The Character of An Effective Church part 2

Last week we started looking at what makes a chruch effective, not so much with numbers but in the spiritual impact that it has.

We saw that it must have Spiritual Leaders

which are divided into 2 different groups

Prophets

Teachers

Then we saw that the church mush has a Spiritual Ministry.

It means that the chruch must minister to the people.

The Church Must have a Spiritual Mission (vv 2b-5)

Spiritual men with effective spiritual ministry will see God extend their spiritual mission.

God chooses for further ministry those already actively serving Him.

He is not likely to take idle Christians down from the shelf, dust them off, and entrust them with important work.

“To know the will of God one must do the will of God.”

We must be active in our faith.

We are not to just sit and soak, we are to go and spread.

The truth that all ministry is to be done for the Lord is here reinforced by the Spirit’s command to set apart Barnabas and Saul for Himself.

They were His men, to use as He would and send wherever He desired.

Another principle that flows out of this text is that God sovereignly calls people to the ministry.

The church did not choose Saul and Barnabas.

Indeed, they would probably have been the last two chosen, since they were the best the church had.

Nor did Saul and Barnabas volunteer. Instead, the Spirit sovereignly called them to full-time missionary service.

A final principle to be gleaned from this text is the importance of waiting for God’s timing.

The Antioch church did not concoct schemes or map out strategies to reach the Gentile world.

Instead, it concentrated on carrying out the ministries God had already entrusted to it.

An important feature in discerning God’s will for the future is to do His will in the present.

Spiritual Opposition (vv 6-13)

When God’s people seek to advance His purposes, satanic opposition is unavoidable.

The missionary team had by now traversed the whole island from Salamis in the northeast corner as far as Paphos on the southwest coast.

Besides being the seat of the Roman government, Paphos was

“ a great center for the worship of Aphrodite [Venus].… The greatest festival in Cyprus in honor of Aphrodite was the Aphrodisia, held for three days each spring. It was attended by great crowds not only from all parts of Cyprus but also from surrounding countries. (Charles F. Pfeiffer and Howard F. Vos, The Wycliffe Historical Geography of Bible Lands [Chicago: Moody, 1967], 305–6)

“It was a city rife with immorality: “Extensive religious prostitution accompanied [Aphrodite’s] rites at Paphos” (Pfeiffer and Vos, 306).

It is well to remember the lesson of these verses. Leading someone to Christ is not merely an academic exercise, nor is it a matter of making a successful sales pitch.

Rather, it involves all-out war against the forces of hell. Saul and Barnabas battled Bar-Jesus for the soul of Sergius Paulus.

Spiritual Victory (vv 9-12)

As so often is related in Acts, God used a miracle to confirm the authenticity of His messengers and the truth of His Word.

Significantly, it was the teaching of the Lord, not the stunning miracle he had just witnessed, that prompted the proconsul to believe.

He was amazed at the teaching of the Lord, not at the miracle.

The church at Antioch stands for all time as an example of an effective church.

The successful mission to evangelize the Gentile world that it initiated was a turning point in history.

The true church of Jesus Christ on earth today is the spiritual legacy of that outreach.