Obedience Without A Roadmap

What if the clearest next step is simply to go—without a map, a timeline, or a promise of applause? We take you to Antioch, where an unglamorous team of teachers and prophets fasts, prays, and hears the Spirit say just seven disruptive words: “Set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work.” No itinerary. No metrics. Just obedience. That choice launches a shift from reaction to persecution toward intentional mission, and it challenges our modern reflex to measure faithfulness by momentum.

As the journey reaches Cyprus, we meet Bar-Jesus, a polished insider who speaks fluent faith while quietly bending truth around power. Luke’s insight cuts deep: resistance to God’s work often comes as subtle redirection, not open hostility. Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, confronts with clarity, and the result isn’t spectacle for its own sake. The governor believes not because of a dramatic sign, but because he is astonished at the teaching about the Lord. Signs may expose deception; teaching forms faith that lasts. Along the way, we explore why posture beats strategy, why availability matters more than outcomes, and how discernment helps us navigate half-truths delivered with confidence.

We don’t tie a bow on the story. Luke refuses tidy endings, and that’s the point. The earliest church was formed in the discomfort of the unfinished—trusting God when clarity was scarce and applause absent. That pattern still holds: ordinary conversations about Jesus, generosity without recognition, staying put in hard places, and praying more when the Spirit speaks. Communion reframes our expectations too: the cross looked like failure before it became victory. Trust comes before understanding, and the “best” God intends may pass through pain before it bears fruit. If your story feels unresolved, you are not off course. You might be right where the Spirit leads.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Learning Faith Without Guarantees
• 2:10 From Defensive To Mission-Focused Sending
• 4:30 Antioch’s Diverse, Prayerful Leadership
• 6:00 Set Apart Without Details
• 8:20 Posture Over Strategy
• 11:00 Availability Over Outcomes
• 13:20 Bar-Jesus And Subtle Resistance
• 16:00 Spirit-Led Confrontation And Mercy
• 18:00 Teaching That Forms Lasting Faith
• 20:00 Embracing Unfinished Endings
• 22:00 Choosing Obedience Over Results
• 24:00 Ordinary Practices Of Faithfulness
• 26:00 Communion And The Painful Best

Transcript

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Welcome to Madison Church Online. I'm Stephen Faith Lee Pastor. And up until this point in our series in Acts, we've watched the church learn a lot of things. Generosity without guarantees. They just stepped out and they were doing things. We've seen power that doesn't respond or behave predictably. And again and again, what Luke shows us is that God can't be managed. God can't be controlled. God can't be secured. We can't demand certainty from God. We've just seen that Luke has put that away. There are no secret formulas. There's no certain way to pray, anything like that. But the conflicting thing, I think, for a lot of us is that most of us believe to some degree, okay? To some degree, even if it's a little bit, most of us believe that if we're faithful long enough, payday's coming. Like eventually we're gonna cross that finish line. Something good is gonna happen, right? It just has to. God will eventually make the path more straightforward than it is. But Luke relentlessly disagrees. And not just as a theologian, but as a historian who's writing about things that actually occurred. He's not a fictional writer making up a story of the early church. He's going through and investigating what actually occurred. Many of us know what the tension feels like. We live faithfully, but yet there are no clear answers. God, what is the purpose for my life? God, what do you want me to do next? God, I'm really seeking your will. And no answers. We know what it's like to live faithfully without a timeline. God, this year will be better, right? Oh, it doesn't look that way. Three weeks into it. Like, it can't get worse. You want to bet? Without guarantees on how things will turn out. There's this idea, I think, that's kind of permeated within the church and our church culture that if I'm doing the right things, I'm gonna be blessed. I'm gonna be healthy or I'm gonna have wealth and whatever it might be, but things are gonna go good. And we just don't see that in Scripture and specifically in Acts. And so as we get today, we get into today, we read how for the first time in the story, the church is going to intentionally send people out. If you remember, Jesus says, I'm gonna send you out, but every sending that's happened so far has been because of persecution. Stephen's killed, we scatter, we go out. And we kind of respond to whatever persecution is occurring to us. But today we're going to see that the church goes from kind of a defensive mode to offense. There's no more hiding. We're brought out into the limelight now. And how will we respond? By going on the offense. We're going forward. The story we're reading insists that God's mission doesn't move forward through control or clarity, but through obedience that trust the Holy Spirit. Even when those outcomes remain uncertain. Before we ever get to Cyprus, which is the town we're going to be in today, before we meet governors and false prophets and moments of confrontation, Luke wants us to see what kind of church sends people like this and what type of road that obedience actually leads us into. So if you remember where we left off last week, Barnabas and Saul, they returned to Antioch. They're going to Jerusalem to drop off money. There was a famine in the land. They delivered the aid in need. And they don't pause and celebrate. There's no champagne bottles coming uncorked. And we don't see about a big party, but rather that they rejoined the community that they had spent the last year or so with. And what they returned to matters because remember, Antioch was the third largest city in this region of the world. And if you'll remember, like up to this point, we had Peter and James and John, and then you had Stephen and Philip, and we get to Antioch, the biggest city, and Luke doesn't have names to give us. The gospel has gone that far where now it's like it's impossible for Luke to track down who were these leaders. They weren't celebrities, they weren't the apostles, they weren't carefully curated experts. And now Luke says they were prophets and they were teachers who were leading the church in Antioch. And for some of you who have been around Madison Church and you're a member, think apest here. Think those living into the functions. And as this new church is getting started, Luke goes out of his way to say, hey, not all of them are necessarily represented here, but what is represented within this church in Antioch are the teachers and the prophets. And this is a leadership community that is ethnically diverse, it is socially varied, it is spiritually grounded. Not a church built around control of government, governance, or charisma of a one leader who can draw a crowd, but around shared life, shared discernment, and as I was talking about, shared responsibility. And Luke tells us that they're worshiping the Lord and they're fasting. And we read in verse 2 one day, as these men were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, Appoint Barnabas and Saul for the special work I have called them to. That's all the Spirit says. No destination, no timeline, no explanation, just direction. Set them apart. And Luke continues in verse 3. So after more fasting and prayers, okay, so they hear from the Lord, and the first thing isn't develop the plan. Okay, we got a sense of where we're going next. The next thing is let's pray and fast a little bit more. We don't need to rush into this at all. The men laid their hands on them and sent them on their way. They returned to prayer and fasting. This is what obedience looks like without a roadmap. They are fully aware of how difficult what comes next is going to be. And as such, they pray some more and they fast some more. One of the clearest voices on spiritual formation, Richard Foster, says this about Christianity. He says, faith is not a matter of grasping information. Often that's what we think, right, with discipleship. We're like, I'm just not growing anymore. I don't feel close to God anymore. And so often the solution is like, well, why don't you just learn more Greek? Why don't you just learn more Hebrew? As if information leads to the kind of transformation God wants to have occur in your life. But Foster says, but of living into obedience without full understanding. It's not a matter of how much Greek you know or how much New Testament culture you know, or if you know what Paxa romana means, or any of those things. But it's about obedience, even when I don't know what's coming next, as none of us in the room do. That's precisely what was occurring 2,000 years ago in Antioch. And Luke is showing us that the church's posture mattered more than its strategy. Our posture matters more than our strategy. As individual Christians, as Madison Church, as a Christian community, our posture matters more than the strategy. God entrusts his mission not to communities obsessed with certainty. If he wanted to do that, he probably would have gone back to Jerusalem. But instead, what we see here is that communities formed by worship and prayer and trust, those who are willing to obey without coming next, God taps them. Luke begins the next movement with a sentence that sounds redundant because it is redundant, but it's not intended to be. That's what you're gonna read. Slow travel, walking, sailboats. They faced uncertain reception. People who didn't know them, people who didn't like them, people who did want them there, to deliver messages that were highly contested. Faithfulness did not guarantee nor provide applause. It often invited risk. And what Luke is emphasizing is not the outcome. That's not the focus of this passage. It's not the outcome, but the availability. Barnabas and Saul show up. They speak when invited, they move when led. And now I think the the problem might be, or potential issue, is that we're like, well, of course, this is Barnabas and this is Paul. They are like kind of some spiritual giants. We've all heard of them. As a matter of fact, we don't just call Paul Paul, we call him Saint Paul, right? And so obviously what they're doing, like that's that's for a special group. But may I remind you, they were nobody at this point in Acts. That means the reason you know about them now is because of what they did, because of what we're reading. They didn't know I'm gonna be Paul and Saint Paul, and it's gonna be this, and people are gonna be talking about me for 2,000 years. I really believe that they did not have any idea that that was actually going to happen. As a matter of fact, we read in Paul's writings that he thinks Jesus is gonna come and end the world, kind of, just like, hey, heaven and earth combined and it's over. Paul is very surprised every time he writes that Jesus hasn't come back yet. So I know for a fact that Paul didn't expect us to be talking about him 2,000 years ago, but this is what it required first. It wasn't the guarantee that someday you're gonna be a household name in Christianity. It was just Saul and Barnabas, spirit-initiated and spirit-led. And we have to contrast that with us because we assume oftentimes spirit-led work should feel clear, should feel affirmed, and it should be measurable. And we look for momentum as proof of faithfulness. If things are going well, momentum is picking up, and the attendance is growing and the money is coming in. This is a very church-world example, but if the attendance is growing and the money is coming in, we must have God's faithfulness, right? Not necessarily. That's not what we're learning here. Spirit-led does not mean predictable. Spirit-led means vulnerable and vulnerability and trusting that obedience itself is the act of faith, even when the outcomes don't come. Or when those outcomes are unresolved, when there is no momentum, and still choosing to be faithful day in and day out. Now we get into this part of the story now. So Paul and Barnabas are sent and they're going out. And now they come to an island in which Luke introduces us to a new figure, and he does it with very careful detail. We're introduced to a man named Bar Jesus. Okay, Bar Jesus, which literally means son of Jesus. Fascinating character that I think you like Googling sometime and just seeing what other people in history have to say about him. But son of Jesus or son of salvation, he's Jewish, he's educated, and he's spiritually fluent. And Luke tells us that he has positioned himself closely with political power. Okay. Luke also says he's a false prophet. Let me point this out about false prophets. It's easy, I think, to read a story like this and be like, oh yeah, he's a false prophet. Of course he is. Well, we're kind of told that. But mind you, before Acts is written, what does a false prophet look like? Bar Jesus looks familiar and he speaks the same language of faith as them. He's Jewish. He can tell you the same stories of Yahweh and the wilderness and all of that. Bar Jesus understands Scripture. He can tell you a Bible verse. You guys could have a good theological argument, and he's good. He knows how religious authority works. But not only that, unlike Paul and Barnabas, who don't have any kind of connection to worldly influence, bar Jesus does. He's close to the governor. And he resists the gospel not by attacking it publicly, not by arguing out loud or persecuting the messengers, but by quietly turning the governor away. He's just a quiet voice. He says, Don't believe them. Read this passage. Read that passage. Well, don't you know this is what God's done before? Don't believe them. And you can see just how confusing it would have been then, because it's just as confusing today. Don't miss the critical detail in Luke's writing. Resistance to God's work often appears not as hostility, but as subtle redirection. And I think you see this every time you open up TikTok or Instagram or Facebook. When you turn on the news or you listen to the podcast, they're saying this is absolutely what Jesus wants. This is absolutely what God wants. Well, what about this verse? Well, what about that verse? We come into it as the disciples do. We have to use discernment. How well do we know Jesus? And can we peel back the layers? It's not always that big hostility out there. It's not always somebody screaming, God is dead. Oftentimes it's these little half-truths. Some of it even sounds like wisdom. A lot of it sounds really good. The most dangerous resistance to the gospel does not always come from outside of the faith, but those claiming to be close in proximity to it. The church responds that Saul, again, that Luke is now going to call Paul going forward, is filled with the Holy Spirit. And Paul confronts Bar Jesus directly. Doesn't result in any sort of persuasion. It's 100% judgment. And we read in verse 10 Paul says, You son of the devil, full of every sort of deceit and fraud, and enemy of all that is good. Will you never stop perverting the true ways of the Lord? Now might read that, like Paul lost his temper, but he didn't. Luke tells us he's full of the spirit. This isn't him blowing off steam, venting personal frustration that he keeps running into the wall, and this guy's the one standing there, and I'm just gonna blow up finally. This wasn't it. This was the same spirit who initiated, the same spirit who led, is the same spirit who fills Paul now to call out our Jesus. And this language echoes the prophets of Israel. It's the same kind of speech used when God exposes deception, unmasks false authority, and interrupts those who are distorting the truth for their own advantage. This moment reminds us that mission does not move forward through mercy alone or through confrontation alone, but through a spirit, the Holy Spirit of God who knows when each is required. The same spirit who says mercy is required here, but confrontation is required there. We read later that blindness falls on Bar Jesus and it's just temporary. This isn't God's punishment. It's not God's retribution for Bar Jesus being way out there. But rather, even here, this false prophet, this person who's standing in the way of the mission that the Spirit is leading, it's a chance for Bar Jesus to repent and change. You see, the same man who is blinding others is now forced into darkness and blindness himself. He's dependent on other people to lead him, just as he was leading other people. For you and me, I think we have to let go of any assumptions that obedience will feel gentle, affirming, or safe. Not always the case. Spirit-led faithfulness will disrupt our comfort. And oftentimes it will disrupt our lives. But as we see in verse 12, Bar Jesus remains unchanged. Even this miracle of going blind and then seeing again doesn't convert him. The confrontation doesn't reform him. There's no resolution to the story of Bar Jesus. But what's interesting is that governor, the one that Bar Jesus was in his ear. That governor, he believes. The highest ranking official in Cyprus, the island's highest ranking official, believes. This man who represents imperial authority, order, and power when it comes to faith in Jesus Christ. Luke describes him as an intelligent man. He's not a gullible official impressed by some sort of spectacle of Bar Jesus going blind and seeing again. As a matter of fact, Luke goes out of his way to say that's not why he changed. The governor's used to seeing. I mean, Bar Jesus is kind of a sorcerer type of person. They're used to seeing tricks and smoke and mirrors. That's not why the governor changes his mind. Luke says that the governor believes because he was astonished at the teaching about the Lord. Remember, it was prophets and teachers. And it was the teachers who led to the governor changing. Signs may confront resistance and power may expose deception, but teaching forms faith. And a faith that lasts. Luke then ends the scene pretty abruptly without any sort of closure or resolution. And for those living in the first time, maybe reading Luke or picking up acts for the first time and reading it, that wouldn't have been terribly uncomfortable for them. They were used to endings not being tied up really nice. They were used to unknown and uncertainty. But let's be honest, for us today, it feels very uncomfortable. We want a resolution to the things we're seeing. Situations at work, circumstances at home. What we see, we talked about nationally and even regionally in Minneapolis things. We want a resolution. We want the story to end so we can move on to whatever's next. And fingers crossed, whatever's next is going to be better than whatever we're going through right now. And so this story ends in a way that I hope you can embrace how uncomfortable it is for you and for me. That perhaps that closure isn't going to happen today. And it's not meant to be discouraging. But let's be honest, we do. We live in a world that expects clarity, outcomes, and we want feedback, and we measure faithfulness by effectiveness. And Luke is continuously dismantling those assumptions, not just in chapter 13 or chapter 12, but this whole story. And it's not failure, it's formation. Coming to grips with these things that we've been talking about in Acts, it doesn't mean that you've been failing. I don't want you to be discouraged. But this is part of the spiritual formation that takes place in our lives. God's mission advances, not just in Antioch 2,000 years ago, but in Madison today, in 2026, through faithful obedience, not cute stories in which everyone lives happily ever after. And we see this when we widen the lens of the New Testament. This is a pattern that's everywhere. Jesus sends his disciples out without certainty. And he teaches that faithfulness looks like ski seeds being scattered all over the place on different types of ground. And Jesus says, you know, some of the seeds they just die. They get picked away by birds, and some of them go in, but they're choked out by thorns. But every now and then one of them makes it. Faithfulness. We're gonna do a lot of stuff. And Jesus doesn't promise it's all gonna be great. Every now and then it's gonna happen. Jesus himself lived that way, being obedient all the way to the death on a cross. That is not a happily ever after story if you were living that weekend. It looks really bad. The resurrection comes later, but obedience came first. The early church learned this pattern. Luke is not inventing a pattern or theology of unfinished faithfulness, he's just tracing it. The historian In Luke. So before we rush past this story, and Kyle picks up the story next week with Paul going out, but let's ask the simple question what would it look like if we today lived this way? This community that is Madison Church. We can't control what the other 200 churches in Madison or Dane County are doing or in Wisconsin. But what if this community were more committed to obedience than outcomes? Where the filter wasn't numbers, but it was what is God saying and what are we doing about it? What if we were more attentive to the spirit than results? When things are good or when they're bad, we say, but are we doing what God wanted us to do? What if we were more willing to move faithfully even when the story goes unfinished? There are no silver bullets to discipleship or spiritual formation, but what we see in Acts over and over again are these basic things that the early church, these Christians practiced that got them through all of these things. And it's ordinary people having quiet, honest conversations about Jesus, not knowing how they'll be received. You can do that at home, you can do that at work, you can do that anywhere. Honest, little, quiet conversations. It looks like generosity that goes unrecognized. I think I've said that the last three weeks. And again, this is a pattern of the early church. It might look like staying present in hard places instead of chasing easier ones. Just because you're going through a difficult time doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. And just because you have conflict in a relationship doesn't mean you throw that relationship away. Sometimes being faithful means hanging in there and hanging tough and working past the conflict. Staying faithful through the hard times. It looks like trusting God is at work even when we can't measure it yet, when we can't feel God, and at those times when we're not even sure God is there anymore. It's the kind of church that doesn't always look impressive. It doesn't always look impressive. But it's one that is deeply and spiritually formed. And that brings us to the communion table as we do every week. We remember that Jesus himself was sent into the world without much certainty. But he was faithful, he was obedient, and he trusted the Father even when the outcome looked like loss on the cross. From the outside, again, the cross, his death, the embarrassing ways that he is tortured and abused and made fun of. It all looks like failure, all looks like an unfinished story. But God was doing something more profound than anyone could see. Came across this quote by C.S. Lewis this week, and I hate it because of how uncomfortable and honest it is. Lewis writes, we Christians, we're not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us. You don't sit here, you're not doubting that. God will do the best for us. But you do get to a point in your faith whereas Lewis says, we're wondering how painful the best will turn out to be. God will do the best for me. This I know. How bad is it gonna suck? Not the results. The results we know. We're like, we'll be faithful to God and it'll be worth it because his will is the best one, his kingdom is the kingdom I want to live on. But for those of us who have been doing this a little bit, we know that when we pray for God's will to be done, oh boy, this is gonna hurt. How much? Communion reminds us that God's work often looks incomplete before it bears fruit. The faithfulness sometimes feels like waiting, and that trust always comes before understanding. And so as we come to the table today, let's not celebrate the finished stories in our lives, the accomplishments, the certificates. Let's sit in the discomfort of the unfinished stories in our own lives. What are you waiting for? How bad does this season hurt? What kind of anger is flaming up inside of you? How deep is the despair or the darkness that you've carried with you today? That's how we approach communion today. We approach it as real people, serve a real God who meets us where we're at.