Allen Jackson - Breakthroughs Rejected - Part 2
So we’re gonna look at some people that don’t get it right and maybe it’ll help us gain some momentum in saying yes. Acts chapter 13, the church is just trying to get their legs underneath them. The pressure in Jerusalem has grown to the point that they’re beginning to spread a bit. Saul of Tarsus has been recruited by the Lord himself. Jesus stepped back in time. How would that make you feel if you’re part of that original group that he recruited and spent three years training and before you’ve gone very far, the pressure’s grown, you’re fragmenting a little bit, and Jesus comes back and recruits a Rabbi.
Jesus comes back and recruits a Pharisee and says, «Here’s the help you need». «No, we’re doing quite well, thank you». They didn’t want anything to do with Saul of Tarsus. He’s an angry, violent, murderous, he’s the opposition. Why did you have to recruit the opposition? It took an intermediary to get the Paul and James and John and the crew in Jerusalem to even let Saul to the table. And now Paul, Saul, and Barnabas are gonna… their first trip, their first, they’re turning the gospel outward, which is blowing the minds of the Jewish community.
When I was at Hebrew University, one of my most engaging classes was in Orthodox and he was… all the professors were Jewish, but when I say Orthodox, he kept the rules. There’s as much diversity within the Jewish community as there is diversity within the Christian community, you understand? Some Christians have dress codes and jewelry codes and beverage codes and some Christians don’t even acknowledge the authority of scripture or people that wear the label Christian. Right, the diversity, same diversity in the Jewish community.
This faculty member was Orthodox. He kept the rules. He wore his prayer shawl. He washed his hands so frequently as a part of the that they were constantly chapped. He was brilliant. Just a brilliant, brilliant guy. We could turn our papers in in eight different languages. I chose English. But he did two lectures on Jesus, and I’ll never forget it 'cause he had the sharpest wit. Nobody would say anything in class 'cause he would cut you to ribbons, he was good. And the only time I ever saw him at a loss for words or awkward was when he talked about Jesus and he said, «There’s no question». He said, «It’s just absolutely clear in scripture that that early group of believers in Jerusalem believed that Jesus had died on a cross and been raised to life again».
And I remember he kind of hung his head for a moment and he said, «If I believed that, I would be a Christian too». Well, that Jesus recruited an Orthodox keeper of the rules and that professor one day said he read in Acts 1 where Jesus said, «The Holy Spirit will empower you to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth». Well, Jerusalem’s the city, Judea is the region, Samaria is the next region, and he looked at the class and he said, «I promise you, to that audience, they thought Samaria was the end of the earth». They didn’t think the story was going past the Mediterranean, the edge of the Mediterranean. And now here’s Saul in Acts 13, and they’ve turned, they’re facing out.
Now that’s where we’re gonna step in, «In the Church of Antioch,» there was a prophet, «there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon, Lucius, Manaen, and while they’re worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, 'Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I’ve called them.' So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and they sent them off». They had to get sent off to do the work. Can you have the imagination God’s called you to something? Please don’t use that as an excuse. I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people, «If I just knew what God wanted». I can help you. You’ve been empowered to be a witness for him. In your home, on your block, in your community. Until we do that, we’ve got no… that’s the assignment.
«Well, I’m an introvert». Good, he’ll use introverts. «I’m not good with words,» he recruited Moses. «Well, I’ve been an angry anti-Christian». He chose Saul. All my excuses, he’s got one of them in the Hall of Fame. So they sent off Barnabas and Saul and then verse 4, «The two of them, sent on their way by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia and they sailed there to Cyprus». It’s an island just off the coast of Israel, still there. «When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the Jewish synagogues. John was with him as a helper».
John Mark, not… And «They traveled through the whole island until they came to Paphos, and there they met a Jewish sorcerer and a false prophet named Bar-Jesus, who was an attendant of the proconsul, Sergius Paulus and the proconsul, an intelligent man, sent for Barnabas and Saul because he wanted to hear the word of God. But the sorcerer opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul from the faith. And Saul, who’s called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked straight at him and said, 'You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! '»
For all of you that think kindness, thou shalt be kind is the 11th commandment, please hear what Paul said. He looked at a very powerful man on the island of Cyprus and he said, «'You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! '» Jesus loves you. «'You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord? Now the hand of the Lord is against you and you’re gonna be blind, and for a time you’ll be unable to see the light of the sun.' And immediately mist and darkness came over him, and he groped about, seeking someone to lead him by the hand. When the governor saw what had happened, he believed, for he was amazed at the teaching about the Lord».
Now we’ve got a little narrative here, before you turn your page maybe you wanna circle some names, 'cause you’ve got some characters being introduced and you need to think about their roles, their assignments, how many, who’s gonna cooperate with the Lord. There’s a breakthrough happening, revivals breaking out. The Spirit of God is moving in the world in a way it had never moved before. Barnabas and Saul are on board. The community of faith that they have been a part of had enough clarity from the Lord that they said, we think you should go and they were in enough unity that they said we will go and they get to Cyprus. Says they were sent on their way in verse 4 by the Holy Spirit. You’re not just recruiting somebody to read your Bible in the new year because it’s an assignment from pastor. God is moving in the earth.
See, you will never believe there’s a supernatural component to what you’re doing until you’re willing to believe there’s a supernatural component to what you’re doing. You don’t have to roll out high-minded words, big center*, you know. Don’t go find somebody, don’t do this. Somebody’s probably done it to you, you know, you get that creepy look. «Oh, I feel like the Lord directed me to you, and we should read the Bible».
I wouldn’t read the Bible with you with an invitation like that. You have to understand that reading the word of God is a way of honoring the Lord, of submitting to the discipline of the Spirit of God. Of subjecting yourself to an authority greater than yourself. That you won’t just own your calendar and your schedule and your to do list, that you would submit to the Lord, and when you recognize the inherent value in that, and you will submit to it, then you become an advocate and you may have to invite three or four or five or ten people before you find one person, they’ll go, I’d kinda like to do that. You don’t need an announcement.
You can simply say, you know, look, I’ve decided to try this. I’m gonna do this, and it’ll help me if you do it with me. 'Cause any commitment that you make and you give away to another person is inherently more likely to hold. See, we’ve been pointing at our pedigree. «I’m born again. I’m spirit filled. I’ve led a small group for 63 years. We did the book of Isaiah. It took us seven years and four months. We didn’t just do it verse by verse. We took it letter by letter». And I mean, I like to study my Bible. So, I understand I’m poking a bit of fun, but I’m inviting you to engage with what the Lord might put before us, rather than to review where we’ve been.
Paul and Barnabas, they get to Cyprus. There’s this remarkable statement that the governor… we got Barnabas and Saul who said yes, then this provincial governor, the proconsul, he would be a regional governor, a regional representative of Rome, in this case over the island of Cyprus, and he has an interest in the gospel. And Luke, the author of Acts, adds that in verse 7, he’s an intelligent man. He wanted to hear more about the Word of God. Now, get this, they’re Jews. There’s a Jewish Rabbi, Pharisee, advocating for the God of the Jewish world, as far as they would have understood it. Rome has a pantheon, many gods, and the governor on the island says I want to know more about this God, wow!
And attached to him is a Jewish person, this Jewish sorcerer. He’s a spiritual person. He’s a false prophet, Luke tells us. Which means he wants the place, he wants to be respected and understood as someone who’s offering, presenting, God’s perspective. That’s what a prophet does. But in reality, he has wrong motives, and therefore he’s delivering a wrong message. Are I know it gets a little complicated. Barnabas and Paul are on God’s mission directed by the Holy Spirit, they get to Cyprus, the governor wants to hear, and right in the middle of this is a Jewish man. You’d expect him to be on board with this. He was a false prophet with the wrong message and a wrong motive, trying to oppose it. It’d be easy to go, you know, we thought the Lord sent us.
We got all the way to Cyprus and we almost thought, but no, so we’re just going home. And this Jewish sorcerer tries to turn the governor away from the faith. «He opposed them,» look at verse 8, «He opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul from the faith». So there’s a two-fold resistance. Again, it’s worth noting we’re trying to learn, he not only opposed the message and the messengers, but he was an aggressive adversary. He sought to turn others in a different direction. He wasn’t sufficient to say, «Don’t listen to them». He wasn’t content to say, «Nah, I’m Jewish. I can tell you, I wouldn’t pay any attention to that». He wasn’t content with that. He tried to turn the governor in a complete, «Come do this, don’t do that».
So it’s a pretty high level of intervention, and he is rejecting the opportunity for a breakthrough in his own life. If anybody in the narrative on the island of Cyprus should have been ready to receive it, it would have been him. He knows the scripture. He knows something of it. He has a heritage with that people. He and Paul shared more commonalities than they did different points of differentiation. The Roman governor is willing to listen, and the Jewish spiritual person is a very aggressive adversary. It’s worth noting. It’s worth processing.
You see, when God presents that, I can explain it in any number of ways, you know, he thought maybe it would diminish his authority if the governor believed. He might lose some of his status. I mean, I can make a lengthy list of reasons, but at the end of the day, he doesn’t want God disrupting. Which is I really think at the root of those places where you and I reject the invitations to breakthroughs. No, I’m pretty good, thank you. We’re confident enough, either in our spiritual position or our spiritual pedigree, our ability to resolve problems. It’s pretty unsettling. How could that be? It’s just bizarre. I know you read it and Luke gives it to us like it all makes sense, but of everybody in the narrative, you’d think, no, that guy should have been on board, and he’s the one that ends up blind for a season, and Paul didn’t hesitate in dealing with him.
Jesus gave us an admonition in Matthew 23. In Matthew, he’s talking to the Pharisees. It’s the group Paul belonged to. They’re power brokers, not only in Jerusalem, but they have authority in all the synagogues distributed all over the empire. One of the reasons Paul would so consistently go into the synagogue when he goes to a new community is he was very much at home there. He had something of credentials with them. He knew how they were trained, he knew their order of service, he knew exactly what was gonna happen. So Jesus is talking to that group in Matthew 23, and he said, «'Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you’re hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves don’t enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you’re hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.'»
Wow. It’s that same two-fold opposition that we saw on Cyprus. They opposed the message and the messengers, but then they are aggressive adversaries in trying to turn people into other directions. Don’t we see that today? It seems to me that that persists. Not just between people of faith and the secular culture, we see that within the Christian community. «You don’t really believe the Bible, do you? You’re not really gonna give it a place of authority in your life»? And then they begin to parse out the pieces that they won’t take. So if I were gonna distill it a little bit, and I’m going to, I think we should live with this understanding that opposition is kind of a part of the assignment and the people that you will imagine that would help will not. «Well, I don’t like that».
Okay. I think, you know, football would be easier if the defense would help the offense. We’d score more points, but it’s not the nature of the contest. And there is opposition to the purposes of God in the earth. We meet them in the opening chapters of Genesis and we see it persist until the concluding chapters of the book of Revelation. You better make room in your understanding for it. I’m not amused, I’m amazed at people who imagine themselves to be Christ followers, and they will say things, «Well, you know, I just don’t, I’m not sure the devil and spiritual, I don’t, you know, I don’t believe it». Really? How do you feel about calories and fat? Can you unbelieve those too? They fill the story.
Look at Acts 19, «Paul entered the synagogue». It’s Ephesus this time, but it’s the same pattern. «He enters the synagogue. He spoke boldly there for three months, arguing persuasively about the kingdom of God,» for three months, «but some of them became obstinate and they refused to believe and they publicly maligned the Way». It wasn’t enough for them to go, «I’m not doing that. I don’t like you. I’m not listening». They decided to be aggressive and saying to everybody else, «Nobody should listen. We have a better way. We’re not gonna pay attention».
Again, God sent someone into the city, multiplied numbers of people. Paul in Ephesus, in the next very verse beyond your passage says he did extraordinary miracles through Paul there. A lot of evidence. Seven sons of Sceva and the demonized man and the riots and the people burning millions of dollars worth of paraphernalia that they used in ungodly things. I mean, there’s a revival breaking out, and yet in the middle of the synagogue, there are people who, Luke says, they refused to believe in obstinance. That’s just not how we believe, that’s not how we do it, and then they amp it up, they’re going to be more aggressive. They’re going to publicly malign people who choose to believe.
Again, there are more examples. There are more instances of breakthroughs being rejected than there are breakthroughs being accepted. It should give us pause. I can tell you from my own personal journey, there have been places where I can look back and say, «Ah, I cooperated to some extent there,» and there are places I can look, and I say, «You know, I missed that. I want to get better at saying yes to the Lord».
I brought you a prayer. The concept isn’t complex. The willingness to allow God to bring change to your life is not simple. It’s not difficult to understand. It requires of us a bit of faith to say that if I reoriented my life towards the Lord in some way, some incremental way, and I were to continue to do that, that it wouldn’t put me in a better place than if I didn’t. The alternative to that is what has flourished in contemporary American Christendom for too long, is we’ve done all the significant things with God we need to do.
Now we’re just trying to maintain a healthy spiritual immune system so that we don’t get infected with something we don’t want. So we’re afraid, we don’t wanna read anything we don’t know about. If it’s not an author that we know has been blessed by the publishing house that we endorse, we’re not sure we should read it 'cause we might get a bad idea. If it’s an expression of worship that we haven’t seen, we’re not sure we want to do that 'cause that’s not the way we do it. Or and on and on and and so we have this rather defensive approach to our faith, and I believe God has begun a shaking in the earth and he’s calling forth a people.
The same way we read about it in the book of Acts and other places in the scripture, and I intend to be a part, if God will allow me and the Holy Spirit will help me, and I’m putting before you an invitation, and you will have said no, you’ll have made some mistakes, we’ve all made some mistakes and maybe you need to talk to the Lord about it and say, «Lord, I’m sorry. I don’t want to excuse it or justify it or baptize it and all the reasons why. I’m sorry, Lord, but I’ll find my voice this time or I’ll stand this time or I’ll say yes this time». Watch and listen and think and act. I promise, it’s not some subtle thread of scripture, it is the story of the book.
So I brought you a prayer, but it’s really just an interpolation of a passage of scripture, so let me read you the passage. It’s Philippians 3, verses 12 to 14. Paul’s writing to a church, to a group of believers, and it’s reflective. This is self-reflection. Paul says, «Not that I have already obtained all of this, or have already been made perfect,» but then he gives them his action plan, «but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I don’t consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do; Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus». Now, if the apostle Paul would say that, I’m thinking that Brother Allen perhaps should raise his hand, and maybe you would like to, so I brought you a prayer. Why don’t we stand together. Can we read this together?
Heavenly Father, I acknowledge that I’m a learner, growing in the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ. My intent is to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. With the help of the Holy Spirit I will forget what is behind and strain toward what is ahead. I choose to press on toward the goal of my heavenly calling, in Jesus name, amen. Hallelujah. Now, that’s a good way to begin a new year. Amen.