We're Only Human - September 20, 2015 - Acts 14:8-18
We’ve been paying close attention to the Book of Acts for the last number of months, with some breaks.
But we’ve been, hopefully, learning a fair bit about the early church, which as I’ve mentioned, is really our early, early history as a church.
Every Christian church in the world today traces its origins back to the experience of the people that we’ve been discovering in these pages, the pages of the Book of Acts in the Bible.
Origins are important, because they impact the present and they impact the future.
When scientists want to learn about humans in general, and humans in detail, they spend a lot of time learning about our DNA.
What’s in our DNA determines how we grow as people from infants to maturity.
It acts as a molecular code that ultimately determines how we look and how we grow.
It determines what sex we are, what our hair and eye colour is, it determines things like if we have ADHD, it determines if we’re morning people or night people (that surprised me as I researched this).
It determines if we’re going to be sensation-seeking and impulsive in our character, it determines our body mass type - are we skinny, average or larger.
Our DNA determines things like our likelihood of getting certain diseases, like Huntingtons disease, certain cancers, cystic fibrosis. All of our DNA can be thought of as a blueprint for us as human beings.
DNA matters. Where we start matters. Where we start in life matters. Beginnings matter.
And so as we think about origins, even origins of the church, we’re thinking about the DNA of the church, the blueprint for what we are.
Now, every modern church is unique and every church has its own DNA. Church at the Mission is unique in that it has 2 origins; Church on the Street and Cabbagetown Community Church.
Church on the Street began as a church designed specifically for youth on the streets of Toronto who were at risk, and it was located at Evergreen, Yonge Street Mission.
It was created as a place where people who didn’t care much for the normal idea of church, or who couldn’t find a place in other churches, could still find a place to worship and belong and grow as disciples of Jesus.
Cabbagetown Community Church, the other church we were formed from, began as a community-based church designed to be useful to and engaged with local people in this area, which at that time, before the new Regent Park, was mixed but generally not well off.
That’s some of our DNA, and that’s why we as a church are deeply a part of this community, why most of you come from this neighbourhood as opposed to driving in from somewhere else.
And it’s also why we specifically welcome people who might not comfortably fit into church elsewhere.
DNA matters. Origins matter.
They help to explain things. They help us to accept and understand why things are the way they are.
It's also important to know where you've come from in order to vision for the future, in order to be grounded in the good of what God has done in the past so that we can enter the good of what has planned for our future together as a church.
And so in the Book of Acts we have the beginning of the church. And in our passage today we see Paul and Barnabas, both apostles in the early church, both passionate about Jesus, committed to spreading the gospel of Jesus among the gentiles, those who were not Jewish.
And we’re going to unpack 3 things here that are evident in the life of the early church which are a critical part of the DNA of the Church as a whole, including this local congregation of Church at the Mission.
#1 The Miraculous
in the passage today that _______ read, a man is healed. This is not unusual to find in the book of Acts.
There were many unusual signs and wonders done by God through the Apostles, and each occurrence generated a unique response by those that witnessed it.
Here, in this account, the Apostles are in Lystra, an important outpost city in what is now Turkey.
Lystra is mentioned five times in the New Testament. Lystra was visited several times by the Apostle Paul, along with Barnabas or Silas.
It was there that Paul met a young disciple who would become an important leader in the church: Timothy.
A man known to have been crippled since birth, who had never walked, was in the habit of listening to Paul speak.
Paul looks at him and says to him loudly, "Stand up straight on your feet." The man leaps up and walks about.
Now the passage is less about the healing than it is about what follows. But suffice it to say that God still heals today. Many of us in this worship service can attest to God’s healing power.
We may have experienced it physically, or emotionally or spiritually or even in our relationships.
God has power to heal. Amen? God may have worked through you to bring healing to another. I know for a fact that God does this?
This passage shows us that God works healing miracles for His people. We need not shy away from confessing the healing we have received.
In this church, and in many others, your experience of God’s healing in your life can be shared and will be an encouragement to others.
So the fact that God heals, that the same God who worked in this account in the book of Acts; well…He works today in your life and my life, that is important for us to grasp, and to understand and to believe.
But there’s something else in this passage that we need to explore a bit more because what happens after this man’s healing is a little bizarre.
After the healing of the man crippled from birth, the crowd shouted something kind of strange: “The gods have come down to us in human form!”
Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes because he was the chief speaker.13 The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates because he and the crowd wanted to offer sacrifices to them.
What on earth would account for this? And how is this important in any way for us today?
The explanation of their being taken for gods lies in the legendary history of Lycaonia.
The people round Lystra told a story that once Zeus and Hermes had come to this earth in disguise.
None in all the land would give them hospitality until at last two old peasants, Philemon and his wife Baucis, took them in.
As a result the whole population was wiped out by the gods except Philemon and Baucis, who were made the guardians of a splendid temple and were turned into two great trees when they died.
So when Paul healed the crippled man the people of Lystra were determined not to make the same mistake again.
Barnabas must have been a man of noble presence so they took him for Zeus the king of the gods.
Hermes was the messenger of the gods and, since Paul was the speaker, they called him Hermes.
Now of course this story of Zeus and Hermes was a fiction, but it was one that the people of Lystra lived in fear of.
So much so that when God Almighty showed his power through this healing, the people credited gods who were no gods with the miracle.
It was, to be sure, an awkward moment for Paul and Barnabas.
When they learned of what the people were saying, and when then learned that the priest of Zeus brought bulls to offer sacrifices to them, they rushed out into the crowd.
Not at all pleased with being mistaken as divine, Paul and Barnabas tore their clothes as a way to show their shock and dismay at what the crowd was doing. And they shouted from within the crowd:
15 “Friends, why are you doing this? We too are only human, like you”.
Far from enjoying the adulation, far from wanting to be idolized, the two apostles counter the crowd by letting them know that they are just like them - human.
Only human. Not divine. Not worthy to be sacrificed to. The very notion would have made them sick to their stomachs. The crowd was making idols of them.
In this day and age people strive to be idols. Musicians, actors...you name it. We like the attention, we like being put up on a pedestal.
But Paul and Barnabas were not interested at all in this. They tore their clothes in dismay. Now, they didn’t let their disgust put them off the crowd.
They didn’t turn their backs on them, they didn’t wipe the dust off their shoes at them. They used this opportunity of to address the mob:
“We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. 16 In the past, he let all nations go their own way. 17 Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.”
This is not a crowd that was steeped in the knowledge of the true God. These were not the chosen people of Israel who needed to be called back to the worship of the one true God.
These were people locked into a religious system that kept them terrified of angering the gods. It kept them from knowing who God is. Paul urges the crowd to “turn from these worthless things”, gods who were no gods, who did not exist...turn from them to the living God.
Because they did not know the God revealed in the Bible, Paul appeals to them on the basis of what they could understand. He describes nature, and demonstrates God’s goodness through His created order. God gives rain from heaven, He gives crops in their seasons and provides lots of food and fills their hearts with joy”
That’s far from the ancient Greek gods or Roman gods who cared little of not at all for humans. The true God, the living God, Paul says, cares about you enough to be your Jehovah Jireh, the one who provides everything you need.
And on top of that, He gives joy. He spoke to them so that they could understand. He started from the here and now to get to the there and then.
You’d think that would work. And likely for many it did. But mobs have something called a ‘mob mentality’ which is not high in the IQ department. Even with these clear, hopeful words Barnabas and Paul had trouble keeping the crowds from sacrificing to them.
So...2 things so far that are here displayed in the early life of the church, where the DNA of the church universal was being formed.
First, God does miracles, on His own terms, according to His will and timing, and for His glory, to heal but also to draw people in so they can have a chance to respond to the gospel of Jesus.
Second, the church is the church as it points people from error to truth, from idols to the living God.
We know that Paul had a pretty big ego. He was not short of self-confidence. A more raw or immature Paul could possibly have been tempted to receive some of the crowd’s adulation.
If Barnabas had not been so keenly focussed on Jesus and so absolutely clear on the gospel, this teaching moment in this passage might never have happened.
So today as the church - doesn’t matter what flavour of church - there’s a lot of denominations, or what I like to call “flavours” of the church...
Today as the church, we exist to love people to Jesus, to direct people to come to know the one true God, who can only be known in His fullness through Jesus Christ and the gospel of God’s grace.
Thirdly, and this point I draw from the character of Paul in particular, but also his words. Paul’s personal, original DNA was that of a pharisee.
That would have pointed him in a certain direction, toward being a teacher of the law and a self-righteous man, someone who fought for legalistic righteousness. He describes this himself in some detail in his letter to the Philippians, chapter 3, verse 4-6.
“If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless”.
That’s where Paul was going. That’s where his original training, mindset and heart were. He was on one trajectory, because of where he came from.
And his trajectory led him to be the primary persecutor of the church, responsible, before his conversion, for the imprisonment and death of many Christians
But then something happened to Paul. What happened to Paul? Jesus happened to Paul.
Jesus grabbed a hold of Paul’s life in dramatic fashion, and so Paul turned from being someone who was determined to destroy the church while it was in its early, embryonic state, to being the one who ended up planting churches everywhere.
A massive transformation. Paul did not get to where he ended up, as a great Christian leader because of his original DNA. And you and I will not get to the place that God wants us to be through our original DNA.
Paul himself puts this quite nicely, speaking out of his own experience of having his DNA rewired, rebooted by God.
He said: “...If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation”
The old Paul died. He died when Jesus Christ came into his life, when he received Jesus Christ as His Lord and Saviour. The new Paul was a new creation. New DNA. A new path in life. A new trajectory.
To put it concisely, with our old dna, were dead in our sins and trespasses. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved.
How was this possible?
God makes all things new. God makes total transformation possible through the cross of Jesus. All things are possible with God.
What does that mean, really? How does this impact me, you might be asking. Well, it means that because of what Jesus has done for us, we are not bound to our beginnings.
As important as DNA is, and it is important, it is does not contain the final picture for our lives.
I was raised to believe that there is no God. From my start, my family and all of their friends, which represented ALL of my influences, taught me that anyone who believed in God was nuts.
I didn’t go to Sunday school, didn’t ever learn anything about God until I was 17 years old. There was no evidence at all that would suggest that I would come to know Jesus Christ.
Which is why it was a disturbing shock to my family when I became a follower of Jesus.
This is the 3rd point. The church is the church when it is made of of people who have been made new creations through faith in Jesus Christ.
This room is full of people who have been made new through faith in Jesus Christ.
God did something. He changed me. He grabbed a hold of my life, enabled me to know he is real and then has done nothing but bless my life ever since.
So I think if there’s one thing that I want you to know about the church that Jesus founded and the church that is very much alive today around the world is that we exist to glorify God and to live and proclaim was is true about Jesus Christ.
We want people in our city to know that God loves them, that God has all power, that the truth about God really matters, because without it we will not discover Jesus Christ.
If there’s one thing I want you to know about you this afternoon is that Jesus means to give you a profound hope. If, when you look back you can only seem to see pain and neglect and hardship and heartbreak.
If, when you think of your future you can’t see through the fog of the pain that lives inside you because of your past, then I hope you will accept the fact that in Christ Jesus God gives us new life. He takes our old, broken selves and He makes us new.
But here’s the challenge: we have to walk in newness of life. In Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
We have to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. He is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
And when thoughts come that discourage us and take us to low places, we have to capture those thoughts. Don’t let them run amuck in your mind. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10 that we must take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
As we do that more and more, we will more and more enter into the freedom the Jesus died for us to have, to experience in life.
So may we grow in the knowledge of Jesus Christ, may we believe that God works miraculously today.
May we walk the walk in full determination to understand the truth of Who God is as it is revealed to us in His holy Word, the Bible, and may we walk in newness of life, embracing the truth that God has embraced us and that God, in making us a new creation in Christ, is able to complete the good, good work He has begun in our lives. Amen? Amen.
