He Saw The Grace of God and was Glad
He Saw The Grace of God and was Glad
Acts 11:23
The book of Acts in the New Testament tells the story about how the Christian movement spread like wildfire from Jerusalem where Jesus died and rose from the dead to Samaria to Syria to Greece to Rome and beyond. We've been following this story for over a year now to see what it has to show us about the work of Christ in today's world.
Today we read a part of the story that describes another decisive step in the spread of the Christian movement. It's found in Acts 11:19-24. In chapter 8 we saw how the movement spread to Samaria and built a bridge over the chasm of hatred between Jews and Samaritans. In chapter 10 we saw how the movement spread to the totally non-Jewish gentile people of Ceasarea and built a bridge over the alienation between Christian Jews and non-Christian gentiles. Now in 11:19ff we track the Christian movement all the way north along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea to the chief city of Syria, Antioch.
Read 19-24 The sentence I want us to focus on this evening is from verse 23: "When [Barnabas] came [from Jerusalem] he saw the grace of God and was glad." "HE SAW THE GRACE OF GOD AND WAS GLAD."
What I would love to see happen because of our worship here at Faith Temple is for everybody here to be able to say: "I saw the grace of God and I am glad." So my question for this passage of scripture is: How did the grace of God become visible in Antioch? "Barnabas saw the grace of God and was glad."
It was visible. And I think the grace of God becomes visible today in our lives the same way it did then in Antioch. So I want to ask this text, How did the grace of God become visible in Antioch?
There are at least three answers. Probably more. But I am only going to talk about one of them. Namely this: the grace of God became visible when it turned persecution into the preaching of Jesus Christ.
When Barnabas saw that persecution in Jerusalem had produced preaching in Antioch, and that many people had turned to the Lord Jesus, what he saw was the grace of God. God's grace becomes visible when he turns persecution into the preaching of Christ and sorrow into salvation.
Verse 19, "Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch . . . (v. 20) There were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Greeks also, preaching (telling the good news of) Jesus Christ."
In other words, the good news about Jesus Christ came to Antioch because of persecution. Barnabas saw this and called it the grace of God, and it made him glad. God's grace becomes visible when it makes the anguish of persecution a means of spreading the good news of Jesus.
If anything is clear from the Bible it is this: the grace of God does not spare his people suffering in this age, but rather uses suffering to bring people to himself. The Son of God himself suffered to save people from condemnation. And now he turns suffering again and again for our good both in this age and in the age to come.
God has been showing his grace in our own time the same way he did in Acts. For example, a lot of people do not know this, but in the 1930's thousands of Koreans fled what is now North Korea when the Japanese invaded. Many of them settled in the then USSR. Many of them were Christians and so by the suffering of the Koreans the gospel of Jesus was being carried into central the then USSR. But the grace of God was just beginning to be visible.
Joseph Stalin saw the Koreans around Vlapostok as a security risk to the weapons manufacturing center. So he relocated them to five areas around the Soviet Union, spreading the Christians even farther into the Muslim areas of the USSR (just like the persecuted Christians that went to Antioch).
One of the places they were sent was to Tashkent the center of the 20,000,000 Muslim Uzbek people who had violently resisted western efforts to bring Christianity. Over the next decades these Koreans became an accepted part of Uzbek society.
Then, with Glasnost and Peristroika, on June 2, 1990 the first open air Christian meeting in the history of Soviet Central Asia happened. God used this meeting to awaken the Korean Christians especially, and the upshot was that the decades of acceptance by the Muslim Uzbeks and Kazaks has allowed the spread of good news about Jesus far more widely than it could have with merely western influence.
In other words, the grace of God was at work in all this. God hasn't changed. This is the same grace of God that used persecution to get good news from Jerusalem Jews to Antioch gentiles.
The grace of God works the same way in the lives of individuals as well. Suffering becomes the stepping stone to God.
Joni Erickson Tada, a women who is almost totally paralyzed from a swimming accident, when she speaks she lifts her arms as high as she can in her braces and shouts, "This is the prison where God set me free." What she means is that the pain and limitation and frustration brought on by her disability threw her back on God in such a way that she discovered what true freedom in life is all about--and it is not about arms and legs and skiing and jogging. It's about forgiveness and hope and love and meaning and eternal life. It's about knowing that God is for you and not against you even in suffering. That's how grace becomes visible.
I want to bear testimony that it has been true in my own life as well. The grace of God has become visible by turning sorrow into substance. But do you know what the grace of God was doing in many awful days? Only a prophet could have known then what I know now: God was making a preacher. I believe he stopped me before so that he could fill my heart. He broke me again and again and made me desperate to find in him something I could not get from other people. He cut me off from the fast track of popularity and drove me into his word looking for some kind of explanation for why my hundreds of prayers were not answered.
But now I know better. He was answering my prayers. I wouldn't see it clearly for about 20 years. But he was making a preacher. He was doing it the way nobody else would do it--because his ways are not our ways. And now I see all my embarrassment and all the humiliation and all the loneliness and all the crying out to God as sheer gift, and my standing in this pulpit today as the visibility of grace. If Hank Gunlock my pastor from thirty years ago at Westglen Baptist Church, could sit where you sit today, he would say like Barnabas in this text, "I have seen the grace of God and I am glad."
I think the grace of God took every day's pain, and used it for my good - and yours. What a difference there would be if my teenage years had been smooth years! But instead God clogged my path in order to fill my heart.
So I testify to all of you today: I have seen the grace of God in my life and I am glad. He takes what seems to be the worst of circumstances and turns them into good news. He did it for the persecuted Christians in Acts. He did it for Korean refugees in the USSR. He did it for Christians like Joni Erickson Tada. He did it for me--and still is. And he can do it for you, no matter what you are going through these days.
I don't mean that everything will be easy. I mean everything will have meaning. Everything will be bearable. Everything will make you wiser and more loving. Everything will draw you nearer to God. That and a lot more. That is how the grace of God will become visible in your life.
And God will do it if you trust him.
So I want to close with the plea that Barnabas gave to the church in Antioch in verse 23. It says, "He saw the grace of God and was glad; and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose (stay with the Lord; trust the Lord)."
That's my plea to you. Trust the grace of God. Don't put your trust in yourself. Don't put your trust in money. Don't put your trust in the government. Don't put your trust in the church. Don't put your trust in your job.
Put your trust in the grace of God. And then hang in there. Don't let anybody trick you out of the greatest gift in the world—which is living in the joy and power of the grace of God.