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Tag: Antioch

Published November 7, 2022

Controversy in the Church

Last Sunday Paul & Barnabas safely returned to Antioch after completing their first missionary journey together. And what a journey it had been! They had travelled over 1400 miles and preached the Gospel in dozens of towns and cities. They had done amazing miracles – such as healing a lame man who had the faith to be healed, as well as blinding the eyes of a sorcerer who had blatantly opposed the Word of God. They had also suffered persecution – they had been run out of town, plotted against, and Paul had even been stoned and left for dead!

But through it all, they faithfully preached the Word of God and completed the work that God had given them to do. And as they preached, crowds of people – including both Jews and Gentiles – came to hear their preaching and many became believers. These new believers formed brand new churches in many cities and so Paul & Barnabas appointed elders in each church to continue teaching and equipping those new believers – so that they might grow and mature in their walk with the Lord.

And so having done all that, they entrusting those new churches and new elders to the care of the Lord, and they returned to Antioch to report all these things to their home church – who had originally commissioned and sent them out.

And if this were the end of the book of Acts, we would probably conclude by saying “And they all lived happily ever after.” Acts chapter 14 kinda ends on that sort of note where the missionary journey was a great success and Paul & Barnabas settled down in Antioch for quite some time!

But that isn’t the end of the book of Acts, and as we get into chapter 15, we quickly see that they didn’t all live happily ever after. Before too long, the church became enveloped in great controversy!

And it wasn’t even the new baby churches that Paul & Barnabas had just planted who were embroiled in this controversy – it was their own home church of Antioch!

Now I know that we can hardly imagine having controversy within the church – especially coming out of these last few years of covid! We know nothing of that sort of thing, do we?

Of course we do! As long as there are people in the church, there are going to be controversies as well. That’s just the nature of different people with different perspectives all coming from different backgrounds and experiences – but all trying to work together to serve and honour God to the best of our abilities! With all those differences, there’s going to be some conflict! And that’s ok! The important part is how we deal with those differences. It’s how we work together though the conflict that really matters. 

And that’s where this next chapter in Acts can be very helpful for us! As we watch this church in Antioch work through some of their controversies, I think there are a lot of principles that we can take and apply to some of our own situations here in the 21st century! The specific issues are likely different, but the principles for working through those issues remain the same.

So let’s take a look!

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Published October 17, 2022

Commissioned

As we’ve been going through our study of the Book of Acts, we’ve noted how the story kinda jumps around from person to person – following a variety of different characters as the Holy Spirit works through each of them in unique ways. We’ve seen snapshots of Peter & John, Stephen, Philip, Barnabas, & Saul – all of them each playing key role in the early days of the church.

But so far, Peter has been the most visible character in these stories. We’ve seen him preaching on the day of Pentecost, later healing a lame man at the temple, confronting Ananias & Sapphire about lying to the Holy Spirit, bringing the Gospel to Cornelius and his household, and most recently being miraculously rescued from prison!

If we had to identify a central character to the book of Acts so far (Jesus Christ not withstanding) – I think we would have to choose Peter. 

However, we are now just about half-way through the book of Acts and it’s at this point that the spotlight of the story shifts and will now follow a young man named Saul and it will track with him pretty much for the rest of the book.

Of course, Saul is not a new character to the book of Acts. We first met him back in chapter 7. At that time he was a zealous young Pharisee whose misdirected zeal for the Lord lead him to imprison and murder many believers. 

But thankfully, in His grace, God saw fit to intervene, and in a very dramatic fashion, brought Saul to the saving knowledge and faith in Jesus Christ. And not only was Saul’s conversion dramatic, so was the change in his life! Almost immediately, Saul began boldly preaching about Jesus Christ – doing the very thing that he had condemned others for only days earlier!

With Saul’s zeal for the Lord now properly directed, He had gone from being the persecutor to being the persecuted! And so for his own safety, the other believers sent him away to his hometown of Tarsus.

But that certainly wasn’t the end of Saul’s story. Sometime later, Barnabas went to Tarsus to find Saul and brought him to Antioch where they both worked together with the church there for quite some time.

And that’s just about the last we’ve heard about Saul up until this point. The only other thing we know is that he and Barnabas have taken a trip to Jerusalem to bring a gift for the church there to help provide for their needs during a famine.

And so that’s where we’re going to pick things up today.

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