The sermon titled 'Believing Jews and Hellenists Become Christians' by Peter Allison focuses on Acts chapter 11, describing the spread of Christianity following the persecution after Stephen's martyrdom. The scattered believers traveled as far as Antioch, initially preaching only to Jews. However, some believers from Cyprus and Cyrene began speaking to Hellenists, resulting in many conversions. The church in Jerusalem sent Barnabas to Antioch, where he encouraged the new believers and sought Saul to help teach them. The sermon highlights Barnabas's role as an encourager, emphasizing his qualities of bodily presence, looking for what is right, expressing pleasure in God's work, and connecting resources with needs. The early church in Antioch overcame cultural and religious differences, leading to believers being first called Christians. The metaphor of 'the hand of God' illustrates God's power and purpose in the spread of the Gospel. The speaker draws parallels to modern Christianity, encouraging unity and respect for differences among believers.

Our Scripture reading is Acts chapter 11. I'd like to begin at the 19th verse. Verse. We've just concluded Peter's recounting of the Lord's work at Caesarea, and we pick up a new thread that really goes back to chapter 8 with the persecution that arose after Stephen. Acts 11, 19.

Now Those who were scattered after the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word to no one but the Jews only. But some of them were men from Cyprus and Cyrene, who when they had come to Antioch, spoke to the Hellenists, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord. Then news of these things came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent out Barnabas to go as far as Antioch. And when he had come and seen the grace of God, he was glad and encouraged them all with that purpose of heart that they should continue with the Lord.

For he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith, and a great many people were added to the Lord. Then Barnabas departed for Tarsus to seek Saul. And when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. And so it was that for a whole year they assembled with the church and taught a great many people. And the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.

May each of us say with David, I will delight myself in your commandments, which I love. Heavenly Father, Your Word is pure, refined seven times. We ask that You would purify us and sanctify us with that Word this morning. Open our hearts, Lord, to receive Your Word. And I ask that you would sanctify my sinful lips to proclaim how you have died for our sins according to the Scriptures.

In Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. Rosaria Butterfield is a very famous and well-known Christian convert because of her conversion story and also her writing and speaking ability. In some ways, her conversion is like the Apostle Paul's conversion. In many ways it's not, but it's very different.

But in some ways it's similar. She was a very gifted academic scholar like Paul. And she went from being a zealot for one side to being a zealot for the other side, like Paul did. And the church that she began attending when she was very first converted was probably a bit shocked by what walked in the door. They'd been praying for her for a couple of years, but I think some maybe weren't quite prepared for their children to see a lesbian dressed to display and even accentuate all the points of their rebellion against God's created order and God's purpose for men, males, and females.

And There are many external, like speech, dress, hair, friendships, and things that are radically different from what that church of predominantly homeschooling families were used to. And the church in Antioch was dealing with these kinds of realities. Antioch was a church that was probably third in significance and rank behind Rome and Alexandria. And one of the areas that it would have excelled in were the vices that went with that pagan way of life. So here was a church in Antioch that was no longer all Jews with the Jewish way of life.

Here was a church in a very cosmopolitan city of that day with people of radically different cultures, radically different patterns of life, radically different habits, and different tastes, and probably everything, like from food and music to art and everything else. It's not that these are worse sinners, it's just these are different sins. These were, we see this church then, These are worse sinners. These are different sins. We see this church then is composed of some big differences.

There's this group of zealous Christians in verse 9, those who were scattered after the persecution that arose over Stephen. These are Jews that were scattered, as we read and looked earlier, that were scattered from Jerusalem and they were scattered into Samaria and Galilee and all Judea and all the way up into Antioch and Cyprus and Venetia. Antioch is probably 300 miles north, right up the coast of the Mediterranean. It's almost up to where we would say Turkey comes over. So they went all the way up there in what we would call northern Syria.

And they preached the Gospel everywhere they went. The New King James says, preach, but it's the ordinary word for speak. They were just talking about Jesus Christ. These are the diaspora Jews. They went about speaking about their Savior Jesus Christ and how He died for their sins.

And they're speaking this word. But they were uncomfortable with other people that weren't like them. The pagans, the Hellenists. And so these Jews only preached to other Jews, to other people that had something in common with them. They preaching the word to no one, it says, but the Jews only.

It may have been an unwillingness to have the profile of their church changed. They wanted other people around them that were like them, that looked like them and dressed like them and had the same habits and the same likes and dislikes. Or maybe they thought that only the Jews were worthy of the Gospel in some way. We do know that this was an issue in the Jerusalem church. We saw that last week when Peter comes back.

They heard word of this amazing conversion of a Roman centurion and his whole household and how the Holy Spirit fell on them. And what do some of these Christians, these believers, they want to call Peter to task because He went and ate with them. So we also know, we'll see later on in Acts 15, how people from Jerusalem come up to this church and create a big conflict over this Jew-Gentile distinction. And try to get everybody up there to say, well, you all have to become Jews. You all have to become like us and keep all the ceremonial law.

But there's another group in this church that is these are zealous Christians. They're Jews. They have their blind spots and sins. There's another group of Christians that came from Cyprus and Cyrene. Cyrene is a city that's west of Alexandria on the northern coast of Africa, west of Egypt, on the northern coast of Africa.

And they've come from Cyrene. And they're willing, so these would be Jews that are used to living in Greek culture. And So they're willing to evangelize these pagans. They're not turned off by them. They rightly recognize that these people need to hear the Gospel just as much as the Jews do.

The catalog of problems in the church in Corinth gives some indication of the background that these Hellenists would have brought into this Antioch church. And I say again, the sins of these Hellenists coming from these pagan cultures. They are not any worse sins than the sins that Jesus confronted in the Jews in Jerusalem. Their self-righteousness, the pride, the partiality, the lust for power, the greed, and so forth. Those are all sins that were very common to the Jews.

So their sins aren't any worse, they're just different. And They look different. And so these men, these Hellenistic Jews, they speak to other Hellenists, to other Greeks, preaching the good news of Jesus Christ to them. And the hand of the Lord is upon that, and the Lord blesses it. And there are many conversions from that.

Many believed and turned to the Lord. The hand of the Lord. Now I know that you young people know that God does not have a body like we do. Does He? God is a Spirit.

And those who worship Him, worship Him in Spirit and in truth. And Jesus said that to His disciples that, look at my hands and my feet, see the holes for a spirit does not have flesh and blood as you see that I have. A spirit doesn't have flesh and blood. A spirit doesn't have hands. So it's a metaphor here to speak of the hand of God.

It's a metaphor that speaks of the power and the purpose of God. The power and the purpose of God. It's a very common Old Testament Metaphor. Isaiah 48 says, Indeed my hand laid the foundation of the earth. My right hand has stretched out the heavens.

When I call to them, they stand together. This is speaking of the two great works of creation that are done by the hand of God, the power of God, the purpose of God is revealed in them. Psalm 89, 13, You have a mighty arm, strong is your hand, and high is your right hand. God's hand is a hand of strength. It's a reference to His power.

Luke 22, hereafter the Son of Man will sit on the right hand of the power of God. It's also used in Scripture to speak of His covenant relationship with us. Isaiah 49, 16, See I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands. Your walls are continually before me. The Lord says that we are inscribed on the palms of His hands.

We're not to inscribe on our bodies any markings or any cuttings for the dead or any other reason. Because we belong to the Lord. We're His. And our body is not ours. Our lips don't belong to us.

We're His. But He has put us on the palms of His hands. That's a very beautiful metaphor for His covenant with us. That His hands, that He remembers us and that we are ever before Him. Fear not, for I am with you.

Don't be dismayed. I am your God. I will uphold you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." So Luke says that the hand of God, this hand of God, This sign of God's power, of His purpose, of His love for us. This hand was with these men as they preached the Gospel.

The Old Testament also, I think, speaks of the hand of the Lord to refer to Jehovah. There's only one other place in Acts that speaks of the hand of God, and it doesn't do so in the same way. And there's one place in Luke that speaks of the hand of God. So it's a phrase that's very unique to Luke as a writer. But I think it's also one connection, one more example showing Christ's deity in the New Testament, because it's used in the Old Testament very frequently to refer to Jehovah, Jehovah God.

And here it's used in the New Testament of the risen and ascended Jesus Christ. So this is a sign then, a seal of God's approval in their taking the Gospel to the Gentiles and their inclusion of the Gentiles in the New Testament church. It's something that as we read in our confession this morning in Mark, Jesus told them, preach the Gospel to every creature. Not just the Jews only. That was something these Jews from the diaspora had forgotten.

They were only preaching to Jews. Jesus said preach to every creature under heaven and whoever believes will be saved. And that's what they did. Now the news of this blessing, because God's hand was upon them, it reached the church in Jerusalem. And they send Barnabas to Antioch.

And this is, I think, a significant step, a very significant statement. Up until this point, Jerusalem has been the center of the church and the center of the Gospel going out. When Peter was done in Caesarea, he went back to Jerusalem church and reported what had happened. The Jerusalem church was the center. It was the mother church from which all these other daughter churches were being planted.

It was where the apostles were. And in different times, they would be sent out from the Jerusalem church. But with this change, with this statement, the foundation or the center of the church in the New Testament is going to shift to Antioch. It's a, as I said earlier, it's a very important city in the Roman Empire. Probably half a million people, scholars estimate, were there.

And this is the church that Paul always returned to after his missionary journeys. He would come, his first couple, he would come back to the church in Antioch and report on his work, in the same way that Peter and others earlier would come back to the Jerusalem church. And you see that, so the Jerusalem church then is is in a sense passing this baton and sending Barnabas up to Antioch. Now Barnabas is a good man that we've seen earlier. In Acts 4, it says his name was Joses, who was also named Barnabas by the apostles.

The apostles gave this man a name, and it's the name the apostles give him that he's known and called by in the rest of Acts. And you remember what that word Barnabas means. It means son of encouragement. Son of encouragement. Because Barnabas, as we'll see in this text, is a preeminent encourager.

He's a man who was gifted and able to encourage people. He was a Levite of the country of Cyprus. So his name, that is a sign of encouragement, is Paraclesis. You might recognize that we sometimes speak of the Paraclete, as the Holy Spirit who comes alongside. So an encourager is someone who we could think of them as somebody who breaks down barriers.

If an athlete is tiring in a race, if he's reaching that barrier where his body says, stop, you're hurting me, and the mind begins to listen to that message and starts to wonder, should I be doing this? The coach comes alongside and encourages and says, Keep going. Keep going. Remember the goal. Keep pressing forward.

You can do this. So what are these characteristics then of a good encourager? We see them in Barnabas. The first thing is bodily presence. To show up in person.

Verse 23, When He came. He showed up in person. He came in person. It's hard to overstate just how important showing up in person is in terms of encouragement. Job's friends, you remember, came and stayed seven days with him.

They showed up in person and They simply sat with Him for seven days in silence. They didn't say a word. They simply sat there. That's powerful encouragement. They saw how great His pain was.

They saw they really couldn't say anything. But they just sat there in silence with Him. That's encouragement. The word encourage is parakaleo. It means to ask someone to come and to be present where the speaker is.

It means to call someone to be by your side. And that's what the Holy Spirit does. That's why He's called the Paraclete. It's what a good coach does. He's right there by your side with you.

He's getting dirty with you. He's not doing the work, but He's encouraging you. He's empowering you. He's motivating you to do what you didn't think you could do. That's a preeminent encourager.

And it begins with a bodily presence. Barnabas was called the son of encouragement because he was gifted at it. And the first thing we see is His bodily presence. He's right there when He arrives. The second thing we see is that He looks for what is right, especially when there are things that are not right.

Especially when not everything is right. He looks for what is right. And what does He see? What's the first thing He sees? He sees that people are being saved.

Because he was looking for that. What did the Jews in Jerusalem see when Peter came back? Did they see this amazing conversion of Cornelius? No. They didn't see that.

They saw a Jew had went and eaten what's a Gentile. But Barnabas as an encourager, he's looking for what's right. He's looking for what's good. In the midst of maybe a lot of things that might not be good. Not saying that they weren't, just saying to encourage her, look for what's right.

And the third thing we see is that he remembers commendation. He expresses pleasure over God's work of conversion. He expresses pleasure that God is working. His hand is present here and that there are conversions. He didn't come and point out their problems, that these Jews were only preaching to other Jews and that there were some obviously divisions going on in the church.

He doesn't focus on that. He expresses pleasure. He's glad at the conversions that are happening. He rejoices with them in that. He wasn't so taken back by the differences that he lost sight of the big picture.

And the big picture was that sinners were being saved. And he was glad. That's encouraging. That's helping to refocus people off of their differences and onto what is good. And fourthly, He points them back to their purpose to continue in the Lord, to persevere in serving the Lord.

He points them to Christ. He says Christ here is your purpose. You're His servants. Your mission here is to serve Him, to be well pleasing to Him. He encouraged them all.

All of them. He's inclusive. He's not ministering to one group or the other. He's ministering to the whole body. He encourages them all.

That's another sign of an encourager is somebody who is inclusive, is able to speak to everybody in a way that is helpful to them. Encourage them all that with purpose of heart, they should continue in the Lord. Words, you see, are a very important part of encouragement. They're an important part of edification. We don't have to tell somebody something that they don't know.

We don't have to bring new information. We can simply remind people of what they already know. That can be encouraging. Thistly Barnabas looks for how he can help. He in a sense comes up, rolls up, gets there bodily, recognizes what is good, rejoices over what is good, encourages the people, all of them, to keep focusing on the big picture and their goal, which is to serve the Lord.

And then he asks himself, how can I help? He looks for how he can help. And he sees a need. He sees a need for a teacher who can come and live in their midst and teach these people. And he realizes he doesn't have to be the one to do that.

Sixthly, a good encourager is a connector who connects up people, resources, with needs and brings the two together. You remember how he saw Paul when all the Jerusalem church was ignoring him, They were afraid of him because he'd been persecuting the church. And it was Barnabas that saw that. And he saw Paul's gifts. He saw his zeal.

And he took Paul and He introduced him to the apostles. Barnabas was a connector. And he acts again as a connector. And he remembers Paul. He remembers Paul's zeal.

He remembers Paul's gifts. He remembers Paul's powerful preaching. And he went to look for him. He went to Tarsus. He went to another city to find Saul.

And when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. Now, he persuaded Paul to come to Antioch, or Saul as he's called here, because he had a prior relationship. Saul would have remembered, here's the man who when nobody would talk to me, when the Jerusalem church was shunning me, he reached out to me and made the introductions to the apostles. And here he's coming again to seek Saul. And so Saul goes with him.

Saul listens to him and goes with him. And he comes back to Antioch. And so this is in that 14 years while Paul was in training to be the Apostle that he and to be the evangelist to the Gentile world that he would become. This is in that 14 years where he's growing in Christ and training. 14 years he mentions in Galatians before he went up to the Jerusalem church with the gift, and we'll read about that coming up, but then it's after that that he's set apart for his missionary labors.

So this is in that period of time. He spends a year in Antioch meeting with the church, and they taught a great many people. Now, it says that Barnabas was a man who was able to do this because, in verse 24, He was a good man. He did this because He was a good man. This is the character of this encourager.

He's a good man full of the Holy Spirit and faith. Now, good is an overused word today, and it's certainly not superlative. If we want to give somebody high praise or something high praise, we don't just say they're good. In fact, that might even be seen as saying They're not as good as we'd like them to be, just to say that they're good. It can be used that way.

But in Greek, good means meeting a very high standard of worth and merit. Just how strong this word good is shown by the comparison in Romans 5-7, where Paul says, For scarcely for a righteous man will one die. You wouldn't really die for a righteous man. Yet perhaps for a good man, someone would even dare to die. In other words, Paul is saying a good man is even above this righteous man.

And Greek scholars have said that the difference between this righteous man and the good man that's compared there is a difference of sympathy. The righteous man being, quote, absolutely without sympathy, while the agathous man is beneficent and kind. There's an element of sympathy. It's a higher quality than even righteous. In fact, when someone addressed Jesus as the good teacher, what did Jesus reply?

Why do you call me good? No one is good but one, and that is God. And so here, Luke is describing Barnabas as a good man. A good man. He had sympathy.

He was beneficent. He was kind. He was very Gracious. Very gentle. He's full of the Holy Spirit.

That's another very high description. This was a qualification that was given in Acts 6 for those that they would elect as deacons to do this work. Men of good reputation, full of the Holy Spirit. To say someone is full of the Holy Spirit is to say that they possess the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Love.

Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. We talk a lot about love, joy, and peace, but there are other very important fruits of the Spirit, kindness.

And there's that word goodness. And faithfulness. And gentleness. And self-control. When Luke says that Barnabas was full of the Holy Spirit.

He is saying he is full of these gifts of the Holy Spirit. That he was good. He was faithful. He was gentle. He had self-control.

He wasn't quick to speak. He didn't fly off the handle. He was quick to hear. Slow to speak. He was a strong man.

We'll see that later. He was a strong man. And he could stand up to Paul. But he was full of the Holy Spirit. Gentle, good, kind.

And He was full of faith. Full of faith. It means he believed what could be. It doesn't mean that he believed in people, but he believed in the power of God to sanctify people, to preserve them, and to empower them. See, there's a difference.

When we can believe in the good, we're believing in the power of God to work through someone, to work good in someone. And that's one of the marks of Barnabas. He was full of faith. And he believed that God could work in people and preserve them and empower them. And so he wasn't believing in that person innately, but rather He believed good of that person.

And we'll see that that is also exemplified elsewhere in Acts of Barnabas. He could see good in people even if they had failed in some way. And so what is the result then of this great encourager who's a good man full of the Holy Spirit and full of faith coming into this church and encouraging these people, seeing the good that was there, and seeing the powerful hand of God at work in this church. What was the result? It's an amazing, amazing result.

I think it's incredible that they dropped the words Jews and Hellenists and quit calling each other Jews and Hellenists and quit thinking in these partisan terms about He's a Hellenist or He's a Jew, and they started calling each other Christians. The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch. They came up with a new term to refer to believers. And They stopped using the old ones, Jews and Gentiles. They didn't all become Jews.

The Jews didn't all become Gentiles. They simply stopped referring to each other as Jews and Hellenists, and they started calling believers, Jews and Hellenists, Christians. That is keeping the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. People like to ask, what religion are you? And the answer in Antioch was, I'm a Christian.

A Christ follower. That's who defined them. They didn't stop being Jews and they didn't stop being Hellenists or whatever they were, but first of all, they were first of all Christians. And that's how they thought of each other. You know, we've experienced these same kinds of differences today.

And we are called today as a church to live together in unity in the bond of peace. There are things that we believe are truth, and we proclaim as truth. We think of that as the doctrines of the faith, Christian education, covenant theology, for example, New Thetic counseling that the Word of God addresses is sufficient for every issue that we might face. Or infant baptism. But even where people have different views on these things, we can still recognize them as Christians.

We can still have fellowship with them. We can still call them fellow saints and love them and maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace with them. And of course, that even extends into the member that... I'd like to give everyone that joins our church a little diagram that illustrates these differences. The inner core.

The doctrines of Scripture that we believe are important and that we teach. But then outside of that, there's areas of personal conscience where individuals have different views about what Scripture commands, or even personal preference. And we want to give liberty and respect these differences. And this, I believe, is what this church in Anyok was doing when they called each other Christians. They were learning how to live with differences, how to respect those differences, and how to live together.

They were giving up that term, Jew, and saying, we want to be a Christian, so that we can be unified, united, with all the other people that are also believers in the Lord Jesus Christ and Christians. And I think this was one of the fruits of Barnabas' gift as an encourager in this Antioch church. May the Lord give us a likewise gift to encourage one another to recognize what God is doing that's good and to commend one another for that. And so to encourage one another in the Lord, to Continue with the Lord. Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your Word, which is sufficient, that we may be thoroughly equipped for every good work, that we may be perfect and complete in Christ.

We ask, Lord, that we may grow as those who encourage one another, those who commend one another, those who see what is good in one another, those who exhort one another to continue and to persevere in the Lord. We ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.