Choosing People for Completing the Mission
Acts 1:12 - 26
Last week we began a series that I am calling “Completing the Mission that Jesus Began”
The mission we are to complete is to seek out people who are not believers yet and lead them to faith in Christ.
The Power for the Mission comes from the Holy Spirit who lives in every Believer.
The Motivation for Completing the Mission, comes from the fact that Jesus is coming back!
Read Acts 1:12 – 26
There are some important principles we need to learn from this historical narrative that are applicable to our lives and this church.
1. God Completes the Mission through people.
2. God calls people through the church.
3. God blesses those that surrender to Complete the Mission.
1. God completes the Mission through people.
It's a marvelous thing to realize that God works His will through people. He is in the process today of completing the Mission that Jesus began and He is doing it through people just like you.
For the most part God does not use overly supernatural means to complete the mission, but rather works through ordinary people.
Ill. God doesn’t send an angel to Time Square to announce to all the people that Jesus is the only way to be saved. God doesn’t speak in an audible voice so that everyone in the world can hear and say I love you.
God doesn’t write in fiery letters in the sky that we need to repent from our sins and put faith in Jesus.
God just uses people like you and me to show the world how much he cares and to tell them how to be saved from the consequences of their sin.
Ill. In the Old Testament when God wanted to deliver Israel from their enemy, the (Judges 6:11) Midianites used an ordinary person named Gideon. What was the battle cry that God gave Gideon’s army of 300? "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon." In other words, it wasn't just the sword of the Lord, but it was the sword of the Lord and Gideon because God accomplishes His mission through people.
Ill. In order to accomplish the mission of delivering the children of Israel out of Egypt and across the Red Sea, and to destroy the army of Pharaoh, God used a man named Moses with a stick in his hand.
Ill. To accomplish the mission of delivering the children of Israel from destruction in Persia, He used a young woman named Esther.
God places people into various places for the purpose of carrying out His mission.
He has placed you where you live and work so that the world might see Him through you and hear from you of His great plan of salvation.
As God was about to give birth to His church, God wanted to make sure that the proper people were in the proper place to complete the mission. Today it is no different.
In that day, the ranks of the disciples have been depleted by one and that one being Judas Iscariot.
T. S. How did God choose someone to Complete The Mission? He did it through the church.
2. God calls people through the church.
Verse 12 They would have probably entered through the eastern gate of Jerusalem when they returned from the Mount of Olives which was less than a mile from the city.
Verse 13, They went upstairs to the room where they were staying. The second floor room in a house was usually the largest room in the house.
Look at who was present: Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James.
“The women" were also present which probably included, Mary Magdalene, Mary the wife of Cleopas, Mary and Martha, Salome and other women as well as the mother of Jesus.
They were disciples of Christ just as much as the men.
Verse 14, "and with His brethren." Now, this is a marvelous thing. Jesus’ brothers had come to believe in Him as the Messiah even though they had doubted Him during most of His earthly ministry.
Note: There are some who teach that Jesus had no earthly brothers because Mary had no other children besides Jesus. That is not true.
We even know their names: James, Joseph, Simon and Jude. And James and Jude figure very prominently in the New Testament. James wrote the epistle of James and Jude wrote the epistle of Jude. James was the first lead pastor of the Jerusalem church.
Note: Mary the mother of Jesus was in no way deity. She is not to be worshiped. No one is to pray to Mary. Nowhere does the Scripture tell us to do that. She was a wonderful person, but she was a sinner saved by grace.
Judas Iscariot had left the disciples and gone to where he belonged.
Note: There is a difference between the details of the account of Judas’ death in Matthew 27:5 and what we read in this passage.
Matthew 27:5 So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.
6 The chief priests picked up the coins and said, "It is against the law to put this into the treasury, since it is blood money." 7 So they decided to use the money to buy the potter's field as a burial place for foreigners. 8 That is why it has been called the Field of Blood to this day. NIV
Now look at verse Acts 1:18. “Judas bought a field" Now, of course, he didn't do it himself. He was already dead, but it was with his money and so in that sense, it was his purchase.
“there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out.”
It may be that he tried to hang himself over a rocky cliff and the rope or limb broke and his body fell and burst open on the rocks below.
The body could have fallen after it decayed.
However it happened, this event was well known to all who lived in Jerusalem, and so the field was called the “field of blood" by the people. If either of these passages had been wrong in any way, the passage would have been rejected by the church and would have never been included in the cannon of Scripture.
We can always trust the Scripture to be true. The Holy Spirit made sure of that as He led men to write it and he has preserved it through the church for us.
There are details and events that one writer will include and another leave out, but that does not make them contradictory but simply complimentary.
How did the church choose a person to replace Judas and to serve?
Verse 14 Notice, They all joined together constantly in prayer. Out of that prayer they were led to choose Matthias to serve as an apostle.
Apostle means one who is sent with authority.
Note: Acts 1:26 “Then they cast lots” The use of “casting lots” seems strange to us. It may have been the last act of the age of the Old Testament and that is the reason we see the casting of lots used here. With the coming of the Holy Spirit and the beginning of the church age, we do not see them used again.
God still calls out people to complete the mission through the church just as He did in this passage.
The whole church needs to pray for God’s leadership and seek His will in choosing such people to lead in the church just as they did.
Prayer is first of all surrender to the will of God. When the call comes to people that have been praying, they are much more responsive to the voice of God and the church makes much better choices.
The church chooses but God appoints.
1 Corinthians 12:28 And in the church God has appointed first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, also those having gifts of healing, those able to help others, those with gifts of administration, and those speaking in different kinds of tongues. NIV
When the church calls on you to serve, you need to strongly consider that God may be speaking to you through His people.
The Church must not only call out people to complete the mission, but sometimes the church must replace a person in leadership because of his conduct or character. Nothing is worst that having a person that is not living for Christ serving in the church.
In verses 12 to 26, we see God leads the church to replace Judas with the proper person to complete the Mission.
Note: There are some who say that it was a mistake on Peter's part to make this decision. He had no business choosing a replacement for Judas. That Jesus would do that when he called Paul.
It is hard to believe that God would not let us know in Scripture that this was an error on the part of Peter and the other believers. Nothing in Scripture says it was a mistake.
The apostle Paul, was an apostle of a different order, although truly an apostle, was chosen out of a difference context.
It seems that the apostles were a body wider than just the Twelve. In Ephesians 4:11 “gave some to be apostles,” There were others referred to as "apostles" such as James the brother of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:7; Galatians 1:19), Barnabas (Acts 14:4,14; 1 Corinthians 9:6), Andronicus and Junias (Romans 16:7).
T. S. God calls people through the church and what happens when those individuals and the church as a whole surrender to God as these did in Acts?
3. God blesses those that surrender.
Matthias is great example to us of surrender. It’s one thing to surrender to serve in the church when there is no persecution. But when they have just put Christ to death and later Steven, it is a whole different ballgame. That is real surrender!
The whole group of 120 is a great example of Surrender. They were praying and surrendered to God and were ready to complete the mission.
Surrender means Submission and obedience to the will of the God and that is where the church was.
Surrender is one of the most important things in the Christian life and in the church.
There may have been only 120 in the church in Jerusalem. They were small in quantity, but they were large in power. They were witnesses energized by the Holy Spirit.
They had a small beginning, but they had a great result because they surrendered to God to complete the mission! On the day the church was started, three thousand were saved and baptized. WOW, now that is a blessing!!!!!
The saw many blessings like that. Thousands continued to be saved after that.
Surrender is the key to accomplishing the mission and to seeing the blessing of God fall.
Unless you're willing to be what God wants you to be and to do what God wants you to do, you will never see what God can do! They submitted to His will and were obedient to His call.
For you who are Christians I say this. I trust you've learned that the blessing of God only comes from surrendering to his call and obedience to his will, and doing your part to complete the mission.
To those that are not believers yet, your friends and neighbors and family, you need to say to them, “When you die, you will go to the place that you've chosen, either to heaven with Jesus or to hell with Judas who rejected Jesus. You need to choose to follow Jesus before it is everlasting too late.
Matthias surrendered to Jesus and found his place among the beloved. Judas rejected Jesus and went to his own place in Hell.
