Yes & Amen
We've been in acts for a long time. Guys wanna acts 13. I don't know if you've looked at the book backs recently, but we started this journey like nine months ago maybe a little bit longer with the intention of just staying in it until we're done. If you've looked at the book of acts recently, you'll know that there are 28 chapters.
Which means we're coming up on halfway in a year, if you believe it. And it's been a good year. And there's a lot more good stuff to come. If you're worried about being in a book for a year, don't be, it's great. Hasn't every, has it been good worthwhile there? You okay. We are in the process of learning what it means to be the church.
To be a church, a local expression of body of Christ, living together, doing community together on mission together, the sake of God, his kingdom and his glory. And with that in mind, I'm gonna dump jump right into our text here, which is acts 13. I'm gonna read the whole chapter. Some of these chapters are getting long, but it's important that you hear the entire book of acts read aloud throughout this year.
Because as we've often said, what I'm about to read is going to be far more important than anything I can say about what I'm about to read. Next bid is the most important part of the sermon. So I'm gonna read 13 in its entirety, 52 verses. Ready. Here we go. Now in the church at Antioch, there were prophets and teachers, Barnabas and Simian called Niger, Lucius of CNE P here for a second on Lucius of Cyrene.
There's a lot of scholarship out there that thinks that Lucius of CRE is actually Luke himself. How cool is that? Oh, pretty interesting, right? It is all the more interesting when you figure that CS actually in Africa, which means that a good chunk of the gospel is written by a black African man. How cool?
Oh, I like that because we white watched this story quite a bit. I have Nat Tiffany said at home and we bust out a Christmas that has a very Norwegian looking baby Jesus . And we can thank the Renaissance for that. But how about it's time? We UN whitewash the story. Most of this is Arabs in the middle east dark.
And Lucius of Cyrene Luke probably inserts himself into the story from here on out. Incidentally, he traveled with Paul. You're gonna start seeing that it shifts from really interesting. He writes himself into the story, but that could be him moving on. I just think that's cool. Lucius of Cyrene who been brought up with hair, the te shark and Saul.
While they're worshiping the Lord and fasting. The holy spirit said set apart for me, Barnabas and solve for the work to which I called them. So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off. The two of them sent on their way by the holy spirit, went down to socia and from their sail to Cypress stuck and sailed from their inside.
When they arrived at Salam salamis, if you want to , it's how our teaching human decided it's where salami was invented apparently. They proclaimed the word of God in Jewish synagogues. And John was with them as their help. They traveled through the whole island until they came to pathos and there, they met a Jewish source in a false prophet named Margie who was an attendant of the PROCO surgeries follows the PROCO an intelligent man sent Barnabus and Saul because he was eager.
He wanted to hear the word of God, but. MOS the Soer, that's what his name means. Also barge, same guy, opposed them and tried to turn the PROCO from the faith. Then SA, who was also called Paul built with the holy spirit, looked straight at El Moss and said, you are a child of the devil. That's something you want to hear and full of all kinds of deceit and trickery.
Will you never stop reverting the right ways to the Lord. Now the hand of the Lord is against you and you're going to be blind for a time, not even able to see the light of the sun immediately missed. And darkness came over him and. About seeking someone to leave him. By the hand, when the pro council saw what happened, he believed that he was amazed at the teaching about the Lord repass Paul and his companions sailed to Turga in Phi, where John left them to return to Jerusalem, rum, Perga.
They went to the city in Antioch on the Sabbath. They entered the synagogue and sat down after the reading from law in the prophets, the leader of the synagogue sent or to them saying brothers. If you have a word of ex exploitation for the people, please speak up, standing up hall motion with his hand and said, fellow Israeli lights and Gentiles who worship God listened to me.
The God of the people of Israel chose our ancestors. He made the people prosper during their stand Egypt with mighty power. And he led them out of that country for about 40 years. He endured their conduct. Literally it says, put up with them in the wilderness and he overthrew seven nations in Canan giving their lands to his people as an inheritance.
All this took. 50 years after this, God gave them judges until the time of Samuel, the prophets. Then the people asked for a king and he gave them SA son of Kish of the tribe and Benjamin who ruled for 40 years after removing Saul, he made David their king. God testified concerning him. I had found David's son of Jesse, a man after my own heart, he will do everything I want him to do from this man's descendants.
God has brought to Israel to savior Jesus, as he promised. Before the coming of Jesus, John preached repentance and baptism to all the people of Israel as John was completing his work, he said, who do you suppose I am? I am not the one you're looking for, but there is one coming after me who sandals. I'm not worthy to.
One's high fellow children of Abraham and you God fairing Gentiles. It is to us that the message from salvation has been sent the people of Jerusalem and the rulers did not recognize Jesus yet in condemning him. They fulfilled the words of the prophet that are read every seven. Who they had found no proper ground for a death sentence.
They asked pilot to have him executed. When they carried out all that was written about him. They took him down to cross and laid him in the tomb, but God raised him from the dead. And for many days, he was seen by those who had traveled with him from Galla Jerusalem. They are now his witnesses to our people.
We tell you the good news, what God has promised our ancestors. He has fulfilled for us, their children. By raising up Jesus, as it's written in the second song, you are my son today. I become your father. God raised him from the dead so that he will never be subject to, to decay. As God has said, I will give you the holy insured blessing to promise to David.
So it has also stated you will not let your holy one C decay. Now, when David served God's purpose in his own generation, he fell asleep and was buried with his ancestors and his body decayed that the one whom God raised for the dead did not decay. Therefore, my friends. I want you to know that through Jesus, the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you through him.
Everyone who believes is set free from their sin, a justification, you are not able to attain under the law of Moses. Take care that what the prophets have said does not happen to you. Look, you SCO while you're in parish where I'm going to do something in your day, that you would never believe, even if someone told you as Paul and Barnabas were leaving the synagogue, the people invited them to speak further about these things.
The nexts when the congregation was dismissed, many of the Jews about the conference to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas. We talked with them and urged them to continue in the grace of God on the next S almost the whole city gathered to hear the word Lord. When the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy, they began to contradict what Paul was saying and keep the abuse on it.
Then Paul and Barnabas answered them boldly. We had to speak the word of God to you first. Since you rejected and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life. We now turn to the Gentiles where this is what the Lord has commanded us. I have made you a light for the Gentiles that you may bring my salvation to the end of the earth.
When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honored the word of the Lord and all were pointed for eternal life, believed the word, the Lord spread through the whole region, but the Jewish leaders inside of the God-fearing women of high standing in the leading men of the city. They stirred up persecution against Paul and barns and expelled it from their region.
So they shook the dust off their feet as a warning to them and went to icon and the disciples were built with joy and with the holy spirit. Wow. All right. Yeah. Great story. Yes. Great story. That really encapsulates what we want to be as a church. Paul's sermon here explains in the fairest possible terms.
The mission of this community. If you've been around here for a while, maybe you've heard us say a few times that canopy is a family of Jesus followers learning to live free. And today via Paul's words here to the church or to the Jewish community at the city of Antioch. I wanna explain what that means.
I wanna explain our mission statement as a family of Jesus follow. Learning to live free. So here we go. The basic idea here, every time you see the gospel preach in the book of acts, there are these great sermons. We saw one or two by Peter. We saw one by Steven, as he was being executed.
We see several by Paul from here on out, and all of these sermons have some different nuances. They have depending on the audience, depending on the person speaking they're contextualized. It's important that we recognize when we preach the gospel, you preach it differently to different people.
Not because the gospel changes, but because the context changes, it matters that a church in west side coast to Mesa looks different than a church in east side coast to Mesa looks different than a church in Sub-Saharan Africa that we contextualize. And so each of the sermons is contextualized to the audience, but they all have two things in common.
Okay, here they are ready. First thing they are thoroughly biblical. You will not find a sermon in the book of acts that is not based on the scripture. They all follow a very similar format where they walk through the entire old Testament. Sometimes that Paul doesn't hear very quickly. Steven took a very long time to do it.
All of them take different versions, but they walk through the whole old Testament and ultimately this culminates in the first of Jesus. So they put Jesus in a biblical context. That's really important. It's really important as a church community. If we want to be a church that's like this one that we preach the Bible.
Okay. That all of our stuff is grounded in this book. Now sometimes I'll be honest with you. When I read this book, I get discouraged and frustrated because I apply it to myself. When I find myself not measuring up and I want to get a different book. I've said that on occasion, when I'm studying this, we should get a different book, but we're gonna stick with this one because these want.
Points to Jesus. Amen. And Jesus is always contextualized out of the scripture here. They always start there and work their way to him. And then through him to the rest of us, see, now the way we get this wrong is when we get that order reversed. When we start with ourselves and we try to work our way back to Jesus into the rest of the Bible.
That's why we have such a hard time with the Bible sometimes is because we start with ourselves and we read a part that's not very interesting to. That doesn't really apply to me. That doesn't feel good. That doesn't feel like what I need today. The question is, does that make it less, a less true or important?
Yeah of course not it happened, it matters it's real. And that thing that happened points in a significant wage of Jesus. And Jesus has something to say about the way we live our lives. So let's make sure we get that order, start with the Bible and cheese, and then work our way to ourselves and not the other way around.
That's just kind of fundamentals of faith. Always start with Jesus and then work your way to yourself. Not the other way around. So the thoroughly biblical, the second thing we gotta point out here is the gospel day preach is one that I didn't often hear up hear growing up in the church. When I grew up in the church, I heard the gospels preached as something that was often for our spiritual lives someday in the future.
Okay. So the gospel essentially was this, if you repent, confess your sins, And accept Jesus into your heart. You will receive the forgiveness of sin so that whatever that means practically so that your soul will be washed clean and you can one day experience heaven with him and avoid the horrors. The hell.
That was essentially the gospel that I was told that I was preach. It strikes me though, as I read the gospel accounts in the book of acts, that they're very different, the way they preach. The gospel is not just a spiritual thing and it's not just for someday. They preach it as a whole person existence.
That's actually not just a person, a whole world changing paradigm that is presently available. Now there is a day clearly in the future where all of this will become fully available, but the way they've reached, this is it's for here and it's for now. And we can live into it with our whole beings. Not.
Our spiritual self, somewhere along the way we became stoic. It's a Greek philosophy that basically separated the body in soul. This is not biblical. This is not how this works. Jesus. Didn't come to the preach of the spiritual side of us. Matter of fact, the whole notion of the spiritual side of us, would've been foreign to Jesus.
If you walked into Jesus and said, Hey Jesus, how's your spiritual life. You would say, what do you mean. You mean like my life? Yeah. Yeah. It's been a decent day, hit my thumb with a hammer, but no big deal, and, but the point here is we separated out. We just preached the gospel to our spiritual lives, whatever that means.
And often it has no bearing on our daily lives and that just doesn't work. It's not the way it was intended to be. So every time you hear the gospel creation book of acts, it's always for now. And it's for here. Like this world, the actual world, the gospel of the kingdom of the heavens is good news for the real world right now.
So lemme show you how this works in Paul's sermon here. We'll start at the beginning. Paul actually doesn't start at the beginning. He jumps into the middle of the story because maybe he assumed that we all knew the beginning. The beginning is God creates a good world that he loves a whole lot. Okay. I won't go into detail on that, cuz it's pretty clear and pretty simple.
God. Loves the world. He creates the world as an expression of his love. It's an overflow, his love. It's awesome. It's beautiful. It's all of these things that reflect him. He puts human beings into which I think is this first mistake. And if I had been there, I might have said, Hey, you might wanna rethink this, but he puts them into the garden, gives them free will.
And immediately they show you what we've been choosing ever since to settle for something less than they've been offered. This is my, my, my very quick, and I'm doing this very fast cuz Paul didn't talk about it. So I'm inserting some stuff that I think he. Again, if I had been there, I would've said, Hey, you forgot Carl, but my dictionary definition of sin and simply value settle for less than God extends to me.
God extends himself. He extends goodness. He extends all of the beauty of creation and we say, Now I'm gonna try something else. This is the definition of sin. We do it all the time. They did it. We do it. We've been participating in it. We've been broken by it. And what happens when we do this is it creates a fundamental separation between us and God.
Now I gotta be really clear on this. Want to correct some dysfunctions. I think we all learned if you've been around the church for a while, when I say it creates a separation between us and God, what I mean is this, it's because we turn away. That's what sin is. It's a rebellion against God.
I grew up in the church, hearing that the separation between us and God is cause God turned away. Guys, you heard this? Yeah. Yeah. The idea that God holy God cannot look on sin. And I understand when you read the Bible from a certain perspective, there are passages that seem to allude to them, passages in Leviticus or in other places where it seems like God doesn't want anything pure in his sight.
And I can understand how you might read that and say, okay God doesn't look on sin. So when I sin you get so disappointed. He walks away that he puts me in this kind of isolation, this timeout, until I say that I'm really sorry and convince him. And he turns back, the problem is that's not actually biblical see for something to be biblical.
It has to be true of the whole Bible, not just bits and pieces of it. And while there are passages that seem to show that you have to put them in the context of the whole, cuz there are way more passages that shows God running to sins. As a matter of fact, When God himself showed up on the scene, Jesus of Nazare.
What was he most criticized for beating the sin. He spent his time hanging out with sinners. So if God cannot look on the presence of sin and Jesus is God himself, then. You see what I'm saying? The dictionary definition of biblical here that we're working on in this church is it true of the whole scripture as embodying the person of Jesus?
And if you look at Jesus as a friend of sinners, then God can absolutely look on the presence of sin. The problem is we turn away. That's what sin is. It's rebellion. We turn our back on him. And he continues to pursue us. So that's the issue through sin. We are separated from God, not by his choice, but by our own.
And the problem of course is when we're designed in the image of God made for a relationship with God, when we lose that relationship, the whole thing falls apart. The whole system we're separated, not just from God, but now from the knowledge of ourselves, because we are created, the Bible says in the image of God.
So in order to know yourself, First know God. And if you don't know God, you can't possibly know yourself, which is what I want to shout. Every time I make the mistake at logging onto Instagram, you think that this is going to help you. You think that this is going to help you understand yourself more, whatever this behavior whatever you're going after you think that this is gonna do it, you are made in the image of God.
If you only knew and you pursue a. Him out of which with full knowledge of yourself, but because we've lost that knowledge of him, we lose the knowledge of ourselves. And then when we do that, it separates us from our relationship with children. Because now we use one another to define ourselves, all of us do it, all of us, I think insecurities the baseline for all of us.
I used to think that there are some people like myself who are insecure and some type, some people like y'all out there love it all together. But I've discovered over the course of pastor four ministry that everyone is insecure. We just express it in different ways. It's the baseline for every human being.
And we all are evaluating ourselves on the basis of everybody else's responsive to us instead of seeking to bless and encourage and uplift and call out the image of God and others. We are now using one another to build ourselves up separate for, from each other. And the downfall of this whole thing is that this world that we were given to work and steward and care for, we now damage destroyed along the.
So the fall out of sin is separation from God, self others in the world. The whole thing just falls apart. The system breaks. That's the part Paul left out. Now we'll pick up where he picks up, but God, whenever you read these words, especially in the new Testament, it's the best words in the Bible when you read the words, but God, it usually follows some version of what I just described.
Some version of brokenness of decay of pain. Trauma sin and darkness, but God, in the darkest moment of creation, he begins a plan of redemption. We actually see it in the curse itself. You guys remember when sin has happened? God lines everybody up from the surface, Adam, and even he explains what's just happened.
This is the choice you've made. These are the natural consequences of this choice, but in the curse to the surfing, remember what he says, he's got this famous messianic. In the very moment that things are in their darkest. He says to the Satan the enemy of all that's good. He says that there will be one born through the woman, through the pain of child, and you will strike his heel, but he will crush your head.
And this li theologians called a proto. We want yellow, which means the first gospel. The first time the gospel is preached in the whole Bible is in Genesis chapter three. The moment when things have gone Hory God says, but I have a plan. I have a plan. There's one who will come through the seat of this woman through the pain of childproof.
That's part of the curse who will redeem the whole system. And then God's people as a result of their sinner cast out. From the garden of Eden, east of Eden famous book by John Steinback. But it's also just a picture of the brokenness where they end up east, wherever, see east in the Bible. It's a bad thing.
That's why I living in California is the best coast, not just the west coast, the best coast don't go east. I know there's a temptation. I know Texas and Nashville are calling people, but stay west. Anyway, I got distracted. Here we go. I didn't have anybody in mind by that, by the way, video.
Sorry. They just. In New York. I didn't have you in mind. That was just a one off comment. Here we go. So east to be mail move east. They leave the garden, but notice they don't leave the presence of God because of Genesis chapter four. It's not like God stayed in the garden and said, earn your way back here.
He goes with them east to be, gosh, presence follows his people into brokenness and he continues to work through some of the darkest times. Genesis four to 11 are weird. Yeah. And. And awful, and God is there at work speaking and leading and guiding. And then finally he identifies a group of people, a family.
He says, okay, it's you it's, you, I'm gonna choose you. Genesis 12, Abraham, I'm gonna choose you. And I will bless you and all nations of earth. In other words, the whole world will be blessed through you. And that's where Paul picks up the story. He adopts this family and mirrors, how God's plan basically works.
I am going to choose you. I will be with you. I will work through you and that's how I'm gonna save the world. As you get to know me, as you get to know me again, you will come to know yourself, you'll be then brought back into right relationship with each other, and you'll be able to step back into your God.
Given vocation as stewards of this place of this work that's God's plan. This is a lot more work on God's part by the way, the original plan before. Of the, into the equation was God just got to show us all the cool stuff, all the cool features of this world that he built. It was just a, an exercise in discovering.
Goodness. Imagine that imagine the day after days we just woke up and it was just more goodness, like stuff that you had never experienced before, stuff you never thought of as you explore the wonders of this world and of each other. And God, that was what it was supposed to be. But now through brokenness, God not only gets, has to show us what goodness looks like all over again, but he has to unteach us badness.
And this involves a lot of work on, it involves a lot of law telling you, you probably shouldn't do those things. Those things are gonna harm you and damage you and harm other people. And so that's what most of the old Testament is about. It's about God trying to unlearn badness in his people and teach them goodness again.
And in that process, as Paul says, there are all sorts of people that pop off these judges and Kings and prophets all along the way that are all. Trying to communicate through whom God's trying to communicate his words team again, it's his plan to save the world. But what Paul says here, and this is where the Jewish audience of the day starts to get lost.
What Paul says here is all of that, that a whole story, the whole history of Israel with all of its twists and turns with its priests and its prophets and its Kings and its judges. And all these things Paul says was not about that ultimately, but was signpost pointing to. Person remember the first gospel Genesis three, one born through pain of childbirth who will bring redemption to the whole system will crush the serpents head.
Paul says there's one coming. In fact, he has come. The thing that you have been waiting for, the thing that has been promised all along has finally happened. And all those stories that, the story of the judges or judges would when Israel was in a bad situation, God would raise up a judge and mighty warrior to come and deliver them.
Generation everything would be fine until they did something stupid. Again, ended up back in a bad situation. And Paul is saying here, know those judges that you read all about. They were pointing to a true and better judge who would one day come and redeem his people, not just for a generation, but for all time, you read this story of this prophet, Samuel who was full of wisdom.
And the power of the holy spirit was on him for tasks like anointing, Kings and proclaiming the word of God. But there's one coming who will be a true and better prophet who will be filled with the spirit. Not. For a moment for a task, but for a lifetime, and then will lavish the spirit through his word on everybody else.
He talks about Saul this first king and he says, there's one coming, who is everything. Saul could not be where Saul was a consum of people pleasing. And that was his downfall. He's always trying to make everyone happy. This one, this true and better soul will come. And his will, his desire, his burning passion will be the fathers pleasure, pleasing the father, doing the will of God.
That's what Jesus said. I have come to do the will of my father. I only do what I see him doing. I only say what I hear him speaking, the true and better soul. And. This man after God's own heart, that Paul says here, David was great, but he was just pointing to something else. He died, his body went in the ground.
He saw decay, but there was a true inventor that bit, a king coming, who was truly a man after God's own heart in every possible way. Paul stood up and said your whole story was pointing to something. And I want you to know that something it was pointing to has come as a present reality. In other words, the king, the Messiah, the one who would come and bring healing to the world has arrived, but he was unlike any king you ever experienced where every other king comes in power.
And he comes in humility where every other king seeks to build a greater empire. This king sought sought throughout his life to descend below his station, hanging out with the least and the lost with the desperate and the broken. He didn't, he wasn't. In the world with Palm and circumstance. The Christmas story is as humble as it gets.
If we were to write it today, this major and these other characters that we've saw romanticized, we would be very underwhelmed to see the Christmas story playing itself out in our context today. It's about as humble as it gets. This king shows up humble, and then he wins not through conquest, but through sacrifice, he is accused of crimes.
He didn't permit. Hung on cross and this in ways that we're still trying to wrap our heads from is how he redeems the Lord. But Paul says he didn't stay in the ground. He rose from the dead, into the resurrection. And now this is where he would've lost his Jewish audience. They all had a concept that resurrection was gonna happen.
That's the hope. If you read the old Testament and the new Testament, actually the hope is not some. Embodied future in the clouds. The hope is resurrection that God is going to restore heaven and earth. And everyone who is faithful will follow him into resurrected life, into new bodies in this place experiencing goodness day after day, learning the wonders of a world without the brokenness of sin, the wonders of one another, without the brokenness of sin, this is what God is up to.
That's what resurrection means. And most Jews had a hope for that someday. But where Paul lost them is he said it's already happened. It's not that there was an age that broke off. And then a whole new age of resurrection began it's that God has begun resurrecting within the present age. And the first one, as Paul would later write in some of his other books, the first fruit of the resurrection is Jesus cheese,
but God raised him from the dead. And the resurrection now becomes from this point onward. Not just from this point on for the whole book of acts and the rest of the new Testament becomes the focal point of the Christian story. I was just I was reading a passage just the other day, talks about how the resurrection is, what makes Christianity, what it's right.
In most religions, you get to decide if you want to follow that religion on the basis of whether you like its teachings or not. That's how most of them work. You study Eastern mysticism. I like this. This makes me feel centered or calm. I'm gonna do this. Something else. I like the way that this works. See, here's the thing, Christianity doesn't function that way.
Christianity functions on the basis of, is it true or not? Because if Jesus rose from the dead, it doesn't matter whether you like the rest of it or not. Yeah, that's right. That's true. And you have to cope with that reality first and that. The past driver was, I was reading the other day.
He said that was actually a problem. Paul's issue, Paul actually didn't like Christianity, remember? Yeah, he was killing Christians. He hated this so much thought they were crazy. He thought it was a perversion of everything that he believed. And then what happened? he saw Jesus risen. And despite the fact that it was a terribly inconvenient truth, it was true.
Yeah. Wow. And now we end up upend. The rest of his life had to throw the whole thing away. That's what he'll saying. Book for Philipp readings. I counted all garbage. Yeah. Cuz it is all the stuff that I, it doesn't matter what my preconceived notions of how the world works are. It doesn't matter how I think relationships out of function.
It doesn't matter what I ought to do with my money. It doesn't matter what I think of sex and the way that plays itself out in society. It doesn't matter what my politics are. Jesus, his rise that I guess that makes him king and he gets to say whatever he wants. Yeah. And whether I like it or not.
Yeah. It's true. That's right. Yeah. So the resurrection of Jesus, Paul points out here, it happened. He came back in this body that is somehow transformed and then he just ate in front of us and it's real. And we saw him and I don't know what to do with all that, but it's, that's why I'm here. But that's Paul.
I. Later say we had to speak the word of the Lord. I know you don't like it, but I didn't have any choice because it's true. Yeah. You Roach from the day changed my life. We say that all the time in the most pleasant ways, Jesus changed my life. Isn't that sweet? No, that, I don't think that's what Paul meant.
I think Paul meant I had it all figured out and then he ruined the whole thing but that ruining is actually gonna be the gay weeks' life, because what Paul's saying here. If he's risen, then the resurrection has begun. The plan of God has been fulfilled. Every promise that God ever made is now complete.
That's what he said in verse 32, we tell you the good news, what God promised our ancestors. He has. Past tense. Perfect fulfilled for us, their children by raising Jesus. You'll see it. Another place in second Corinthians, one 20 for no matter how many promises God has made. They're yes. In Christ. And so through him came amen.
Spoken by us to glory. Do all that song. We're sing that song. Aren't we? Yeah. Yeah. We are yesterday. Amen. We listen to that song when we sing it. And we think about these promises that we feel like God has made in our own lives, where you guys are gonna cut it once you and I just like. No we're doing it.
All right. Perfect. All we had no idea at this point. I know, right? It's like we planned it,
but he says every promise that God ever made is yes. And amen to Jesus. It has been fulfilled in him. It's been completed now. Here's the point? It's been a long lot of ramblings get point, but here it is, this moment right now is the era of God's prime. This is the year of the Lord's favor. This is the restoration of good Jubilee is on right now.
Enter into it. Imagine that's what Paul's saying here right now, here and now in this place, I know it's not complete yet. I know that there'll be a day when Jesus comes back and restore the whole world and everything in it, but the restoration is on now. God's promises are fulfilled. The war has been won.
The end is not end doubt. We need to start acting like it. He's announcing. And this is the gospel that's preached everywhere in the book of acts a new reality. There's a new king and a new kingdom that is breaking out in the middle. One, I know you thought it was gonna be a hard break and that one would end and this one would start, but that's not the way it's working.
The way it's working is it's breaking out right in the middle of it. And like a mustard seed beginning to grow up through the ground it's growing and it's spreading out and it's changing things. It's changing environments. It's see the problem with the old breaking. Plan where it's we have this evil age and it breaks.
And then the new age starts is that everybody in the evil age just gets obliterate. Whereas this plan actually brings redemption to dead places because it grows up in the middle of this evil age and begins to transform what was intended for evil, into good, where God is now redeeming broken and messed up people so that they can be a part of the age to come.
Does that make sense? . It's way better this way. This is an age of mercy. An age of grace, an age of inclusion and invitation
restoration is on. This is the year of the Lord's favor. Will you enter? And Paul here says simp that there's two ways you enter in and both are important. First is through the forgiveness of your sentence. In other words, you have to be set free. As you were born into a system and have participated in a system with brokenness for far too long, and along the way, have accumulated all sorts of death, all sorts of separation.
You have strayed and wandered far. You have missed the work of God for far too long tomorrow. And what you need now is a savior to do for you, what you couldn't do for yourself to make your way back. Help you turn around. That's what Paul says here. You say you had this law, you couldn't pull it off. It didn't work.
It was good that you couldn't actually obey it. So Jesus came and obey it for you. And now what you need to do is fall on your knees before the savior and ask for forgiveness, which is his delight grant. In other words, what you're saying is I don't want that to be my story anymore. Would you cancel the legal debt against you and.
And you've, you have already dealt with the penalty, but let me receive the reward of your faiths
because you received the penalty of my own faith. That's how the gospel works. God made him from new, no sin to be sinned for us so that we might become more righteousness of God. Second parent thing is 5 21, 1 of the best verses in the. Cancels the legal debt against us by taking it on himself and forgive it.
So the gateway into this new life, this era of Jubilee is forgiveness of our sins. We need forgiveness. We can't keep doing it the way we've been doing, but that's just the gateway into this new life. I'll also says that through him, freedom is given to any who believe and here's where the can mission statement comes.
We don't want to just be forgiving as in, in the past, all of our sins that we did in the past have been forgiven. And now at this moment, we're zero let's. Let's just be clear on this here at canopy. We don't want to live at zero. We want to live into flourishing and that's what freedom means. It means you have been set free now.
Live free. Because Jesus, didn't just forgive the past sins in that moment so that we kind of sin and then he forgives us and he SINED and forgives us. And we keep getting reset to the zero. That's not how it worked. The Bible also makes it clear when Jesus died on the cross, he crucified the powers that had caused this whole sin system in the first place that he hung them on the cross, he triumphed over them.
And now we are free to live in a new kingdom where there are new rules, a new way of playing the game. Actually the original way. Yeah, what it meant to be human all along. And so when we say we're learning to live free, we're learning to catch up to what Jesus has already done. We're learning to become who he says we already are.
We're learning to live into the resurrection, grow in freedom every day, every year I want. My dream for this church. My dream for myself is that I would be able to stand in front of you next year a year from now and say, I'm more free this year than I was last year. I'm more free of my insecurities. I'm more free of, I'm not gonna say up here and profess all of 'em right now, man.
I'm more free than I was before. And I would hope that we'd all be able to say that in tangible ways I have grown in freedom. I have grown in becoming Jesus, being faith. That's the gospel. Jubilee is here. The restoration is on. Do you want to be a part and come be forgiven and live free. Now three responses we see in this passage really fast three responses we see, first of all, This guy, bar Jesus, hell man.
Interesting guy. His name literally means son of Jesus, which is why Paul says to him, your son and devil, it's a play on words. He's clever this Paul Guy, but notice he says he's opposing the messages to the gospel. The reason probably is because he was making money off of his relationship with this Roman rule.
Pro counts is like the governor. So this guy, the source, or probably a fortune teller or somebody who's predicting the future or interpreting dreams is making money off of his relationship. And when Paul comes along and threatens that, and this outsider, because it's going to affect his life is his idolatry resists the gospel.
This happens to us a lot. Where the external influences our lives. Our dollar trees are the things that we're enslaved to will push back. As soon as we hear the gospel. Okay. This happens all the time. The gospel is preached. Freedom is announced and we feel it and we're drawn to it. And then we run into this wall of, oh no.
That means I'm going to have to give up dot. That's going to cost me this. If I really move into it. And that's what VA Jesus, this guy, that's what he represents often, by the way, it is money . Cause Jesus is always gonna have something to say about the primary obstacle to people following him, which in every age has always been money.
Jesus is always gonna say something about it. And if Jesus hasn't said something about your finances recently, you're probably not listen. The truth is our finances as always what Jesus need to look different than they would have. Otherwise they must. That's true of everything, but especially here. And that's what we see here is there's this external opposition from the outside world, from the spirits world, from the idols of the age to Jesus coming in.
And so he pushes. And the holy spirit of iterates, his opposition, of course, then there's an internal opposition represented by the Jewish leaders who it says we're jealous when they saw the crowds. And this happens too, when Jesus shows up, he also confronts not just the idols of the age, but also our image of God that we can build up in our minds.
It's very safe and very controllable. Because that's what we all do. We put God into this nice little box where we can maintain control over him. We can put him in the areas of our life that we want him pull him out when we want to play and put him away. When we don't bring him into the spaces that we think he belongs and keep him out of the places that we think he doesn't, we create God in our own image in this great, ironic reversal.
And when Jesus shows up, he doesn't allow that because by virtue of his resurrection, by virtue of his being, he shows that God can do whatever he wants. Who is in fact, in control himself, you have these Jewish leaders who have been fighting for control for so long because of their understanding who God is and how he has to operate.
And when God shows up and operates in the way that they didn't want, you didn't expect they resist. And the same is true of us. It's not just our idolatry, our external idolatry that gets in the way of receiving gospel. It's also our religiosity. It's also our churchiness. Some of us have been too institutionalized in church that we miss when God is up to something good.
If he want to enter into Jubilee. I'm gonna have to lay it down. There's the third group here. They're represented by the pro council and by most of the people of the city in Antioch, which is they receive it with joy, recognizing that this thing that God is doing, if it's true, if it's real, it's better than anything else I've got going.
And so I just leave us with question today. Where are we at in that continuum of response? Cause this is the truth. This is the gospel. And will you step in? I imagine if you're liking me, you have a little bit of all three of those responses in you right now. You've got these external things. If you're having a hard time laying down, it's keeping you from life.
I imagine many of us in this room have a lot of churchiness a lot of ways we think God has to operate. And when he operates outside of that, it gets frustrating.
And I imagine in this moment too, there's also a sense of joy. What if it's true? What if it's real? What if the resurrection is on and I can grow in freedom and life and joy,
let's feed that last response. And by the power of the holy spirit to death, the other two, would you bring.
Jesus. We love you. Thank you. You have done all this love for us.
I'm gonna keep it simple. And just ask if you show up by your spirit and show each of my friends, each of my brothers and sisters, how true be my words, convincing your spirit. Use this resurrected Jesus to you. Meet with each person here. Draw them to life. Break off anything that is not life
just for maybe just a minute or two, the silence. I know that you're allowed, don't get a whole lot of silence. So let's take advantage of this opportunity for a minute or two. And just invite the holy spirit to search your heart. As I describe those three responses to the gospel, and as you've heard the gospel preach in this way, in this place.
So ask the question, where am I right now? What's pushing back inside of you. Invite the holy spirit, lovingly and gently speak to you about that. We're gonna worship together in just tomorrow.