Into Action in Acts: Attitude, Altitude and Acting on it
Do you ever feel that God is unreasonable in what he asks or decides or even a little crazy sometimes...
Or let me put it a different way
Good Decisions can be a bit of work, but they aren’t terribly hard. You look at the long term goals, and you pick the decisions that will best help you get on the right path for that result.
Making Decisions that are a part of the Action of the word of God, is the reverse, it is not a lot of “work” but it is incredibly hard.
God likes the underdog, and over and over again, he surprises with the most unlikely ways of doing things. He picks an old, childless couple to create a great nation, an escaped murderer hiding in the desert to liberate a people that would be God`s, a 40 year journey instead of a straight trip through a desert, an army of 300 to defeat thousands, the least impressive of 8 brothers to be king...over and over again, God does the counter-intuitive, least likely, thing...
And that is why it can be so hard to do what God wants at times.
For us as a church, who are looking and striving to be a people who are in the action of God, it is crucial that we learn how to go about being a church that makes decisions in a way that propels us into the Action of God instead of away from it.
Making the decision for the action of the word of God takes half as much work and is 5 times as hard.
The passage we are looking at today is in Acts 13, and it shows this issue in a different way.
13 In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch) and Saul. 2 While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” 3 So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off.
4 The two of them, sent on their way by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia and sailed from there to Cyprus. 5 When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the Jewish synagogues. John was with them as their helper.
We are going to break down this passage into three parts as we seek to find how this community, and to some degree, how we are to be a people that make our decisions that move us away from our own wisdom and into the action of God.
The first Part is about being the community that listens for God, this is the Attitude: This is a very important and is often the very emphasized part, to be a people that are yearning to hear from God; but it is also only a third of the puzzle:
This text, talking about the church in Antioch, gives us a glimpse of the leadership and action of the church. First of all, it was a people that were living within the spirit`s gifting and power...and it lists the people who were exercising certain types of gifts, those that were prophets and teachers...
Now, many can get thrown off by this term Prophets: we think of this as seeing or predicting the future, and although God does give indications sometimes of future events, the grand majority of the biblical understanding of the “prophet” is one that hears from God, speaking an inspired word from God for the edification and direction of the community.
The central idea behind both of these titles (Prophet and Teacher) is a heart`s desire to listen to God, and to be made more what God intended us to be. It is a heart for the presence of God, and one of the primary means a community learns and forms into a people that listen to God.
The list of 5 names is interesting, in that it has two very well known people (Paul and Barnabas) and three who we know nothing about. This is how it works within the work of the word of God, that different people will be used in different ways as God sees fit, which means not everyone gets the same roles, the same fame, and the same success. And truth be told, God isn’t concerned with making sure everyone gets the credit they deserve, nor is he worried about making everyone into the definition of “success” as the world sees it, but instead will seek to do what is best for the word of God to go forward. This is even with having a “superstar” in the group, with Manean being a childhood friend of Herod and obviously someone of high social standing and wealth, God uses all of them, but not all of them become the renowned movers and shakers in the rest of the book.
“It is surprising how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
Abraham Lincoln
Verse 2 “they” most likely refers not just to the leaders, but to the whole community of faith in Antioch. This is crucial to a community that is wanting to be in the midst of the action of God, that they are defined and find their identity as a people that seek god, in worship, prayer and in purposeful ways such as fasting...the purpose of all these things is to focus on God, so that we might hear what he says and what he points to, so we hear the beat of his heart for this world and start moving in those directions
So if the first Part of the puzzle is to be a community that is listening to God, then the next part has to be actually hearing from God, or the Altitude: This is the part that goes beyond the general attitude of the community and into the heart of each of us.
In this Passage, they are not just going through the motions as a group, but are making it a central fact in their lives, and learning from God so often that they recognize God’s voice.
The right Attitude and the right altitude: Attitude is shown here as the willingness to form themselves and their community into a people that listen. The right Altitude is shown by the closeness to God, the time that has been taken by the church in Antioch and the leaders to seek God, spending time with him, and learning to hear him.
This learning to hear him isn’t some secret thing, only being given to a few, but rather the result of the time and importance in someone’s life to seeking God. You cannot expect to be able to recognize what God is saying if you never give him any time.
As a church, we want to be a community that comes together and hears from god, through the worship, through the community times, through prayer and through study of the word...and that we take that and we don’t just rate it and decide whether we liked it in a consumer kind of way, but to make sure we meet with God. This is central to being a community that is a part of God’s action.
The third part is Acting on it, first we need the Attitude, then the Altitude, but these have to have the third to be of any use.
We move beyond the hearing and we have to then go and do something about it.
To do anything else is to become spiritually schizophrenic, talking and acting one way for Sunday and then doing whatever else the rest of the time without any thought to God’s call.
The people of the Acts 13 church were a group that came into God’s presence and then did something because of it.
In verse 2 God directs them to set aside these two for “the work” : it seems like the spirit didn’t even let them know what work they were doing to be doing, just to get them ready, to let them go, and to see...something.
That “something” that we might do, it might not make any sense, just like going to the gentiles didn’t make sense to the church in Antioch, it had never been done before, and there was no growth in the Antioch church from what Paul and Barnabas might be doing elsewhere. Sure the church had figured out it might be ok for some God worshiping gentiles to be included when God did something special, but to actively go out and seeking that out...should they even do that. Not to mention that Paul and Barnabas would be pretty handy to keep around. Can you imagine the kind of church growth could be expected if you kept someone like Paul in one place for 30 years...wow. Talk about potential for a “successful congregation”, but instead they followed God, and instead of being the powerhouse church, they became the sending church for the powerhouse movement of God into the whole known world.
To develop the first, the Attitude, we are seeking to be a church that gathers together to do the core of who we are as a community that learns and listens to God. It is found in the importance that we give to gathering together to listen and learn, not just to the sermon or the worship, but to hear from what God might say to us. It is developing the understanding that we gather to meet with God, and that means we gather to listen to what he might say to us.
The Altitude is developed on the more personal side of things; this is what we do to actually hear God, the actions of worship, silence, fasting...those parts that cannot be faked, the parts that go, not just to the heart of the community, but of each of us. This is about making these things a part of the rest of our lives, and not just going through a once a week God work out.
The Acting it out is the part that can trip up many, because God isn’t interested in telling us what we can do just to have us not do it, and as a matter of fact he often only tells us in light of what action we are willing to take, it is the willingness to do the insane thing, even moving to Manitoba, if that is what God is asking. And this is an interesting thing: God is not just interested in speaking into the whole group, but also into the individual, just as he is not just interested in speaking into the individual and not the group.
One of the core things is that the church in Antioch realized that none of them were the captain of the ship, they were not the one that needs to be in charge, God is, and so they sought to hear Him, they sought to follow him, and they sought to do what he was calling them to do
The important thing was not that they were missionaries, but that they were trusting God and sacrificing their own plans for trusting in God’s plan that they did not even know
That might mean a move, or giving to the unglamorous need instead of the flashy exciting one.
It might mean stepping up and saying you are willing to do something that you could fail at.
As a church it might mean that we don’t play it safe with things like budgets, giving, or our goals and vision. We listen, we hear and then we go, even if there is nothing under us but God, because just God, is as much as we will ever need.
It isn't a lot of work, and it is very hard, but as we discover the life we can live when we make our decisions in this way, I don't think we could ever go back.
