The Church God Wants to Be a Part of

could you stand and let's read God's Word together? We're going to read from Acts chapter 11 this morning, and you listen as I read it to you. Acts 11 verse 19, "Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen, traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who one coming to Antioch spoke to the Hellitus, also preaching the Lord Jesus, and the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord. The report of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. 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." Verse 24, "And a great many people were added to the Lord." This is the Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Well, quick personal update before we get started. This has been a couple of eventful weeks for me, two Sunday nights ago, I went to bed after preaching here, and woke up with a severe pain in my abdomen that I first thought was food poisoning, but eventually my wife took me to the emergency room, and to make a long story really short, a few hours later, they removed my gallbladder. Apparently, I am at the age now where you wake up with pain, and then you go to the hospital, and you have random things removed from your body. It's all heavy, amen, right? And I did not tell you all about it, because A, it all happened so fast, and B, there was nothing you could do about it anyway. I know some of you found out, and you prayed for me, and reached out, sent cards, and that kind of thanks. So thank you very much for that. The doctor told me that I should avoid fatty foods for a little while, so naturally, I went

straight to the state fair the next weekend, so I could stand in line for 90 minutes to get a box of peachy donuts and eat them, so I'm not sure whether the residual pain that I'm feeling now is from the gallbladder surgery or from the state fair, either one, right? But anyway, I'm alive and well, and the next time I have a gallbladder, it will be a glorified one in the new Jerusalem, which means it will work perfectly, so I'm looking forward to that. Okay? All right, that's my personal update. Acts 11 this weekend, if you have not already found it in your Bible, please find it. Acts 11, here's my question for the morning. What kind of church do you want to be a part of? After being a pastor for more than 25 years this year, I've learned that there are a lot of people that come to our church who want a doctrinally rich church, which means they want the pastor to preach long, theologically rich, and precise sermons. Some want a spirit-filled church, and by that I mean one with powerful worship and spiritual gift manifestations and the tingles and the warm fuzzies and deliverance and lots and lots and lots of prayer. Others are looking for a family church, just a place where you belong, a place where you feel needed and known where everybody knows your name, a cheer church. Others are seeking a felt needs church, meaning great kids' programs, we've got men's and women's ministries, sermons that speak directly to your life. There's a lot of people who really want to be a part of a missional church, a missional church where you're constantly hearing about community impact and reaching the nations. All of these are good. Which of these, by the way, is most important to you in your selection of a church? You got one? What if I told you that more important than what kind of church you want to be a part of is what kind of church does God want to be a part of? The church in Antioch gives us a picture of the kind of church that God wants to be a part of.

The church at Antioch was one of the healthiest, fastest-growing churches in the first century. It became known as the missionary-sending hub of the early church. In fact, Antioch was so closely associated with sending that numerous mission organizations today have adopted the name Antioch, the Antioch movement, for example, the Antioch network is another because they're seeking to emulate the impact of this early church in Antioch. But Antioch's secret, Luke tells us, Luke is the author of Acts, Antioch's secret was not its sending program. It was not its leadership model, it was not its organizational structure, or even its strategy. The writer of Acts, Luke. He says very simply, the hand of the Lord was with him. More than anything summit church, this is what I want. You see, so often we focus our efforts and our conversations on what our hands can accomplish, money that we can raise, programs we can run, problems we can solve, all good things. Ultimately though, we don't need better strategies, what we need is the hand of God. So I'm gonna step out of our series and the sermon on the Mount for just one week and I wanna talk about the kind of church that God wants to be a part of. And here is why I think this is on my heart for this weekend and why I'm interrupting our series, which I'm very loath to do to talk about this. I've had an extraordinary few weeks where God has let me experience a few things and I just haven't had much of a chance to catch up with you about them, having my gallbladder removed and whatnot.

First at the beginning of October, I got to take a handful of our summit collab pastors, our collaborative by the way, is just all the churches that we've planted over the years and some partner churches with them. I took several of those collab pastors over to Southeast Asia where Peter Park, who is our former downtown Durham campus pastor, hello downtown Durham, he now leads a growing church and a global city there. The church is bilingual, English, and the language they speak there, they do ministry in both languages. Peter has only been out there for a couple of years, but they are now several hundred people big and they've already planted two churches out of that church. Peter helped host a multiplying church conference over there and through your generosity, we are establishing a multiplying church hub right there in the middle of a Muslim and Buddhist stronghold. It is amazing, okay? That was the first experience, second experience. Last weekend, this is the video you saw just a moment ago, we hosted right here at the Capitol Hills campus more than 1,100 staff from churches that we've planted around the world in our annual collaborative movement conference. In both of these events, y'all, I just sat a little dumbstruck at what God has let us be a part of.

God has taken the smallest seeds of faith and he has multiplied them beyond our wildest imagination. This past Easter, we had over 120,000 people in Summit collaborative churches just in the United States and we baptized over 1,000 in those churches in just the last year. And so it's made me ask the question, the last several weeks, what kind of churches are we building? And is God pleased to be a part of them? And what do your and my roles in that kind of church, those kind of churches, what do they look like? At one of those events, one of our church planners got in Corbin Hobbes, he's at the Heights Church in Denver, Colorado, he preached a message from Acts 11 that I thought was so compelling that I wanted to share some of it with you. Now, I've taken his basic framework there from Acts 11 and I've reworked it for our context here at Summit Church, but I wanna give Pastor Corbin credit for helping me see some things in this passage that I hadn't seen quite the same way before. Think of this, what I'm gonna give you in the next few minutes. Think of this as the profile of the church that God wants to be a part of, or the kind of church that God's hand is on. Here's characteristic number one, the kind of church that God wants to be a part of is a church full of ordinary people who know they're on an extraordinary mission.

I want you to first notice in this passage we read that these church planters didn't end up in Antioch because Jerusalem had identified a strategic location, trained up a leadership team, raised money, and sent them out. No, verse 19 tells you persecution broke out, believers were scattered. That means there was no organization at all, and some randomly ended up in Antioch, and when they got there they started a church. No strategic plan, no core group meetings, no fundraising campaign, just ordinary believers, ordinary church members running for their lives who decided to take the gospel with them. The only names that Luke gives to these believers are those in verse 19 and them in verse 21. If you were making a movie about the book of Acts, these guys would be crowd members numbers three, four, and five in the credits. No names, nobody's. And yet these anonymous believers, these unnamed believers planted one of the most fruitful, fastest growing missionary church, missionary sending churches in the New Testament. And Stephen Neal's classic book, The History of Christian Missions, is almost 100 years old, this book. specifically about Antioch. Luke does not turn aside to mention the name of a single one of those pioneers who laid the foundation few, if any, of the great churches were really founded by apostles.

It's just ordinary, anonymous, un-seminary trained Christians upon whom God's hand rested. Here's my question, does God's hand rest on you this way? Francis Chan said it this way, I love this quote, "Long gone are the days when we pastors should be content with a bunch of people who sing out loud, put their hands up. Don't get divorced and give the missions." I now want to know I can drop off any member of my church in any city, and that person could grow in Jesus, make disciples, and help start a church. This was literally true of the church at Antioch. The kind of church God wants to be a part of is a church where the members, not just the apostolic leaders, see themselves as instruments of God's mission. For 25 years here, summit, this is what I've tried to preach to you. You did not call me to be your pastor so that I could do the ministry for you. Ephesians 4, 11, and 12 says that God gave to the church pastors. He gave to this church me what was the reason He gave me to this church? Here is what it says, "To equip the saints for the work of the ministry." Look at that phrase, who does the ministry? You, the saints, and what do I do? I equip you, which is why I say according to this verse right here, when I became a pastor, I left the ministry. I took a spot mostly in the background to help you do the ministry. This community is not going to be reached by a great pastor. It's going to be reached by spirit-filled, ordinary members who have God's hand on them. In fact, let me tell you one of my favorite summit baptism stories that illustrates this. A few years ago, young lady stood in my kitchen, talking with Veronica and me. I had never met her, or at least I thought I hadn't. She was one of my daughter's new small group leaders, and their small group was hosting an event at our house. So there in the kitchen, I introduced myself to her and she got this coy smile on her face and she said, "We've actually met before, but you probably don't remember." A couple of years ago, though, we were both at the RDU airport waiting for a 6 a.m. flight to Atlanta.

She said, "You walked past me there in the gate area and you noticed that I was reading a book by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, and you said something like, "Well, that's some really heavy reading for this early in the morning," then you asked me if I was trying to figure out whether or not God really existed. She said, "I muttered something about having a lot of questions, and you took that as an invitation to tell me about how you came to know Jesus." By the way, when she said that, I suddenly remembered the conversation because I remembered seeing the book and sensing the spirit prompting me to say something to her. She said, "I thought this was all a little bit random, but I actually had been wrestling with questions about God, so I listened." She said, "Then we got on the plane and I ended up sitting about two rows behind you." She said, "You struck up a conversation with the guy next to you, and you started sharing your story with him too, except this time you went a lot deeper because you had more time." And then she said, "Now, I don't know if you know this, but you don't really have what we would call an inside voice," which means you were basically sharing the gospel with the entire comfort plus section of the plane. She said, "Honestly, I was a little annoyed." She said, "It was 6 a.m. All I wanted to do was sleep, but I had forgotten my headphones. I had forgotten my headphones, so I had no choice but to just sit there and listen to you." Finally, she said, "We landed in Atlanta. I was exhausted, and I just wanted coffee and a bagel. That's all I wanted. So I walked to the other end of the terminal, and I got in line at the Atlanta Bread Company. Suddenly, I heard this voice ahead of me. I looked up and thought, "You have got to be kidding me. It is that guy again." Except this time, you were helping a woman with two kids, though she was at the register

struggling to find her money, trying to manage her two kids, and you told her not to worry about it, and you just paid for her. So I thought, "Well, this guy doesn't know how to use an inside voice. Doesn't have basic social skills, but at least he's not a total jerk." Okay, fast forward, six months. She's talking with a co-worker at Duke, where she works about her questions about God. And the co-worker keeps praying for her and keeps inviting her to come to her church. Eventually, she agrees to come, mainly to get her co-worker to stop inviting her. The one Sunday she walks into the summit church. She said, my jaw hit the floor. I turned to my friend and I'm like, that's him. That's a guy I was telling you about in the airport. I'd never told her I was a pastor, of course. People get really weird, would you tell them you're a pastor? Fast forward another six months. She's now been coming regularly. She receives Christ and she gets baptized. Then she eventually joins our high school ministry team. And I meet her standing in my kitchen as one of my daughter's small group leaders. That is the first time I've heard any of this story. Here is what I love about that story. I am not the hero. I had one conversation with this lady and completely forgot about it. I never thought about or prayed for her again. But there was another believer, a co-worker of hers at Duke, whose name you would not recognize,

who was a summit member who kept praying, kept inviting and kept loving her until she came to faith in Christ. God used both of us. Summit, that's how the gospel advances, okay? (audience applauding) Ordinary believers each doing their part with the extraordinary hand of God upon them. You don't have to be a pastor. In fact, being a pastor in those situations is usually a liability. People scramble and start screaming for their headphones and fake and fake phone calls when you tell them you're a pastor. You don't have to have all the answers. Just open your mouth and obedience to the Holy Spirit and see what God does. So first, God's hand was on this church because it was a church full of ordinary people on an extraordinary mission. Second, God's hand was on them number two, because Antioch was a church that sought to grow wide and deep. Once you first notice in verse 21, how Luke celebrates the wide part of their growth, it says a great number turned to the Lord. Then three verses later in verse 24, Luke says again, "A great many people were added to the Lord." And then just two verses after that, verse 26,

it says, "A Barnabas and Saul taught a great many people." Y'all, that is three times in five verses that the book of Acts celebrates size. So I'm just gonna go ahead and say it. I do not understand churches or church leaders that are skeptical or derogatory about numerical growth. Now I get it, I get it. Just because a church is not growing large numerically does not mean God's hand is not on it. No, God uses lots of small churches. And I also know there are plenty of artificial smoke machine advertising driven fleshly ways that you can grow a church. I know that the haze of a smoke machine is not evidence of God's hand being on that church. I understand. But Luke clearly celebrates numerical growth, doesn't he? And I do not understand Christians who are instinctively cynical about it. Y'all, Jesus didn't come to shrink his church. He came to grow it. So we celebrate every single number here because every single number represents an individual person that is being rescued from eternal separation from God. We celebrate numbers 'cause they represent marriages restored. They mean drug addicts delivered. They mean prodigals coming home to the Father. They mean prisoners being saved and restored to society.

(congregation applauding) Which of those numbers do you not wanna clap for? The question is not whether you prefer big churches or small churches. I'm so sick of hearing that. Who cares what you prefer? The question is whether we love seeing lost people come to Jesus. Listen, there have always been detractors in cynics, even in Acts. Acts 2, for example, the spirit falls. 3000 people get saved and baptized in one day. Everybody's like, this is amazing. And there's a bunch of theological critics all to the side going, "Well, I bet these people are drunk." Don't be that person, okay? And yeah, growth creates inconvenience. New service times. (congregation laughing) When you figure 'em out, we're gonna change 'em again. So don't get used to it, all right? Cramp parking lots. New campuses, giving campaigns 'cause we need new buildings. So let me just acknowledge this, okay? Again, if you are looking for a church where you can park in your favorite spot every week, sit in your standard seat. Everybody knows it's yours. See basically the same people every week, this church is gonna frustrate you.

We are a family. We're a family, we want you to be known, want you to be connected through small groups and on serving teams. We try to make that really easy and accessible. But listen, if you want a nice, cohesive, contained, controlled experience, this place is gonna frustrate the heck out of you. But if you love seeing people saved, you love seeing lives changed, and you love seeing those baptismal waters stirring often, you will gladly put up. (congregation applauding) And based on what I read in Acts 11, y'all, that's the kind of church God wants to be a part of. The kind of church that's always making room for one more. Somebody once asked me, who are the 100 most important people at the Summit Church? I thought for a moment, my goal is that our 100 biggest donors, would that be an honest answer? Is it our 100 best small group leaders? Man, they're important. Maybe our 100 longest 10-yard members? Y'all, those are all important groupings, but the 100 most important people in our church are the next 100 we need to reach. The 100 that our 100 most important people at this church aren't even here yet. By the way, we get that from Jesus.

Jesus said the good shepherd leaves the 99 to go after. The one. And that there's more joy in heaven over one's lost center who repents the number 99 who don't need repentance anymore. That is Jesus's heart. And he wants to be a part of a church that has that heart also. So that's why I'd growth. They were committed to that. I want you to notice that God's hand was also on the church that grows or sought to grow deep. Verse 25, Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul. Saul's a guy who's gonna change his name in a few years, he was gonna call himself Paul and he's gonna write 2/3 of your New Testament. And when he had found Paul, 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. Barnabas and Saul/Paul spent an entire year teaching this church. Why? It's because God's plan is not just to get lost people into heaven, but to put heaven into them so they would represent him and glorify him on earth. Sir Barnabas and Paul spent a whole year, they didn't just baptize him and move on, they spent a whole year discipling them. I want you to notice that little detail

that Luke tucks in at the end of verse 26. After that year of discipleship was the first time believers were called Christians. After a year of Barnabas and Paul's discipleship, these new believers get called Christians. It wasn't even a term they gave themselves. What should we call ourselves? How about Christians? No, this was a term the community gave to them. It was probably intended as an insult. Scholars say it meant something like the Jesusy people. But see these believers were so like Jesus that people identified them by him. That's what discipleship does. It transforms you from somebody who looks like the world into somebody who looks like Jesus. At Christmas of last year, I challenged some of you who were checking out Christianity. I challenge you to give us a year. I said, don't just show up at Christmas Easter, maybe Mother's Day, and then Christmas again. No, come consistently. Some of you have done that. And some of you've even been saved and baptized. You've introduced yourself to me. Now it is time for you to take the next step. You need to start growing. You need to get under the teaching of the apostles. You need to join a small group. You need to join a men's group

or a women's disciple group or a volunteer team. You need to start putting down roots. You need to talk to your campus pastor today about that. God does not want us choosing between a church that is a mile wide and an inch deep or a church that's a mile deep and an inch wide. He wants a church that grows both deep and wide. And that is our goal here at the Summit Church. Our third characteristic of the church that God wants to be a part of. According to the church at Antioch, number three is the church that turns grace and the generosity. Look with me at verse 27. Now in these days prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch and one of them named Agabus stood up and foretold by the spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world. See this took place in the days of Claudius. So the disciples there at Antioch determined everyone according to his ability to send relief to the brothers who were still living back in Judea, Jerusalem. And they did so, sending it to the elders by the hands of Barnabas and Saul. The church in Antioch hears about a famine that's going to come all over the world, which means it's going to hit them too, but it's going to be especially hard in Jerusalem because the church was so persecuted up there. So they open up their pocket books and each one of them gave.

By the way, there's a beautiful reversal happening here. See the believers from Jerusalem, remember? They're the ones who brought the gospel to Antioch. And now Antioch is sending financial relief back to Jerusalem. I am so tempted to use this to tell our big successful church plants that they need to start sending some of their budget back. The recipients of spiritual generosity became agents of material generosity. Pastor Brian always says generosity is an indicator light that shows that you've encountered the gospel. Those who truly believe the gospel always become like the gospel. By the way, notice it wasn't just the rich people who gave. It says literally everybody gave. Everybody gave according to his ability. The rich gave a lot because they had a lot to give. The poor gave a little because they had a little, but everybody gave. You see, when you've received the greatest gift in the world, there's something inside of you that has to give a response. You want to give out of what you have. Of course, you give your first 10% back to the kingdom of God. That's just the baseline. That's the time. You see, when you've really experienced Christ's generosity, you just find yourself wanting to give more out of whatever you have. You want to make a statement to Jesus about his value to you. I was talking with a really wealthy guy here in our church who actually been saved right here. One Sunday, he heard me preach about the poor widow who gave her two mites, which is basically an eighth of a penny, to the temple. Jesus comments, some of you have been a church, you know the story. Jesus said this woman has given more with her two eights of a penny than all the rich people who walked in today because she's given such a substantial portion of what she had. Afterward, this rich guy came up to me and he said, "Is that a real story or is that like one of Jesus's made up stories?" I was like, "You mean like a parable?" He's like, "Yeah, yeah." I said, "No, no, it's real." He said, so just make sure I'm understanding this. This is an actual woman that I'm going to meet in heaven one day. I said, "Yeah." He said, "So when I meet this woman, I do not want this woman to be able to look at me and say that Jesus said, "I gave more than you." So whatever her gift represented about her heart, my gift is going to represent that about mine.

See, it's not about the amount. It's about what your giving reveals about your heart. Does what you give to God make a statement about the value of his salvation in your life is what you give a worthy thank you for what he has done for you. Did Jesus though pocket change at you when you needed to be saved? Did he just give a little bit off the top because he didn't need the money? No, based on some of your giving, that is exactly what you think he did for you. A church where God's hand dwells overflows in generosity. So I'm going to hold here. Right here in my hands, I hold a copy of a Bible translation that we just finished, we being some churches finished through a group called Illuminations. It cost a few hundred thousand dollars for us to produce this. This particular translation was started at the behest, the request, of one of our church planting teams in East Africa. There were some summit members who had moved there to work among this people group in East Africa, and while they were there, they discovered a neighboring Muslim people group that had no believers and no Bible in their language for all of this people group's history. So through your generosity, we produce this, the first New Testament ever translated into their language. And I'm happy to report to you from our church planner that there are now 300 believers in that people group that previously had nine. By the way, you 300 who started with me 25 years ago, you, you did this. This is one person for each of you. Now, sadly, the government forced our people, our members to flee that area a few years ago, it's making contact much more difficult, but they left this, they left this. And our church planner told me that every one of those 300 believers who receives one of those Bible arrivals actually takes two, because they have made a commitment to each other to whenever they receive a Bible, they take a second one that they commit to give to a Muslim neighbor who doesn't have one. I want you to think about the chain of generosity that is represented right here. Summit members sacrificed to go overseas. They left a comfortable life to go live over there. Then there was your generosity in sending them and your generosity and funding this translation. And now we got the generosity of these brand new believers, these 300 believers to share this Bible with their neighbors, and it all goes back to the radical story of generosity that is contained in this book in a language for the first time, and that is about Jesus' extravagant generosity toward us.

Those who have received great grace instinctively show it in response. And so heads up, okay, over the next few weeks, as we do every November, you're gonna hear what God is inviting us into as a church, and you're gonna have an opportunity to recommit yourself to mission through the summit church. The hand of God was on this church because they didn't just receive grace, they became conduits of it. Now, one more, one more, really quick, because it's so important to us. Number four, God's hand was on them because they were a church where Christ mattered more than culture. See, verse 19 tells us, pretty honest, though when the first Jewish Christians got an Antioch, they basically only preached to fellow Jews. See, that was just the easiest thing for them. They spoke the same language, they had the same customs, they liked the same things. I see verse 19, it actually tells you that. Those who were scattered went and they spoke to nobody, except for the Jews, right? That's what they do. So then it tells us that there was another group that came in verse 20, and they came and began preaching to the Hellenist also. Now, the Hellenist were Jews who had adopted Greek culture, not Hellyans, like they were a bunch of wild partiers, okay,

but Hellenest, which means Jews who had adopted Greek customs. Y'all, it would have been so easy for those earliest Christians in Antioch to have gotten siloed into three different churches. You have first Baptist Jew, first Baptist Gentile, and then first Baptist Hellenized Jew. That would have been by far the most comfortable thing for them. Instead, they formed one church, every reference to the church in Antioch is one. They have one church, even though it meant rubbing shoulders with people who weren't like them, and that created some friction. And don't miss this, it's immediately after Luke tells us this right here that he says the hand of the Lord is with him. Do you think that's an accident that he puts that right there? The immediate context for God's hand being on this church was their pursuit of unity across cultural and ethnic divisions. In fact, jump ahead to chapter 13 real quick, 'cause he continues the story of Antioch there, flip over two chapters. Luke is gonna list out the leaders of the church at Antioch, and he makes a point of showing us their different backgrounds. In fact, I'll put it in a chart so that you can see it, okay? It says a Barnabas, he was a Hellenistic Jewish believer, right? Then we have Simeon called Niger. He's from an African background. We have Lucius, he's from North Africa, Luke tells us.

We have Manian, well, this guy's a Roman, he got saved out of here, it's household. Then we've got Saul, who's gonna become Paul, he's a Jewish Pharisee, and highly educated. Here's my question. What did all these people right here have in common? Nothing. Is this some kind of DEI checklist, by the way? No. Luke is showing us that these believers chose the harder road of pursuing unity in Christ, rather than retreating into their own cultural ghettos. And because of that, God's hand was on them. Here's why I didn't wanna skip this point. It's election weekend, and there ain't nothing that brings out all cultural divisions quite like an election, am I right? So I wanna say two things about this. So buckle up. First, Christians have a responsibility to think biblically about the issues at stake in an election. A lot of these questions are not simply matters of personal preference, or just Republican versus Democrat. A lot of these are profoundly moral questions about the sanctity of human life, the nature of marriage and family, what a man is, or what a woman is, and if there's a difference, religious liberty, justice, and the kind of society that we're leaving to our children. Those things matter.

They matter a lot. We cannot shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, you know, politics don't matter 'cause Jesus is king." Don't you dare say that. Jesus being king is precisely why we should care about justice and truth and the well-being of our neighbors. So I urge every one of you, in the strongest of terms, to vote, not because our ultimate hope is in an election. It is not, but because loving your neighbor means caring about the society that your neighbor has to live in. Here's the second thing. Even when we agree on biblical moral principles, we won't always agree on the best political strategies for implementing them. I'm not saying they're not wiser choices. Listen, you can make some profoundly bad decisions in an election. I'm just saying that people from different backgrounds sometimes prioritize different political questions, which brings us back to Antioch. These Christians came from different backgrounds. They had different customs, different histories, and different perspectives. They had different thoughts about what you should do in the Roman Empire, but they had something that transcended all of that Jesus. The church at Antioch was not unified because they shared a culture. They were united because they shared Christ. Their differences were real, but their Savior was greater. Summit, I want us to be a church where our convictions are deeply biblical, our consciences are informed by the Word of God and our commitment to Jesus Christ is greater than any cultural identity. There, I've pointed out four things that God loved about the church at Antioch.

Four things that resulted in God's hand being on them. They were number one, a church full of ordinary people on an extraordinary mission. They were number two, a church committed to growing both deep and wide. They were number three, a church that turned grace into generosity, and they were number four, a church where Christ mattered more than culture. Y'all, there is so much more that I can pull out of this passage, but I'm going to stop right there. These were the reasons and the evidence that the Lord's hand was on them. My question, Summit, is he with us? Does Jesus love being a part of the church here? One more thing, I want you to look at the result of God's hand being on them. I've already had you in chapter 13, so just look at verse two, watch this. "While they were worshiping the Lord in fasting, the Holy Spirit said, 'Set apart from me, Barnabas and Paul, Saul, for the work that of which I have called them, been after fasting and praying, they laid their hands on them, and they sent them off to carry the gospel to Europe, a trip that would ultimately lead to you and I being saved." I almost made multiplication my fifth point, but I think it's actually the result of the other four. See, when God's hand was on this church, the result was they multiplied. Dayton Hartman, who is one of our Summit collab pastors who planted Redeemer church up in Rocky Mountain, he said something this past week at our collab conference that really struck me. He said this. He said, "In the biological world, something is not mature until it can reproduce. Maturity is smart by an organism's ability to reproduce, but even though the church is a living organism, we don't apply that standard to it." Why? Spiritual maturation is demonstrated not by the accumulation of information, it is demonstrated by your abilities and multiplication. Think about that.

How do you define? How do you define spiritual maturity? Is it about how much Bible you know? By how consistently you come to church? Those things matter. They're important, but there's another question, a more important one, and that is who are you multiplying into? Who is there that you can point to and say, "Yeah, that person is here because I invited him. I share Christ with him. I prayed for that person. I helped them take their next step toward Jesus. Is that happening with you?" God never puts his hand on a church summit, never puts his hand on a church, just to bless that church. And he never puts his hand on a believer, just to bless that believer. He puts his hand on us to bless the world through us. So as I close, let me encourage you with something I saw firsthand over the last few weeks. I mentioned visiting our new church planting hub over in Southeast Asia. While I was there, I connected with several summit members whose lives are a picture of what multiplication looks like in our context. First, there was Jordan. Jordan was an executive recruiter in Durham who moved to Dubai to launch a redemptive recruiting business there in the United Arab Emirates. His wife, Tina, is a pediatrician. She's at the only pediatric hospital in the entire United Arab Emirates where she just recently got promoted to lead their residency program. Jordan serves as an elder at our church plant there, and he leads our faith and work network in Dubai.

They are using their careers to advance the mission of God. Second person, Peter. Peter I've already told you about, campus pastor here at Summit, he had a comfortable thriving ministry, but God called him and his wife, Grace, and their kids to leave that behind and move overseas. He went through our collaborative church planting residency, then he moved his family to Southeast Asia to lead Garden City Church over there. They've already planted two churches and they're now helping launch our first overseas collaborative church planting hub. Peter tells me that it's the hardest thing he has ever done, but it's also the most rewarding. Third, Bailey and Madison have changed their names for security reasons, but these were for two summit. They learned that there was this thing we'd started through the church over there called Kingdom Refugee Center. It's a ministry that serves refugee children in the region. They learned that they needed teachers and staff over there, so they had degrees from UNC and math and communication, and that made them a perfect fit for these positions, so they went. Now they are not only serving refugee children over there, they're helping launch the young adult ministry at Garden City Church. Some of you know who these people are. They're crowd members number three, four, and five that I told you about at the beginning of the sermon. Those, them, ordinary believers whose names most of the world will never know. But whose lives God is using to change eternity. They were sitting here, just like you.

Now they're out there multiplying. That's what a healthy church looks like. Something you should be next. If God is stirring something in you on this, even a little bit, you're like, "Something's going on." I want you to stop by the next steps area at your campus. There's one at every campus. I want you to talk to your sending coordinator because they will be there at every campus. Whether it's a short-term trip, going on a short-term trip, or supporting a missionary, or exploring a long-term calling, then they will help you take the next step. Some of this is exactly what you're giving supports, but you're going to hear about more in the coming weeks. Some of it 25 years ago, 25 years ago, this January, I could never have imagined what God was going to do through this church. We've baptized more than 11,000 people in those 25 years. We have planted churches. We have sent out missionaries all over the world. And when I look back on all of it, I know one thing for absolute certain. We didn't do this. The hand of the Lord was on us. And so my prayer is that 25 years from now, if Jesus hadn't returned yet, the 25 years from now, people will look back on what God did through summit

in these next two decades, and they'll say the same thing. Not what an extraordinary pastor. I mean, 25 years from now, I'm going to be 58 years old. And that's ancient, right? So nobody's going to be talking about the pastor then. People aren't even going to say what an extraordinary church. No, they're going to say what an extraordinary God, the hand of the Lord was upon them. Can I leave you to ponder these four things for just a moment and just listen to the Holy Spirit? I don't even say what to do with it, right? What's He telling you to do? To give in an extraordinary way this next year? Put yourself forward to go, reach out and share Christ with the neighbor. I'm going to invite our worship leaders up at every campus. They're going to give you just a few moments, just a few moments to listen to the Holy Spirit. I would encourage you to take a glance at these, snap a picture of them if you want to, then just bow your head and spend a few moments in prayer before they come to lead us, to lead us in response together. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music)