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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Acts 11:19–26
Now, those who were scattered
because of the persecution
that arose over Stephen traveled
as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus
and Antioch,
speaking the word to no one except Jews.
But there were some of them, men of Cyprus
and Cyrene, who, when coming to Antioch,
spoke to the Helenus,
also preaching the Lord Jesus.
And the hand of the Lord was with them,
and a great number
who believed turned to the Lord.
The report of this came
to the ears of the church in Jerusalem,
and they sent Barnabas to Antioch.
When he came and saw the grace of God,
he was glad, and he exhorted them all
to remain faithful to the Lord
with steadfast purpose.
For he was a good man,
full of the Holy Spirit and of faith.
And a great
many people were added to the Lord.
So Barnabas
went to Tarsus to look for Saul,
and when he had found him,
he brought him to Antioch.
For a whole year they met with the church
and taught a great many people.
And in Antioch the disciples
were first called Christians.
Hey everybody, welcome to CCC.
My name is Joe.
I'm one of the pastors here,
and I'm glad you've come.
All right.
This is the eighth week of our ten week
series in the book of Acts.
We're calling this series room for more.
I told you last week that we're actually
looking at the origin of this phenomenon
we call the church,
and I call it a phenomenon
for a number of reasons, not the least of
which is that
it started with a handful of peasants.
And now, 2000 years later,
it has crossed through the centuries
over oceans,
through a bunch of different languages,
through innumerable people groups.
And right here to Hudson, Ohio.
It's pretty remarkable
that Jesus started the church
and he didn't start it for the disciples
and their friends and family.
He started the church to be a movement
to actually change the world.
In acts chapter one,
Jesus has died on the cross.
He is resurrected.
He spent 40 days appearing to the
disciples, teaching them different things.
He's about to ascend and he gives the last
his last instructions to the disciples.
This is what he says,
but you will receive power
when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,
and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem,
and in all Judea and Samaria,
and to the end of the earth.
And then he ascends.
And every one of the disciples
stayed in Jerusalem.
Jesus says, you're
going to be my witnesses in Jerusalem,
Judea, Samaria, the whole world, right?
Not a single disciple went home, packed
a bag, and said, I got Judea and Samaria.
Anybody coming with right? Nobody.
They just stayed there.
They did remarkable things in Jerusalem.
They led tons of people to Jesus.
But I think sometimes we're in danger
of being content
with something less than what God wants.
You know, right now
we are in the midst of building here at.
And while our sanctuary
is being renovated, we've had to adjust
to a lot of different things.
We had to change what used to be our gym
into a worship venue.
We still have East
Hall as a worship venue.
That wasn't enough.
So during the summer
we had a tent outside in the parking lot.
If we knew
the weather was going to be like this,
we'd still have the tent out there,
but we collapsed the tent.
Now we meet at the block during the ten
30 hour to make space for all of that.
Now we hope if everything goes
well that we will be in the sanctuary
within a month,
and then we'll be working on the kids
area,
and the kids area will be a mess, where
we're building a two story playground
and renovating the whole kids space.
I tell you all that because sometimes
it's easy to get fatigued.
Ended up saying,
why are we doing all this?
Why didn't we just leave it
the way it was?
And the answer is because God's heart
is always to make room for more.
Always, always.
God is always looking for more.
That's why I love that
our church has three
monstrous goals
to try to accomplish by the year 2050.
We want to see 10,000 people come to know
Jesus within a ten mile radius.
We want to have plant 60 churches
in Northeast Ohio.
We want to give $30 million to missions.
Those goals don't just come from us.
They come from this verse where
Jesus says, I want you to be my witnesses
in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria,
to the uttermost parts of the world.
So Jesus tells to the disciples
that they all stay in Jerusalem.
You know, Jesus told the story
in the Gospels about a farmer
who went out to so see
that he threw seed all over the place.
And in Jesus story, says the farmer,
some of the seed
fell on good soil,
and the seed that fell on good soil
had a harvest some 30 fold, 60
fold, some even 100 fold.
Seed was meant to be scattered
so it could multiply.
The title of this message is
the church is multiplying.
The church is multiplying.
Here are my three points.
The church multiplies when ordinary people
are talking about Jesus.
When just ordinary people are talking
about Jesus, the church multiplies.
When ordinary people
are being changed by grace,
and when ordinary people
become extraordinary.
All right.
First, when ordinary people talk about
Jesus, this is the way the passage starts.
It says, now those who were scattered
because of the persecution
that arose over Stephen, traveled
as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus
and Antioch,
speaking the word to no one except Jews.
But there were some of them, men of Cyprus
and Cyrene, who uncommon to Antioch,
spoke to the Helenus,
also preaching the Lord Jesus.
Okay, so what's happened?
Steven in chapter seven was murdered
because he was preaching about Jesus.
And then persecution hits everybody
and they are run out.
They run for their lives.
Houses burned down,
they lose their jobs, they leave
family, friends, all of that,
and they head out.
And it seems like like Christianity
is going to be extinguished
by this persecution, but instead it
remarkably spreads like wildfire.
Okay.
When I say ordinary people,
I mean in these verses
there are two names that are mentioned
towards the end.
One is Barnabas and one is Paul.
They're the headliners.
That's like Pastor Zach.
Pastor Joe,
like nobody else is mentioned by name.
It just says they were all sharing
Jesus first to Jews.
And then some of them started sharing
with the Helenus.
Paul and Barnabas were called in
after the church was already multiplying.
But they're talking about Jesus.
Let me stop right there.
Okay.
They have to run for their lives
from Jerusalem.
They go 500 miles north
to what is now southern Turkey,
to a place called Antioch.
Right when they get there, they begin to.
Now, if put yourself in that position,
you've been run out of town
because you've been talking about Jesus.
You get to a place that you don't know.
You see people
that are other Christians that have run.
Don't you think you would grab them
and say, listen, let's worship at my house
will worship in my basement.
We'll still worship Jesus.
Just keep our heads down.
It's kind of scary.
That's not what they did.
They were talking to people about Jesus.
They were talking to Jews, fellow Jews.
It was the Jews, fellow Jews,
who had run them out of Jerusalem.
That's one thing.
My second question is this
what was that conversation like?
Like somebody says,
hey, where are you from?
And they say, we're from Jerusalem.
Oh, really?
What brought you all the way to Antioch?
Well, they burned our house down
and they ran us out of town.
And they said, why did they do that?
And the answer is, because of Jesus.
You want to hear about them, right?
That's a tough sell.
I you know, I was convicted by this
because sometimes when I share Jesus
with people, I always want to put him
in a way that will enhance,
like a supplement that will enhance,
that will make their lives better.
That's not what they
that's not what they cared about.
They were convinced
that Jesus had resurrected
that was the news and that he had come
to forgive people of their sins.
So they were telling anybody
and everybody,
you know, there's a song that I want sung
at my funeral.
It's called Give Me Jesus.
And the refrain goes,
you can have all this world,
you can have all this world.
You can have all this world.
Give me Jesus.
That's what these people are like.
The church multiplies
when ordinary people,
people like you, are so convinced about
Jesus
that he becomes worth
anything and everything.
So you talk about it.
The second reason that it spread
is that it says that they first
were talking to Jews.
That's the first verse in verse 19.
And then it says, but there were
some of them, men from Cyprus and Cyrene
who went coming to Antioch,
spoke to the Helenus.
All right.
Helenus are Greek pagans.
So there's a difference.
Like Jews believed in God already.
So it seemed like
you just had to convince them
that about Jesus, which was no small task.
But Helenus, Greek pagans
may or may not believe in God,
certainly not the way Jews did.
And they were not moral people,
especially with sexual morality.
They were wild, right?
So what happened was that
they started talking to everybody.
Like, there's a story
that Jesus tells in Luke chapter 15.
You know, we tend to think of it
as the story of the prodigal son.
But a father has two sons.
One is the older brother
who does everything right.
He's very moral.
And then there's the younger brother
who's super immoral.
But in Jesus story,
they're both separated from the father,
and the father wants them
both to come home.
So what happens here
is that these people, ordinary people,
are talking about Jesus,
but they're talking about Jesus, who
they to people that they think
might be interested in God.
They're talking about Jesus to people
that they think are far away from God.
They don't care.
They know that Jesus wants all of them,
so they talk to everyone.
So that's the first thing,
is that the church multiplies
when ordinary people are talking about
Jesus.
The second thing is the church multiplies
when ordinary people are being changed
by grace.
So what it says beginning of verse 21,
it says, in the hand of the Lord
was with them, and a great number
who believed turned to the Lord.
The report of this came
to the ears of the church in Jerusalem.
And they sent Barnabas to Antioch.
When he came and saw the grace of God,
he was glad, and he exhorted them all
to remain faithful to the Lord
with steadfast purpose.
That phrase,
when he came and saw the grace of God,
what does that mean?
Like how do you see grace?
Like grace doesn't come in a vial.
Grace doesn't come in tablets.
The only way you see grace is the evidence
that grace has on someone's life.
It put it this way.
In 1843, Charles Dickens wrote a story
called and he called it A Christmas Carol.
It became a classic.
It's about a man named Ebenezer Scrooge.
You probably know the story.
I'll just run through it quickly.
Ebenezer Scrooge starts out.
He is angry.
He's frustrated.
He's joyless. He's stingy.
He's unkind.
He's not compassionate.
He just allows a guy.
And then it's Christmas Eve.
He's visited
by the ghost of Christmas past.
Christmas? Christmas future.
He wakes up Christmas morning
and he realizes that it's Christmas Day.
And I always love the movie
where it's George C Scott plays
Ebenezer Scrooge,
and he throws open the window
and he is so full of joy
and he yells down at a boy,
and he gets him to go
and buy the big goose for Bob Cratchit.
He makes a huge donation to the poor.
He ends up being full of joy
and happiness and compassion and love.
He is a radically different man
now, when he would tell his story
that in this,
the story of the Christmas Carol doesn't
go into this, but people could decide
whether they were going to believe that
he really experienced
Christmas past, present and future.
But they could not deny
that he was different,
that on December 23rd
he was one kind of man.
And on December 25th
he was completely different.
That's grace.
I have a friend named Sanjay Kalra
in Atlanta now.
I used to live here in Hudson,
and Sands would come
to church every once in a while,
but he wasn't serious about church.
Word around town was that Sandy lived fast
and loose in his neighborhood.
He lived right off here on 303,
and he had a house with a cupola on top,
where if the light was on in Sanders
house and his cupola,
that meant that he was having a party,
and his parties were known to be wild.
Right.
And then Sanjay experienced a crisis,
and his life was kind of falling
like a house of cards.
So he came to church
to meet with one of our pastors.
It was a guy named Marshall Brandon
at the time, and I love this story.
So he comes in to see Marshall
and seeing just crying and everything
saying she told me the story.
So he's crying and Marshall says,
so singe.
So your your life's not working for
your plan is not working for you.
It's just Christ says, no, it's not.
Marshall says you want something different
because, yeah, I want something different.
So Marshall explains the gospel.
He says, well, Jesus came.
He lived in your place,
died in your place, resurrected.
If you give your life to him,
he will forgive your sins, give you
new life, Sanchez says.
That's what I want.
Marshall goes.
Maybe tomorrow.
That's what he said. Maybe tomorrow
we'll go home and think about.
It goes, no, no, I want, I want now.
And Marshall goes, maybe tomorrow.
And then San says he got
down on his knees, grabbed Marshall's
leg and said, give me Jesus now.
And Marshall said, okay, now you're ready.
Sanz radically changes within a month.
There's not a person that Sanz knows
that doesn't know he has changed.
He made a list of all the people
that he had offended here in town
that he had wronged in one way or another,
went to their door,
knocked on their door.
They would open the door and he would
say, listen, I need to apologize.
Ask your forgiveness for what I did to you
two years ago.
Will you forgive me? And they're going,
what are you doing?
Why are you doing this?
You know, and he said, Jesus,
Jesus.
People could look at sins
and they could say, you know,
I don't believe that Jesus stuff,
but they could not refute
that was one thing one day.
And he had completely changed
the next day.
That's grace. There's
nothing more powerful.
There's no more powerful testimony
for for the gospel
than grace that you see in somebody's
life.
Now, here's the question.
What about you?
I mean, if I asked, what evidence
could you show me
that grace has happened to you?
Could you show me something?
Could you tell me?
Yeah.
This is what I was like before. Jesus.
But this is what I'm like now.
Hey, we're about to do the Thanksgiving
baskets thing.
We have 2100 baskets this year,
which means,
you know,
you fill it up with a Thanksgiving feast.
It's supposed to feed, like, ten people.
So that could be 21,000 people
in this area
that will have Thanksgiving
because of our church, which is great.
Last year when I went to the atrium
when people were picking up baskets,
there were three Akron University varsity
basketball players in line.
They took five baskets
and they filled them up.
They went to the grocery,
filled them up with a Thanksgiving feast
so that we could deliver them.
What would make three varsity basketball
players in the middle of the season
decide to do that?
You know what,
Grace?
That's what they tell you.
Listen, the church multiplies
when ordinary people are talking about
people
like you, talking to people about Jesus.
The church multiplies
when ordinary people, people like you
are being changed because of grace.
And finally, the church multiplies
when ordinary people become extraordinary.
It's the way the
this passage ends, it says so
Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul,
and when he found him,
he brought him to Antioch
for a whole year.
They met with the church
and taught a great many people.
And in Antioch the disciples were first
called Christians.
All right.
So Barnabas goes and gets Paul
the apostle, you know,
and they says they
they taught them for a whole year.
Pastors act does a thing called Deep Dive
where he does five hours on one subject.
It's it's amazing he's
going to do another one like next month.
Can you imagine what it would be like
to be taught for a whole year by Paul
the Apostle?
Right? Crazy.
But the thing that got my attention
was that last phrase where it says it.
In Antioch, the disciples
were first called Christians.
Greeks
like to give satirical names
to groups of people.
This was not a compliment.
When they called them Christians,
they were kind of.
They were. They were calling them
like little Jesus people.
Like that was kind of what it meant.
Little Jesus people.
But the reason they had to do
it is what I think is amazing.
So I did some research on Antioch.
You know,
Antioch was a very metropolitan place.
You know, you go to a big city
and they talk about big cities being like
a melting pot,
because there are all these different
ethnic groups that are all together.
But I read an article that said that
most cities are not really melting pots.
They're more like bowls of soup
that are really close together.
Like you go to New York City,
you have Little Italy.
That's a group of ethnic people
all in one place.
So you go to Chinatown,
another group of ethnic people
go to Harlem,
another group of ethnic people.
So you have this
these group of ethnic people
that are separated from everybody else,
right close to another
group of ethnic people
that are separated from everybody else.
Right? So that's the city
in Antioch.
It was the same way, only more
so because in ancient Antioch
they built a wall around the city,
which was normal, but a Antioch,
they actually built walls inside the city
because the people couldn't
stand each other at all.
So they would have,
like Little Italy, all walled off
so that you would keep them away.
And then Christians came
and Christians talked about Jesus
to Greeks, to Gentiles,
to Jews, to moral, to immoral, to people
close to people far off.
And all of a sudden
they had a real melting pot of people
from every ethnic group
and every walk of life.
And the one thing they had in common
was Jesus.
So when they decided to make a name
for those people,
they called them little Jesus people,
because something remarkable had happened.
And the remarkable thing that had happened
was that people who had nothing else
in common became like brothers and sisters
because of Jesus.
You're sitting around people
you would have nothing in common with,
but you come here
and you have learned to love them
simply because of Jesus.
Jesus
gave marching orders to the disciples.
He didn't create the church
for all of us to be alike
and just for our friends and family.
He created the church to be a movement
that would actually change the world.
And the church multiplies
when ordinary people
are talking about
Jesus to anyone and everyone.
When ordinary people
are being changed by grace,
and when ordinary people becoming
extraordinary just by coming to worship.
And when people see this group,
they have to make a name for it
and they call us Christians.
Let's be the church.
Would you pray with me,
father in heaven, thank you for
what you've written here
in the book of acts.
Thanks for the church that has traveled
over centuries and through over oceans
and through languages and people groups
to right here in Hudson, Ohio.
We pray to help us not to be content, but
to always be
looking for what you want to do.
And I know you want room for more.
I pray that you'll give us the courage
to talk to people about Jesus.
Just talk to him
that you will give us the change us.
Change the things inside of us
that need to be changed.
So when people look at us,
they will not, will not be able to deny
that grace has happened.
And then I pray
that you would make us extraordinary
as a group of people who love each other,
simply because you loved us first.
Thanks.
We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.