Text today is Acts 11 verses 19 through 30. It's on page 1102 of the Bible's in the seats. So last week we saw Peter defend his fellowship with the Gentiles to the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. They were still confused about the Gentile inclusion in the new covenant, how that was all gonna work, how Jewish did they have to become, that kind of thing. And this week we hear more of ministry to the Gentiles. This time it's in Antioch, not just Antioch, but we're reading primarily about Antioch. So we're gonna read from verse 19 through the end of the chapter. So then those who were scattered because of the persecution that occurred in connection with Stephen made their way to Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except the Jews alone. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who came to Antioch and began speaking to the Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a large number who believed turned to the Lord. The news about them reached the ears of the church at Jerusalem and they sent Barnabas off to Antioch. Then when he arrived and witnessed the grace of God, he rejoiced and began to encourage them all with resolute hearts to remain true to the Lord. For he was a good man and full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And considerable numbers were brought to the Lord. And he left for Tarsus to look for Saul. And when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. And for an entire year, they met with the church and taught considerable numbers. And the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch. Now at this time, some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. One of them named Agabus stood up and began to indicate by the spirit that there would certainly be a great famine all over the world. And this took place in the reign of Claudius. And in the proportion that any of the disciples had means, each of them determined to send a contribution for the relief of the brethren living in Judea. And this they did, sending it in charge of Barnabas and Saul to the elders. Let's pray. Lord God, today is the day that you have ordained for us to set aside for rest and for worship. to proclaim the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, to remember his work to save us, and to set our minds on our heavenly hope, and to be edified by the proclamation of the word as we seek to worship you together as a church. We seek your power, and we seek your presence as we do this this morning, Lord. Bless now your preached word. Make us receptive to the truth found in these scriptures. Bless our gathering with your presence. It may be glorifying to you, faithful to the text, and helpful for your people. Send your spirit to work in us now. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. So now that Luke has shown that the conceptual seal has been broken, that was separating Jews and Gentiles, even in the New Covenant, that idea that had kind of began, it was still persisting. Now that that's kind of been broken, he now details to us the larger scale missions to Gentiles. We don't know the exact timeframes here relative to this event with Cornelius, his household in Caesarea that we just covered. But we can assume it was fairly close chronologically, very likely. And the details that we are reading about today probably came right after it or very soon after it. So we're probably around 43 or 44 AD at this point, most likely. It's possible we're still in the late 30s. Some try to make that argument. But we're probably 42, 43, 44, somewhere in that time frame with this time in Antioch. We have no direct dialogue in these verses. I don't know if you noticed that. There's no direct dialogue. So it kind of reads to us somewhat like a missions report, almost. It's not the kind of text that if someone was just choosing a one-off that they would go to. Not that there's not good and helpful information in here. There is. But it's one of those texts that you probably wouldn't get real excited to hear about preached or to preach. Andrea sometimes asks me as we're going to bed on Sunday morning, technically, I guess. She's like, are you excited to preach tomorrow? And usually I am, but sometimes the text is just like, eh. And it's not that the Bible is boring or I'm not interested in what it says. It's just sometimes the text doesn't lend itself to Strong proclamation. You get paranoid about shoehorning stuff into it to make it more of a sermon. So this one has that reading. When there's no direct, when it's just like a historical report, it can feel that way. But it still does have interesting stuff. So we have a report about the evangelism efforts in Antioch, as well as a report regarding the famine relief in Jerusalem. Both those are informative to us about the early church. There's a decent amount of traveling in this passage, actually. And there's multiple geographical references. It's all still fairly close. Relatively speaking to the size of the world, but you can tell they're expanding. They're getting out farther and farther. The first locations mentioned are where the disciples had spread following the persecution that arose in conjunction with the stoning of Stephen. We read that a while back. Remember this is still, there's a ton of people in Jerusalem as soon after the resurrection and they're staying there and they scattered after Stephen was stoned because persecution arose from the Jews. So they had been scattered to Phoenicia, that was on the coast where modern day Lebanon is today, to Cyprus, that's an island in the Mediterranean, and to most importantly, to Antioch. Antioch was a large, significant city in Syria. It's up there with Rome and Alexandria in terms of its size and its commercial and cultural significance. Like Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, those are the three big cities of the Roman Empire. It's about 300 miles north of Jerusalem. had a population between, some say quarter million, some say up to half a million, somewhere in there, but that's big, especially back then. And it was the headquarters of Rome's Syrian Legion. There was a decent-sized Jewish presence there, as you would expect in most of these big cities, but it was a thoroughly pagan city, a very pagan city, and it was notorious for its immorality. And you see that referenced even in the secular writings of the day. They just refer to it as like this vile place on the river, whatever the river is that goes through there, I don't remember. They had a large temple to the god Apollo, They had numerous mystery cults there, and they had a host of pagan diversity. And it was known for that. It was known for its pagan diversity. Archeologists have actually found some ancient inscriptions there that says, pagan diversity is our strength. So I might've made that one up, but. I'm sure if they thought of it, they would have said it. So Antioch was at the time, it was a modern metropolis. One archeologist called it the New York City of the Roman world. It was a modern metropolis. And we're spending a bit more time on it because not only is it at the center of our text today, but as was typically the case, big important cities tended to have big important churches in the ancient world. So that's why Rome became a big, important church, and Antioch became a big, important church. These were big, important cities. So even though we're seeing just the very beginnings of the church here, it did indeed grow to become one of the most significant congregations in the early church. What we see as Luke records this for us is that the missions there sort of escalate from the beginning of this passage through the end. First, you know, there's just unnamed men that we don't really know who they are. They're unnamed men from Cyprus and Cyrene. These are Jews that had scattered out from Jerusalem or were living from these areas, but they're Jewish Christians. We don't know who they are. Then Barnabas is sent there. Then Barnabas and Saul are working there together in Antioch. And then lastly, we see at the very end, there's prophets showing up there from Jerusalem as well. So we'll follow the story of evangelism in Antioch from the beginning. We'll just kind of walk through it. Jewish Christians arrived there after fleeing from persecution in the preceding decade after Stephen was stoned. That's kind of how it starts. But as they were accustomed to doing in Jerusalem, they were only speaking the word to the Jews. And this probably persisted for a good while. Because we're probably at least, probably around a decade after the stoning of Stephen at this point. And still, that was pretty much the case. But some new Jewish Christians who were seemingly part of the Jewish diaspora, that means they had come from this Mediterranean island of Cyprus where they had been, or the North African Roman city of Cyrene. If you remember Simon the Cyrene that carried the cross for Christ, he was a Jew from Cyrene in North Africa. But we had some Jewish Christians in these areas, Cyprus and Cyrene, that arrived there in Antioch and they began preaching about Jesus to the Greeks as well. Now we don't have any evidence that the other Jewish believers there opposed this per se. We don't know that that was the case. It probably made them at least uncomfortable. They had not been doing it themselves. And then these men show up and they start doing it. But we know such a thing was not done deliberately before this. These men that showed up and started doing it were probably emboldened and encouraged by the reports of Peter's ministry to the Gentiles in Caesarea. What had happened with Cornelius and his household. They probably heard about Peter and they're like, we can do this everywhere. That's a huge mission field that is open to us. And they started following this new precedent that he had set for them. And much like Peter's ministry, the Lord likewise blessed their labors. And we're told a large number turned to the Lord. Luke tells us that explicitly too. We don't even know who these men were, but we know that they preached Jesus to people that needed to know about Jesus. And why did this succeed? Why were they able to see so many conversions? Because as verse 21 tells us, the hand of the Lord was with them. That's why it worked. It's always a good reminder that church success is determined exclusively by the hand of the Lord being with us. He's the one that raises up churches. He's the one that puts down churches. He's the one who grows and shrinks churches. That's not to say that every church that grows is doing something right. There's churches that use unbiblical means and they get a lot of attention and they grow. It's not saying that if they're growing, they're doing something right. It's not to say that every church that shrinks is doing something wrong. That's not always the case. Sometimes faithful ministry is going to shrink your church. So it's not really that simple that you're growing, you're doing it right, you're shrinking, you're doing it wrong. Not that simple. But it is to say, when Jesus is preached, truly and rightly, as these men obviously would have been doing, then it is Jesus who grows his church through his power. The apostolic methodology to church planting or church growth is to go preach Jesus to those that don't know Jesus. I know the situation in this text, you know, it's an unreached people group in a pagan city. So we don't want to overextend the application here as if things are that straightforward in our own time, in our own area. They're not. We don't have that kind of thing. You'd be hard-pressed to come across anyone around here that doesn't know about Jesus or probably was even raised in church. But this text still informs our theology of missions, as well as the central focus of our preaching, that we preach Jesus Christ. We are still and we always will be about preaching the Lord Jesus Christ. And we must remember that our own success as a church, as far as we are successful, is because the hand of the Lord is upon us, and we can rejoice in that. I mean, it's so hard not to think back. I mean, I've only been here seven years, but when we moved into this building seven years ago, you know, we had these folding chairs here, the uncomfortable ones that people don't like to sit on for two hours. That's all we had, and it was not even halfway full, barely. And now we're bursting at the seams here, and we're setting these up. I don't think we've set up chairs here on the side before, and we're starting to do that until we have another addition or building. And I wasn't even here when you guys were in the tomato packing plant. And I'm sure some of you can remember sitting there with no heat and trying to picture what we picture right now, what we have right now. How do you not rejoice, right? Hand of the Lord is on this church. It's exciting. We keep that in mind because we're not doing anything fancy here. I think you can tell from the concrete floors. We're not putting on a show. There's no smoke machines and lights. It's just preaching Jesus and trying to love each other as Jesus would have us to love each other. So the hand of the Lord is on us. The news of the large number of believers amongst the Greeks in Antioch reaches back to the church in Jerusalem. They receive reports, missions reports, more or less, of what's been going on. And Jerusalem's still serving, you know, it's the mother church of sorts, and it's the hub of apostolic authority, because most of the apostles are there, most of the big names are there, and then they go out, but they report back. And as they have done in other cases like these, they choose somebody to send. We've seen this already multiple times. They want both a reliable witness of what was happening, and they want someone that can go there and can encourage the new believers when they hear that there's a bunch of conversions. They want someone to go in there and encouraging them that's going to be Orthodox. Perhaps also to make sure that this Gentile inclusion in the church went smoothly, because this is sort of a new thing for them. So they chose someone with a proven track record who they could trust and who they knew could contribute to the work there. They chose Barnabas. And in verse 23, Luke sums up his visit in just one verse in a series of verbs. He says, he arrived, he witnessed the grace, He rejoiced at what he saw, and then he encouraged them all. So he arrived, witnessed, rejoiced, and encouraged. Remember, he is the son of encouragement. That's what his name meant. Last time we saw him, he was the one bringing Paul to the apostles. They had this reservation about Paul's conversion. He's the one that came and encouraged him and brought him to the apostles. He is the son of encouragement. And his encouragement here to these new believers centered on a call for them to purpose in their hearts to remain true and faithful to the Lord. Remain true and faithful to the Lord. Set it in your heart. These were new converts here, and they were coming out of an extremely different religious practice, worldview, and set of morality, right? And these sorts of new converts that have this drastic life change like that, they're typically vulnerable. When they begin to experience the hardship of temptation and persecution and sacrifice that comes with the Christian life, that call from the old life and go back to your old ways, they need encouragement and Barnabas is a great guy to have there ministering to them. His presence there resulted in What did it say? Considerable numbers being brought to the Lord, according to verse 24. There's considerable numbers before he gets there, he gets there, and considerable numbers continue. So there's a quick growth of the church here. Interestingly, Luke takes the time to tell us about Barnabas himself and says he was a good man and full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. So we are here reminded of what kind of person we ought to be used, or ought to be in order to be used in the kingdom of God. If we're looking to be used in the kingdom of God, then we should seek to be a good man, full of the Holy Spirit, and full of faith. Those are great descriptions. When we read things like that, it's hard not to question our own usefulness in a similar situation. To kind of put yourself in a scenario and be like, could I, be considered by my church a good man full of faith and full of the Holy Spirit, where they would feel confident sending me out to a situation like this. Now, I don't say that so that we can sit here and we can, you know, mourn and pity our lack of sanctification or something. I just mean that in a way for us to be encouraged to seek this description for ourselves. Anyone who could be accurately described by their church family as a good man or a good woman, full of the Holy Spirit, full of faith, they are doing things well. And we've done this before. We've had a scenario. We've sent men to India to the missions we supported there. It was years and years ago now. But we sent at least three guys over there, I believe, if I'm remembering right. It might have been two. It might have been three. As we're doing that, we're expressing some confidence in those men to be reliable, to be helpful to that church, to be able to handle going to India. There's confidence expressed there. If we were looking to do the same, we would have a whole host of men. in this church, and women, if we thought it was safe, too. A whole host of people were like, we would want them there before that ministry to encourage them. They would be helpful. There's tons, and that's great. I think we should all be seeking this, this sort of thing. And you see these characteristics displayed in Barnabas's actions here, because he's willing to be sent a pretty long way from home. He sees what's going on, he rejoices at the Lord's work there, and then he gets to work himself, building on the foundation that has been laid in Antioch. It is these type of men and women that are going to get used in the church. That's not to say that God uses all things and all people, right? But we seek to be used because we're doing the right thing, not because we're doing the wrong thing. God can use the wrong thing, but we don't seek that. You know, like Joseph's brothers, they don't rejoice that them selling Joseph into slavery got used to save Israel in the long run from the famine. They're not like, oh, we did well there. No, they should be ashamed. God still used it, but we should be seeking to be good and be doing good so that God will use the good. And Barnabas was useful in ministry because he lived the Christian life well. And we should seek to do the same. Live the Christian life well, and we will be an asset to the church and be used in the kingdom of God. Now another good thing about him was that he's there, he's ministering, and he sees there the potential for even greater outreach, even greater teaching. In such a large city with so much paganism, he sees the need. And he has no ego on him. He's not trying to build his own personal ministry, right? That sort of thing wasn't even a thing yet in the early church. There wasn't Barnabas International Ministries and he's seeking donations to fund, you know, that sort of thing did not happen. He doesn't have an ego like this is my territory. So what's he do? He goes and he finds his old friend Paul. He wants to find Paul because he knew that Paul would be a huge asset to the church here. There's tons of converts and we need good, solid teaching. So he goes to find his old friend, Paul. He would have had to travel about 100 miles, even farther north, up to Tarsus to find Paul, who, if you remember, he was back in his hometown for several years now after he did those years of ministry in Arabia, and he had been back in his hometown of Tarsus. But Barnabas eventually does find him, and together, the two of them come back then to Antioch, and they taught large groups for an entire year. So this is how the church in Antioch really took off. You know, there's Jews there, and there's Jewish Christians. They're preaching the word to Jews. New Jews come in, start preaching to Greeks. Tons of conversions. Barnabas comes, more conversions. Barnabas gets Paul, and those two are there feeding the church. More conversions is growing. This is the church of Antioch and where it began. Now the last verse in this section, before we get to the famine part, the last verse of this section has a side note from Luke telling us the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch. There were a variety of epithets and designations used for Christians up to this point, anything from just disciples or followers of the way, a few others that we read. But Christian is the one that has persisted through history. Which is kind of funny because it's only actually used two additional times in the New Testament. I think it's used when Agrippa, Paul's testifying to Agrippa, Herod Agrippa, and he says, do you think you would persuade me so quickly to be a Christian? And then the other one is in First Peter that we read. It says, don't be ashamed if you suffer for the name of being a Christian. It seems to be a name that came from outsiders. That's pretty often the case. Outsiders name another group, and they get referred to that way. And it would have been outsiders. They're trying to identify this new group, this church. And the etymology here is not difficult to figure out, right? It's obviously the name Christ. And it's got this Latin suffix, I-A-N, or at least that's the anglicized version of the Latin suffix. It means belonging to or identified by. So Christian, Christ in, those that are belonging to are identified by Christ. They basically called political leaders after their names, right? So there were the Caesareans following Caesar, the Herodians following Herod, Pompeians following Pompey. And even though the Christians were not a political sect, and they never were, we aren't now, never were, it was natural to call us Christians. It's an appropriate name because we follow Christ. That is indeed who we belong to. He is indeed who we seek to be identified with. We're not ashamed of that name. It may have been meant as a term of derision, as outsiders typically do when they name groups like that, but we wear it proudly because it's never a shameful thing to be associated with Christ. And what did Peter say when he said, if you suffer for the name of being Christian, don't be ashamed, but he said, but glory in that name. and being called to be associated with Christ. Glory in that. We're baptized into his death and resurrection. Our sacraments are literally designed to show that we belong to and identify with Christ. Baptism does that. Lord's Supper says we are proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes. We're proclaiming Christ. So Christian is not a name that we should shy away from, regardless of who came up with it. And the historical significance of it beginning to be used is that You know, they were at last being seen as a separate distinct group apart from the Jews. They now have a separate name for us. It marks a new public identity out from under the umbrella of Judaism, which makes sense because the Jews are going to begin to be outnumbered by the Gentiles coming into the faith. It doesn't really make sense to keep referring to the church and to Christians as this group of Jews because now it's largely Gentiles eventually that's gonna get there. So Christianity is clearly not a subset of Judaism that's becoming evident enough where they come up with their own name for us. But what that also means is that persecution was going to be coming from two directions now. You know, it started with the Jews who refused to acknowledge their Messiah. They hated the church and they sought to wipe out the church, so they persecuted the church. But from the outside, it just looked like Jewish infighting. This group of Jews fighting with this group of Jews about some guy named Christ. Jews, remember, had a degree of freedom, a degree of protection from the Romans in the first century. As long as they didn't stir up trouble and they didn't rebel, the Romans gave them some latitude. Rome had learned it was really not worth challenging their religious practices too much because they would put up a fight. And credit to them for doing so, right? To a degree. So Rome gave them a bit more liberty. It was just like, all right, all right, all right, you can, you know, practice your own little thing and have your own sort of laws, but you're still under our authority, but you can have a little buffer. And as long as Christians were seen as just a different kind of Jew, as a sort of a subset of Judaism, then they too enjoyed a degree of freedom from the Romans. Not from the Jews, but from the Romans they did. But now that they are finally being distinguished from the Jews, Rome is going to start being a problem. Now that they will be encroaching on pagan Gentile beliefs and practices, there's going to be a new horde of persecutors against them. And we will, of course, see that going forward in the Book of Acts. It's not the Jewish persecution that really steps up, it's the Roman persecution now. And the reason for that is they're not seen as Jews anymore. It's not a subset of Judaism. They're now Christians. Now, in the last section of the text today, we're introduced to a prophet, Agabus, who came down from Jerusalem with some other prophets. Remember, the church was built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. Christ is the cornerstone. Apostles and prophets provide the apostolic authority and the special revelation until they have scripture. And prophets were operative during this period in which the canon was open. Scripture is being written. We read that Agabus foretold the coming of a great famine all over the world. And when we read that, that translation makes it sound kind of more extensive how Agabus said it. He's not saying, like, the world is in, the entire earth is going to experience a famine. The word he uses there is more of a reference to, like, the civilized world. You know, primarily the Roman Empire. He's predicting a famine in the Roman Empire, more or less. And this prophecy is confirmed historically because there was indeed a famine from 45 to 48 AD. Or more accurately, we could even say an entire series of regional famines all over the Roman Empire. And these stemmed from wide ranging crop failures. And it was a serious famine. People literally died of starvation. They couldn't afford food and people died. And we even read about relief efforts that came after, even from secular sources. So Luke's a good historian, too. He tells us this took place during the reign of Claudius, and we know that he reigned 41 to 54 AD, which again shows the reliability of Luke's history. The famines really did happen in the reign of Emperor Claudius. We know this for a fact. But what matters here is that The disciples took up a collection and they sent it with Paul and Barnabas up to Jerusalem to help the saints there. Now, before we discuss that any further, let me take just two very quick things in the description, two notes here about the description of these circumstances. First, this contribution is said to be sent to the elders. They give it to Paul and Barnabas and they go and they take it to the elders in Jerusalem. Even though the apostles were still alive, they had begun setting up proper church government. They were already appointing elders in the churches. And if you remember from Peter's first epistle, he exhorted the elders among his audience and he called himself their fellow elder. We read that as well in the scripture reading a little bit ago. He calls himself a fellow elder. There's no hierarchical structure here. There's no episcopacy. Obviously, there is no papacy. There were elders in the churches. That's who ruled the churches. The practice that we do today is the apostolic practice. You have elders in the churches and deacons that serve alongside, and each church has their own, and they serve as the authority in that local church. That's the apostolic practice. And then second, the second note that we want to take note of here. Notice this says, each of the disciples gave in proportion to their means. according to their own abilities to give, right? This was voluntary, it was without a designated amount, like everybody must give this set amount or this set percentage. And that is how giving is meant to be in the new covenant. We give according to how much we are able. We don't technically have a tithe. We use the word tithing for our giving, just in a generic sense, but tithe means a tenth, and we don't technically have a tenth. I know that's subjective, that we don't have a number, and there would be a whole lot less questions about it if we were all given a designated percentage. We wouldn't have to debate or wonder if we're given enough or too little. But that's simply not how it is. We don't have a designated percentage or designated amount, so we must judge for ourselves and be sure that we are giving sacrificially and wisely. That's how we judge it. Are we giving sacrificially? Are we giving wisely? Make sure we're giving. That's how they did it in the apostolic era as well. Okay, anyway, back to the actual matter at hand. So these disciples sent money to the other churches, up to Jerusalem to be distributed throughout Judea, most likely through the deacons. From the context, it seems that the disciples that it's talking about were the ones in Antioch. That's the disciples who send this money with Paul and Barnabas. It's pretty obvious. And now these Christians in Antioch are sending support to churches in Judea. In other words, Gentile churches are sending support to churches made up almost entirely of Jews. And it's always beautiful to see churches helping churches. That's great. But there is an added element of beauty here found in the obvious reconciliation that's present. Remember that historical context. The Jewish Christians had previously been largely ministering almost exclusively to Jews. That's the first verse of our passage today. They went there and they talked to Jews and shared Christ with the Jews. There was, generally speaking, a persistent level of animosity and disdain cross-culturally from Jews and Gentiles, as we've covered in the previous sermons. And Jerusalem had been serving as a sort of mother church, ministering to all these others, right? But now, it's the Jewish Christians in great need. The church is in Judea. These regional famines killed people because they couldn't afford to buy food. Antioch is on a river. They probably had one of the areas that had the least amount of crop failure because of their access to water. But these churches in Judea don't have the access to food, and they need, food prices go up. When there's a famine, food prices go up, and if you can't afford to buy food, you die. And they sent support. The new Gentile Christians in Antioch held no grudge. They didn't resent the Jews for their previous separation. They're like, oh, you went a decade without coming and telling us about Jesus? Okay, you have your churches, we'll have ours. Let's just keep our distance, all right? No, that's not their approach. They all get it. The dividing wall has been broken down. There's no longer any distinction in the new covenant. They're all co-heirs of the promises of God. There's not Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. They're just Christians. There's not Jewish churches and Gentile churches. There's just churches. They get it. They're all co-heirs of the promises of God. Or as Peter said it at Cornelius's house, Christ is Lord of all. So we get to witness, through the testimony of the Word, the power of reconciliation that has been won through the atoning work of Christ. These people groups are now united to the point of sacrificially giving to one another where they formerly hated each other, they're giving money. A lot of people have said, I don't know who came up with it, but show me your checkbook, I'll show you where your treasure is. That's probably a little outdated because we don't use a lot of checks anymore. But the idea of you send your money where your heart is where you send your money. The things you care about are seen in where you spend your money. And the Antioch Christians cared enough about the Judean Christians. And that unity comes directly from the fact that they are all collectively looking to Christ's blood alone to atone for their sins. That's the source of that. Believing the same gospel, that unites them and that reconciles them. Obviously, the whole point of the work of Jesus is reconciliation, right? It's to reconcile us with God the Father. He removes the curse of the law. He propitiates God's wrath so that we can be reconciled, so that we are no longer his enemies. He has no need to execute judgment on us through his wrath. That's what reconciliation is. We are now his friends. And if the gospel can reconcile us to God, and it does, then of course it can reconcile these different people groups. And if it can reconcile different people groups, then of course it can reconcile our marriages. There's even less of a boundary there. It can reconcile families and it can reconcile friends. If there is true unity in looking to Jesus alone for salvation, then all these worldly differences that we come up with, that we have, the culture, the language, The preferences, all that kind of thing can be managed. Not easily, but it can be done. The gospel is that powerful. It can reconcile us to the creator. It can obviously reconcile fellow creatures. Our reconciliations and marriages are rooted in the gospel. That is all possible through the work of Christ. We can love one another in a supernatural way because we've been supernaturally loved. We can forgive one another because Christ has forgiven us. The gospel is at the root of all that. It's the work of Jesus. And the fellowship that we read of today between these churches is just a mere glimpse into that perfect unity that we are going to have one day in eternity. There's not gonna be any more famines. Not gonna need a prophet to come and tell us like hardship's coming. No more famines. No more warnings about suffering. There's not gonna be any even need for relief from any kind of suffering. And there'll be no surrounding pagan culture to make life difficult. Not in the new heavens and the new earth. There we will live. in perfectly reconciled relationships with God and with men, all because of what Jesus has done. Amen and amen. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you once again for the display of the power and the blessing that come from trusting in Jesus. We always look to him as our example, as our model for behavior, but we do humbly ask that you would grace each one of us to be good men and women, to be filled with faith, and to be filled with the Holy Spirit as Barnabas was described. We long for this description to be accurate for us. Give us the discipline to practice the faith in such a way as to develop these traits. We pray as well that our church as we seek to sacrificially give to other churches that you would bless those efforts and be pleased by them. We pray each of those churches or the schools or the individuals that we give to would be encouraged by our love for them and that that encouragement would cause them to likewise with resolute heart to remain true to the Lord. May we always be generous in sharing our blessings with others, each of us according to our ability and our means. And likewise, as a church, we pray we would do the same. You have blessed us tremendously. We see your hand upon us. We credit you with all of our growth and all of our maturity, all of our fellowship, and all of our joy. We pray these things to honor you and to ask them in the name of Jesus, who has reconciled us to you, Father. Amen.