in so doing.

This is a modern rendition of the sermon that Paul preached in Athens. That is, I'm going to use the same outline that he used, making the same points and applications he made. Part of the reason I'm doing that is that we live in the midst of ignorant pagans who think themselves very smart, like the Athenians did. My other reason for it is that we need to know God, seek God, and not think that he is like man-made images. In other words, Paul's message was not only timely for the Athenians. It is timely for us too. The Kingdom spread in the cultural capital of the ancient world through the faithful preaching of Paul about God's nature as creator, provider, and judge. And it will spread here in Gillette through that same kind of faithful preaching. So know your God as creator, as provider, and as judge. Seek Him, think worthily of Him, and repent before He comes to judge the world.

Inducting Athenians into new religions was illegal. Knowing that helps us see that Paul focused on proclaiming the high God, the one deity who is superior to every other deity or object of worship, and that he also focused on proclaiming the humanity of Jesus. He did not want to be seen as peddling a new religion; his goal was to inform the ignorance of his hearers regarding the objects of religious worship that were all around them. This text has been taken as a model of cross-cultural engagement, and so it is. It cannot answer all our questions about how to evangelize cultured pagans — but it definitely shows that the Kingdom came to Athens too, and that the good news about Jesus is clearly superior to the most impressive parts of pagan culture there.

My childhood pastor used to say it all the time: "Be a Berean!" The name is near and dear to the hearts of many of you, as I know that some of you worshiped for years at the Berean church here in Gillette. When a church calls itself "Berean," or a pastor says to "Be a Berean," what do they mean? Just this: Read and study the Bible for yourself. If you hear a claim about God, go look into the Bible and find out whether that claim holds up. That's what the Bereans did. And that is what Luke characterizes as genuine nobility of birth, contrasting it with the ignoble or base-born resistance to the word of God displayed by the Jews and mob of Thessalonica. True nobility lies not in who your parents are, but in how you respond to the word of God.

The reign of Christ was manifested in Thessalonica too, through the salvation of many people who heard and believed the gospel. The Kingdom made progress in Thessalonica, but Paul also testifies in 1 Thessalonians that the Thessalonian Jews' opposition to the gospel was the work of Satan. In other words, brothers and sisters, once again we see the clash of kingdoms. God's Kingdom is on the attack, smashing in the gates of hell and bringing people out of the Kingdom of Darkness. But the Kingdom of Darkness fights back by ignobly recruiting riffraff, loiterers in the marketplace, and deploying them to riot and keep the gospel from spreading. You see, though Luke makes it clear that the Kingdom of God will eventually triumph, he isn't trying to minimize the reality of the conflict. Satan's Kingdom can and does fight back, and it can cause some serious damage in the medium-term. We should still throw in our lot with God's Kingdom; it is certain to win in the long run. But don't expect to win every engagement with the forces of darkness!