The First Missionaries

The most enduring metaphor used to tell the human story is that of a journey. It appears in every literary tradition from Odysseus of Ithaca to Mohammed of Arabia to Frodo Baggins of the Shire. The Bible is filled with stories of journeys. Indeed, the central affirmation of the Scriptures regards the greatest journey of all, the journey made by God the Son from heaven to earth, to be born as a child in poverty, executed on a wooden cross, raised in victory, and exalted to the right hand of God. And we can easily think of other stories in Scripture of folks who traveled: Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Daniel, Mary and Joseph.

We have come to Acts 13 in this message, the place in the story of the young church that describes the beginning of the three missionary journeys of Paul. This story describes some who began an expedition in God’s name and made discoveries along the way.

The metaphor of a journey is an important one. We uphold the historical accuracy of the Biblical record, yet we know the accounts also have spiritual lessons to impart. We all discover important spiritual lessons by observing God as we follow him in our travels.

There are two characteristics of the journeys in the Bible that I’d like to highlight before we turn to Acts 13. The first is that the journey of faith that we are on is a journey home. In every case we leave behind the wilderness, or slavery, or exile in a far-away country, and are invited home to God’s presence. The writer of Hebrews, commenting on these stories from the Old Testament and their spiritual implications, made this observation, as rendered by Eugene Peterson in The Message :

“They saw [what was promised] way off in the distance, waved their greeting, and accepted the fact that they were transients in this world. People who live this way make it plain that they are looking for their true home. If they were homesick for the old country, they could have gone back any time they wanted. But they were after a far better country than that-- heaven country. You can see why God is so proud of them, and has a City waiting for them.”

The second characteristic of journeys in the Bible is that in following Christ on this adventure, we don’t go alone, cast adrift to do our best. We find as we go that we have the Lord God himself as our companion. It is he who directs us, his wisdom that guides us, his love that strengthens us. And even when we feel as if none of these things are true, and that we are abandoned and alone and confused and uncertain, he is still our companion. He may at times hide awareness of himself from us, but only to accomplish a greater good in the end.

There are warnings raised in the Scriptures for those who end the journey too soon. Remember the carping of the children of Israel in the wilderness. They shook their fists at Moses and called on him to send them back into slavery in Egypt, because they didn’t like following God in the wilderness (Numbers 14:1-10). Remember Lot’s wife, who was fleeing to the mountains for safety, but because of her love for Sodom and Gomorrah and all they represented, she turned back, and forfeited her life (Genesis 19:12-26). Jesus told a parable of a rich fool who loved this world and all it had to offer. He had become extremely wealthy and began making plans to make bigger barns to gain more for himself of the payoff of this world. But he had no idea that that very night was the last night of his life (Luke 12:16-21).

In addition there are warnings for those who never undertake the journey at all. Some are determined to make it on their own. They may even be on a spiritual quest, but they take matters into their own hands, promote themselves. The church is often acquiescent in this, isn’t it? Sometimes we build up extravagant programs, long lists of dos and don’ts, and self-help strategies, with the idea that by dint of our effort we can fix ourselves to become what we want to be. But we are not the companions of God in this.

Life in Christ is a journey he leads us on, an adventure. In Acts 13:1-12 an adventure begins:

What is God teaching the church in this event? The first thing to observe is that this is a very small story.

A small story with a big impact

At this stage in the development of the church neither Barnabas nor Saul is a very important person. At best they are second-tier leaders of the early church. They were not among those whom Jesus named apostles from the very beginning. Saul has a checkered past, including persecution of the church and then arrogance and failure in his early life as a Christian. So what we are reading here is the story of two growing Christian leaders setting off on a trip with an intern. It’s not a long or difficult journey. And the trip is not to an important place. Cyprus is a sleepy little island in the middle of the Mediterranean, insignificant in the eyes of Rome and the rest of the world. Cyprus is Barnabas’ home region and probably his cousin John Mark’s as well. They can stay with relatives and be served home-cooked meals.

Yet everybody who considers Christian history in totality recognizes that this small story is critical. It is a hinge of history, to use Winston Churchill’s phrase. G. Campbell Morgan calls these paragraphs the watershed of the book of Acts. Once we know what comes of this, we realize that something remarkable happened at the beginning of this little journey: for the first time Christians heard the Spirit say, “Go with the gospel to people and places unknown to you, but made ready by God.”

The earlier chapters of Acts are filled with stories of God’s doing miraculous things and the church’s explaining what he was up to. On the Day of Pentecost there were tongues of fire and a mighty wind, people gathered around and asked what was happening, Peter explained, and thousands came to Christ. At the Beautiful Gate of the temple a man was healed, a gathering crowd wondered what to make of this, the explanation was made, and people came to Christ.

When Jesus gave his disciples the Great Commission, in which he commanded them to go and make disciples of all nations (see The Great Commission by Danny Hall, Discovery Paper 4854), they did not understand at first that the whole church was called to share the faith--going into places and into lives and into discussion with folks who had not yet asked for an explanation. There were individual accounts of witness along the way. Peter went under duress to Cornelius’ house and preached to a Gentile family, but he struggled with it. The church didn’t leave Jerusalem with the message until they were forced out under persecution. They were not instinctively inclusive. The widows who spoke Greek as their first language were subjected to a degree of persecution in the earliest days of the church. The Samaritans who came to Christ were looked at doubtfully until the apostles went to pray for them. Gentiles’ coming to Christ was a cause of concern and long discussion.

But here in Antioch, a group of Christians led by a diverse community of elders heard the call of God, and they sent a couple of leaders and an intern on a journey. It was a journey that would become a way of life. The church has understood ever since that we are called not just to answer the questions asked of us, but to offer what has been given us to others whom God loves. We are to have the heart of God for the lost (a theme Scott Grant and Danny Hall have preached on recently in Discovery Papers 4787-4790 and 4851-4857, respectively).

So this is the watershed of the book of Acts, a marvelous turning point in the story. But what are we to make of the fact that it doesn’t appear to be such? There is no fanfare, no entourage, no mighty steeds, no great ships involved anywhere. It looks like a small story, yet it is a great one. How does that observation offer us some help as we think about our own journeys in Christ? Well, I think it’s simply that we don’t know what is important and what isn’t. We don’t know when a conversation we have is going to change a life, or a community, or the world. We don’t know which act of love God will turn into an extraordinary thing of beauty. We don’t know when a grand enterprise is beginning, because God knows the future and we don’t. What we do know is that he is our companion on this journey. We do know that he’ll open doors that we can walk through.

We also know that the most influential, world-changing, history-shaping citizen in all of Rome’s hundreds of years of history, which included Caesars and senators and generals, was one of the men on this trip. Saul of Tarsus had more influence on the centuries to come than any other single citizen of Rome. Yet no one in Rome paid any attention to this trip. Caligula was being assassinated by the Praetorian Guard in these days, and Claudius was elevated to the throne--important events in the imperial capital, yet these faded quickly in their significance. No individual of that day knew it, but a great thing was happening. God was forging a servant whose writings, vision, and passion would change the world.

What about you and me? At a recent meeting of the Road Crew, the men’s group that meets on Wednesday mornings, a number of guys were sharing about the trip they had just taken to Mexico with the high school kids. They were talking about houses that got built. Those houses won’t last forever, but these men invested their lives in kids, praying with them, standing beside them, listening to them, believing in them. What might these kids become? We can’t see that yet, but God can see.

Dan and Judy VanElderen have foster-parented more than fifty children in their home. Some have been there for a few days or a week; some have been there for months. Two of them ended up staying as their own adopted children. I believe God has something magnificent in mind for at least one of those kids, maybe a lot of them, who were loved for Christ’s sake in a genuine Christian home for the period of time God allowed. We don’t know what was planted in each child’s heart because these folks took up the opportunity presented by God.

I know couples in this church who have stayed married because they were part of a home fellowship, a group of folks who believed in them and prayed with them during a struggle that threatened to break them apart. Who knows what future God will bring from this?

The small scope of the beginning of this story ought to remind us that we can’t know what God will do. We don’t know where the journey is going to end. We don’t know what influence we can have. We don’t know what is critical and what isn’t. What we do know is that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. We have been given gifts by him. We can seize the opportunities that he presents. He wins honor for himself through his people.

A church that takes God seriously

We observe first that in Antioch there was a community of leaders who are called prophets and teachers. A prophet in the sense the word is being used here was not somebody who got original information from God and spoke it. The term here describes the functioning elders of this church, preachers and Bible teachers.

This church was very much like our church. Antioch was a university community just as ours is. It was a tossed salad culturally; they had residents from Africa, Egypt, Rome, Greece, Syria, and Judea. It was a large, bustling, integrated, interesting, and challenging place to be. The church there had learned the lessons of inclusiveness that were so difficult for the Jerusalem church at the beginning. The leadership was diverse. Simeon was called Niger, which means black. He was a black man, perhaps from somewhere in Africa. Lucius of Cyrene was from the Mediterranean coast of Africa. Manaen was raised with Herod the tetrarch, in that confusing, partially Jewish and partially Edomite family focused on the world of Roman politics. Barnabas was a Cypriot who had been converted in Jerusalem. Saul was from Tarsus, educated in Jerusalem, formerly a persecutor of the church, converted in Damascus, and so on. These people were from all different backgrounds, but they led their church together as a community. There was no bishop or senior pastor. There was a leadership council made up of preachers and Bible teachers who took the word of God seriously and acknowledged that the Spirit had spoken.

How Saul became Paul

Let’s consider now the scene in Paphos, where Saul confronted the magician. In the midst of the description of Saul’s challenging this sorcerer, it says that his name was changed: “Saul, also known as Paul.” Ever after, he will be known only as Paul. In verse 13, following this text, Luke says, “Now Paul and his companions put out to sea from Paphos….” Hereafter whenever the team is mentioned, Paul is the first one named: “Paul and his companions,” “Paul and Barnabas,” “Paul and the others,” and so on. At the moment of crisis in this story, Saul stepped into the leadership role God had prepared for him. He didn’t know what was ahead, but he was seized by the Holy Spirit in that moment. He confronted a Jewish false prophet and discovered what his life course was to be from then on.

Saul, with his great rabbinical training, longed to minister to Jews primarily (see Romans 9:1-5; 10:1). But it was predicted of him from the beginning that he would go to the Gentiles and speak to kings (Acts 9:15). He struggled with the ways of God for a long time. But here I believe he saw something clearly. Elymas could speak of the mysteries of God on some level; he used the glory of Israel and her Scriptures and the authority that went with them--because the word of God always has power and authority even when it is used by those who speak it falsely--to exert power over people. He was a liar and a cheat and a self-promoter, taking advantage of people like Sergius Paulus, a good, intelligent man who was interested and ready to receive Christ.

Perhaps it was at this point that Saul realized he would become the alternative to Elymas, someone who came with a gift instead of a con. He was called to preach Christ from the great stories of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the kings and the poets of Israel, to a Gentile world that needed to hear. I believe that in this confrontation not only did he change his name to Paul, but he received his commission to be the apostle to the Gentiles.

Paul, Barnabas and John Mark made discoveries in the course of their journey. What about us? The Spirit of God is no less capable than he was then. Again, the metaphor of the Christian life as an adventure, a journey, is worth recapturing. Perhaps we are too risk-averse. Perhaps we take too much account of what is comfortable and familiar. We are too afraid that if God were to do something new, it would be difficult. Listen to yourself talk about the Lord. Are you talking mostly about things that happened ten or twenty years ago, or are you talking about something that he is doing now, new visions you have seen of him and new experiences you have had of him? Do you expect God to open doors that no man can shut, and are you willing to go through them?

What God does with us is going to be shaped by the quality of our community. The believers in Antioch were serious about God and they were serious about each other. That allowed them to send out some who effectively altered the course of Western civilization and changed the world.

The book of 2 Timothy, as far as we know, is the last thing Paul wrote. He probably died shortly afterward. It gives a fitting conclusion to a life shaped by lessons learned in going where directed. Long after the events of Acts 13, Paul looked back on a long life and wrote:

“For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved his appearing.” (2 Timothy 4:6-8.)

Scripture quotations are taken from New American Standard Bible, ã 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. Where indicated, Scripture is taken from The Message . Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

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