Grace At Work In Antioch

Movements rarely grow the way we plan them. In Acts 11, we watch grace move ahead of structure as scattered believers carry the message of Jesus into Antioch, a bustling hub where cultural lines blur and new possibilities open. What happens next is not a victory lap but a blueprint for long-term faithfulness: leaders who refuse to grasp at control, a community that chooses slow formation over quick acclaim, and generosity that binds people once divided by history and habit.

We walk through the turning points. Barnabas arrives not with a clipboard but with discernment, looking for “evidence of grace.” Instead of capturing the movement, he encourages it, then travels to Tarsus to bring Saul back to teach alongside him for a year. Their shared leadership reframes authority as service, collaboration, and trust. It’s leadership without anxiety—confident enough to multiply itself and humble enough to celebrate what God has already begun through ordinary people. Along the way, we talk about how to organize around grace, not manage it, and why that shift matters for churches, teams, and any community trying to follow the Spirit’s lead.

When a prophet warns of famine, Antioch acts—no delay, no theatrics, just clear-eyed generosity. Each gives as they are able to support believers in Judea, a stunning reversal of social boundaries that once kept these groups apart. This is where transformation becomes visible: resources stop being private possessions and start functioning as tools for shared survival and mutual care. We offer a simple practice to carry forward this posture—meet one real need this week without being asked or praised—and reflect on how communion forms us into a people who belong to Christ and therefore to one another.

If this conversation helps you rethink leadership, generosity, or the shape of community, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway so others can find it too.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage For Acts 11
• 1:40 From Jesus’ Promise To Growing Circles
• 5:30 Antioch And The Hand Of The Lord
• 9:20 Leadership Arrives Without Control
• 12:30 Barnabas Seeks Saul For The Work
• 16:00 Slow Formation And Shared Teaching
• 18:45 Prophetic Famine And Swift Generosity
• 21:20 Redefining Leadership Around Grace
• 24:00 A Simple Practice Of Shared Belonging

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to Madison Church Online. My name is Stephen Feith, lead pastor, and so thankful to be back with you today after a long extended holiday break. I do hope that you got to spend some time resting and enjoying good company with people. For nearly three years, though, at Madison Church, we're coming up on year three of walking through Luke and Acts. That's kind of volume one and two of Luke's writings. And so we've been deep diving this for a long time. And if you're newer with us and you're like, well, I'm jumping in at the end of three years, don't worry about it. If I do my job and when Kyle speaks, if he does his job, if we do our jobs well, every message will make sense for that particular day. But in this final one that we're calling the Long Way Forward, we're finishing Acts. This is it. We're gonna just run right through it here this spring. And what we're going to see is it's not a victory lap. I mean, you might think if you've never read Acts before, you we hear Jesus, we read about him in Luke and his life, death, resurrection, the birth of the church, and things up to this point, they're going, and they're going really well in some cases and not in others. But we might think, like, hey, we're about to cross the finish line. And actually, what Luke is going to kind of paint the picture of is not quite that. Victory has been accomplished through Jesus, but the work for the church is just now beginning. The Spirit has been poured out, the gospel has gone out, walls are breaking down. These are all of the events leading up to Acts chapter 11, which is where we're going today. Luke continues to show us all of the boundaries after boundaries that are falling, the gospel getting pushed further and reaching new people from Samaria to an Ethiopian official. We see Saul's conversion and Peter and Cornelius most recently. The debate really about are the Gentiles going to be included is over. There is no debate anymore. They're here, the Gentiles are here. God's spirit has moved among them, has invited them in. God has answered the question. The question for the early church now becomes not do we include them or not. The question for the early church is now what kind of community will we become now that the Gentiles are part of us? Now that they're part of the community. So today's passage doesn't center on miracles or speeches. We've come accustomed to kind of Luke doing scenes like that where it's like a speech here, a miracle there, and weaving them. Today's passage is he's shifting gears into this final run through his writings. And what we're going to see in this passage is that early church biblical leadership was not an anxious leadership. It didn't mean that they don't feel anxiety as human. Certainly they did. But what we see as a leadership team, it's shared, and they share it in one another's burdens. It's not an anxious leadership team. We see generosity isn't symbolic, and we're going to see responsibility again that is shared amongst the community. Now, as Kyle mentioned, we started this study in Acts about a year ago. And so I do want to go back a year just briefly to kind of set the scene. At the start of Acts, Jesus tells his followers what will happen. So Jesus has already been killed. He's raised from the dead. He's spending a little bit of time with his followers, and some of the last words he says is that you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere. Jerusalem, throughout Judea, and in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And from this point on, Luke, the historian, the theologian, has been showing us, his readers, how exactly that has happened, how that promise takes shape in real time. So yes, the movement begins with Jesus himself, and that's what we just celebrated over Christmas, the birth of Christ. It starts with him, but then we see Jesus as he lives his life, he picks disciples. And he has other followers, but he picks his disciples. And then from there in Acts he says, Hey, the Spirit's gonna come on you, and you're gonna go out. So then those disciples are in the upper room with some of his other followers. The spirit comes down on him, and 3,000 people are added. They're in Jerusalem, and now all of a sudden we've gone from disciples to a pretty big crowd. It's starting to expand, and it's at that point that these disciples pick some of their own helpers, people like Stephen and Philip. If you'll remember, they're picking people, and the gospel continues to spread. But then Stephen is killed. Persecution is high. And now all of a sudden everyone is scattering out of Jerusalem. And in doing so, the gospel spreads throughout Judea. In doing so, the gospel spreads throughout Samaria. And we see it going from Jesus to the twelve, to the seven that they've picked, to where we're going today. And what we're going to see is we've now moved beyond these circles. The gospel movement has expanded beyond what we can now contain. And it's going to go to, as Jesus says, to the ends of the world. Luke tells us that unnamed believers, their names don't make it. I can't tell you if it was Stephen, if it was Philip, if it was Peter, if it was John or Cornelius. It's just unnamed. They're just people going and they're having ordinary conversations and they're carrying the gospel message, this news of Jesus' life, his death, his resurrection, and what he is doing to places that they never thought that they could go. And today we find ourselves in Antioch, which in that region of the world would have been the third largest city, only behind Rome and Alexandria. So we're going into Antioch, the biggest city the gospel has gone to. And Luke describes it this way, beginning in verse 19. The believers who had been scattered during the persecution after Stephen's death traveled as far as Phoenicia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch of Syria. They preached the word of God, but only to the Jews. However, some of the believers who went to Antioch from Cyprus and Cyrene began preaching to the Gentiles about the Lord Jesus. This should sound a little familiar if you were with us for Acts 8, because Luke is almost verbatim the same thing. Stephen died, the church is scattering, and he's recapping where we've been the last few chapters. He says, remember, they're going around, but they're only talking to the Jews. And then there's this big breakthrough. Now we're outside of the Jews. Just ordinary conversations, ordinary people speaking about Jesus wherever they go. But here is a critical line. In 21, Luke says, the hand of the Lord was with them. And the reason that this is a critical line, and I use the NASB here. Your translation, if you're using one of our house Bibles, probably says the power of the Lord. But the reason I'm going with the NASB here is because the hand of the Lord that meant something to the Jewish people. Because when you read the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and they're in the wilderness, we keep reading that phrase over and over again: good days, bad days, whatever, that the hand of the Lord was on them, and that gave them confidence. We're not doing it. You know, God is still with us no matter how good, bad, or ugly things are. What Luke is saying is not that God is like passive watching the gospel go to the Gentiles. Well, I guess that's okay. That sounds like something I'd be okay with. Rather, that the hand of the Lord is on these ordinary people spreading the gospel. Luke is saying that this God right here in Antioch and in Samaria and Judea, this God is that God, Yahweh from the Old Testament. The God who is doing this now is the same God who was doing that stuff then. And this God is not reluctantly blessing what's happening in Antioch as an afterthought, but that this God is the one doing the things in Antioch. God is actively driving it. We live in a world shaped by whatever comes next: established churches, leadership structures, buildings, budgets, bylaws, plans. We are trained to ask questions like who's in charge? What's the process? Is that approved or not? And who decided? Now, those instincts aren't wrong, and I believe they can be done biblically and done in wisdom, but Acts 11 reminds us that those things are not ultimate. Before leadership ever arrives in Antioch, before Peter or John or any other disciple who walked with Jesus can get out to Antioch, decisions are being made before structures were built. And the hand of the Lord is in it and with them. I think for us that's both comforting and kind of confrontational. It's comforting because the future of God's mission doesn't rest on perfection. We don't have to have a perfect plan in place to take the next step. That should make some of us feel good. Okay, a little less pressure. But it's confrontational because that means we don't get the control where we go next. The comforting part is that, oh, I don't have to control everything, but the confronting part is, well, we got to join God in what he's doing. So let's read how that church in Jerusalem does respond when they finally hear about what's going on in Antioch. They send Barnabas to Antioch, and when he arrived, he saw this evidence of God's blessing. He was filled with joy, and he encouraged the believers to stay true to the Lord. Barnabas was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit, and strong in faith. And many people were brought to the Lord. Now Barnabas is not sent to control the movement. That's not why they sent him, but rather to see the movement. What's going on in Antioch? Let's send somebody who knows what's up, what this could look like there. They did this earlier with Peter and John, right? There are things going on over here in Samaria with an Ethiopian official. We got to send some insiders over to see what's really going on. So we see this kind of, this is like a policy of sorts for the early church. Let's send somebody out there just to check and make sure everything's going on. Now, Barnabas doesn't begin by asking whether or not it's legitimate. He doesn't go with a clipboard and a pen and yes to this or no to this. Rather, when Barnabas arrives on the scene, what he is looking for is the evidence of grace. And that's what he sees. And that's what he names. Now, there's a decisive moment here for Barnabas that I don't think you get just from reading this passage. But scholars will point out, because this was happening all over the place, there'd be a movement, and some leader would come in and hijack the movement. I'm in charge. This is who I am. And this would have been a perfect opportunity for Barnabas to do that. He shows up, he was sent by the apostles, the church in Jerusalem. He's the guy. He could have leveraged himself to be the leader. The leader. Everything now runs through me. I'm consolidating the authority. He could have tightened oversight. He could have positioned himself as I'm indispensable. You need me. But instead, Luke says Barnabas encourages them to remain faithful to what they've been doing. Barnabas doesn't step in front of them. He walks alongside of them. He commits to the work being done there. And this community continues to grow. And Gentiles coming to faith in significant numbers. And at some point, encouragement is no longer enough. No longer enough. So you can imagine Barnabas shows up, great things are happening. He's encouraging them, he's walking alongside of them, he's helping them however he can, but he gets to the point where he's like, what we are doing is not enough to sustain what God is doing, to continue to do what God is doing. So Barnabas has an idea, and he goes to Tarsus to look for Saul. And when he finds Saul, he brings him back to Antioch. Now I think a little context will help here. The last time we saw Saul was in chapter 9 or in chapter 11, and over 10 years have passed. Again, that might not be something you pick up in on the reading, but a decade has passed since we last heard from Saul. What has Saul been doing in Tarsus? We don't know. You can speculate. There's pretty good biographies on Paul out there, but we don't know what he's doing. But Barnabas says, you know what? We need help, and I know just the guy for it. And he travels a hundred miles to go look around Tarsus. Hey, we're Saul, we're Saul, we're Saul, following Saul. Saul, I need you to come back to Antioch. They go back to Antioch, and it's here that they teach together. They teach together. And this is the kind of biblical leadership that we hope to practice at Madison Church. Leadership that's not anxious or threatened by one another. A leadership that's not territorial. A collaborative leadership that comes to the table and says, look what God is doing. How can we join in now? Leadership that's confident enough to multiply itself for the sake of the community, not about me, but about us. It's about long-term faithfulness. So Saul and Barnabas, they teach for a year in Antioch, and it's slow work. It's relational work. It's not dramatic. This church in Antioch isn't the fastest growing church. It's not the biggest church. They're not getting put on the cover of ancient magazines by any means. But it's slow, faithful, good work that continues to grow and reproduce and multiply this gospel. As Luke brings this section to a close, he introduces what might seem like a small detail, but it reveals the depth in which this community has become in Antioch. Prophets from Jerusalem come to Antioch, and one of them foretells of a famine that will hit the land soon. The church in Antioch, they don't panic, they don't spiritualize the warning, they don't delay action, they don't wait for instructions. Well, what do you want us to do? This church that joined what God was doing before anyone from Jerusalem ever showed up says, Well, we know what we have to do. And we read in verse 29 the believers of Antioch decided to send relief to the brothers and sisters in Judea, everyone giving as much as they could. This they did, entrusting their gifts to Barnabas and Saul to take it to the elders of the church in Jerusalem. Luke tells us they decided to send relief. It wasn't a tax for being a Christian or being a part of a church, it wasn't pressure, not uniform giving. It was a discerning responsibility. We're in this together. And what affects my brother over here or my sister right here affects me too. This belonging that we have in Christian community, it comes with a responsibility. Not one I have to coerce you into, but one that says, I want everyone to be included, which means I have to include myself in the responsibility. I have to participate in this shared life. Theologically, this is crucial. This is a quote from Richard Foster that I shared, I think about a month, a month and a half ago. But Foster says in the Christian community, generosity is not an occasional act, it's a way of life. It's not just something we do on a Sunday morning. Oh, we're gonna give. Luke shows us again and again and again, and you might be thinking, like, man, like generosity comes up a lot when we're in Luke and Acts. And you're right, that's one of Luke's topics that he talks about all the time. It is generosity because he's showing us that for followers of Jesus, generosity is not an optional virtue. It's not something for super Christians or those who are really committed. It's one of the primary ways that the Spirit forms a shared life. This is what it looks like when people stop seeing resources as private possessions and start seeing them as tools for mutual survival. What happens to my brother there affects me here. What happens to my sister here affects me. For first century believers, this was radical because the Gentiles in Antioch were not even allowed to sit at a table or enter the home of a Jewish person. They were excluded, discriminated against, hated. And it's that group, those on the outside, who decide let's get our resources together to help them. Mind blowing, paradigm shifting. This is what the gospel does. The gospel creates a bond stronger than ethnicity, geography, and even history. This is what grace produces when it has time to mature within us. The gospel doesn't just reconcile individuals to God, it reconciles us with one another. And it creates a community in which we are responsible for one another's well-being. Not just me and my spouse or my significant other, not just me and my family, not just me and my friends, but me and those people on the other side of town gathered right now that I don't know who they are. And those gathering on the other side of the world in Jesus' name. We belong together, the same community, not abstractly, not symbolically, but materially and at a cost. And that's the final picture Acts 11 leaves us with. What does the early church look like right now? It's a church formed by grace, a church led without anxiety, named Christians by those who are just observing them from the outside, quietly committed and faithfully serving one another. This isn't a spectacular part of the story. Again, there's not some big teaching or sermon. There's not some big miracle that blows your mind. But Luke is clear, this is what faithfulness looks like as we start the long way forward. Across this passage, one principle keeps surfacing and resurfacing. When God's grace moves ahead of us, the church, Christian, follower of Jesus, we are not called to control it. We're called to organize around it. We organize around what God Is doing. Grace that moves ahead of us does not eliminate the need for leadership structures or discipline, but it redefines them. Barnabas still goes to Antioch and teaches. He goes and he gets Saul, and Saul still teaches. There's still a shared leadership occurring in Antioch. The church is organized, but it's very different than how we tend to organize it today. We say, well, God's working here, and we set up some pretty permanent shops around where God is working today. But God is always moving. And so we have to have like a nomadic theology of church. We have to have deep roots within ourselves, but we have to be ready to go when the Spirit of God starts moving. Again, and this is oftentimes when we look at church history, whether it's the last hundred years, the last 400 years, or the last 2,000 years, this is where the church begins to make mistakes. Is when we say, right here is where God is, and this is where God will always be, and God will never move. And then the insinuation that God wait, He's doing this thing over in Antioch, imagine the church in Jerusalem being like, that's just not possible. Sorry. The policy says we don't have budget for that. You know, no, we take it to the committee and we'll see if we can even bring it up to the other committee. You know, no, there's none of that. Most of us don't struggle to believe that God is working, but what we do struggle with is trusting God when things start changing. And oftentimes God working means things are going to change. And we have been programmed so hard in our society to be against that. We want clarity before commitment. What exactly am I getting into? We want control before cooperation. Well, I'll do that, but only if this is guaranteed. We want assurances before generosity. But the early church is seen in Acts 11 challenges those instincts, not by asking us to be heroic. You don't have to be a hero, but by calling us to be faithful. Will you be faithful? So a simple shared practice for us this week. As I was thinking, we get to the culmination of this passage. What do we do? And I think that as a Christian community, Madison Church, what if each and every single one of us, we take the responsibility, shared belonging to meet one concrete need without being asked, without publicizing it, and without waiting for permission. That could be reaching out to someone you know who is struggling and just offering help instead of advice. That's a big one, guys. Help instead of advice. It might look like covering a meal, a bill, or a shift at work quietly. It might look like giving time, attention, or presence when it's easier or more convenient to just stay distant, to just stay in the background. It might look like praying for someone and actually praying for someone and showing up and following up with that prayer. Hey, I actually was praying for you. I didn't just say I was going to, and I'm wondering how that's going now. The point this week is not the size of the action, but it's the collective community effort. Because if we all do this, if we all do this, there's going to be a ripple effect. The point is posture. It's seeing a need, it's recognizing it's belonging, it's responding. Needs would be carried. Isolation, I think, would actually shrink. We start this week doing it once, being really intentional, but as a people, we continue this posture of how can I meet a tangible need this week? Isolation would literally shrink. Trust would tangibly grow. And Madison Church would feel less like a place we attend on Sunday and a community we belong to. And that's the mission, that's the goal. And so as we come to communion today, as a church, as we do every single week, we are reminded of the same pattern we see in Acts 11. And that is that Christ does not wait for us to get right with him before he gives himself to us. Grace is offered first. A body is broken, a cup poured out, not a reward for you being mature, but by means in which we are formed. Communion reminds us that we do not belong to ourselves, but rather we belong to Christ. And because of that, because we belong to Christ, we belong to one another. We come as individuals, but we receive communion as a people, equal at the table, dependent on grace, and sustained by what we did not earn.