Acts 21.1-14 - Mrs. Incredible and Christ's Suffering

Podcast Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)

Good morning, or good afternoon, or good evening, and welcome back to Tabernacle Talk. We are in Acts 21 today, Acts 21, and we are on the way back to Jerusalem with the Apostle Paul. And he is returning from his third missionary journey.

He's trying to make it in time for Pentecost. And in yesterday's episode, we were with the elders, the pastors of the church in Ephesus, and they were all in the city of Miletus because Paul didn't want to go to Ephesus itself.

That was going to be too long of a trip for when he wanted to get back to Jerusalem by. And so he called the pastors there and said, hey guys, here's what's going on. Here's what I did.

Here's what I modeled for you. Here's what I'm calling you to do and for you to model going into the future for your church. And I had a great time with that.

I put into action the thing that we learned about in the episode previous, which was Eudicus. And Paul spoke till midnight and then till dawn. And Eudicus fell asleep and died.

And thank God, raised him from the dead. I gave a live action of that with an extra long Tabernacle Talk. That's not what I'm going to do every time.

But yesterday, with it being such an important passage, I thought it would take some time and kind of dive into those thoughts and the implications that we find from that passage among other places talking about pastors.

After we tore ourselves away from them, so this is now Luke saying after we tore ourselves away from the Ephesian elders, because they were sad that Paul was leaving and that he had told them, I know that most of you will never see me again because

of what the Holy Spirit was communicating with Paul through prophets and through his own spirit saying, hey, when you go back to Jerusalem, it's going to go down this time. So Luke here, Acts 21 and verse 1.

After we tore ourselves away from them, we set sail straight for Cause, the next day to Rhodes and from there to Patera. Finding the ship crossing over to Phoenicia, we boarded and set sail.

After we sighted Cyprus, passing to the south of it, we sailed on to Syria and arrived at Tyre since the ship was to unload its cargo there. We sought out the disciples and stayed there seven days.

Through the Spirit, they told Paul not to go to Jerusalem. When our time had come to an end, we left to continue our journey while all of them, with their wives and children, accompanied us out of the city.

After kneeling down on the beach to pray, we said farewell to one another. And boarded the ship and they returned home.

When we completed our voyage from Tyre, we reached Ptolemais where we greeted the brothers and sisters and stayed with them for a day.

The next day, we left and came to Caesarea, where we entered the house of Philip the Evangelist, who was one of the seven. So the seven, that's those initial seven deacons for the church. When we last left Philip, he was heading up to Caesarea.

We talked about how he was going from city to city all the way up. And it's cool to find him still here. He's in a house now, a permanent dwelling, that he is preaching the gospel in Caesarea.

It says he's an evangelist. I don't know maybe what your background with the word evangelist is.

Growing up, for me, it was an individual that went church to church, preaching messages, maybe having kind of revival services that people would invite friends or neighbors or family members to. And they would say, hey, you should come tonight.

We've got a special speaker. And the speaker would, Lord willing, communicate the gospel. And maybe they would do some other things there at the church.

But an itinerant preacher was the thought I had growing up.

An evangelist, as mentioned in Scripture, is more so one that communicates the gospel, that they preach the gospel, that they win people to Christ, and that they have a particular gifting in it.

It's something that all of us as Christians are called to do, to evangelize, to share the gospel with the world.

But there are some people that God has gifted both in communication and in relationship to be able to lead people into relationship with Christ, to well articulate the gospel and to connect with people on calling them to faith in Christ.

Philip was one of these. It says, we went into the house of Philip the evangelist, who was one of the seven, the seven initial deacons, and we stayed with him. This man had four virgin daughters who prophesied.

So these were, here, virgin daughters. This isn't necessarily saying like, hey, this is the ideal for people. You should never marry.

Here, the thought is, these are young women, maybe in their teens, maybe even, possibly even children. It would be more likely that it would be teens, those that have not yet reached marriageable age.

And they prophesied that they told people what God said and that could have been in a sense that was like the Old Testament prophets many times where they would say, okay, God has said this in His Word.

And so we are saying this to you now and declaring what God has already said. It could have been a foretelling. Foretelling, so saying, hey, this is what God has told us is going to happen in the future.

This is what's going to happen with you. This is the consequences, the results of your actions if you continue down this path. It doesn't specify what kind of prophecy, both kinds of prophecy are mentioned in scripture.

So sometimes when someone prophesies, they're telling about a future event. Sometimes when someone is prophesying, they're just saying, this is what God has said in the past.

So those two categories are foretelling, telling the future and forth telling. God has said this, so I am echoing it to you. So they're daughters who prophesy.

And I think depending on what your maybe denominational background is, maybe you've never heard a woman say anything that God has said. I know for myself, I had some teachers growing up that were women.

I've been able to, even via things like online or Facebook or YouTube, been able to be blessed by great women who know the Word of God, who communicate it well, who prophesy in the sense of saying what God has said.

I think one of those is Jackie Hill Perry, and she has a great book, Gay Girl, Good God, that talks about her kind of exit from a life of immersing herself in a homosexual lifestyle and relationships and how God saved her.

And now she has just a wonderful ministry of reaching people and communicating the truth of God's Word in a very accessible manner.

And she has another book, Holier Than Thou, that is wonderful, would really encourage you to read that book, Holier Than Thou.

So here, these four virgin daughters who prophesied, we should not silence the mouth of those that God has to be able to do things.

I can think back all the way in Acts 2, the sermon at Pentecost, where Peter mentions the passage from Joel that says, hey, your young women will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams. He's saying all of creation is now getting in on this.

I think of the quote from that great book of scripture, The Incredibles. Where the heroine of the movie, Mrs. Incredible, very hard to remember, Mrs.

Incredible says, leave the saving the world to the men? I don't think so. And that's kind of what I think of here with these daughters that prophesied that they said this isn't just going to be dad's thing, this is going to be our thing personally.

We're all in. We're going to communicate the gospel.

And just because perhaps you're not a pastor or just because you're not even something like a small group teacher or a Sunday school teacher doesn't mean that you can't share God's word with people, that you can't text a friend and say, hey, read

this verse today, it made me think of you. I'm praying for you. Let me know if there's anything that I can do for you. It doesn't stop you from being able to maybe have a Bible study in your home.

It doesn't stop you from doing any number of things in communicating the gospel. It is not just for the deacons and the evangelists and the pastors. It's for teen girls as well, that they would proclaim the gospel.

They'd say what God said with their life. Verse number 10, after we had been there for several days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea.

He came to us, took Paul's belts, tied his own feet and hands and said, this is what the Holy Spirit says. In this way, the Jews in Jerusalem will bind the man who owns the spelt and deliver him over to the Gentiles.

When we heard this, both we and the local people pleaded with him not to go up to Jerusalem. Then Paul replied, what are you doing weeping and breaking my heart?

For I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus. Since he would not be persuaded, we said no more, except the Lord's will be done.

Here Paul is, and we saw it a few times earlier in the chapter as well, he's being warned by people. The Holy Spirit's telling Paul, okay, you are going to be captured here when you go down to Jerusalem.

But we've also read that the Holy Spirit was the one that was driving Paul towards Jerusalem. But here he's cluing him in, he's saying, you are going to undergo persecution. You are going to be trapped, be thrown into prison again.

I want you to know that as you're going forward. But in obedience to the Spirit and in a desire to, I'm certain, knowing what I know even from the Book of Philippians, a desire to be like Jesus, he says, it's fine if I'm turned over to the Gentiles.

My Lord died in Jerusalem, I don't mind dying in Jerusalem. Like, I'm just living out Jesus' story. I'm doing what Jesus would do.

And Jesus didn't run away from going to Jerusalem.

I think of the one verse that talks about the fact that Jesus, as he was heading towards that Holy Week of when he would go to Jerusalem and suffer and die for sin, rise again, it says he set his face toward Jerusalem. It's that intent direction.

And here Paul's doing the same thing. And the response that the believers there have is much like the response that Jesus had, where they say the Lord's will be done.

It's just like with Jesus as he was going into his time of being captured and his trial and his beatings and then his crucifixion, where he says, not my will, but your will be done. And here the believers are kind of echoing that.

The story of Jesus is continuing to play out more and more as time goes on.

And it's such an incredible thing that we're able to enter into that story, that as we suffer, it is Jesus continuing to suffer on our behalf, that just like his suffering brings life, he makes it so that our suffering isn't meaningless, isn't

hopeless, but that there's a purpose that we can encourage people, that we can have grace and find his peace and comfort in those times, and then be able to testify to other people, hey, why are you not distraught and just angry and furious? Why

aren't you all those things in your time of trial? It's because I have Jesus and this is how he suffers. And so this is how I'm going to suffer as a result. God doesn't promise easy roads, but he promises us that he will always be with us.

So whatever trial that you might be in this week, if it's something small, if it's something huge, know that God is with you.

And just like we can learn from Philip's four daughters that prophesied, share the gospel, preach God's word to whoever's around you, continue to share his words and his ministry, his story, share Jesus's life with those around you.

Hope this would be an encouragement to you today and can't wait to dive in to the rest of Chapter 21 tomorrow. Thank you.