Morning everyone congratulations to the newlyweds as well Gabriel
and Hannah. That's really cool.
Can you believe that some people say, oh, if I become a
Christian, does that mean I have to go to church and and yet the
the truth is we get to go to church.
Isn't that so brilliant? I just, I'm, I'm loving our
church today for some reason. I always love it, but I just
anyway, so this is the part of the service where we're going to
read the Bible and then we're going to try to understand its
meaning for our lives today. And so if you've got a Bible
with you in the original book version, then you get a special
Gold Star about you, You know, if you've got it on your device
or whatever, that's good too. We're going to be reading in a
moment from the book of Acts, chapter 13.
And just so you know, there's, there's like a, there's a
contents page at the beginning of every Bible.
I, I and I, in all kind of seriousness, you know, for some
of you, you're new to church, you're new to the Bible, you're
new to faith and you're like, I've no idea how to find
anything. The contents page is there's
always one and there's no shame at all in just having a look.
And also just to say the book of Acts is about that far, about an
inch from the front and it's about, I'm going to say 9
millimetres from the back. So metric and imperial, there be
more or less the same in all Bibles.
Let me just say before we open up the Scriptures together, just
you may be are aware you maybe not that as well as having
responsibilities in leadership in this church, Karen and I also
carry some other leadership responsibilities in our family
of churches. So, so this church is part of a
movement called the Vineyard Movement.
That's about 2 1/2 thousand Vineyard churches in 100
different countries around the world.
And in this country, there are about the Vineyard churches in
about 150 locations. And we have some
responsibilities there. And one of the responsibilities
that I have is that I am, I lead A-Team called the Multiply team,
which is a team right at the heart of the Vineyard whose
responsibility is to provoke and initiate and train and resource
church planters, church planting.
So new churches in new different places.
The truth is that you know, like if you're, if you were going to
go away to university somewhere in the UK or Ireland or you're
going to get a new job somewhere or maybe you meet someone online
and there's a love interest for that's the reason why you want
to move to a new place. There are a whole bunch of
Vineyard churches around the UK and Ireland, but there are also
lots of towns and cities all over the place where there are
not churches like a vineyard. And so we, we want to see new
churches planted all over the place and as one of the ways to
kind of flush out people who maybe, you know, that's part of
their future at some point down the line.
Me and Taran are hosting a conference.
It's called the Multiply Summit. And it's happening in two weeks
time. And it's really for anyone, it's
not really, it's not specifically about church
planting. It's a conference for anyone
who's trying to hear God about the future, right?
So if you're there will be a whole bunch of people online or
in Hemel or Hatfield, hate, hate to you guys or, or, or in the
room, you're like, I think, I think I just need to hear God
about my next step or about where I'm headed in my life.
Then that's what this conference is for.
It's called the multiply summit two weeks time.
Now the really cool thing is that you, you already know the
venue because it's here, right? So so you can come.
It's an and we just wanted to throw open the invitation.
You are welcome to come to the multiply summit.
It's two weeks time. It's a Friday night, Friday the
19th, I think Saturday the 20th. So it's Friday night, all day,
Saturday up until about 5:00. You will need to buy a ticket,
although the tickets are very reasonable.
And so to buy a ticket, you have to go to the Vineyard Churches
website, not the Versa website, the Vineyard Churches website.
And you need to click on events and you'll find it.
You'll find it there. We would love you to come.
You know, the worships going to be epic.
Eduardo and the team are going to do that.
And so we already know that's going to be awesome.
And then our friends Jeff and Sherry Surat, who are remarkable
leaders from from Denver and Colorado.
They've been on the staff of Saddleback with Rick Warren and
they've been the kind of world's experts on church planting and
different things like that. And so we'd love you to come.
You're super welcome. 19th and 20th, come and speak to me
afterwards. If you're in this room, I'd love
to tell you more about it. OK, Can we just pray for a
moment? Lord, we understand that for
2000 years the followers of Jesus have been gathering around
this book and trying to hear your voice.
And we're just kind of stepping into the flow of that.
And we pray that by your word and Your Spirit, we would hear
your voice and that you would guide our lives.
Amen. Amen.
So we have been in this series working our way through the book
of Acts and called Impact. And we've been stopping every
time the Holy Spirit is mentioned.
And we've been doing that for months and months and, and, and
we're kind of coming into land with that in the next, I don't
know, a few weeks or so, but we're in Acts chapter 13.
And here's another mention of the Holy Spirit.
So Acts chapter 13 reading from verse one says this.
Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and
teachers, Barnabas, Simeon, who they called Niger, Lucius of
Cyrene, Manaean who had been brought up with Herod the
Tetrarch and saw while they were worshipping the Lord and
fasting, the Holy Spirit said, there he is the Holy Spirit, The
Holy Spirit said, set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the
work to which I've called them. So after they had fasted and
prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off.
The two of them sent on their way by the Holy Spirit went down
to Seleucia and sailed from there to Cyprus.
And that's going to be our text for this morning.
I don't know what you do for a living.
I know what some of you do for a living, but not all of you.
I imagine there are some people in the room who are medical
doctors and your passion is medicine.
And I imagine that on a Friday night or Saturday night, there's
nothing you could imagine doing more just really enjoying
yourself than watching like, ER or, or, or the Pit.
Hands up, if you've watched the Pit.
Yeah, it's really cool. I love that thing.
But anyway, so I imagine you're sitting there and you're
watching it and you're watching them like get some kind of it
like a rib spreader and spreading open the ribs and then
like, you know, squeezing someone's heart like that.
And I imagine you're just like, now that is medicine.
In fact, you're probably not. You're probably like, they never
do that in real life because as you know, your heart is just
beating a little bit faster when you do somebody do medicine
really well. Or perhaps you're really into
cars. Maybe you're a mechanic and you,
you know, you're watching Top Gear or you're watching one of
those Youtubers, Matt Armstrong or something like that, someone
like that. And you're like, hey, there's
the Bentley Continental GT super Sports or the, you know,
whatever it is and you're like, now that's a car or whatever it
is. Well, the truth is that I'm like
a professional Christian, right? I'm a pastor.
And so when I read stuff like this about a brilliant church in
the Bible, I'm like, now that's a church, you know, my heart's
beating faster. And to be honest, that's not
exclusively reserved for pastors, right?
You know, if you know and love Jesus and you love his church,
and then you read something in the Bible and you just think
that is so brilliant, you know, that's open to you as well.
You can take that. But what I want to do this
morning is, is to point out two ways in which this church that
we've just read about is brilliant.
Like, like just a couple of things.
And then we're going to speak a little bit about God's guidance.
But, but the first reason that I love this church in the book of
Acts in Antioch is that it's a stunningly diverse church.
So Saul and Barnabas, they've they've visited their brothers
and sisters in Jerusalem. They've just come back.
The leadership community. It's like the the leadership
group, the leadership team of the church in Antioch.
They gather together and they want to hear what it is that
Saul and Barnabas have got to say.
But what's amazing about this leadership community is it's is
it's, is I've forgotten how to speak.
It's extraordinary diversity there in verse one.
First of all, there's Barnabas. Now we know from Acts chapter 4
verse 36 that Barnabas is a Levite from Cyprus.
So he's a European Jew. Secondly, there's someone called
Simeon who's also got the name Niger and that the word Niger is
a Latin word, it means black. So he's he's most likely, that's
most likely referring to his colour, right?
He's a black African. Then there's Lucius of Sireni.
Sireni is in modern day Libya and so he's a kind of North
African Libyan. And then there's Manaean.
Manaean. It says about Manaean that he
was brought up with Herod the Tetrarch.
Now what's quite funny, I was, I was Googling this this morning
because I wanted to get my facts right.
And that's what you do, right? You look at Google and it's said
that there are actually six different Herod's in the Bible.
And so I won't list them all, but there is 6 people called
Herod. But Herod the tetrarch is, is
Herod Antipas. And he was the one who was
responsible for the beheading of John the Baptist.
And so this guy Manaean, he's grown up in royal palaces.
In other words, he's he's grown up with opulence and with with
opportunity and with influence. He's he's someone who's known
extraordinary wealth. Maybe he's the foster brother or
the best friend or something like that of Herod the Tetrarch.
And so there are people even just in this small group in the
church in Antioch. There are people from southern
Europe, from northern and other places in Africa potentially,
and then also from western Asia. And there are people who've
grown up with extraordinary wealth and people who really
haven't. And can you see this?
This is an extraordinarily diverse group of people.
And we're only like, I mean, what's the maths?
11 chapters from the birth of the church.
And the the church starts off just with Jews in Jerusalem.
And then suddenly it's like this enormously diverse group of
people, black people, brown people, white people, people
have known extraordinary influence and opportunity and
wealth and people who really haven't.
It's a stunningly diverse church.
And the truth is that the church always flourishes best when
she's diverse. I was a while ago changing the
brake pads on my wife's car. She's got a Mini Clubman, right?
So, and I was, I was like, no, no, I don't need to read any
instructions or anything like that.
I'll just, I'll just, I'll just know what to do.
And then I really quickly got myself into hot water.
And so I found this website for mini owners, right?
It's like a forum. And so I go on to the Mini
owners forum. And then I'm like, OK, well,
it's actually a Mini club man F50 four.
So then I go on to that and I find the Mini Mini Clubman F54
owners. And then it's like a section for
people who own Mini Clubman F50 fours that have been
manufactured between 2014 and 2017.
And then I go on to that section there.
And then there's a section for people who having problems with
their front brake pads for their Mini F54 manufactured exactly
between 2014 and 2017. And I'm like, here's my people,
right? There's my tribe and I'm
chatting away to them and they're helping me figure this
thing out. And my point is that we all
imagined, didn't we? We were, we, we were sold a
vision of how, how the future was going to be, you know, that,
that we are the world, we are rich people.
You know, it's like we're, we're, we're going to be mixing
with, like our life is going to be full of the energy and the
vitality and the colour of just knowing people from all over the
world. And EasyJet is bringing us
closer together and the Internet and mobile phones and we're just
going to be connecting with all kinds of different people.
And yet the truth is technology is doing the exact opposite to
us, right? I don't need to hang out with
anyone who owns anything else. And the other than a mini club
man manufactured between 2014 and 2017, you've got problems
with their brake pads. The algorithms, right?
The social media algorithms are reinforcing our preferences and
making it so that you never have to mix with anyone who doesn't
believe the same things you believe and who doesn't who
doesn't see the world the way that you see the world.
Everything is is mitigating against us knowing anyone who
who is like different from us. And yet can you see the Bible is
casting a vision for us about an entirely different way to live.
So we would be the kind of community that is like we're
mixing all the time with people who haven't.
We have nothing in common with other than the cross of Jesus
Christ. That the Spirit of God would
unify people of incredible difference in diversity in a way
that is totally counter cultural.
You know, I'll never forget years and this isn't in my
notes, but years and years ago we had a barbecue in our church
in Scotland. And I've been chatting to this
guy before the the church service on the Sunday morning
and I knew for a fact that he was sleeping in a car park.
And to be honest, he smelled like he was sleeping in a car
park. But there he was at this church
barbecue and there was a three legged race and he was strapped
to a guy who was responsible for the finances of all of the
decommissioning of the oil rigs in the North Sea.
Where else in the world does that happen but in the local
church? And maybe it just takes Taryn
and I to come from another country to come here and be part
of this church, to say to some of you who have just been here
for so long that you can't see it anymore, that what God is
doing in this church is incredible.
Let's just have a look around this morning and just look at
the difference in the diversity and people from all kind.
And I'm not just talking about ethnic heritage, although that
is obviously incredibly important.
I'm talking about people with PhDs and people who just didn't
really get on at school, right? People who are hugely wealthy
and other people who are really not.
People who are creatives and artists, artists and all of
that. And other people who are really
good at maths and science. People who are extroverts and
people who are introverts. People who are loud and people
who are quiet. And the Lord is knitting us
together into this incredible thing and he's been doing it
since the beginning of this church.
But you can kind of see it accelerating over time, and I
couldn't be more excited. And so the first thing to notice
about this church in Antioch is one of the reasons why it's so
brilliant is because it's stunningly diverse.
And what I want to say to you is if you're from Brazil, then you
don't, OK, You don't need to stop being Brazilian when you
walk through the door, right? Just bring it.
Just bring it if you're Nigerian, if you're, if you're
Welsh, if you're from Yorkshire, like wherever you're from, bring
it. Just bring it in all of its
diversity and all of its richness.
We, you're welcome here. We want you here and we want you
to bring your whole self into this community.
There's a stunningly diverse church.
The second thing is it's a church that hears the voice of
the Holy Spirit and is led by the voice of the Holy Spirit.
We've often seen, you know, in our journey so far through the
book of Acts, the way that the Holy Spirit empowers people,
right? So, so you know, we started off
in Acts chapter 2 where the Holy Spirit is like tongues of fire
filling people. You're filled with fire when
you're filled with the Holy Spirit and, and how people
suddenly start speaking in languages that they haven't
learned. And they're, and they're,
they're speaking with enormous courage and boldness and they're
being empowered in all kinds of different ways.
But what struck that me in this passage wasn't so much how the
Spirit empowers the missionaries so much as the Holy Spirit
directs the mission. You know, I don't know whether
you noticed it, but actually that's what's happening.
We've been seeing it all the way through the book of Acts,
actually. And when you when you see it,
you can't Unsee it. It's the Holy Spirit who tells
Philip to go and stand by that chariot over there and then it's
the Holy Spirit who whisks Philip off afterwards.
It's the Holy Spirit who directs Peter to go to Cornelius house
in Acts chapter 10. It's the Spirit who stops Paul
from going into the province of Asia and then prevents him from
going to Bithynia. It's the Spirit who says in in
verse 2 in our passage set us set apart from me, Barnabas and
Saul for the work to which I've called them.
And then it's the Holy Spirit who sends them on their way.
So the point is the Holy Spirit is like masterminding this whole
thing. In fact, George Eldon Ladd, who
was a theologian kind of from the middle of of the 20th
century, who was incredibly influential right at the birth
of the Vineyard movement in in the second-half of the 20th
century. He said this, the whole
operation, he's talking about the mission of the church, the
whole operation is masterminded by the Spirit.
Without the Spirit, there would be no mission and no story for
Luke to write. And so my point is this, the
Holy Spirit has a master plan for the nations.
If you, if you, if you're a kind of the, the sort of person who
likes to picture things in your mind, maybe you could picture
one of those big war, big maps they have on the wall in, in war
films, you know, where they're like moving tanks from this
place to this place and moving soldiers from this place to this
place. Or maybe it's on a big table and
they're like pushing them along. Have you seen that?
And it's like the Holy Spirit has got a plan for everyone.
He's moving the Peter here and Philip there and, and Saul and
Barnabas there. He's like directing everyone as
to where they should be. And not only does he have a
master plan for all the other nations of the earth, and not
only does he have a plan for all the people who've gone before
us, he has a plan for us. He has a plan for Saint Albans
and for Hertfordshire, for Hemel and Hatfield and, and London and
all these kinds of places. He has a master plan and he's
moving people around. Taron and I, to be honest, we
have no idea why we're here. But somehow in the master plan,
it's like Chuck and Taron move from Scotland to there, and then
you move from there to there. And and, and so so the
responsibility we each have is Lord.
Where are you calling me to? It's inconceivable that you
haven't found yourself in your workplace by accident, right?
It's like it's a whole mindset that needs to change when we
start to think. The Holy Spirit has put me here
in my workplace, in my family, in my friendship group, at the
gym I go to or don't go to in my case.
There's a vision being cast for us today about the kind of
church that we could and should be, a church that is led by the
Spirit. You know it's not.
We need to not reject the idea of human leaders in the church,
right? This is a human leadership
community that we've just talked about, but actually we want the
Holy Spirit to be like the senior leader, right?
The rest of us, we're kind of under shepherds, under God's
shepherding. You know, I'm not an
unintelligent person. I've got A levels in mass
physics and chemistry, although I didn't do as well as my
parents might have hoped I would have done.
And and you know, my wife, Karen, she is an amazing leader
and she's like strategic and visionary and creative and ever
so kind. But what we don't want in this
church is to just live on and follow a whole bunch of good
ideas. What we actually want is God's
ideas, right? We we want to, we want to be led
by the Spirit of God. And so the vision being cast for
us today is that we would become a church a bit like Samuel in
the Old Testament. You know, young Samuel, he says,
speak, Lord, your servants are listening.
Or like Isaiah, you know, Old Testament prophet Isaiah, who in
Isaiah chapter 6, he just says, here I am, Lord, send me.
Or a church like the Israelites in the book of Exodus who like,
they're hungry and they're grumpy and they're, they're, you
know, emotionally fragile and they're walking around in the
wilderness until God says, here you go.
And he sends a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by
night. And he guides them from the
wilderness and into a land filled with promise.
And as a church is so important that we become like that the
week that we allow ourselves to be led by the pillar of fire and
the pillar of cloud. And so how would we do that?
How would we go about just posturing ourselves as a
community in such a way that God would lead us by his Spirit?
Well, let me just point out some completely obvious things for a
few minutes and then we're going to pray for each other.
The answer is found in verse 2 where it says this while they
were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said
set apart for me, Saul and Barnabas.
So this isn't just like, Oh well, I just, you know, whilst
I'm peeling the potatoes, I occasionally pray to the Lord.
You know, I mean that would be a good thing to do.
There's a whole has anyone read brother Andrew the practice of
the presence of God? He literally talks about peeling
the potatoes whilst whilst speaking to the Lord, right?
Don't don't let me stop you doing that.
But that isn't what they're doing here.
You know, this isn't just, well, as I'm driving in my car, I
sometimes cast my mind to the Lord and just he and I have a
little conversation. It's not really that either.
Although don't, don't let me stop you from doing that.
There's an intensity and a sincerity and an intentionality
about what they're doing here. They this is a community that is
posturing themselves in a deliberate way to hear the Lord
and I just want to land on three particular applications, three
decisions that we might make as a church family.
The first one relates to worship.
While they were worshipping the Lord, the Holy Spirit said the
influential Bible teacher John Piper says that that it's
impossible to overestimate the significance and importance of
this moment in the whole of human history.
Before this moment, there's been no mission trips beyond the
immediate locality that you know, they've not visited Spain
or Asia or or Greece. There's been no intentionality
when it comes to mission. There's been no missionary
journeys, no organized mission just outside of that little part
of the Eastern Mediterranean. And from this moment in Acts
chapter 13, suddenly the missionary movement is born and
people start travelling all over.
And this, this, this kind of almost inconspicuous little sect
of the Jewish religion that is just a few thousand people in a
very localized part of the world, suddenly within 2 1/2
centuries becomes the major dominant religion of the Roman
Empire. And now there there's barely a
country on earth that isn't filled with followers of Jesus,
2.4 billion of us across the globe.
And all of that can point to this moment when the Holy Spirit
said, now go and start to do this thing in an intentional
way. And how did all of that happen?
That all began in a time of sun worship.
I just find that so fascinating. And isn't it so important that
we start to raise our expectation about what God might
want to do in our worship? You know, so, so often I find
myself getting so caught up with, is it too loud?
Is it not loud enough? I, I, I'm not sure I agree with
the words of this song. I don't like this song.
I, oh, I like this song. It's like all about my
preferences, right? And I'm so caught up with my
preferences that I'm forgetting that God might want to speak to
me in a way that might change something about the world.
Maybe we need to start like coming into church and just
being like, OK, Lord, maybe this is the day when as we're singing
songs of love and adoration to you, Maybe you want to drop a
holy bomb in my life. And so we as a community, we
like, we are so blessed, aren't we?
So blessed by the guys who service week in week out in
worship with they do such an amazing job.
It makes it a lot easier, doesn't it, to hear the Lord
when the guitars in tune. And so we're, we're, we're very
grateful for that. But let's as a church, let's
just say Lord in the worship, if you spoke to them in the Bible
during the worship, we'll have it.
That's the first thing, worship. The second decision that we need
to make is about unfortunately, fasting.
Hallelujah. It's actually quite shocking,
isn't it? The the part that fasting plays
in this passage. I don't know whether you noticed
it actually comes up gloriously twice.
Verse 2, while they were worshipping the Lord and
fasting, the Holy Spirit said, and then after God spoken, it
says verse 3. So after they had fasted again
and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off.
I don't know about you. I'm not, I'm not delighted about
that. I'm the kind of person, you
know, if you have to fill in a form and you have to fill in
your hobbies, right? I'm the kind of person who would
have written on their CV, though I've written ACV for a while,
but I write, you know, what do you like to do?
Eating with friends, you know, or I might, I might put cooking
or baking. It's very hard to think of
something that I enjoy doing that isn't in some way food
related. During this is my confession
during COVID, the thing I missed most when we were in lockdown,
Nando's, right? So but friends, this is this is
actually a thing fasting in the purposes and promises of God is
is is a thing. In Matthew chapter 6 in the
Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is talking about hidden devotion,
things that we might do in in a kind of private way that honour
the Lord and posture ourselves in order to to be blessed.
And he says when you give right, when you give, not if you give
when you give, he says make sure you do it in a way that your
left hand doesn't know what your right hand is doing.
In other words, this is a kind of a private devotion when you
give. Second one, when you pray, not
if you pray when you pray, make sure that you don't do it in an
ostentatious way, but just do it in a way that has real integrity
to it. When you pray, when you give,
and then he says when you fast. This is Matthew 6 verse 16.
When you fast, don't look sombre as the hypocrites do, for they
disfigure their faces to show that others that they're
fasting. It may just because they can't
help it, because it's so miserable, but truly I tell you,
they've received their reward in full.
When you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face so that
it will not be obvious to others that you're fasting, but only to
your Father who's unseen and your Father who sees what's done
in secret will reward you. This is so this is like the hop,
skip and the jump of the Christian life.
When you give, when you pray, when you fast, This is this is
the three things that would be normal to followers of Jesus in
his expectation. Now, I just want to put this out
there. There's a narrative out there
that says when you fast, you're going to experience all kinds of
glorious, you know, encounters with the Lord, right?
Or, or when, when you fast, you're, you're, oh, you'll never
know his presence like when you fast or when you fast, you'll
just get this incredible mental clarity, right?
And, and if you've been, if you tried fasting once and you're
like, it didn't work for me. I just felt hungry.
Then I just want to say to you, it doesn't actually say anywhere
in the Bible that I can find that you would experience mental
clarity or that you would hear God's voice in a remarkable way,
or that you would like encounter the 7th heaven or something like
that. In fact, if you think about it,
Jesus, when he fast for 40 days, right?
Does he hear God's voice? Well, mainly he hears the
devil's voice, right? And then it says Jesus fasted
for 40 days and 40 nights and he was hungry is what it says.
So if when you're fasting, right, if when you're fasting
you are not feeling especially connected with the Lord, you're
mainly feeling connected to the side effects of not eating, then
I just want to endorse that from the Bible and say I think that's
what it is. I think it's actually the
opposite of what some people think it is.
Fasting is about surrender. It's about coming before the
Lord and saying if I don't even eat, then I become a terrible
person. It's about waving the white
flag. I surrender to you, Lord, I need
you. I need you for everything.
I'm powerless without you. And the truth is I actually I
can't think of a better time in our lifetimes to fast and right
now to to surrender before the Lord.
We're living an incredibly complicated and angry world.
We're living in chaos, and I'm not only talking about the
potholes, right? The world is the world's broken.
And yet in this moment, God is moving in the most remarkable
way. Wouldn't this be a really
important moment for us as a community to come before him and
just fast and say, I surrender to you, Lord.
And so let me just say this. If you've fasted before and that
in fact, let's just try this, Put up your hand.
If you fasted before and you're glad you did it.
OK, Loads of us. Yeah.
Brilliant. And and I should probably just
just for the sake of balance, put up your hand if you fasted
and you you'd not glad you did it.
OK, one or two anyway. Anyway.
But my point is, if, if fasting has been something that you've
tried before, then why not consider building a rhythm of
fasting? And maybe once a week, it's like
I'm going to skip. And this isn't intermittent
fasting, by the way, This isn't just like for the sake of my
health benefits, I'm going to not have breakfast or I'm going
to reduce my eating window. I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about for the purposes of surrendering before
the Lord. I'm going to now only do it if
your doctor approves of it, right?
If there's a medical reason why you shouldn't do it, then then
fast something else. But for the rest of us, let's,
let's make this a habit. And if you've never done it
before, do it once and see how you get on fasting really
quickly. So worship is a is something we
could do and take more seriously.
Fasting is something that we should implement.
And the third thing if we want to be guided by the Lord as a
community is obedience. The Holy Spirit said verse 2 set
set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the witch for the work
to which I called them. What was their response?
Their immediate response was OK verse 3.
So after they fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them
and sent them off. It's all very well listening to
the Spirit of God. I mean really listening.
It's another whole thing to then do it, to put it into practice,
whatever he's asking us to do. And the interesting thing is
they don't. There's so much that they don't
know, right? He hasn't revealed to them the
full journey. They don't.
They don't know what they're going to be doing when they go.
They don't know whether they'll be back in a week or a month or
a year or never. But they do know the first step.
And so that's what they do. And we've got to, as a church
community, we've got to posture ourselves in a way where we
really listen for the voice of God in all kinds of ways, not
just in a peeling the potatoes way, but in a no, I, I'm
posturing my life in a way that if God was speaking, I would
hear him. And then we've got to make sure
that we do whatever we're told. Why don't we stand?