Paul's View of the Ministry, Part 2
Acts 20:21-24
We've entitled this two part message Paul Looks at His Ministry, Paul Looks at his Ministry. And this is part two. And we'll be doing some review from our last one to bring you into perspective for this morning.
Certainly the chapter that we're studying, the 20th Chapter is expressive of the great love of Paul for the church. We've seen this again and again, all through the 20th Chapter. We usually think of Paul's love chapter as 1 Corinthians 13, you know, where it expresses all about love. Well you might say that 1 Corinthians 13 is a love chapter in doctrine, and Acts 20 is Paul's love in action , because certainly here, he expresses his love for the Lord and his love for the church by the sacrifice of himself and his dedication to his ministry. So we've learned much about Paul's love for the church in this chapter, and shall continue to see some of it as we go this morning.
I suppose in the mentality of today, if we were to examine the apostle Paul and he were present with us, and he were invited to be our guest, we would want to find out his methods for success. This is a day when methodology is a marketable commodity. And even churches today and religious organizations are both selling and buying success methods. There is even a whole curriculum of material called Success With Youth, in which the whole effort is to bring about a successful response. The word success is a tremendously dominating word in our world, and we look, so very often, at success in terms of method.
When somebody is successful, the first thing we want to do is bottle his method and transport it somewhere. And I suppose if Paul were here today and a whole lot of churches leaders gathered around him, they'd start pumping him on the area of, well how did you do this? What are the techniques for reaching a city? Or what are the patterns for growing a church? Or how do you work this way? Or what is this little trick that you may use here? Or so forth or so on.
And we could do that 'til we were blue in the face and never get to the real success of Paul unless he sidetracked us off of that and got us on the main track, because the success of the apostle Paul how do nothing to do with his methods, and I don't hesitate to say that. It had nothing to do with his methods directly. Indirectly the methods grew out of what he was and were important. But Paul's success was totally based upon who he was.
I just spoke at a conference on leadership, and they had trained a whole lot of leaders for 10 weeks, you know, they had all kinds of graphs, and charts, and things that they had trained them in, and all were very good and very helpful. And I was asked to give a keynote thing to wrap it all up and express, in one statement as best I could, in one message, what success was Biblically. Now that, at first seemed like a monstrous problem to try to reduce it all, all of this down, what leadership is, what successful leadership is in one message. And, you know what, I reduced it to one message and, better than that, I reduced it to one word. I said a few more things after I said that word.
[Laughter]
I want you to know. But anyway I reduced it to one word, and the one word that spells leadership, and the one word that spells successes is the word, example. Example. In all of Christian leadership, that is the most dynamic thing that happens. It's expressed throughout the scriptures.
You take, for example, the Lord Jesus Christ who taught repeatedly by example. Do to people what I have done to you. He expressed his love in service by washing their feet. Time and again, Jesus manifested what they were to do by doing it himself. In Acts 1:1, Luke says, "The former treatise have I written to you, Theopholos, of all that Jesus began to do and teach." Jesus not only taught but he set example. The Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy and told him how to be a leader, he put it in one statement, "Be thou an example to the believers," right.
The Apostle Paul said to the Philippians, "The things that you have seen in me, do them." Example. Peter said to the elders, he said, "You take care of the flock, and you feed the flock, and you take the oversight of the flock, not as being lords over it with a big club, but being examples.
And people, the reason Paul was so successful was he was an example. There was no credibility gap between what he said and what he was, and people patterned their lives after him. He said, "Be followers of me as I am of Christ." The Christian life boils down to example and Biblical leadership is example. And the thing that made Paul what he was was the example, not of his methods but of his life. And if you want to know how to be successful in the ministry, or you want to know how to be successful in building whatever particular objective you have in mind, it is as simple, spiritually speaking as being the right kind of person.
And I don't care what gimmicks you've got for leadership, if you're not the right example, you'll never pull it off. Leadership is example. This is true even in the secular world. But, monumentally true in the spiritual. And so rather than caring about what Paul's methods were, and tricks of the trade, and gimmicks, which he didn't have, I'm concerned about what kind of a man he was. Because if I can pattern my life spiritually after the things that made him spiritually successful, then I can have the same kind of fruitfulness that God gave him. Maybe not the same dimension and the same degree, but the same in kind.
And so I'm not concerned with talking about all of the avenues of approach that Paul used as much as I am concerned about talking about the kind of man that he was, because if my life can at all approximate the kind of man he was, I'll know the kind of fruitfulness that he knew.
And so as we look at Acts Chapter 20, we're seeing some of the greatest insights into effective ministry, and they're not pedantic, they're not academically strung out in a list, they're just there in his life, and they just ooze out of him, but they're the keys to everything.
And so, really, to reduce Paul to a list of successful techniques is absolutely wrong. He was a man that was what he was because he was the man that he was. And believe me, people, the Christian life is as simple as being what God wants you to be and then letting the spirit work through you. That's what I tired to express in the little book we wrote on God's will, that if you're the right person, God'll express his will through you. It's a question of being the right person. And Paul's success was because he was right, he was called of God, empowered by the spirit, he yielded to that power, lived a holy life, and through that avenue, the spirit of God operated with blessedness.
But there's one little dimension here in this chapter that just gives us an insight into Paul's mind that really helps us see the man that he was. And that is in versus 17 to 27, we have Paul's view of the ministry. He saw the ministry in perspective, and he saw in four different dimensions: He saw his ministry as it related to God; to the saved; to the lost; and to himself. And they were all spiritual perspectives. He saw the ministry for being what it was, a ministry toward God, toward saved, toward lost, and an obligation toward himself.
And, you know, you don't need any more than that. I know In my heart, that if I ever got into the position that Paul is in in Acts 20, and ever really and honestly and totally felt these four dimensions the way he feels them, that the world wouldn't be able to handle the impact of my own life. And that's true of yours as well. Because these four things, as simple as they are, are the heart of the success of the man.
Now the setting is Miletus, verse 17, Paul is completing his 3rd missionary tour, the church is being planted around the world, that's the story of the book of acts. By this time it's reached the gentile world. Paul himself has been the great agent of that planting, establishing churches all over the eastern Mediterranean area.
And now coming back from this third tour under great persecution and stress, he lands at Miletus, headed for Jerusalem, he's got a lot of money that he's gonna give the poor saints of Jerusalem from the gentile church, he wants to tie the two together and show their love, and so he's got all this money with him, he's got some other men with him who represent the gentile church, and they're heade