Paul and Barnabas have a heated disagreement, part ways, and head out on new journeys to visit the churches they had planted previously and preach the Gospel.
Transcription (automatically-generated):
So, as we pick things up, Paul and Barnabas are back in the city of Antioch in present-day Syria. It is the home base, so to speak, of the church in Gentile territory. And Paul and Barnabas are both elders there. They are teaching and building up the saints in the faith.
They're making disciples. But Paul is an Apostle. He's an evangelist. And so, it's not long before he feels compelled by the love of God to check on the spiritual health of the churches he helped plant during his first missionary journey. Additionally, he knows millions have not heard the Gospel, and he can't help but want to do something about that.
As he wrote to the Romans, my aim is to preach the Gospel where Christ has not been named. Paul's passion didn't come from learning some secret evangelistic technique of the pros. It came from loving and knowing Jesus so deeply that God's heart for the lots became Paul's. He described his passion for the Gospel to the Corinthians, pointing, I am compelled to preach, and woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel. And so, we'll pick it up in Acts 15:36, where we read.
After some time had passed, Paul said to Barnabas, let's go back and visit the brothers and sisters in every town where we have preached the word of the Lord and see how they're doing. Paul had the heart of a pastor. He didn't simply drop in on a city, preach the Gospel, count the number of hands raised, take some pictures for his social media, and say, that's 100 decisions for Christ. See you again. Never.
No. Paul planted churches, he appointed elders, and he continued to monitor the spiritual health of those churches. Even from a distance, Paul understood that the command of Jesus is not to make converts, it's to make disciples. Jesus gave his disciples the Great Commission, and most Christians are familiar with the first part. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.
Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. But it doesn't end there. It keeps going. And Jesus says, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. The goal is disciples.
Men and women who desire to obey Jesus know how to obey Jesus and then wait for it. Obey Jesus, mature believers. That's the goal. So, write this down. It's your first fill-in.
Jesus commanded his followers to make disciples, men and women who worship and obey Jesus as Lord. That's what a disciple does. They worship and obey Jesus as Lord. The greatest evangelistic technique is not a method or huge events, our big conferences, or Gospel rallies. The greatest evangelistic method is mature followers of Jesus.
Because they reproduce, they make more disciples. And in the long run, the good works produced by a well-taught, mature, and spiritually strong local church will have a far greater impact than any evangelistic crusade. We want people at Gospel City who are exploring Christianity, checking it out, to feel comfortable here. We really do. We want anyone who wants to grow in their faith and follow Jesus as Lord to feel comfortable in our church, whether you're a brand-new Christian or you've been a believer for decades.
But it might surprise you to know there's actually one group we want to make uncomfortable at Gospel City. If you consider yourself a Christian but you do not want to obey Jesus in every area of your life, we want to make it uncomfortable for you to stay in that place at Gospel City church. We really do. Because when we study the Scriptures, we see people who are not Christians who don't want to obey Jesus, and we see people who are Christians who want to obey Jesus. But a category that doesn't exist in the Scriptures is people who are Christians but don't want to obey Jesus.
That's not a thing in the Bible. Christians who don't want to obey Jesus.
Again, just to use my favorite analogy, this is like somebody wanting to say they're a member of Greenpeace while they're wearing, like, a fur coat with, like, a fox head on it. You know, what's the problem? I thought you guys were open to anyone. The Bible views people who don't want to obey Jesus as non-believers, people who are not saved. And so, because we love people, we cannot be a church where it's easy and comfortable for people to deceive themselves into thinking they're in right relationship with God when they don't even want to obey Jesus.
Like, this weighs on me as a pastor that I would ever end up standing next to someone before Jesus. And this person would say, I went to your church for years and you let me think I was saved. Because I just said, well, the important thing is let's just be gracious everyone's at different places. And so sure, they're a Christian who doesn't want to obey Jesus, but who am I to judge? It haunts me, the idea of that ever happening.
And so, we want to be explicit that Christians who don't want to obey Jesus is not a thing in the Bible. The only time you see anything like that is when the Bible is saying you need to check yourself to see if you're actually saved because Christians want to obey Jesus. Now, people deceive themselves and they find a way out of this. And perhaps someone here is already thinking this, well, Jeff, nobody's perfect. Everybody makes mistakes, everybody sins.
And all those statements are true. But that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about perfection. We're talking about intention. We're not talking about our countless failures and sins on our journey of sanctification.
We're talking about our desires. A Christian desires to obey Jesus. There's no such thing as a Christian who doesn't desire to obey Jesus. A Christian fails over and over and over again. Our brother John tells us if we say we have no sin, we're deceiving ourselves.
And the truth is not in us. But the desire of the Christian is to be righteous. The desire of the Christian is to be holy, set apart for the glory of God. The desire of the Christian is to be set free from sin. The Christian hates their sin.
They don't coddle it or excuse it. They wage war against it. Write this down. Christians desire to obey Jesus. It's not about perfection.
It's about intention. It's about intention. Here's why I can say this with such confidence. Because the Christian who doesn't want to obey Jesus doesn't want Jesus to be their Lord. It's that simple.
If you don't want to obey Jesus, then you don't want him to be your master. You don't want him to be your Lord. So how can you be a Christian who doesn't want Jesus to be your Lord? It doesn't even make sense. At Gospel City, the elders desire to have Paul's heart for the Church.
He wrote this to the Colossians. We proclaim him the Lord Jesus, warning and teaching everyone with all wisdom so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. If you're checking out Christianity, we're so glad you're here. Welcome. I hope you don't feel any pressure in any way.
If you are a Christian, we will never apologize for never stopping, doing everything we can to help you grow into greater maturity in Christ. We'll never apologize for that. We'll never apologize if it makes you uncomfortable that we call you to be more like Jesus'. We're always going to do that. And if you're a member of Gospel City, then you've made the commitment to your brothers and sisters, you've made the commitment to BJ and myself.
And together, as a church, we're going to do everything we can to help each other follow Jesus. That's the commitment that we've made to one another. Help me. Follow the Lord. If you see me getting off track, help me get back on track.
If I need someone to pray for me, be there. When I ask you to, I'll be there for you as well. That's what the church does. We follow Jesus together because we want to obey Him. That's our desire.
And so, with all that in mind, Paul wanted to check in on the spiritual health and development of the new believers that he had left in the many cities and towns in which he had previously ministered. In the next chapter, we'll be told that they also took the letter with them from the Jerusalem Council so they could share the decision that had been made and James's instruction for Gentile disciples to abstain from sexual immorality and pagan idolatry. And we discussed that in our previous study. If you missed it. Verse 37.
Barnabas wanted to take along John, who was called Mark, but Paul insisted that they should not take along this man who had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not gone on with them to the work. To refresh your memories, John Mark had joined Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey. But for whatever reason, when he got to Pamphylia, this region around Galatia, he decided to split and go back home. We aren't told why, but it's likely either because he got scared by the danger inherent to their mission, or he didn't like the fact that Paul had emerged as the leader of their team and not his Uncle Barnabas. The disagreement between Paul and Barnabas is understandable.
Paul believes that the nature of their missions work will require them to depend on one another and trust each other with their lives. The stakes are high. The preaching of the gospel to men and women who have never heard it, to risk the mission being sabotaged by someone who lacks the necessary commitment and is not ready to yet lay down their life for the Lord is not an option in Paul's mind. On the other side, you have Barnabas, who believes in second chances and views John Mark as a young man who loves the Lord, has learned a painful and embarrassing lesson, and is ready to try again. And Barnabas had to be frustrated by Paul's seemingly short memory, because you may recall that Paul was at one time the foremost persecutor of the church before being radically transformed by an encounter with the Lord Jesus on the road to Damascus.
But when Paul journeyed to Jerusalem to meet with the apostles, none of them were willing because none of them trusted him. But who was it who believed that people can change? Who was it that did go and meet with Paul, even though he didn't yet know if Paul's conversion was sincere? It was Barnabas. And it was Barnabas who vouched for Paul and brought him to the apostles.
And so, Barnabas must have been full of righteous indignation. Really, Paul, you don't believe a person can change. You don't believe that a person can change. And what we see is there are different personalities and giftings in play. Barnabas had such a heart for the individual.
He's all about one person at a time. He was totally present with who they were at that moment, and he was laser-focused on how he could help them move forward in Christ in a greater way. And he was willing to risk his life for just the potential opportunity to help one person move closer to Christ. Barnabas had the heart of Jesus. That leaves the 99 to go after the one.
Now, I don't mean that to imply here that Paul didn't care about people, because he obviously did. But Paul was gifted with an obsession and drive for the Gospel, for the big picture of the kingdom of God. We need to plant churches. We need to preach the Gospel where people have never heard it, heard it. We need to make sure that churches are teaching truthful doctrine.
We've got to raise up and appoint elders and deacons, we got to build up people in the faith and create systems that are going to do that and instruct people. And Paul showed the heart of Jesus that set his face toward Jerusalem and refused to allow anything to distract him from the mission that he had been given by the Father. In verse 39 we read they had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company and Barnabas took Mark with them and sailed off to Cyprus. But Paul chose Silas and departed after being commended by the brothers and sisters to the grace of the Lord. This is no small disagreement.
It was contentious and interestingly, the Bible doesn't tell us who was right. John Mark later became a valued co-laborer of Paul in the work of the Gospel and such a close associate of the Apostle Peter that he helped him write his Gospel. That's the gospel we know is the gospel of Mark. It's Peter's gospel recorded by Mark. So, was Barnabas right?
Well, I think we can say that Paul was not the right person to disciple John Mark at that season in time, but Barnabas was. You can argue for Paul and say, well, the text says that only Paul was commended by the Church before he left. It doesn't say Barnabas was, but I think that's kind of an argument from silence. But I think we can also say that Barnabas was not the right partner for Silas, but Paul was. The result was that both John Mark and Silas ended up on a missions team with the right leader for them.
And the Gospel went out with twice the efficacy as two teams now went out from Antioch instead of just one. So why didn't the Holy Spirit just tell Paul and Barnabas, it's all cool, you take Silas, you take John Mark, double the work for the kingdom? Why didn't the Holy Spirit just tell them that? He probably did. He probably did.
This might shock you, but sometimes we're not good at listening when God speaks, sometimes we make assumptions. And what we notice is that Paul and Barnabas just assumed that if there was another missions trip to go on, it would be the two of them going together. They apparently didn't stop and seek the Lord and say, lord, do you want us to go together again? They just assumed and they didn't ask. But praise God.
Praise God. Because when we desire to do his will, he will do good through us, even through something like a sharp disagreement to get us where we need to be. And I'm so thankful that God is gracious to work and move even through hard-headed people like you and me. He really does look at us and say, your heart's in the right place and so I'm going to use you even though you're doing everything you can to make it as difficult as possible. In summary, it seems neither of them was wrong.
God was just doing something neither of them had considered. God gifted both Paul and Barnabas. God used both men, and the church grew because both men operated in their gifts. We need different gifts in the Church. We need different gifts among elders and deacons and church members.
We need people with a heart for different areas of ministry. We need advocates for different causes so that the full heart of God can be reflected in his church. We need that. This will be the last time we hear about Barnabas in the Book of Acts. He continued to be fruitful in ministry, but the focus of the text is going to move to Paul's missionary travels.
And we know from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians that he and Barnabas later reconciled. So, Paul takes on a new partner, Silas. Silas was a leader in the Jerusalem Church. He was a recognized prophet, and he would have been adept at teaching the Word of God. He was a Jew, so he would have had full access to any synagogue.
But he was also a Roman citizen like Paul. Silas is a Greek name, and that came with certain legal protections and benefits that would be useful while traveling the empire. Furthermore, he could serve as a representative of the Jerusalem Church as they shared the letter from James and the Jerusalem Council with the churches. He could be an actual witness from the Jerusalem Church. Now, in the previous chapter, we learned that Silas went down to Antioch with the contingent from the Jerusalem Church to share that letter about the Jerusalem Council.
And after spending some time with the brethren in Antioch, he felt like the Lord just wanted him to stay there, and so he did. He didn't know why. He just felt like he should stay. And now we see why God had chosen him to be a traveling companion of Paul's in his next missionary journey. And that's one of the ways the Lord leads us.
He gives us an affection, a bond with a place, a people, a ministry. He inclines our hearts in certain directions in accordance with his will. And so, when he does that, when he gives us an extra affinity for something, we pray, we fast, we seek wise and Godly counsel. What do you think the Lord is doing? We search the Scriptures, and if there are no red flags, then we trust the Lord is leading us and we move forward in faith.
So, make a note of this. God sometimes directs us by giving us a heart for a specific place, people, or type of ministry. Place, people, or type of ministry. Please make sure that you didn't use selective hearing and block out the part where I said that we seek wisely, godly counsel. That's really important.
I don't want anyone to show up next week and be like God's given me a heart for the Mime community. And so, I need to start a miming ministry in this church. Please seek wise counsel. Let's pray and discern together what the Lord might or might not be doing. So don't just follow your heart.
Scripture says the heart is deceitful. So, you want to pray, you want to search the Scriptures, you want to get wise counsel. Is it possible? Yes. Not in this church, though.
Just putting that out there. Silas joined Paul as he revisited the towns and cities where he had previously ministered Paul's second ministry. Sorry. Paul's second missionary journey is going to begin in earnest. In verse eleven of the next chapter, it says, He - that's Paul - traveled through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.
Let's throw our map up on the screen and take a look here. So, from their home base of the Syrian city of Antioch, Paul's team traveled around the Roman province of Syria, and then up north to the Roman province of Cilicia, where they almost certainly passed through Paul's old stomping ground of Tarsus. It seems that they were likely following the route taken by the false teachers who had been spreading the heresy that salvation is by keeping the law instead of by faith in Christ. So, as they visited those churches to expose that heretical teaching, share truthful, correct teaching, and share the verdict of the Jerusalem Council and encourage the brethren in each of those churches. These were courageous men who were setting out on these missions trips.
Remember what happened to Paul on his first missionary journey. He still bore the scars from the stoning that almost ended his life. And he certainly would have laid out the risks to Silas before inviting him to partner with him. These men put their lives on the line for the Gospel, as I've shared before. Men like Paul and Silas did this because of their love for the church.
Their love for the people of God was greater than their fear of earthly death. They knew there were Christians who were young in the faith who needed to be encouraged, strengthened, and built up in their knowledge of Christ. And their hearts loved to visit those saints and provide what they needed. Paul would later write to the Philippians, even if I am poured out as a drink offering on the sacrificial service of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you. They didn't fear death because they had grasped the reality of eternal life, the reality that the end of our earthly lives is not the end.
Paul told the Romans, all these verses are on your outlines. None of us lives for himself, and no one dies for himself. If we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. Christ died and returned to life for this, that he might be loved over both the dead and the loving.
They knew what was waiting for them on the other side of death heaven and the Lord Jesus. Paul wrote to the Philippians for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. Now, if I live on in the flesh, this means fruitful work for me, and I don't know which one I should choose. I'm torn between the two. I long to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.
But to remain in the flesh is more necessary for your sake. They understood that following and obeying Jesus meant laying down their lives without limit. Peter told believers, you were called to this because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps. They understood that if they suffered for the Gospel, it meant that they were being identified with Christ. Remember back in Acts chapter five, when the Sanhedrin, the ruling Jewish religious council in Jerusalem, arrested Peter and the apostles?
In the early days of the Church? They had them all flogged, but we read they went out from the presence of the Sanhedrin, rejoicing that they Derbe counted worthy to be treated shamefully on behalf of the name of Christ.
When it came to bringing honor to Jesus, no price was too high. And for all these same reasons, millions have died for Christ, and millions are suffering for Christ today. May we remember them in our prayers, and may we be faithful to walk that same path. If the Lord asks it of us, we'll keep going into chapter 16. Paul went on to Derbe and Lystra.
Let's show our next map on the screen. These were cities where Paul had ministered during his first missionary journey. You might remember we're also told that he visited Iconium, and he certainly would have passed through Pisidian, Antioch as well. Paul didn't really have any issues last time he passed through Derbe, but Lustra is where he was stoned to the point where the crowd thought he was dead and left with permanent scars. But he didn't think twice about going back and encouraging the brethren there.
Unbelievable. And in Lystra, there was a disciple named Timothy, the son of a believing Jewish woman, but his father was a Greek. It's likely Timothy, his mother and his grandmother, and any other family members we may not know about became Christians in response to Paul's preaching during one of his earlier visits to Lystra. Timothy was probably around 16 years old when he converted, and it would have made him around 20 during this time. The original language tells us Timothy's father had likely died already, but he had been a Gentile who practiced neither Judaism nor Christianity.
Verse two. The brothers and sisters at Lystra and Iconium spoke highly of him, of Timothy. I can tell you from firsthand experience that one of the greatest joys you can experience in life is catching up with someone who you poured into in a significant way on a spiritual level years ago, and then finding them walking faithfully with the Lord, that's the best. When you catch up with someone you saw years ago who loved Jesus, and you see them again and they're still loving Jesus and following him. And that joy was Paul's, as he found that young Timothy had grown from strength to strength in the years since Paul had last seen him.
Paul wanted Timothy to go with him. So, Paul takes on Timothy as an apprentice in the ministry. Timothy was eager to serve the Lord, and Paul could sense that the Lord wanted him to take Timothy on as his protege. In his second letter to Timothy years later, Paul will write, I recall your sincere faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois, and in your mother Eunice, and now, I am convinced, is in you also. Timothy had a spiritual heritage on his mother's side.
He had a Jewish grandmother, Lots, who loved the Lord and raised her daughter, Timothy's mother Eunice, to also love the Lord. And the sincerity of their Jewish faith was proven by the fact that when they heard the Gospel, they recognized it as the Truth and became devout followers of Jesus as the Messiah. And so, Timothy's mother raised him to love the Lord as well. And Paul affirms this in Two Timothy, where he writes to him, you know those who taught you, and you know that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures. That's a very, very special thing.
Timothy's one of the greatest men who's ever lived on the planet. He's a mighty man of God. And Scripture tells us who were his teachers, his mom, and his grandma, those were his teachers. And Timothy will grow to become very dear to Paul. And Paul opens his first letter to Timothy with the words to Timothy, my true son in the faith.
Paul wasn't the man to pour into and disciple John Mark in the ministry, but he was the man to pour into and disciple Timothy in the ministry. Then we read, so he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places, since they all knew that his father was a Greek. Now, it seems that Timothy's father had objected to the idea of his son being circumcised, as all Jewish boys are on the 8th day after their birth. In Hebrew culture, the Jewish ethnicity was and is considered to pass through the mother's side. So, if your mother is ethnically Jewish, then you're considered to be ethnically Jewish regardless of the ethnicity of your father.
This means that Jews would have considered Timothy to be ethnically Jewish, and they would have interpreted the fact that he was uncircumcised as apostasy. In other words, they would have perceived it as Timothy intentionally disowning his Jewish ethnicity and heritage. And then they would have viewed Paul as approving of this, and they would have wanted nothing to do with them. In fact, there's a good chance they might have attacked them as heretics. While Paul was primarily preaching the Gospel to the Gentiles, we know that wherever possible, he would always start with the Jews of a city visiting the local synagogues.
So, Timothy would not only have not been welcome in those synagogues, and by proxy, Paul would not have been welcome, but they may have been in danger of assault or worse. So, Paul says he says, Listen, this issue could prevent us from being able to share the Gospel with Jews in synagogues on our travels, and it may put your life in danger. So, I'm going to have to circumcise you. And now you may be thinking, Wasn't, like, the whole Jerusalem Council about this thing? Like, one chapter ago? I thought believers didn't need to be circumcised!
The Jerusalem Council settled the issue that a Gentile man did not need to be circumcised to become a Christian. A Gentile man didn't need to follow the law of Moses. That wasn't the issue here. This was a cultural issue. Timothy would be perceived to have turned his back on his ethnicity and his heritage.
Nobody was putting pressure on Timothy to be circumcised as a salvation issue. Titus was a Gentile believer in Antioch who was part of the team that went up with Paul and Barnabas to the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. We know from Paul's letter to the Galatians that when they reached Jerusalem before the Jerusalem Council, some of the Jewish believers there immediately began putting pressure on Titus to be circumcised. But Paul wasn't having it. And he wrote to the Galatians, not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek.
This matter arose because some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus in order to enslave us. In other words, to try and make us go back under the law when Christ has freed us from the law. But we did not give up and submit to these people for even a moment so that the truth of the Gospel would be preserved for you. So, with Titus, people were trying to make circumcision a salvation issue, and Paul says, no, we're not doing it. With Timothy, nobody was trying to make it a salvation issue.
It was a cultural issue. Doing it would not have been sin, and it would have removed a cultural obstacle to sharing the gospel. So, Paul did it. And this was in keeping with Paul's pattern of ministry. He would later write to the Corinthians although I'm free from all and not anyone slave, I have made myself a slave to everyone in order to win more people to the Jews.
I became like a Jew to win. Jews to those under the law like one under the law, though I myself am not under the law to win those under the law too. Those who are without the law, like one without the law. Though I am not without God's law, but under the law of Christ, to win those without the law to the weak, I became weak. In order to win the weak, I have become all things to all people so that I may, by every possible means, save comes.
Now, I do all this because of the gospel so that I may share in the blessings. Paul says, Listen, when I go and I minister to Gentiles, they're making bacon burgers. Fry one up for me, baby. Let's go. When I'm going with the Jews and everyone's eating kosher, guess what I eat?
Kosher. He says, I adapt to cultural settings so that I can share the gospel in that culture. We're not talking about sin. We're not talking about compromising the gospel. We're talking about cultural issues.
Paul says, as long as it's not sin and it's just cultural, I'm up for pretty much anything if it gives me an opportunity to share the gospel. Here's the idea. Write this down our rights and personal preferences are not as important as the gospel. Our rights and our personal preferences are not as important as the gospel. If you help out with kids at all in the kids ministry and bless you for doing that, then you know this a small example...
You might be like, I don't ever dance anywhere, but when I'm serving in the kids ministry, I'm John frickin'. Travolta, let me tell you. Because the culture demands it. The culture demands it, and the gospel demands it. You better believe I'm dancing with those kids.
So, if we can advance the gospel by sacrificing our rights or preferences or dignity without sinning, then we should be willing to do so. And historically, this gives us some insight into how Jewish Christians were expected to reconcile their traditions, heritage, and culture with the gospel. Because you got to understand, even though Christians were not under the law that this was part of Jewish culture. This is how they had lived. And some of it was tradition, it was family values for them.
And so, it seems that in the church they were free to continue obeying parts of the law if they wanted to as long as it didn't create any unnecessary division with the Gentile believers and as long as they understood that it had cultural significance. But no soteriological significance. In other words, as long as they understood you're doing it because it's a tradition, but it has no impact on your salvation. If you do it because you think it affects your salvation, you can't do it. If you do it because it's a tradition that you love and value.
That's cool. No problem. On the human side, I want to point out how emotional this - and by "this", I don't mean the circumcision, I mean Timothy leaving with Paul - I want to point out how emotional it must have been for Timothy's mother and grandmother. They had raised him in the Scriptures.
Timothy's dad wasn't around anymore. His grandfather wasn't around anymore. He was the man of the house. They had raised him together from the time he was a baby to love the Lord. And now they're watching him leave with Paul, a man who was almost killed in their city for preaching the same Gospel that Timothy was leaving with him to proclaim.
Timothy's mother and grandmother had seen with their own eyes Paul's bloodied, battered, and beaten body following his stoning. And they knew that the same thing could happen to their precious boy. They knew they might never see him again. And yet they blessed him, and they let him go because they understood that he belonged to the Lord Jesus even more than he belonged to them.
We read in verse four, as they traveled through the towns, they delivered the decisions reached by the apostles and elders at Jerusalem for the people to observe. This, of course, is a reference to the letter from the Jerusalem Council. And it gives us some idea, though, of just how far and wide the trouble was that was caused by these false teachers. They'd gone all over Syria and Cilicia and Galatia and Phrygia and Pamphylia to share their false gospel of salvation by works. And so this second journey that they were on was really to undo a lot of that damage before they went and broke new ground for the Gospel.
Verse five. So, the churches were strengthened in the faith, underline in the faith. Churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers. Can I tell you, the grew daily in numbers part of verse five only matters because of the strengthened in the faith part of verse five because the goal is not numbers or programs or campuses, our social media followers, the goal is making disciples, strengthening men and women in the faith.
I'll summarize with these thoughts here. If you consider yourself a Christian and I were to examine your life, would I find evidence of somebody who wants to who has the desire to obey Jesus in every area of their life? Or would I find someone who picks and chosen where to obey and doesn't really have any desire to obey the Lord in certain areas? Would I find areas of your life where you've just said, I know what God says, I'm just not going to do it, just not going to do it. And you've just tuned out the conviction of the Holy Spirit by saying, no, no, over and over and over again so that you don't actually even feel any conviction about it anymore because you've just tuned him out.
You said, I'm going to do what I want to do in this area. You may not be Lord. Is that where you're at? If you desire to obey the Lord in every area of life? Praise God, man.
Praise God. Be encouraged. I can tell you with confidence if that is your desire, the Lord is blessed. The Lord is blessed just that it's your desire. And we're going to thank Him in a few moments for that desire in you.
And we're going to pray that he would bless and strengthen you as you seek to obey Him. But if you don't desire to obey the Lord in every area of life, repent. And if you feel no conviction because you've tuned out the Holy Spirit for so long, repent and beg the Lord to restore your spiritual sensitivity, to bring life to that part of your heart that has become dead and calloused. But do not ask Him to do that. If you're not prepared to obey, don't do it.
Don't ask the Lord to show you if there's an area where you've shut Him out unless you're willing to let Him in, don't disrespect the Lord. So, when we come to Him and we say, Lord, show me if there's anything in me you want to change, we do so having already made the commitment that if he does, if he does show us something, we're in. We want to obey, we're going to obey. So, let's ask the Lordto give us his heart for the lost, the heart that Paul had. Let's ask for the boldness that the apostles and men like Silas and Timothy had.
Let's ask the Lord to give us the understanding of eternity that freed the early church from the fear of suffering and death. And let's thank the Lord that he's faithful to lead those who desire to obey Him, even through our stubbornness, even through our stupidity. He's good. He's gracious. The Lord is not looking for perfection.
He's looking for people who desire to obey Him, who desire to be holy and righteous, you might say. I don't see how that could ever happen, Jeff. I don't know how I could ever be free from this. You don't need to worry about that part yet. You just need to worry about having the desire to see God do it.
The desire to be set free.