Exodus 18:13-18

Acts 9:23-27

Acts 11:21-26

1 John 4:19-21

There are certain lies that we are told as children now. Now, some of those, you as adults, are telling your children right now. Here are a few of those. This one always boggles my mind. If you swallow that gum, they will be in your stomach for seven years. I think we just tell kids that because we don’t want ’em to swallow their gum. Of course, it’s not true. But we like to say it. And for some reason that specific seven years has been around for a really long time. We tell kids things like this. This medicine tastes like candy. Our youngest had been sick and she got to choose the flavor about two weeks ago, the flavor of her medicine, either cherry or bubblegum, and she chose bubblegum. And here’s what she can definitively tell you. It does not taste like bubble gum.

We tell kids, your artwork is beautiful. Now my kids are on the front row. So I’m gonna tell you, I’m not saying this is a lie to my kids that I tell them, but my parents told me this lie, when, when you look at most kids’ artwork objectively, it, it’s not that great. It’s a lot of scribbles. And so we say that the artwork is beautiful. Really, we should say, I love you because you are beautiful, or, or that effort because your effort is beautiful. But, but probably that one’s not entirely accurate. My grandmother used to say that the crust of the bread is good for you. It’s not any better than the rest of the bread. She just was too lazy to cut off that crust like my mom did. And so she’d say the nutrients are in that part. It’s just the more toasted part.

This is a lie that maybe we didn’t know it was a lie back in the day, but we always used to say, you must learn this math. It’s not like you’ll have a calculator in your pocket everywhere you go. And now, as an adult, I can tell you, I have a calculator on my smartphone everywhere I go. Kids, you still do need to know math, but you will have a calculator with you someday, <laugh>. But probably the most common lie that we not only heard as kids, but probably you said as a kid, was this one that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. That, that probably now as an adult, when you think back on your childhood, the most painful memories you have are not from being physically hurt, most likely as an adult. The most painful memories you have are from words that someone said that cut like a knife and oftentimes create baggage that we carry with us for years and years into the future, that we have insecurities as an adult, that the reason we have those insecurities is because of that one thing that that boy or that girl or that adult in our life said to us that one time.

See, what we recognize is that the words that are spoken to us and over us, they have value. They matter. They are important. And even as an adult, the words that people are speaking into your life have value. They matter. And so here’s a question for every one of us to ask. Who is it that is speaking into my life? We’ve been in the sermon series looking through the book of Acts, talking about the early church. And in the last four weeks we, we’ve talked about really four key things that we see inside the early church. That the early church had a goal that they were trying to be Jesus’s witnesses to the uttermost parts of the earth. That the early church was willing to pay the price, that there was a cost to following after Jesus. They were persecuted, but they paid that price anyway, that the early church loved others.

Well, we talked about that last week, how they demonstrated love with service. And today I wanna recognize that the early church participated in meaningful and intentional community. Now, the famous passage is Acts chapter two, sermon in verse 42 through 47, when it talks about how they devoted themselves to teaching and to prayer and to fellowship. We talked about that passage about six weeks ago, that it’s kind of this pinnacle passage of what the New Testament Church looks like. And I think sometimes we can falsely say, well, that’s where community started. But when we look through scripture, we recognize from the very beginning to the very end of the Bible, there is an emphasis and a value on important on community. It’s important that we see at the very beginning in the creation story that God creates all kinds of different animals. Then God creates Adam.

And it says that although there was all kinds of different animals, that none of them were right for companionship. So maybe you’ve got a dog that you really love your dog and it’s your best friend. But there’s something about that relationship that is not the same as relationship with other people, other humans, that God looks at Adam and says it’s not fit for a man to be alone. And so he creates Eve. Throughout the Old Testament, we see this emphasis on community. Why is community important? In Exodus chapter 18 we see a snippet of what happens when we try and do it by ourself. It says, the next day, Moses said to judge the people, and the people stood around Moses from morning till evening. Now pause for a second, get a little bit of context. So Moses is leading the nation of Israel.

They’ve just come out of Egypt. He parts the Red Seas, they come out, they’re roaming around in the desert, and he is the boss over everybody. And this is what he’s doing. He is sitting down and the people are bringing all the different challenges and frustrations and issues that he, that they have to him. And he’s functioning as a judge for him. It says, when Moses’ father-in-law saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, what is it that you are doing for the people? Why do you sit alone? And all the people stand around you for morning till evening? Now Now pause for a second. I just want you to imagine that your father-in-law shows up to your workplace and you’re in the middle of whatever you’re doing at work. And then your father-in-Law say, Hey, you’re doing it wrong. Hey, I, I see how you’re doing that.

That’s not the right way to do it. Maybe you’re doing something at your house, you’re changing a tire, you’re doing some, some type of a manly work. And then your father-in-law says, Hey, that’s wrong. I wouldn’t do that way if I were you. Probably there’s a natural emotion of Moses to say, Hey, father-in-law, zip it. I’m good here. I’m fine. Did you see the ocean spread apart in two and us What? I think I’m doing okay. I think I got things under control. There’s probably a part of him that wants to say that. But look what it says. It says, and Moses said to his father-in-law, because first he starts to give this explanation, this excuse because why am I doing all this? Because the people come to me to inquire of God. When they have a dispute, they come to me and I decide between one person and another, and I make them know the statutes of God and his laws. Moses’ Father-in-law said to him, what you are doing is not good.

I I’m gonna make a T-shirt when my kids get, get married someday. My, my two girls, when she get, when they both get married, my son-in-laws, I’m gonna have just a T-shirt when they get engaged, day one, I’m gonna give to ’em. And on the top front, it’s gonna say, what you are doing is not good. It’s just a warning sign of saying, Hey, get ready for it. I will, I will call you out. But it gets better. He goes on to say, you and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out for The thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone. I mean, if you are somebody who underlines, underline for the thing is too heavy for you, you are not able to do it alone. There’s some people in the room that you don’t need to hear anything else today other than this phrase right here for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone. And then a couple verses later, the Bible says, and Moses did everything his father-in-law told him to do. That’s gonna be the back of the T-shirt.

You see, Moses fell into the trap that we oftentimes also fall into this idea that I gotta put everybody on my back. I gotta carry the team, I gotta carry the load. And and maybe you are a personality that does that, that maybe you do that in your family or you do that in the workplace, or that you just do that in life. Well, I I don’t wanna burden other people around me with my challenges, so I just gotta figure this thing out by myself. And that’s what Moses thought. Moses thought that’s what leadership was. Hey, I’ve gotta be the guy. I was pointed as the guy and it was killing him. It was destroying him. Not only was it destroying him, it was also an ineffective way to lead the people around him. The burden was too heavy. He had to recognize that he needed help.

It’s interesting, interesting how often science backs up what scripture over and over and over says it’s true. So scripture has this value on community of not doing things in isolation by herself. Look what an article from Psychology Today says, they echo this sentiment about community. They write in fact, evidence has been growing, that when our need for social relationships is not met, we fall apart mentally and even physically. This is what’s happening with Moses in that passage. There are effects on the brain and on the body. Some effects work subtly through the exposure of multiple body systems to excess amounts of stress hormones. Yet the effects are distinct enough to be measured over time so that unmet social needs take a serious toll on health eroding or arteries creating high blood pressure, and even undermining learning and memory. That loneliness is a challenge that when we try and do things by ourselves we think that we’re keeping our pain or our burdens or our challenges from hindering other people.

But in fact, the opposite is true, that we are causing not just issues because we’re trying to do it by ourself. We’re causing health issues and stress issues and anxiety issues. It’s interesting when you look at studies that in the last few years, multiple medical professionals have claimed an epidemic of loneliness across our country. What what’s wild about that is that there’s never been a time where we were in one sense more connected than we are today. I try and explain to my kids sometimes that, that when news happens today, you find out about it on your phone like that if an emergency alert went off, we’d all get it at the exact same time and you’d look down at your phone if some big thing happens, you don’t have to wait 24 hours later for a newspaper or you don’t have to wait, you go back into the history of mankind.

Sometimes it’d be weeks or months before a news spread about some crucial event. But that’s not the case anymore that my kids, their grandparents, they live in a completely different state, but they talk to ’em over FaceTime. That’s something I didn’t have, you didn’t have as kids. So on the one side, we’re more connected potentially than we’ve ever been. And yet studies find that we’re more lonely that we’ve ever been. There’s an article in the Atlantic and using research, here’s what she writes. She says, we volunteer less. We entertain guests at our homes, less. We’re getting married less. We’re having fewer children, and we have fewer and fewer close friends with whom we’d share the intimate details of our lives. We are increasingly denying our social nature and pain of price for it. Over the same period of time that social isolation has increased, our levels of happiness have gone down while rates of suicide and depression have multiplied.

So we, we live in this time that think back to, to when you’re growing up that there was more personal intentional relationship and community. And that for some reason, as a society, as social media has made us more connected technologically than ever before, that the in-person connection has gone way, way, way, way down. So now there’s loneliness and social isolation that is paying a pig, big cost on our health. If you look in Acts chapter nine, we see the importance of having community in our life to set it up. This is right after Paul has had his conversion experience on the road to Damascus. We talked about a few weeks ago how his name is still Saul. Saul is just his Hebrew name, and Paul was his Greek name. So he was persecuting the Christians, and now he’s become a Christian.

This is sometime later because he’d been proclaiming the gospel. He’d gone away and studied. And this is what it says. It says, when many days had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him, but their plot became known to Saul, and they were watching the gates and day and night in order to kill him. But his disciples took him by night and led him through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a basket. And they were all afraid of him for they did not believe that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared to them how on the road he had seen the Lord who spoke to him and how a Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus. And now, now pause for a second and imagine the story of Paul. Paul writes so much in the New Testament, becomes this key figure in the expansion of the gospel.

But because of the baggage that he had, because he had persecuted the early church. When he shows up to Jerusalem, what do the apostles do? They say, Uhuh, man, stay back. We don’t want anything to do with that guy. And they thought that he was gonna somehow be a mole that he, he was gonna be a double agent, that he’d say, oh, I’m a Christian. And then once he got in close that he’d arrest them all or have ’em all killed. And so they said, we’re just not gonna take, take that risk. And imagine what the story of Paul would look like if that was the end of it. But Barnabas Barnabas is a figure that we meet for the first time right here that Barnabas says, takes a chance on Saul. The Barnabas goes, and he has a conversation with him. How do we know that he has a conversation?

Because it says that he now knows his story, his testimony, he sees the evidence of God’s fruit in his life. And he takes that back to the apostles and he says, I can vouch for this guy. I know what God has done in him and through him. We talk a lot as a church that we wanna know people by name and by need. That’s what we see Barnabas doing, that he knows Saul by name, that, but it’s not just a surface level conversation that he also knows the biggest needs in his life. He’s gotten to know him, he’s heard his story. You probably have a lot of people that you know by name, but how many people do you know by need? If you were to answer the question, the biggest need in this person’s life is, can you answer that? And maybe more importantly, how many people know the biggest needs in your life?

How many people have I allowed into my life to know the biggest challenges and struggles that I am dealing with? Y you see, Barnabas in Greek means son of encouragement. That’s who Barnabas was named like Barnabas. My guess is they probably called him Barney Shorten it gave him a nickname. Reminds me of this guy. If you remember, I’m not gonna sing the song, but Barney, if you don’t know who he is, was a kid’s dinosaur. It’s always funny to me what we turn into kids mascots. Like, you go to Chuck E. Cheese. What, what is kids gonna like a giant life-sized rat? That seems a little terrifying to me. A T-Rex, probably not the friendliest child mascot. And yet Barney was exactly that, this friendly child mascot. And this whole thing was, I love you, you love me. We’re a happy family. And he’s happy all the time that he’s an encourager.

And it makes me wonder, everybody needs a Barney in their life. Everybody needs somebody that is just looking at them and seeing the best in them and encouraging them and speaking truth and life. And so my question for every one of us is, do you have a Barnabas in your life? Who is your Barney? That for every one of those negative things that we hold onto those insecurities because somebody at some point said something mean or dangerous or evil to us, and we carry that baggage, what helps to unload that baggage is a Barnabas that speaks life. I know it’s true in my life. I I’ve talked to you all about Nancy Paul, pastor Nancy. When I was 15 years old, I went to work at a church. And the reason that happened is because we were on our way to kids camp, and I got recruited to go as a, a camp counselor, and we were on a bus.

It was a 50 person bus. We were driving down the road when the tires blows out, we pull off to the side of the road. I was 15. I I didn’t know any better. There’s 50 kids on the bus. They started to get stir and angsty, and there was a microphone at the front of that bus. And so I walked up to the front, front of the bus and I picked up the microphone and I started telling kids stories. And it took ’em a really long time to change that tire. So I told kids stories for two hours, 45 minutes.

And, and just as a side note, they weren’t spiritual. I wasn’t ex executing scripture, all right? I, I told stories about, in my mind, it’s made up on the spot. I took Indiana Jones and my grandmother and I merged ’em together, <laugh>. And I told stories about her name was Indiana Grandma. And for two and a half hours, we talked about Indiana grandma. And after that storytelling, while we were at camp, Nancy Paul, who was on the back of that bus, she came up to me and she said, I need you to come work for me because I see something in you, a gifting that God has given you that is going to be incredible. Now, now, again, I I I wouldn’t teach him. I I wasn’t talking about the Bible. I said nothing spiritual in that two hours of 45 minutes. But she saw something in me that I had never seen in myself, and that nobody else had ever called out in myself.

And so I worked for her full-time in the summers part-time during the school year for the next three, almost four years. And in that time, over and over and over again, she was this Barnabas speaking life and encouragement. And it changed the trajectory of my life. Do you have a Barnabas that’s speaking that life into you, but also in some ways more importantly, are you, am I a Barnabas in someone else’s life? Are you that person that is looking at someone and speaking life and encouragement, telling ’em that they don’t have to carry their burdens alone? Look what happens next. In the story with Barnabas and Paul, it says, and this is two chapters later, it says, and the hand of Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord. They reported this, came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem.

This is where the apostles were. And they sent Barnabas to Antioch. And when he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad. And he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose for, and this is describing Barnabas. He was a good man full of the Holy Spirit and of faith, and a great many people were added to the Lord. So Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul. And when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch for a whole year. They met with the church and taught a great many people. And in Antioch, the disciples were first called Christians. Now, it doesn’t give us exactly all the details about what’s happening, but, but here’s what we can read between the lines to know is that that Saul’s often Tarsus and Tarsus is where Saul is from. So he’s gone back to his hometown, and Barnabas is in Antioch, and he’s saying, wow, God’s moving, God’s doing great stuff.

And then some part of him remembers Saul, and he says, you know, who could help in this church? You know, who’s gifting would be a net ad net positive in what’s happening right now, Saul? And it’s not a short trip from Antioch to Tarsus. And yet that’s what he goes and does. And he goes, looking for Saul. He didn’t have a cell phone. He didn’t just call him up and say, Hey, come this way. Like he had to go physically find the guy and then say, I need you. And then he brings them to Antioch, and it says that they minister the gospel together for an entire year. What a guy Barnabas sees, the guy that everybody else had kind of cast aside and said, don’t worry about him. I’m not sure about him. And he vouched for him. And then he saw something in him that maybe Saul didn’t even see in himself at that point.

And God used Saul to do a miraculous work in the early church that we benefit greatly from what God did in, in, through Paul. And it’s partly because of how God used Barnabas community matters. The people that we are surrounding ourselves with matters, the people that we are investing into intentional relationships with matters. Now, look what another study says about community. It says, belonging to a group of community gives us a sense of identity. It helps us understand who we are and feel part of something larger than ourselves. Researchers also find that people with strong social connections have less stress related health problems, lower risk of mental illness and faster recovery from trauma or illness. Researchers have found that people are happier when they’re with other people than when they are alone.

Now, sometimes inside the church, we have this idea that, well, I don’t need community. I, I I can just be by myself reading scripture. I I I don’t need to hang out with other people. I mean, there’s so much drama that comes with other people. You know what the biggest challenge inside of a church is? People, every single time <laugh>, you know, who causes the biggest problems inside a church? People, every single time people are messy. And so because of that, sometimes we say, well, I’ll just, I’ll just go on hikes by myself with the Bible and pray, and, and I don’t need any of this. But that’s contrary to the life that God calls us to in the New Testament. Look what Eugene Peterson he is the author who translated the Bible in the version called The Message. And he writes this, there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience and following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life, apart from an immersion in and an embrace of community, and not myself, by myself.

It’d be easier if that was the case, but that’s not how God created us. That, that when I absolve myself from community, I’m harming myself, but I’m also harming the community around me. It goes back to identity. You see, the world says that your identity is wrapped up in what you’ve done or how you were born or where you were born that we have all these different things we can check as far as identity. Probably if you pulled out your wallet or your purse right now, you’ve got a whole lot of different things that would give different parts of your identity. But what the gospel does is it says that my first and foremost identity is in Christ. And so even though we might have all kinds of different, this, different opinions and tastes and disagreements with one another, that when our identity is in Christ, we come together to learn more about who God is calling us to be than we ever could by ourselves.

That I’m submitting to somebody else’s authority, some spiritual authority to say, I want you to speak into my life when it’s not going the way that God would call it to be. There’s an interesting thing in the New Testament that when you count up all the times that it says one another’s, it’s 54. So 54 times it says something like love one another or be gracious to one another or forgive one another or outdo one another in honor 54 times. All of these one another’s, they’re impossible to do in isolation. You see, here’s the message that we see in the New Testament Church, that I need you and you need me, that we need one another. And so I’d end with this just a question. And that question is simply, are you, am I participating in meaningful and intentional community? It was seven years ago that, that my wife and I lost our daughter.

So if you don’t know a little bit of that story that we had a daughter named Lane she was born sick. She was in the hospital for four months in the nicu and then she passed away. And I, I just remember vividly the months after that how awful and how painful that was. You’d go through these different stages of grief where you’d have one moment and you’re just angry and, and how come it couldn’t happen to somebody else? And why would it happen to us? And God, why would you do that? And then you’d have times where you were just sad and you wanted to climb into a hole and never talk to anybody else for the rest of your life, just sobbed. We had two young kids. And so my wife and I, literally what we did, we just had kind of this rotation where one of us would go into a room and just sob, and the other would be with the two kids who didn’t fully quite grasp what was going on. And then we’d swap. And we could have been in a really dark place for a really long time. But what helped pull us out of it is our community that we had people that kept showing up no matter what. And I can tell you, we didn’t want community. Like we didn’t want people to show up and talk to us, and yet they kept showing up. And I can tell you that, that we, you never get past pain like that, but people can help you walk through it.

I remember I, I think it was the day that our daughter died, it might have been the next day that Gary and Lisa Thomas showed up to our front door with a box of popsicles. And for them it was probably the most awkward encounter. ’cause I remember we lived in the same neighborhood. We were about half a mile from each other. And I opened the front door and Gary and Lisa Thomas were there, and they were holding a box of popsicles. And I started sobbing immediately. And that was pretty much my reaction when anybody showed up at the door right afterwards, I just started crying. And so then, then I’m sure they felt bad. They were like, oh gosh, we weren’t trying to make you, we just wanted to bring you popsicles. And they gave us the popsicles and they gave us a hug, and then they probably left feeling like, wow, that was awkward.

But can I tell you, seven years later, I vividly remember them showing up with popsicles, and I will never forget for the rest of my life. Popsicles, you said community is what takes us from the darkness towards the light Christian community as a way to take all those pains, all those hurts, all those things that, that you identify with, that you’ve dragged along those, that baggage, that instead someone can speak life and say, no, no, no. Your identity is not in those things. You identity is in Jesus. And I see a future that is far greater than what your past might declare. God did not create us to do this life alone. Heavenly Father. Lord, I just pray that you would help us to not do it by ourself. God, help us to not think like Moses, that we’ve gotta carry all the burdens and we’ve gotta charge ahead, and we’ve gotta be the hero of our own story. Lord, help us to remember that you are the hero of our story. And Lord, just as Moses’ Father-in-law said, the burden that you carry is too great. You cannot do it alone. God, I pray that we would recognize that same truth and help us to create intentional community, meaningful community, be willing to invest in the relationships around us. Help us to have a Barnabas help us to also be a Barnabas. It’s in the name of the Lord Jesus we pray.