We continue this morning, our series going through the book of Acts and we've looked at most of the chapter 13. And so we're going to pick up today with verse 42 and we'll read till the end. So let us give our attention to God's inerrant, infallible, and inspired word. Acts chapter 13 in verse 42. As they went out, the people begged these things might be told them the next Sabbath. And after the meeting of the synagogue broke up, many Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas, who, as they spoke with them, urged them to continue in the grace of God. The next Sabbath, almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord. But when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and began to contradict what was spoken by Paul, reviling him. And Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly saying, it was necessary that the word of God be spoken to you, spoken first to you, since you thrust it aside and judged yourselves unworthy of eternal life. Behold, we are turning to the Gentiles. And so the Lord commanded us, for so the Lord commanded us saying, I have made you a light to the Gentiles that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth. And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord. And as many who were appointed to eternal life believed. And the word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region. But the Jews inside the devout women of high standing and the leading men of the city, stirring up persecution against Paul and Barnabas and drove them out of their district. But they shook, they shook off the dust from their feet against them and went to Iconium. The disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy spirit. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. Lord, we thank you that it is so potent, Lord, but or in another analogy you use is of seed. And so I just pray that the seed would fall on good soil. Even now, Lord, you'd be plowing up all of our hearts as you have intent for this passage for us today. And so you've brought us here to this place. So Lord, we ask, unless spirit you move, nothing good will come. It's always true. And so we pray it now in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Well, this morning, I want you all to imagine that you are army recruiters. All right, so I know for maybe some of you, you find that highly offensive because you serve in some other military branch. You can just fill in the blank and you can be a recruiter for them, that's okay. All right, so we're here at a conference together, and I'm here teaching you about your job, how to be a better Army recruiter. And so I say, all right, so what you should do is when you're trying to recruit people, like show them pictures of like exotic places and like people sitting on the beach, sipping cocktails with big smiles and tell them you can go, you can go, you can travel around the world. All expenses paid, your food, your lodging, everything will be taken care of for you. What do you think of this strategy? Should we use this for recruiting? No, you don't even work for the army and you know that, right? Well, how do you intuitively know that's a really lousy idea to recruit to the army? We talked about our retreat, the fall retreat, right? Expectations, right? They will be sorely disappointed when they get to bootcamp, right? If that's our strategy. So this morning, we're looking at this, what it means to be a Christian. And it's not all rosy, right? There's hard things in this passage. And so as we've said, and we've been working on, I want to set realistic expectations. Look at the outline on page seven. You see where we're going. We should expect the Holy Spirit to save, but we also secondly should expect the counterattack to come. And then third, we should allow scripture to define our perspective. Okay, so let's look at that first one. Expect the Holy Spirit to save. So let me just catch you up to speed if you weren't here, or just to review if you were. So let's, we're going through chapter 13. Last week, if you might remember, was a huge passage, right? We looked at the whole sermon of Paul in this place. So it's a synagogue and they invite him. They say, hey, would you like to preach? He says, I'd love to. He stands up, he preaches his whole sermon. To summarize it, basically he went through the history of Israel, And he kind of showed this pattern, right? That basically Israel's being unfaithful and then God shows up. Israel's being unfaithful and God shows up, right? And he walks through the Old Testament and then he gets to Jesus and he says, and then God sent the Messiah who fulfilled all the prophecies the Old Testament had looked forward to, right? And then, and so just jump, if you have your Bibles, like your paper Bible, or it's on your phone, look at the verses before this passage, verse 38 and 39. That's kind of the real heart of his sermon. Verse 38, he says, let it be known to you, therefore, brothers, that through this man, being Jesus, forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Your sins can be forgiven as we sang. And then verse 39, and by him, by Christ, everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses. I've used this analogy before. Here I am, here's my expectations, here's maybe your expectations, but here's God's expectations, right? And we're all that way. The gods that none of us meet, we don't meet anyone else's expectations, but the gods are so much higher. And if you read the Old Testament, you realize how high it is. You know the Ten Commandments, Right? Well, have you ever lied? Well, yes. Have we ever desired something and coveted things we didn't have? Right? We've broken all kinds of commands in our hearts. Have we ever lusted? Have we murdered anyone? Have we been angry with them? Right? We're guilty of all kinds of stuff. And so his point was, look, Jews, the law of Moses doesn't lead to freedom. Right? Because here's you are, here's God's standard. Jesus did meet that standard. And so through the cross, right? He took the penalty you deserved and you can be saved. That was the heart of the gospel. It's the heart of what he said. That's the whole sermon. Okay. So now we pick up with how they responded. Look at 42. Now we're in our passage for today. As they went out, the people begged them that these things might be told them the next Sabbath. Now I can safely say I've never had that experience. No one has ever begged me like, please, please preach more. Like come back next. I want to, I want to hear more. That's a great moment. Every preacher loves that. But this has had to be really encouraging to Paul and Barnabas. And now, it was because he did such a great job. It was a good sermon. That's not why, right? Paul will say later in 1 Corinthians 2, I love these verses. And they might even show up next week. And so this is Paul talking. When I came to you, brothers, and I come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom, It wasn't with eloquence. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. That's my heart's desire, is that you would leave this sum total of all the sermons you hear from me and say that Nathan knew nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Like that was the central thing. I saw Christ was put before me. And he goes on, he says, I was with you in weakness. I can relate with that. And in fear and much trembling. Also true. My speech, my message were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the spirit's power. Do you see what he's getting at? He's saying it wasn't I was such a great preacher. It was that it was Christ and Christ moved in you. This is what's happening to these people. Right? Look at the next verse 43. I'm just going to walk through this passage. We'll look at it. 43. And after the meeting of the synagogue broke up, many Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas. They're following around. and says, as they spoke with them, they urged them to continue in the grace of God. Okay, to continue in something means they must be converted. Okay, so these are believers. A bunch of people got saved and they're following around. And this is a little mini discipleship. Look at 44, the next Sabbath, almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord. That'd be really cool. That'd be cool. Like a half of Cane Bay showed up. I'd love that. That's what happened. This huge crowd, the word got out about this gospel they were proclaiming. Literally the whole city showed up. Obviously the reason why is because the Holy Spirit was moving. So let's make application of this even before we move on. So from these few verses, what do we see as one mark that the Holy Spirit is moving? What was it about them that stands out to you? Look at this first couple of verses, 42 through 44. I think what stands out is their insatiable desire for the word of God. Is that fair? They have an uncanny desire for the word, right? I think that's true. I think this is one of the marks when the Holy Spirit shows up in a person's life, it is a desire for God. Let me illustrate this. So we talked about military recruiters. We'll just stick with that analogy. Okay, so you're deployed in the army and your buddy is getting letters from the woman he loves, right? And he takes them and he just chucks them aside. You're like, what? Yeah, yeah. The woman I love. You're like, uh, I doubt that. Right? Because if you, and so is this not, this is, these are letters from the God that we say we love. Right? And so this is naturally when someone becomes a Christian, you have more of a desire to know what God says. It's very natural. Now, if you've been a Christian for many decades, you're thinking, whoa, that's uncomfortable. So we all know that, and this is true even in relationships, right? Sometimes things are great, and sometimes, ah, well, what? You're committed to the vows you made, right? And so it's with God that there's ups and downs. You have periods where you feel a little bit colder, and you feel, I'm really excited about God. That's normal, but haven't there been periods in your life, if you look back over the sum total since you said you became a Christian, that the Word of God, you really loved it. Right? Every Christian should say that. Right? There should be some periods in our lives that we really love the Word of God. If you never loved it, you would be like that soldier that said, yeah, I love this woman and I'm just throwing her letters aside. Right? There's something odd about that. So this is an attribute of when God gets a hold of a person that they, they love His Word. if this is something you'd like to grow in, hey, stick around for 2026. Come to our Vision Banquet on January 24th and go and mark your calendars. We now have a date and we're going to look at this, right? The word of God and how we can get into our lives more successfully. Anyway, my first point was just simple. Expect the Holy Spirit to save. The Holy Spirit showed up. He did the work and he saved these people. But of course, the story does not stop there. And we get to our second point, which is expect a counterattack. So look at verse 46 here. Everything's going great. The whole town shows up, actually in 45. It says, but when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and they began to contradict what was spoken by Paul, reviling him. Bummer. It was looking pretty good. So then they're all upset. How did they respond? Look at 46, Paul and Barnabas. Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly and saying it was necessary that the word of God be spoken to you. And then he goes on. But I appreciate their boldness. Something you know about me, I was talking about this in my podcast, if you listen to that, on anxiety. But just how I've really struggled in this area. I don't like conflict, I never have. I used to in conflict, I just shut down. Like if I tried to form coherent sentences, I didn't succeed. And I don't know if any of you can relate with that. That's how I responded. Someone got really angry at me and lashed out. And so they didn't do that. They didn't pack up their bags and run for the hills. They responded back boldly, and I appreciate that. You know, this is one reason that I appreciate that God waited until I was 40 to be a pastor. Much before that, it would not have been good for you or for me. God had to grow me up before I could do this. And God has taken me a long, long way. I've been addressing that the past few weeks in that podcast about just conflict and anxiety. Anxiety has been huge for me. But anyway, we keep going. So they're bold. They speak out boldly. And so you think back to the military recruiting, that the reality is if you become a Christian, if you follow Christ, you will have enemies. That's not much of a sales pitch. Well, it's true. It's reality. You have enemies. Enemies that want to destroy you, that want to cut off your supply lines. Yeah, they want to destroy everything about you. Who are those enemies? Well, look at Ephesians six. Let me read you a few verses from Ephesians six. And it says, finally be strong in the Lord and the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. Okay, so that's, you have the devil. And then listen, it goes on. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, not against people, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present age. present darkness against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Hope you see from that you have enemies. There is a spiritual world. There's more to this world than what you see. And even if you're just checking out Christianity and you're not a Christian, you probably have this sense. There's more to this world than what I can see with my eyes. Right? And it's true. There is. And scripture says it well. If you lived in other parts of the world, this wouldn't be such a hard thing for you. There'd be witch doctors. There'd be demonic activity that's just there for everyone to see in America. It's more hidden. It's more denied, right? We pretend like it doesn't exist. It does exist. Scripture says it exists. Just go travel the world and you could see it firsthand. Okay. So you have enemies. We should expect opposition. And we see it in this passage. You know how God has called you as ambassadors, right? He uses people. Satan does too. Satan uses people too. What did Jesus say to Peter? Peter was saying some ludicrous thing and Jesus turns to him and says, get behind me, Peter. No, he said, get behind me, Satan. Jesus acknowledged that Satan was even using one of the disciples against him. So both, Jesus uses us and Satan uses people. And so we need to understand that, right? In conflict, Satan can use people just as Jesus can. Another, I don't know why this is like podcast Sunday, but one I like is Sinclair Ferguson. It's called Things Unseen. My wife and I listen to it every night before we go to bed. It's like four to six minutes. They're really good. But anyway, I was listening to it and he used this analogy from a famous European theologian I've never even heard of, Oscar Coleman. And, but I liked it. So I'll share it with you. So Oscar Coleman says, We use this analogy of World War II. So you know D-Day, right? And then at the end of the war, so D-Day was June 6, 1944, right? At the end, there's V-Day or to be more specific V-E Day, right? So the victory in Europe. And so that's in May 45. So we have about 11 months between those two. And so this is his illustration is the decisive events of what would end up being the end of the war happened on D-Day. Once we breached Europe, now you can argue historians, but it's his analogy and I like it. So I'm using it. So that V-Day was pretty much inevitable from D-Day. Now, whether you agree with that historically, think about it with Jesus. Jesus's incarnation, His death on the cross, and His resurrection, and His ascension was like D-Day. It was, you knew, it was a certainty of what would come. V-Day would come. That's the second coming. That's when Christ comes back. Do you see the illustration? And so we live between these two. There's a great expression, already but not yet. Have you heard that? A theological expression, already but not yet. The kingdom of God has already come, And yet it's not yet come, right? DNA has happened, but there's still a lot of suffering and this should set our expectations. You should expect opposition because we're between these two. Isn't that good? I like that illustration. It just helps us with our expectations that there will be suffering. Look down. If you skip down to verse 49, It says the word of God was spreading throughout the whole region. That's great. And verse 50, but the Jews incited the devout women of high standing and the leading men of the city and sort of persecution against Paul and Barnabas and drove them out of the district. Isn't this crazy? We have this back and forth, right? This is normal. This is normal. If you follow Jesus, there will be opposition. You will face opposition. If you are faithful, Jesus promised. If you follow Jesus, there will be opposition. We've even seen that as a church. Has it just been an easy road? No, right? From major health concerns to many other things. We've had a hard, there's been a hard go of it. The six years we've been here. Right? And that's normal. And I was warned before they tried to set my expectations. They said, Hey, church planner, this happens every time you're going to suffer. We don't know what it is, but the hard things are going to happen. And that's normal, right? This is normal to be a Christian. We should expect a counterattack. We should expect. And it's, you know, Paul says in second Corinthians for the room of Christ among those who are saved, right? Is a fragrance of life, but the two of those who are perishing of death. This is what happens. The gospel divides. We'll look at this again next week too. The gospel divides. Now for any of the history buffs, there was a counterattack by Hitler and I'm not even gonna address all the counterintelligence, all the stuff that was going on to fool Hitler, but there was, right? Hitler fought back. And so also Satan does, the forces of evil fight back. But the word of God spread and that's good. All right, so that's the second point. We come to our third point about just, let me more broadly about our perspective. Look back at verse 46 with me, right? So they spoke out boldly. That's great. They had courage, but they'll look at what they say. They say a couple of things. It was necessary that the word of God be spoken first to you. Who's the you? The Jews in the synagogue. This was his pattern. He always went first to the Jews and then went to the Gentiles. Okay, so that's the first part. Look at the next line. This has a bite to it. Since you thrust it aside and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life. That is painful, right? There's, if you're receiving that, you are judging yourselves unworthy of eternal life. If you are a child here growing up in a Christian family, we never want this to be said of you. you would judge yourself unworthy of eternal life. It is being given. I'm giving it to you right now. I'm giving you the gospel again. I do it many weeks. Your parents do it. The Jews received the gospel that day, and yet they judged themselves unworthy. They self-excluded themselves. At judgment day, There'll be no one that can say, that can claim innocence, can claim, I'm sorry I didn't know, Romans 1 says, just that creation itself gives every human on this planet enough information that they should worship the Creator God. They won't be judged for not knowing the gospel because they never heard it. But if you do hear it, you'll be judged for that. If you're growing up in a Christian house, we want to make sure, I want to make sure, I say week after week, and that's why I speak to you kids often. You're the next generation, you outlive all of us. And so we're giving you and trusting to you this message of eternal life. That is strong words and worth taking to heart. Judging ourselves and worthy of eternal life. And this is not the perspective of our culture. Our culture says, ah, religion's not for me. I'm happy that that's good for you or it helps you. I like to think of God more like, My life's just fine the way it is. Don't push your beliefs on me. But this is, this is reality. This is, do you see how this passage is framing up? This is how things work, right? You're either, there's really only two people in the world, right? Two types of people, people that either believe or disbelieve, right? In the end, at the end of the day. And so we see this here, we have some rejoicing and excited, and we have others who are very angry and trying to run them out of town. Look at that verse he quotes, it's actually from Isaiah 49.6. It's in the middle of the passage, it's verse 47. He says, Well, the Gentiles, they're thrilled by this, the Jews aren't. He's saying this is always the way it's been. God has promised the gospel to go to everyone. How do you apply this? One way we even talked about in Sunday school, right? That this applies to everyone. If you feel like I don't fit in in church, you do, right? Because it's always included people. And Jesus did that. They always got mad at him. Why are you eating with those people? Why do you hang out with those guys? The gospel is for everyone. Verse 48, when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying Paul and Barnabas with the word of God. They love the word of God. Oh, okay. So yeah, we have a decision to make. The second half of verse 48 is kind of controversial. So either get out a Sharpie or a highlighter. You get to decide. But I'm going to get out a highlighter and say, hey, this is one commitment we have at Hope Community Church. We're just going to preach what's here. Read the last half of 48. It says, and many, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed. What does that mean? And as many who were appointed to life, okay, that's passive language, right? They were appointed to eternal life. Luke has just given his narrative and he just, not even thinking about it, puts in this huge theological statement. The people who believed predecessor before that was what? They were appointed to believe. This is not the only place. There's many places in scripture that talk about this. Ephesians one says similar things. He says, he chose us before the foundation of the world that would be holy and blameless before him. And in love, he predestined us to adoption. God chose you before the foundation of the world. Even Jesus said this, John 6 37. He said, all that the father gives to me will come to me. What came before them coming was that Jesus gave them to Jesus. He would die for them. Whoever comes to me, I will never drive out. They may be thinking, okay, not only did I start with, hey, my sales pitch, my army recruiting talk, hey, if you join us, you're going to face opposition. Oh, and the other thing is, really, it's not even in your power. You actually can't even believe anyway. You can't even volunteer yourself. I'm sorry, your name already has to be on the list. Wow, what a deal. So this is our commitment, because I want you to know what you're getting. With Jesus, with the Bible, you just get it as a whole package. And you say, hey, whatever this says, I just have to submit myself to it. This has been my commitment through my life, is that what's written here, I have to submit to. And so this is what's written here. Now, aside from the difficulty, that's a hard pill to swallow, on the other side of it, once you get it down, once you can swallow it, it's a joy. It's a little bit like medicine, right? It doesn't taste good once you get it in you, it makes you feel better. It's this, there's a great comfort in knowing you can't believe. You can't do it on your own. Your salvation did not depend on you making a decision that you could have not made. And did you really make it? And were you genuine about it? Maybe you weren't genuine. Maybe, no. Your faith is actually dependent on God doing something in you. This is an incredible comfort. This can give you an assurance. The assurance of Philippians 1.6. He says, I am, I am assured of this. I'm convinced of this, that he began a good work in you. We'll carry it on to completion. The day of Christ Jesus, that confidence comes from knowing God started what he started. He'll finish. There's much more to be said about this, but he threw this in. So we gotta, we gotta talk about it. Yeah. So there's some, there's some glorious things in this passage, some, some tough pills to swallow, but they, they are great. God is at work. This should give you confidence. Right? As you go into Cane Bay, you will face opposition. Not everyone is going to be thrilled with the message that you share. Right? But some will respond. There are people pointed to eternal life. Do you believe that in Cane Bay? There are people right now asleep in their beds, watching golf, who are pointed to eternal life, that live next door to you and to me. They have no clue, right? And so we proclaim just like Paul, just like Barnabas, a message that's very offensive, that will divide, that will be a room of death at first, right? That they're a sinner and they can't live up to God's standards. But in the end, it leads to death. I mean, in the end, it leads to life. So in summary, as we wrap up, if you're on the fall retreat, right? We talked a lot about expectations. I want to give you realistic expectations. We know it as a church, you know it individually. Opposition is normal, but God meets us in it and he really shows up. We should expect the Holy Spirit to save people. There will be a counterattack. Those bullets whizzing above your head are live rounds of ammunition. People really get knocked out of the race. People that were once following God when I was in college and in college ministry, some of them aren't anymore. You all know it. Satan is really after people. He's after you, young people. If you go to college, if you don't go to college, wherever you go, Satan will be there too. There'll be people that will try to talk you out of the things you heard here. So that's so crazy. So primitive of you, right? You have to have convictions, be convinced of what you know from the Bible. Not what I say, right? But read your Bible and see what it says. That's our commitment to Hope Community Church. I'm going to end with this in John 10, John 10, 10. It's actually where our vision comes from. It says the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. That's Satan. Satan has a great plan for your life. He wants to ruin it. Thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. But I have come, Christ says, but I have come that you may have abundant life and have it to the full. Right? Look at the, look at the, how the most emotional state, Look at verse 52. Okay, so we're almost ending on John 10. The verse 52, the disciples were filled with joy. You know, they might, I don't have recliners for you on a Caribbean beach, right? With cocktails, right? There's suffering. I have suffering for you, but I have a big smile. This is the happiest life you could have. That actually doesn't lead to happiness. This does. Following Christ leads to joy. They left happy. They'd shake the duffs off their feet, right? Which is a whole nother thing. A whole sermon could be preached on that, right? But they were full of joy. You can have joy serving Christ. Kids, you'll be lied to. You'll be told through advertising, through all kinds of things, the joyful life is somewhere else. If you vape, if you drink, if you do this or that or the other, We know that following Christ is the way to joy. Amen? Let's pray. Lord, we want that joy, but we're all scared. We don't like conflict. We don't want anyone to be upset with us. We don't want to lose any friends. Lord, I pray that we'd gain brothers. We'd gain sisters. Lord, we long as a church, as our theme this year is living on mission. As we come to bring the year to an end, Lord, we pray that you would give us hearts for those we don't know or those that don't know you and live near us. Lord, may they hear this gospel and may your Holy Spirit save them. And Lord, even this morning, I guarantee there are people in here that don't know you. I can't see their hearts, but you do. Lord, I pray right now, Holy Spirit, move in their hearts that you would convict them if they've never loved your word, if it's not precious to them, they would turn to you in repentance and faith and be saved. Jesus, thank you for dying for what I've never lived up to anyone's standards, mine or anyone else's, particularly not yours or none of us have. We just acknowledge that before you. Lord, we want you to be not only our Savior, but our Lord, our King. We want to follow you, King Jesus, in your army, Lord. We know you're still recruiting. We know it's not a joy ride, but Lord, we want to follow you. Help us as a church to do that. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.