This year, we’ve been talking through the book of Acts in our Bibles each week. Commonly known as the Acts of the Apostles, but I think a better name would Acts of the Holy Spirit, as the Holy Spirit has been the primary mover, the primary animator, and the primary instigator in the stories we’ve waded into. From the very beginning of Acts where Jesus tells his apostles to wait for the Spirit to arrive, to the day of Pentecost, where the thousands of people gathered are overcome with the Spirit, speaking in tongues that they can all understand despite not all speaking the same language, to the community of believers selling their stuff and using the money to take care of the poor in their midst. To the miraculous healings, and the miraculous conversions of Saul and Cornelius. The Holy Spirit has inspired, motivated, and moved these followers of Jesus to give of themselves, to bring others into the fold in a radical way.

I’m excited for us to talk more about this movement of God a little more today. Let’s pray together:

Lord, thank you for being here with us. God, may we talk to You and listen for You as much as we talk about You. This morning, please provide a message for us, something that seeps deep into our bones and changes us from the inside out. If there’s anything today that’s from me and not from You, God I ask that it will fall away and be forgotten. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear what You have for us today. In Jesus’ Name we pray, Amen.

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Acts 14:26-28

²⁶ From Attalia they sailed back to Antioch, where they had been committed to the grace of God for the work they had now completed. ²⁷ On arriving there, they gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. ²⁸ And they stayed there a long time with the disciples.

Last week, we talked about God’s radical inclusion in chapter 10. How Cornelius, a Gentile, along with his family was filled with the Spirit, about how Peter had a vision from God that made him change his thinking. God’s love and desire to be in relationship with humanity transcends cultural and ethnic boundaries in ways that Peter couldn’t have known without an interrupting experience with God.

Then in chapter 13, we see the church in Antioch prayerfully and obediently commission Paul & Barnabas to go and do the work that the Holy Spirit has for them to do. So they get going. They go from place to place preaching the good news about Jesus in the synagogues. The Holy Spirit is making this new mystery known: that God is reaching out to all people, not just the Jews. As they were going around, many people were coming to faith, people of high status and low status, Jews & Gentiles.

But it wasn’t all mountain peak moments of unity & kumbaya. Not everyone rolled out the welcome carpet for Paul & Barnabas. Yes, on their journey in chapters 13 & 14, there’s large groups of people turning to God, putting their faith in Jesus for the forgiveness of sins and then being filled with the Spirit, and the Holy Spirit performed miraculous signs in their midst, but even so, in chapters 13 & 14 they get expelled from one place, they flee another because of the threat of danger, and in this place called Lystra, this crippled man at the city gate gets healed and because of that people think Paul & Barnabus are the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes and want to offer sacrifices to them, so Paul & Barnabas have to convince them that they’re not Zeus and Hermes. Then these Jews who had kicked them out of other cities showed up and turned the crowd against them, and Paul gets stoned and left for dead outside the city.

So this is a roller coaster ride. A lot of good, a lot of bad. They’re experiencing a lot of things that would make me want to give up, and yet, before returning back to Antioch, they go back through and encourage all these new believers saying “We must go through hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.” And they return back to their home church in Antioch, and they report all that God had done through them, how God had opened this new door for the Gentiles. How God is working in it all.

This singular focus that they have on what God has done and is doing among them sticks out to me. The way that Luke describes their report back to the church at Antioch sounds a little different than the way that I think we often tell stories from our lives. I think if we came back from a trip, even one where we felt God was leading us  as we went along, I think we’d probably describe it in us central terms: The craziest things happened to us. We were like preaching in the synagogues and a ton of people were there and they got baptized and now there’s these churches that are starting up because of it. And then the guy I was with got stoned, like not what we mean now when we say that, he got like rocks thrown at him and everybody thought he was dead. And then he was ok after all so we left town.

Do you see what’s missing from that description? Clearly God was in those stories, but when we tell stories we typically find a way to make ourselves the main character. And why is that?

I think there’s a few reasons. Maybe one of the most common reasons is that we maybe don’t want to over spiritualize things. We know there’s people in our world who use God as the mascot for whatever thing they want to happen, even if its not necessarily good, or beautiful, or just. I would guess a lot of us in this room came to faith within a group of people that had some doubts about the legitimacy of some other Christian groups and how they might interact with the Holy Spirit. I know that holds me back personally. As I heard Josh say earlier this week, and I think this is true for a lot of us, many of us probably came to faith within a group of people, that believed “Ya know, God just doesn’t work like that anymore.” So the scope of what we might contribute to God’s work in our world or our life is sort of narrowed down to explicitly answered prayers like for a loved one to be healed or for us to get that job we’ve prayed for.

But as we’ve been walking through Acts together, I feel like I want more of this. This kind of relationship with the Holy Spirit, where we can sit together and ask God to take us where God wants us to go, and trust that the Holy Spirit is going to take it from there. Where we ask God to present opportunities for us and actually are willing to accept what falls into our lap.

There’s a common phrase in the circles I think a lot of us run in. The phrase “it was just a God thing.” And I think we use this phrase to describe when something works out in a great and unexpected way. Like for instance, when I get a call out of the blue from a random phone number the day before a Mobile Food Pantry and its FedEx, saying they’re going to bring 30 volunteers, that was a God thing right?

I don’t want you to hear me knocking that phrase because I think it gives us a good shorthand way to talk about how we saw God work in our world or life, but at the same time, we shouldn’t limit our understanding of how God works to serendipitous God thing moments we encounter.

Yes, it’s a God thing when we run out of gas on the side of the road and a fellow church member sees us and just happens to have a gas can in their car, but its also a God thing when we watch our friend become a better father over the years as a result of their relationship with Jesus. It’s also a God thing when a loved one passes away and we have brothers and sisters in Christ who will sit with us, and grieve with us, and pray for us. It’s also a God thing when our neighbor trusts us enough to ask us to put their trash can out when they’re out of town.

The idea that we’re talking about is God’s immanence. This theological concept that the God who created our universe still is active and present in creation today. From Ephesians 4: There is one God and Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in all. Or as Paul tells the Athenians in Acts 17, in God we live and move and have our being… If we take seriously this notion that God is present with us in every moment of our lives, and not just a passive observer, then our language should reflect that belief. If God is an active participant with us in life, then we should talk about God in that way.

And Paul and Barnabas believed that. They report back to the church in Antioch all that God has done. God opened doors to new believers, God carried them through persecution, and God retuned them back to this family of God who sent them with blessing. God prompted, they responded. God lead, they followed. God did the thing, and now they are bearing witness to that truth.

During Sundays in Lent, there will be an ongoing invitation to share how you have noticed God in your life. Each week, there will be a link in the newsletter to upload of photo that represents a story. A story of how you saw God breaking into your world, your day-to-day life. As we’ve talked about today, God is immanent, meaning that God is here. God is with us in the big moments, and God is with us in the small moments.

There’s a 17^th century monk, Brother Lawrence, who had this deep belief and passion for relationship with God. He was a cook and a dishwasher at his monastery in France. He wrote a book called The Practice of the Presence of God. In this book he talks about how God is present in the ordinary and the mundane things. He believed these basic everyday tasks, like washing dishes, was a way to connect with God. I first heard about his idea when I was like 18 or 19 years old. I had always wondered how it was possible for us to pray without ceasing like what Paul writes to the church in 1 Thessalonians. Prayer doesn’t have to be confined to our room at night on our knees with our hands nicely folded. Prayer can be a way of life. A way of inviting God into every moment.

As we talked about on the first Sunday of this year in January, both as a church and as individuals, we should be sailboats, not row boats. As sailboat captains, we still have a job to do, our job is to get the sails set up in a place to catch the wind. Let’s get our sails ready and go where the Holy Spirit takes us. We can only do that if we are living attentively, aware of and watching for the presence of God in our midst, when those moments of goodness, justice, peace, and love burst through the noise around us. Let’s walk open handedly into our world this week and, like Paul and Barnabas, report back all that God does.

As we go to the Table this morning, we remember Jesus. We remember the moments from Jesus’ life that we read about in Scripture, and we remember that Jesus is here with us in this room right now. We remember all the ways that God has worked in our lives, in big ways and small ways. In short moments of time and in the long nitty gritty of heart transformation. Let’s remember all that God has done in us, through us, and among us as we go to the Table today.

Let’s pray:

God thank you for being here with us today. Thank you for listening to us, and thank you for working in ways that we both see and don’t see. Help us to draw near to you and be more and more aware of how you’re leading us and working in and around us. Thank you for Jesus, through whom we have access to this relationship with you in the Spirit. Help us to be more like Him. In Jesus Name we pray, Amen.

This sermon was delivered on March 2nd, 2025 at the New Garden Campus of Woodmont Hills Church. You can watch it here.