Qualities of a Great Missionary, Part 3
Acts 14:21-28
Turn in your Bibles to the 14th chapter and take a look with us at what is part three of our study of the 14 chapter, Qualities of a Great Missionary. Really these are qualities as we've said of any great servant of Christ, be he a servant at home or on a foreign field. Qualities of a Great Missionary is the theme, and in the verses that make up this chapter we find flowing out of the narrative as we have said in past weeks the principles are the qualities or qualifications of effective service.
As we come to the 14th chapter we're reminded again that we're following Paul and Barnabas. They're on the first missionary journey. Previous to this, they were pastors of the church at Antioch in Syria. The church sent them out under of course the commission and call of the Holy Spirit and they went to Cyprus and then they've been touring Galatia. We find them in chapter 14 on the Galatian tour, and as we watch them ministering the Gospel to the gentiles as the church expands, we find that in their ministry there are very evident features that just kind of rise out of the text that indicate to us factors of success. It's not as I've said before a lecture on success factors but rather an illustration of them.
Jesus gave a rather simple directive frankly. In the beginning of all of this missionary effort Jesus simply said, "Go you into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature" and that's the calling of believers that still stands. It's basic to the missionary effort. Further, Jesus said in the Book of Acts prior to his ascension into Heaven, "You shall be witnesses unto me." It wasn't really an option; it was a statement of fact. All believers upon the receiving of the Holy Spirit are witnesses. It's only a question of whether you're a good one or a bad one. Every Christian is giving testimony to Jesus Christ. The issue is what kind of testimony.
And so there is a basic commission that is really laid on the life of every believer to bare the truth of Christ to the world and you are doing that in some fashion. The call still stands today and of course obviously what Christ wants is faithful Christians who will dedicate themselves to carrying out The Great Commission with diligence and with success, but you know as you study the history of the church, and I think that we're all aware of this; as you study the history of the church you find that it's always the minority that do it and the majority that don't. There always seems to be in the - were we able to paint a portrait of the history of the church we would find the foreground dotted with individuals and then we would find a mass of faceless humanity in the background but the commission isn't any different for all of them. It's just that sometimes in every period of church history there are men singularly who dominate it, and women, and then there are masses of Christians lost in the fog in the background.
It was one man, David Livingston, who so greatly influenced the continent of Africa toward God that Africa and Livingston are almost synonymous terms. It was one man, William Carey, responsible for the redemptive transforming power of Christ being effectively presented to the teeming millions in India. It was because of one man, William Booth, who gave himself completely go God's service that there started in the slums of London the beginnings of an evangelistic movement that encircled the globe known as the Salvation Army. It was CH Chapin who said on one occasion, "Not armies, not nations have advanced the race, but here and there in the course of the ages an individual has stood up and cast his shadow over the world." He's right, and the history of the church is no different.
The history of the church is the history of individuals, and there are individuals that move in church history, and between the individuals there's the flow that they have created. It's like seeing a whole lot of people lying down and then one standing up and then lying down and standing up in intervals. The mass of the church sleeps and here and there great men have changed its history for God. Now what is it that makes somebody dominate the foreground and somebody else get lost in the background? What is the difference between the Christian that makes things happen and the Christian that doesn't know they're happening? What is the difference between the success in a dynamic sense of some Christians and the sort of anonymity of another one? Well I think the answer lies in Acts 14 and it lies in many other features in the New Testament but it's here for sure, because in this chapter I've found at least eight qualifications of a successful missionary.
If you want to be one there are qualifications. If you're already one, these are the qualities that made you one. They're success factors and they're not lectured to us but they are just illustrated. We're looking at two men, Paul and Barnabas. Really one cast his shadow in a sense over the other. Paul dominates Barnabas in a sense. Both of them cast their shadow over the world and Paul's shadow still lingers over the world. The world is still affected by what Paul has written. Now flowing out of this record of their touring Galatia are some principles that signal their greatness, and I really am so hopeful and prayerfully hopeful that you get these because I think these can really become things that you can nail down, principles that you can get handles on for understanding what makes the difference in the Christian experience. Now we've already discussed five of them and we'll review those and then discuss the last three that I see in this chapter.
The first thing that was such a key to their success was they were ministering spiritual gifts. Remember that? We have said, and said it many times, that the Christian is most effective when he is functioning in an area where he has been gifted by the Holy Spirit, and when they were doing that they consequently were of the most effect. Now it is true that Christians for example may not have the gift of teaching or preaching or administration or helps or showing mercy or whatever. You may have some gifts of course, others you don't have, and yet in the sense even though you don't have a gift there is a sense in which you need to minister in all those areas. For example, we all don't have the gift of exhortation but we're all called on to exhort each other. We all don't have the gift of teaching but we're all to declare Christ. So there's a sense in which we don't all have the master gift but we all in a lesser sense are called to do all these things but when we really function dominantly through those gifts that are specially given to us, then our success is really dynamic, not in terms of the world but in terms of what God wants.
Now these guys were functioning according to their gifts. Preaching, teaching, exhortation and administration are all apparent in this chapter. Those are the four gifts of a leader in the church, and they had them and they exercised them and thus they were really functioning in the energy of the Spirit, and so they were successful to begin with then because they ministered their gifts. Christians need to begin with to find their gifts and use them. Secondly we saw they were successful because of boldness. There's no substitute for boldness because boldness is the ability to go through opposition, and if you don't go through opposition you never get anywhere because any time you try to do something for God, what's the first thing that happens? Opposition. So if you can't handle oppositions you can't handle anything and that's boldness, plowing through the opposition.
The third thing we saw that was so basic and so intrinsic to success was Divine power. We saw in the illustration verses 1-7 dealt with boldness and versus 8-10 dealt with Divine power. The Apostle Paul right in the middle of a sermon God just goes right through him and performs a miracle. These guys lived in the power flow and last week we talked about the fact that some of us Christians know something is coming up and we can take a week to kind of get the power going again, but Paul just lived with the power flow and at any moment right in the middle of his sermon God just interrupted him and healed the guy. I mean the flow was there all the time. He lived in the power of God. That's why his gifts ministered so effectively as well, and there's no substitute for ministering in the power of the Spirit. Believe me, there's none. I mean I know that from my own life. If I have the gift of teaching I can minister the gift of teaching in the flesh or in the spirit.
Just to give you a little homespun personal illustration, I would rather preach here than anywhere, and I mean that sincerely, than anywhere, and yet the flesh in me would say, "But Macarthur, when you preach here you have to study hard because they know everything you know and you have to come up with something different every week" and that's right, but I would rather do that. I would rather spend 25 or 30 hours a week at least studying to tell you something once than to be a traveling speaker, and you know there's a lot of kind of glamour in being the traveling whatever who comes to town, the professional Bible teacher. That's a great ministry. I used to do that. For about three and a half years or so I did that. I went all over the place.
It was in a very real sense very difficult to really minister in the spirit, and I want to tell you why. When you do that you find that wherever you go there are certain messages that you use, the good ones. In the business we call them the sugar sticks. You go back to these and you get excited as you can get when you hear you're gonna go someplace you've never been. All your good stuff you can use. They've never heard you, right? That's very easy to do, and I'm not knocking it.
It's fine if you can handle it in the spirit, and of course it was always the same things. They always want to hear salvation, Holy Spirit, prophecy, and something about marriage and sex, always the same things, and so you had a little series that you'd come in and you'd say, "Let's see, it'll be message number 13, 14, 15 and 16 this week" and you punch your little button and that's it. You've got it so in your brain you know exactly when they're going to laugh, you know how to build up to it, you know when they're going to cry, you know everything, you've got that little outline. If your wife punches you in the middle of the night you sit up and you repeat the message. It's there; let's face it. You've got that one down pat. Believe me, you could have absolutely no connection to God and you can give that thing. I know. I've been there.
You know what? I did that for just a few years and I realized that was in a sense unfulfilling. Now I don't want you to call up the people that I'm gonna minister to this summer and say, "Remember you'll be ministering in the flesh." I'm working on it, but you know I said to the Lord, beginning to pray about this, "Lord, I have to be somewhere where I am dependent on you where I can't go in there knowing I've got a winner." I mean sometimes I come to preach here and I am scared because I said, "You know I work on that, Lord but it didn't fall together. It isn't there. I don't understand just how to put it together and where you're gonna put the emphasis" and I just pray a lot and I get down on my knees in my office before I get over here and I just really pour out my heart to the Lord and I come in here and it's over and God really blessed us.
Other days I work through it and it's terrific, and I get done and I say, "That's good. That is gonna get 'em. That'll be a hot item on the table." And you know what? You come in here and nothing, zilch, nothing, and you go away and again you just say to yourself, "You know, dumbo, one of these days you're gonna learn."
But you know you learn in the ministry that you can't function on your own strength. You can't do it. It is Divine power or it is nothing. I mean the Spirit is the only energy the Word has the really operates, and Paul knew this. Everything he did he did in the energy of the Spirit and he tried to get it across to everybody. In Ephesians 3:16 he says, "I pray that you might be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man." See? He knows that's the only way. Then he says, "That you might be filled with all the fullness of God. Then you'll be able to do exceedingly abundantly above all you can ask or think according to the power that works in you but the power doesn't work until you're strengthened by the spirit in the inner man, not in your own strength." You can't go out and minister on your own strength. Divine Power. Well, I don't want to get into that. We covered that two weeks already.
The fourth point that we saw in terms of features of a really successful work is humility. This is so basic. Remember that after Paul's power, the power of God through Paul had been exhibited and he healed the man and the guy jumped up and walked? Well it was a temptation for pride. Everybody in town in verse 11 just couldn't believe it and they said, "The gods will come down to us in the likeness of men. Gods are here! Hermes and Zeus or Mercury and Jupiter" and they were going to worship. Well Paul and Barnabas heard about it in verse 14 and started tearing their clothes and screaming about blasphemy and in verse 15 said, "What are you doing? We're men of like passions with you. Cut this out." They didn't want any exaltation. They were humbled. That's a great quality. You can't beat that.
Jesus said that, "When a false prophet comes along he seeks his own glory. When a true prophet comes along he seeks the glory of him that sent him." They didn't want anything for themselves. They said, "We're trying to turn you to God" verse 15, "not to us. We want you to know God" and they described the God of whom they spoke. Well you know whenever you start getting proud you just have to keep remembering what you were. Isaiah 51:1 where he says, "Whenever you think you're something, remember the hole of the pit from which you were digged." Solomon said, "Before honor is humility and whoever humbles himself God is going to absolve." I tell you, humility, that's a tough one but that's a basic.
Paul expressed his attitude toward humility in 1 Corinthians 15:9. Just listen to this. He says, "I am the least of the apostles." That is not hypocrisy. That is real. He's honest. You say, "Paul, why would you feel like that?" He says, "I'm not even fit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God. I know the hole of the pit from which I was digged. You couldn't have gotten into a deeper hole in a deeper pit than I was in. I was killing Christians. I'm not worthy to be an apostle." Then he says this, "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace, which was bestowed upon me was not in vain. I labored more abundantly than they all." You say, "There you go, Paul, bragging" and he says this, "Yet not I with the grace of God that is in me." Everything was God. God got him out of the hole to begin with and God ministered through him. Paul didn't want any glory and neither does any successful servant of God.
There's a fifth thing that we've studied and just continuing to review here, and that is persistence. Another great feature of successful effort is persistence. You couldn't stop Paul. I mean the guy was just absolutely unstoppable. They tried to stop him in verse 19 with about as strong an effort as imaginable. "There came certain Jews from Antioch and Iconi" and by this time he's in the town of Lister and he's moving on. "Persuaded the people in having stoned Paul. Threw him out of the city supposing he'd been dead." They stoned him. You think well, that'll fix him. Not really. Verse 20 says, "He rose up, went back into the city and the next day went 30 miles to Derby." We talked about last week the unbelievable characteristic here. How could this guy possibly get up from being stoned until he was obviously in their eyes at least dead, walk back in town and the next day go to Derby, and what did he do when he got there? "He preached all over the place", verse 21. You say, "When does he rest?" He doesn't know the meaning of it. He is persistent.
Now last week I went over that and somebody said to me, "John, you avoided the issue of the verses." I said, "Well what's the issue?" and they said, "Was Paul dead or wasn't he?" And we just kind of kidded about the fact that t