[0:00] The following sermon is from Grace and Peace Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Grace and Peace is a new church that exists for the glory of God and the good of the northeast suburbs of Hamilton Place, Collegedale, and Ottawa.
[0:16] You can find help more by visiting gracepeacechurch.org. All right.
[0:30] We're going to continue on in our looking at Acts together. We started that passage earlier with Ansley reading, but we're going to continue on in it.
[0:43] So looking from Acts chapter 20, I'm going to read on starting at verse 17. Now from Miletus he sent to Ephesus, that's Paul sent to Ephesus, and called the elders of the church to come to him.
[1:00] Remember, he had been in Ephesus for three years with them. He was close to them. And so Paul has been traveling around, visiting his churches, and he's headed towards Jerusalem now.
[1:11] So he didn't want to stop in because he knew he'd have so many people to see, so much to do. And so he just is making a brief stop to talk to the elders there. Verse 18.
[1:21] And when the elders came to him, he said to them, You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews, how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks the repentance towards God and of faith in our Lord Jesus.
[1:57] And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me.
[2:10] But I do not count my life of any value, nor as precious to me, if only I may finish my course in the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.
[2:25] And now, behold, I know that none of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming this kingdom will see my face again. Therefore, I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all of you, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.
[2:42] Pay attention to yourselves and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which He obtained with His own blood.
[2:53] And know that after my departure, fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. And from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw the disciples after them.
[3:04] Therefore, be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease day or night to admonish everyone with tears. And now I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among those who are sanctified.
[3:25] I coveted no one's silver or gold or apparel. All you yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities, to those and to those who were with me. In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way, we must help the weak.
[3:39] And remember the words of Jesus Christ, or of the Lord Jesus, how He Himself said, it's more blessed to give than to receive. When He said these things, He knelt down. He prayed with them all.
[3:51] There was much weeping on the part of all. They embraced Paul and kissed him, being sorrowful most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they would not see his face again. And they accompanied him to the ship.
[4:05] Amen. Friends, remember this is God's word, and He gives it to you because He loves you and He wants you to know Him. Do you know what I mean when I use the phrase, the cruciform life?
[4:20] Is that a familiar phrase to you, I wonder? The cruciform life. It's a life that is shaped into the shape of the cross. The life that we have with Jesus as an example to us.
[4:33] Now, we use all kinds of language to talk this way. The old mystics used to talk about the imitation of Christ. If you were a cheesy 90s evangelical, you might have worn a WWJD bracelet.
[4:46] You know, what would Jesus do? It's the same idea. But I like the word cruciform because, you know, it just sounds cooler. And it's a life that is lived in the form of Christ. If you've been to one of the old, big old cathedrals, typically in Europe, but some of them here in the States, they're often built in the shape of the cross.
[5:05] You've noticed that, right? You've got this long nave or aisle that goes all the way up the center, and then there are the transepts off the side. It is literally built into the shape of the cross in order to teach you.
[5:19] The architecture is teaching you a spiritual lesson. That as a worshiper of Christ, your life is supposed to take on the look of the cross. You know, we talk about this in, we use this kind of language in our confessions of faith.
[5:37] The Westminster Shorter Catechism says, sanctification, that's the process by which we are made holy, is the work of God's free grace, where we are renewed in the whole person after the image of Christ.
[5:52] We are to become like Christ, to look like Christ. We're to become little Jesus mini-me's, you know, if you like the Austin Powers thing. Little Jesus mini-me's, that's what we are supposed to look like.
[6:05] In fact, the first Christians were often called little Christs. Little Christians. Our lives are to be cruciform. So, when we have been watching the story of Paul, all the way from his rebellion against the Christians, all the way through, what we are beginning to see in Paul is that his life is becoming more and more reflective of Jesus, of the reality of Jesus.
[6:33] It's really clear in the passage that we're looking at today that Paul has developed a cruciform life. And so, I want you to see, I want to look at Paul's life, not because I want you to see Paul as the hero, as though you're supposed to follow Paul, I want you to see Paul's cruciform life so that you see clearly Jesus' cruciform life, so that you see who Jesus is.
[7:00] You know, that the cross, the life of the cross, is the way for Christians. This is the way, you know, in a Mandalorian sense. This is the way, the way of the cross.
[7:12] And, you know, here's the thing. The way of the cross, what we're seeing from Paul, is that it is not easy. Paul's life is not shown as a super easy, you know, really cool life that everybody wants to do.
[7:26] It's actually shown as something hard and sacrificial. The Christian life is hard and sacrificial, but it is something that is deeply satisfying. So that's what I want to look at. I want to look at the cruciform life that we see through Paul, we see Jesus, and the way that that shows us that it is deeply satisfying.
[7:45] So we'll look at it in three aspects. Paul's life given to others, Paul's life of sacrifice given to suffering, and Paul's life given to love. So, Paul's life given to others.
[7:57] So the first section that Ansley read earlier was filled with this kind of travel story. There's a lot of great stuff there. You should go and read it for yourself and study it another time. But I just want to point out one particular aspect of it, and that was the people.
[8:12] Did you catch all the names that Ansley deftly just breezed right over, whether she said them right or not? She breezed right through, which was great. And did you see all the different people that were traveling with Paul?
[8:27] Sopater from Berea. That was a town in Macedonia at the north part of where Greece is. There was Aristarchus and Segundus.
[8:37] They came from Thessalonica, which is right there at the top of the Aegean Sea, right as Greece comes over towards Asia Minor, not far from where Constantinople would be.
[8:49] There was Gaius from Derbe, a small town in the very deepest part of Asia Minor in Turkey, one of the first places where Paul had planted a church.
[9:00] There was Timothy. He's from Lystra, another small town deep in Asia Minor. Tychius and Trophimus, who probably came from the church in Ephesus, where Paul had been for three years.
[9:12] Of course, Luke was there. He doesn't mention it, but probably Titus was with them. There was a group of nine to twelve people who were traveling with Paul from all over the place.
[9:24] These men were the fruit of Paul's diverse church planting ministry. They came from all over this area. They came from small towns and from thriving port cities.
[9:38] They came from bustling, cosmopolitan metropolises where they were educated, perhaps wealthy, and they came from little backwater towns. See, all of them had been converted to Jesus through the ministry of Paul as he was planting these churches.
[9:58] It kind of reminds you of Jesus and his disciples, right? This kind of ragtag group of guys who are living life with their teacher, going around, traveling with him, learning, being taught, being sent back to begin taking on responsibility for their own ministries.
[10:14] And that is intentional on Luke's part. But it not only reminds you of Jesus, it reminds you of God himself. You know, I said it's Trinity Sunday.
[10:26] Have you ever asked the question why it is that God is a Trinity, that he is three in one, three persons, one united God? Why in the world is it that way?
[10:38] It's actually surprisingly simple answer. It's the fact that God in his very nature is loving. The very foundational aspect of who God is is that he delights to set his affection on another.
[10:56] From eternity past, God in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has been showing perfect love and affection to the other members of the Trinity.
[11:06] And then, when they decided to create this world and create humanity, they did so for the express purpose of shedding abroad their love, of showering their love and affection upon their creatures.
[11:24] And then they brought us into that love through Christ. Amy Bird is a writer, and she's joked that God is fundamentally extroverted. I love that.
[11:35] That God is delighted by people. There's a book, Michael Reeves has wrote this book, Delighting in the Trinity. I put a link to it on the website. If you can click on that little QR code, there's a number of little links that I've put on there this week.
[11:51] You can always find our links on there. But Michael Reeves writes this. He says, God does not begrudge having someone beside him. He enjoys it.
[12:03] He has always enjoyed showering his love on his son, and in creating, he rejoices to shower it on children he loves through his son.
[12:13] See, Paul is just following the pattern that Jesus set, the pattern that Jesus was from eternity living in. See, living the Christian life is one that is lived by giving ourselves to one another.
[12:27] You know, and that can be really hard sometimes. Some of you are, you know, are super. You've been hurt by other people that you've given your life to. You've been wounded, and you're slightly cynical that you can actually trust one another.
[12:41] I've heard people joke that the church would be great if it wasn't for all the people. Right? Sometimes we feel like that. But the vision that God gives us through Acts right here that Paul had begun to pick up on is that in giving yourself to other people, you begin to reflect who God is in His very nature.
[13:04] You reflect Him as you give yourself to Him. Some of you really need to consider that you need to give yourself to this church.
[13:17] You've been kind of hanging around, but you haven't really allowed yourself to be known. You haven't been a part of a group of people consistently, missional community groups or driveway dinners.
[13:31] Maybe some of you need to open your home to people so that you can show what your life really is and allow other people to love you there. It can be really scary.
[13:42] It can be really vulnerable to do that. Maybe it's just irritating. Some of you just don't like people that much, and that's okay. You don't have to be as extroverted as God might be.
[13:53] Introverts are welcome at church too. It's vulnerable. It reminds me of that great quote from C.S. Lewis. He says, To love at all means to be vulnerable.
[14:04] Love anything, and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. But if you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal.
[14:17] Wrap your heart up carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or the coffin of your own selfish safety.
[14:33] But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
[14:51] Because to love is fundamentally to be vulnerable. That's what Paul's doing. He's giving himself to others.
[15:02] That's part of the cruciform life, to give yourself to other people. That's the first thing. The second thing is, Paul is giving his life to suffering. To suffering and difficulty.
[15:13] So, we'll skip the story of Eutychus. I talked a little bit about that a moment ago. I just want to look at Paul's gathering with the elders from Ephesus. And this really kind of tender moment.
[15:25] You know, this is the only speech of Paul in the entire book of Acts. In fact, the entire book of any of the Christian leaders that are given to Christians only.
[15:37] Every other sermon is Paul or Peter talking to believers and non-believers. Here's Paul talking to the insiders. Here's Paul talking to just Christians.
[15:48] The elders that he's labored with. Men that have been converted and been raised up and are now leading in the church. And it breaks down into kind of two sections.
[16:00] And so, the first theme is that Paul was willing to suffer on behalf of the church in Ephesus. He starts in verse 18. I love this. He says, You know how I lived. I love that.
[16:11] Paul is openly living his life in front of these people. He's sharing his life. He's giving his life to other people. And they can see exactly how he lives. He's not hiding from them. He's not demanding stuff from them that would just be for him.
[16:27] Everything he has is living right before these folks. And part of what that means is that it was obvious that he was willing to suffer. Just, I mean, look through this.
[16:38] Let's see. Verse 19. Serving the Lord with all humility, with tears, trials that happened with me through the plots of the Jews, his enemies.
[16:50] I didn't shrink back from declaring to you anything that was profitable. I taught you in public and from house to house. I testified to both Jews and Greeks of repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus.
[17:01] And now, now I'm going to Jerusalem constrained by the Spirit. I don't know what's going to happen to me except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me.
[17:14] But I don't account my life as any value, only that I may finish the course. See, Paul is saying, I'm willingly walking into difficulty and suffering.
[17:28] There's, in Luke, as the author of Acts, and in Luke's gospel, there is one verse that kind of is the hinge of the whole gospel. And Jesus is there and he's been ministering, he's been healing people, and then Luke says, and then Jesus turned his face towards Jerusalem.
[17:46] And from that moment in Luke's gospel, everything in Jesus' life is looking towards Jerusalem and the cross. He's focused on it.
[17:58] John Stott thinks that this is the passage where the same thing is happening for Paul. John Stott says, if you look at it, there's a ton of parallels between Paul and Jesus here.
[18:11] That Paul is traveling with his disciples, like Jesus. He's opposed by hostile Jews who plot for his life, like Jesus. Paul is predicting his sufferings, just like Jesus.
[18:24] Paul is declaring his readiness to die if necessary, just like Jesus. Paul was determined to finish his work in life, just like Jesus. Paul had declared that he was absolutely committed to the will of God, just like Jesus said he was.
[18:44] See, Paul sees his life as cruciform, that he is following the way of Jesus, the pattern of Jesus. Being a Christian is really costly for Paul.
[18:56] Let me just stop for a minute and talk to non-Christians, to people who would not call themselves Christians. First of all, I'm so glad you're here or you're watching online.
[19:07] I know some of you who are doing that, and I'm really thankful for that. But I want you to see that there is a costliness to being a Christian. You know, as you look around to kind of the Christian, evangelical world in our country right now, what you may see is a lot of Christians who don't think that Christianity is all that costly.
[19:32] In fact, just the opposite. They actually see their Christian faith as their kind of, their membership card in order to be right, in order to be in power, in order to be insulated from the difficulties of life.
[19:47] That's why they're a Christian, is to avoid all of that stuff. But that isn't true, and that is not what being a Christian is about. Being a Christian is being willing to live a life where you may not win, where you may not, because of your faith, may not get ahead, where you probably will not be comfortable in most situations.
[20:12] But, we receive something more satisfying, because we get to be a part of the glory of God revealed.
[20:23] We get to be made into children, children of the one true King who will come and who will make this world right and will make it comfortable one day, but until that day, we get to be His children and participate in the glory that He has given to us.
[20:41] But it's costly in the short run. You see, when you look at Jesus, you look and see that that's exactly how Jesus thought. Jesus was willing to take on, He consistently looked at the difficulties and went towards the difficult things.
[20:59] He refused the glory that He could have just kept for Himself that was His right. He took on flesh. How humiliating for the Creator to take on flesh.
[21:11] To be a baby without bladder control. You know? To be a teenager. Nobody wants to go back to eighth grade. Not a one of us.
[21:23] You know, how humiliating for Him. He turned away from the praise and the accolades of the crowds. He could have gotten exactly what He might have wanted and He consistently said no and He submitted to the Father's will that sent Him to a cross.
[21:42] You see, it was in Jesus' submitting and suffering on the cross that He achieved His true glory. He won by losing. Jesus' glory came through His pain.
[21:57] Jesus' permanent fulfillment came through His losing. That is the cruciform life that Paul is taking on for himself and that we are to take on for ourselves.
[22:11] I don't know if any of you saw on Facebook or anywhere, you may have seen the news story recently about our own Dave Thompson. Dave, who comes to Grace and Peace.
[22:22] He's been serving with this ministry to veterans called Reboot for a number of years. And every Thursday he goes to Reboot. It's over in Hickson and they feed and teach and listen to and encourage and love these veterans who have been absolutely broken by their service.
[22:44] What's really cool, and I didn't know this until I saw it on the news story, which I put that link on our website, is that it was started by a lieutenant colonel. So as a retired lieutenant colonel, you know, I don't know much about the military world, but I know that the lieutenant colonels are pretty impressive, accomplished people.
[23:03] And I know that this man could have had a very comfortable retirement life. But he decided, after having a friend of his commit suicide, he decided that he needed to sacrifice that comfort to enter into the world of veterans because they were suffering.
[23:26] Because for them, life was overwhelming and so he traded in some of the comfort and the accolade to dig in for this reboot program and to serve those, you know, for lack of a better word, the grunts who were on the front lines.
[23:40] The grunts who were the products of the decisions of people who sit in leather chairs in Washington and other places who did the dirty work on the ground and who suffered the consequences of that.
[23:56] And this man left his comfortable place and entered into that suffering. You know, he doesn't get anything from it except for the glory that will come one day when the great king of this world makes every act of service right.
[24:15] That's the cruciform life. That's what it looks like. So, first thing is the life given to other people. The second one is the life given to suffering and sacrifice.
[24:28] The third one is the life given just to love. I mean, the most striking thing about this speech that Paul gives to these guys is just the fact that you can see the emotion. They care about one another.
[24:40] You know, the thing that really got to them was Paul saying, hey, look, I'm never going to see y'all again. You know, we live in a world where we have like, you know, FaceTime, you know, Kyron moved here across the country, but he can still FaceTime family.
[24:55] He and Crystal can still FaceTime their family. They can see grandkids and grandparents and all that. You know, in the ancient world, you left and you left. You know, the idea of getting even a letter across that distance was, you know, inconceivable.
[25:11] And so, there's so much emotion to that. He's emphasizing the deep love that he had for them. And so, it's setting up an expectation of how it is that we are to love one another in the church.
[25:24] In particular, what we should look for in the way that that love is manifested amongst church leaders. You know, at Grace and Peace, we will one day have formal leaders and when we get close to that, I'm sure I'll come back to this passage and spend some time preaching on all of this passage.
[25:42] So, I won't do that today. But, I want you to just say that at this point in our church's life, you should be looking for leaders who look like this, who have this kind of cruciform life, who are able to love and to show forth their love to people.
[25:59] If you think that being an elder is about power and sitting and making decisions for other people and delegating, then you don't know what leadership really looks like in the church.
[26:11] Because it looks like this. It looks like sacrifice. It looks like giving yourself to other people. It looks like loving and being loved by others. Paul had given his life for the Ephesians and loved them.
[26:27] He wanted them to imitate his love on behalf of their people, of the people at the church in Ephesus. You know, he told them as you go through here, look, teach them, protect them, shepherd them, love them, help them, help them, don't try to get anything from them, give everything to them.
[26:51] That's what cruciform looks like. For Paul to give himself to others meant that he was willing to suffer for them, to love them deeply.
[27:03] It wasn't a way of getting anything for himself. You know, one of the things that I find really fascinating is that Paul ended that conversation by quoting Jesus.
[27:13] I don't know if you've got your Bibles, but there's that quote there. It's in red in my Bible because I've got the red letter edition. And he quotes Jesus, it's better to give than to receive.
[27:27] But that quote is not in the New Testament anywhere else. That's not like because Paul, you know, was reading the New Testament somewhere. Nowhere else is that quote. I mean, it sounds like Jesus.
[27:38] We have no reason to doubt that that's not an authentic thing that Jesus said. But it does make you wonder, the only time that Paul met Jesus was on the road to Damascus. Paul wasn't there for Jesus' ministry.
[27:52] Where did Paul pick this up? See, what's fascinating to me about this is to get in Paul's imagination that Paul, because of his love for Jesus, because of his desire to imitate Jesus so much, he had spent tons of time listening to the stories of Jesus.
[28:10] He'd been listening to the other disciples. He'd been listening to, you know, Luke was on this trip. Maybe Luke had been writing his gospel and had been sharing, you know, things as he was writing it along.
[28:23] Maybe Paul had been, when he was in Jerusalem, maybe he sat down with Mary Magdalene. Maybe he sat down with the other women who were a part of Jesus' ministry.
[28:34] He sat down with the people who knew Jesus, and he learned from them, and he internalized who Jesus was, and it became part of the way that he was ministering.
[28:46] Here's why that's important. You cannot develop a cruciform-shaped life, a cruciform life, unless you sit at the feet of Jesus, sit with his word, and begin to know and to love and to see who Jesus really is.
[29:04] Only when your imagination and your eyes are set upon Jesus will you be able to see and to live this cruciform life.
[29:19] You know, that's the real calling for us. The danger for us is you hear me talk about this and you say, okay, I've got to get on being more sacrificial, giving myself to others, loving others deeply.
[29:32] Yes, you do. But the way that you do that is by putting your attention upon Christ. Dallas Willard has this great quote where he says that the gospel is less about how to get into the kingdom of heaven after you die and more about how to live in the kingdom of heaven before you die.
[29:56] See, when you think about these kind of things, so many of our minds go directly to what I was talking about earlier. We go directly to, okay, how do I do this better? How do I do this better so that I can grab a hold of Jesus?
[30:12] What you've got to begin to do is see that Jesus has grabbed a hold of you. He has put you now into the kingdom of his beloved son. He's rescued you from darkness and he's now calling you to live as his child in his new kingdom.
[30:29] You don't have to wait until that one great day to enjoy the blessings of that kingdom, but the blessings of that kingdom are seen in humility as we humble ourselves, giving ourselves, sacrificing ourselves, loving ourselves.
[30:49] As we move down, we find our way up. I'm going to stop there.
[31:00] I've been going a long time. When you're an early church plant, you get a lot of me. And I want to make sure you hear those words of grace that God has already started this.
[31:13] The way that you move forward as a Christian is by taking on Christ, by seeing what he has done, and by leaning more deeply into it.
[31:26] As you see his cruciform life, you will be enabled to live that life yourself. Okay. I'm going to stop there and pray for us.
[31:37] Father, it is humbling to think that we follow in the way of Christ. We pray that you would show us Christ more so that we might be better equipped to do that well.
[31:54] Would you move in our hearts even this morning as we see him, even as we turn to communion, as we taste and see your grace.
[32:06] For we pray in Christ's name. Amen. for you.
[32:29] Thank you for listening.