Elder Brian Haferkamp preaches on Acts 16, the Macedonian Call. He challenges us to join God in the work that he is doing in the world all around us.
My father is a grocery store man. He began when he was in high school. He’s been managing stores since I was born and I’ve never known him to do anything else. When I was in Junior High my dad started his own grocery store. The year the store opened, I spent the entire summer working in his store. There was an expectation that I would join him at the store each day; that I would join him in this new business. If you’ve ever had parents who started a family business, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
As children in God’s family, God calls his followers to join him in his work--the family work.
God’s ultimate plan and work is redemptive. We were created to be with him and, because of the Fall, have been separated from God. But he had a redemptive plan. In Christ he made it possible for humanity to come back to him. He calls believers out of the world to once again come back into his family--back into a relationship with God--and to participate in the good works that he has prepared for his children before the foundation of the world.
He has chosen humans to be a part of that redemptive plan; to work his purposes in and through them. God’s purposes for his people have always centered around bearing witness about him. Those who have been called out of the world and into God’s Kingdom have been given the mission to go wherever they are sent and bear witness about who God is, what he has done, and to share that he offers abundant life now and forever. Israel was given this purpose. Christ and his disciples were given this purpose. All who are in Christ from their work to now have been given this purpose.
As Evangelicals we often think about our concept of evangelism--going out to non-believers and telling them about Christ--as our work of bearing witness. It is true that speaking to others about God and his redemption through Christ is a part of bearing witness. But just as prevalent is the idea that the unity of God’s people, their love for one another, and their devotion and faithfulness to God are also bearing witness. We are lights. We are salt. The Apostle Paul taught the Church in the cities where he founded congregations, but when he speaks to power he simply gives his testimony about his experience of God on the road to Damascus; that Christ is who he said he was.
The call of salvation is also the call to join God in his purposes--his purpose being to bear witness about who he is and about the redemption that is found in Jesus Christ. There is no separate call. It is one and the same. So that those who are in God’s family will be known by their participation in his work and their work will be to bear witness about what God has done, is now doing, and will do in the future.
God calling people to join him in his redemptive plan and to bear witness about him has been happening since the beginning of time.
Noah was a prominent beginning figure who was called out by God to bear witness to the world about God’s righteousness and his redemption. God called Abraham to leave his country and journey through Canaan. Through the blessings of God in his life he bore witness to the Lord. Through military victory over his enemies, he testified to God’s power.
Hebrews 11:8
8 By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.
In Exodus 3, God came to Moses and invited him to join into the work that God was about to do in freeing his people, Israel, from the hand of Pharaoh and the Egyptians.
Exodus 3:8, 10
8 and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land...10 Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.”
Each of the prophets encountered God and received a call to join God--to be his voice on earth to the people of Israel and their kings. Their roles were not to strategize or make something happen. They were to speak on behalf of God. His words would be their words. It was God’s reign and rule that they were testifying to, not their own ideas or works.
In Acts 10, God calls Peter to join him in this new thing that he is doing. For thousands of years the Jews have been the gatekeepers to the Lord. They had the scriptures, the history, the understanding of God. But God was doing something new. In Ephesians 3 Paul writes that this new plan is “the mystery hidden for ages in God.” Like Paul in our text today, what God was calling him to do was beyond his understanding and out of the way that he was naturally inclined to go.
In our text today, we read that Paul wanted to go to Bithynia, which is the northwest region of modern-day Turkey, but God stopped him from going north. Instead, Paul saw a vision of a man from Macedonia. Macedonia is north and east of Greece, across the Aegean Sea from where Paul was staying in Troas. God’s call to Paul was clear: “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” Paul heard the call, concluded that it was God calling them to travel to Macedonia, and began making plans to go there.
That’s all fine and good, you might say, but surely those are special circumstances. I’m no prophet or apostle. They were special people with special circumstances who did special things in the grand history of our faith.
I want to encourage you not to follow this thinking. God still calls people to join him in his work. We heard the testimony of one of our missionaries, Sherri Paulson, last week. She talked about her call to follow God into ministry. If you remember, she had gone to Ghana on a short term missions trip and was doing dishes at the sink. While she was doing this very everyday thing, God spoke to her clearly and asked her to join him in his work in Ghana. Would she do this with him? She said yes and, like the apostle Paul, immediately made plans to join God in the work he had for her.
My own family’s journey from Busan, South Korea, to Forest Park Baptist Church is evidence that God is still speaking and calling people to join him. Shortly after we moved to Busan I was connected with an opportunity to become the pastor of a small English-speaking congregation. A month later the congregation asked me to be the pastor.
Only a month into that position, as I began to pray and begin work on that week’s sermon, I sensed that I needed to look up something specific online. One of the sites that came to the top was forestparkbaptist.com. The congregation seemed like an interesting one, but I’d never been here before. I began to explore the website and started listening to Pastor Dave’s sermons online during my trips to the church building where I was pastoring. I didn’t really know why I was getting connected to Dave but I began to pray for him regularly.
Shortly after that I told Keturah about this pastor and congregation I’d been praying for in Chicago. She told me that she had a job offer in Chicago and that started us down the road to eventually moving here in 2013. God proved himself so many times over that summer and I became more and more resolute that coming here is what we should do.
I remember the man who told me about the pastoral position in Busan driving us to the airport as we were leaving the city. I recounted to him what had been going on and what I sensed the Lord was doing with us. He said, “I don’t think that’s how God works.” In the moment, I was determined so I’m not sure there is anything he could have said that would have stopped us.
Over the years, though, I’ve thought back to that conversation. I keep coming back to what I know of God’s working in the scriptures and in the lives of the believers that I know. He does, in fact, still work like that. The God of the Bible is a God who speaks. He calls people to join him in his redemptive work. He has prepared good works for his people to do. He calls them to testify to who he is, what he has done, and what he is doing.
If God is still speaking then what will our responses be to him?
Henry Blackaby, a Canadian pastor, released the bible study, Experiencing God, in the 1990s. His primary concept is that God is continuously at work around us. He always has been at work and will continue to be at work until the end of this cosmic plan is finished. God calls people to join him in the work that he is doing. This invitation to join him in his work comes through a relationship with God, made possible by our faith and acceptance of the sacrifice and work of Christ.
The study focuses on 7 “realities” of experiencing God as a follower of Christ. It’s a cyclical sort of pattern that God uses throughout the scriptures when he calls people to join him. One of these realities is that God speaks--he gives the invitation to join him in the work that he is doing in the world. However, when God speaks to a person it always causes, what Blackaby calls, a “crisis of belief.” When God calls a person to join him in his work, the person now must make a choice to follow or not follow. How a person responds to God’s call reflects what he or she believes about God.
In Mark 10, we see a negative choice made by the rich young man, sometimes called the rich young ruler:
Mark 10:17-22
17 And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 18 And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” 20 And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” 21 And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” 22 Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
We can see from the young man’s reaction what he believed about God. He did not believe that Jesus was the pearl of great price or that Jesus would keep his promise that if the young man would give up his treasures on earth, he would receive treasure in heaven. He wanted to follow Christ, but not at the expense of this world.
In our passage today we see that Paul’s response to God’s call was to immediately change course. Paul believed that God would not only provide if he went in this new direction but that God knew where Paul should be going better than Paul knew.
In Isaiah 55 God said:
8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.
9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
We’ve read that and probably quoted it at some point, but do you believe it? When the time comes to trust his thoughts and his ways over our own, do we put our faith and trust in God?
God calls people to join him in his work, not the other way around. God’s call is not to see what we will come up with or to try and help us out along the way. He is not our cosmic fairy dust or a genie that we pull out when we can’t think of anything else to do. He is not interested in fitting our ideas, philosophies, and structures around his work.
In our Sunday night bible study in 1 Peter, we talked about the Diaspora of Jews throughout the Roman Empire. Many of these Jews had settled north and east of Jerusalem in response to the captivities in Babylon and Assyria. The people were largely gathered in modern day Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Armenia. It seems that Paul’s plan was to move throughout Asia Minor and then move east into Asia because of the large numbers of Jews who had settled there. This completely agrees with Paul’s mission: to the Jews first, then to the Greeks (or Gentiles). However, God was doing something different. Same same, but different.
Paul could have tried to push forward and continue with his plan. He could have pulled a Jonah and ran in another direction. He could have just sat there and forced God to do something (and missing the opportunity completely).
We see, however, the responsiveness of Paul to God’s plan. Paul understood that he was joining into God’s work, not the other way around. How many times people receive a call from God and then begin working out the plan for God. Or worse, that they construct a plan for how best to have God save the world and then asking God to bless their plans.
How often the Church wants to see God move; she cries out for God to show himself and to work in her community and country. But when God speaks the Church reveals her belief.
“That’s not the way we’ve done it in the past.”
“We can’t afford that.”
“We’re just not equipped to begin moving in that direction.”
“That doesn’t see like good stewardship of what God has given.”
“That doesn’t sound like God.”
All of these responses reveal what we believe about God, whether they are personal responses to God or corporate responses. The root of this type of thinking leads us to a far greater question:
Have you given your life--your whole life--to God? Did you give your life to follow God or to follow the tenets of the Christian religion?
When we made the choice to follow Christ, we made the choice to not only put down our own righteousness for salvation, but we also gave him the rest of our lives, from that day forward, to be spent as he sees fit. Jesus addresses the nature of the life of a follower of Christ in Matthew 6:
Matthew 6:25-33
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? 28 And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Are you seeking the Kingdom of God first or second? When God calls, do you take your life back or do you continue to give it to him in faith, knowing that you are his and you have given yourself to him for his work in the world? The rich young ruler couldn’t let go of this life and fully grasp onto God. Paul understood that his life was no longer his own. When his Master called--even in the face of not fully understanding why he was being asked to go in a particular direction--he followed. His choice revealed his heart--he believed God and was committed to joining God in the work that God was doing, not the work Paul was doing.
In Christ our lives are no longer our own. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:
19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
And in Romans 14:8:
8 For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. 9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.
What about you today? Is God calling you? Is he asking you to join him in his work in the world? When consider God’s call we often think about missions, or full-time vocational ministry, but God is at work all around us in every part of the world--including Chicago and Forest Park. Is he calling you to join him in some work he is doing?
Have you truly given God your life? Not just for salvation but is your life his to do with whatever he desires? If not then I encourage you to give it to him today; to give him your whole heart, your entire life.
Is God calling you to make a radical shift in your life that you have been justifying away? Have you been rationalizing that God couldn’t possibly want you to do that or go there or speak to that person? Today, let your response be, “Yes, Lord. I don’t understand why or how, but Yes.”
God is still speaking. He is still calling people to follow him and join him in what he is doing in the world. Can you hear him calling? Will you follow?
Amen.
