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Paul, Silas and their missionary team are in the city of Philippi.
They’ve already had some evangelistic success, but in this passage, things
start to become chaotic. In this city where so many were in bondage to sin,
Paul and Silas begin to announce that in Jesus freedom has come. They not
only announce it with their words but also with their deeds, setting a pesky
slave girl free from her bondage. This poor girl who had been taken captive
by an evil spirit was set free in the name of Jesus. We see that as good news,
but those who thought they owned this girl weren’t very excited about
it. They were about to lose revenue. She was a cash business and now it was
gone. The world doesn’t like it when you start setting free what it thinks
it owns. And the words spoken by these merchants about Paul and Silas as they
are trying to get them in trouble are powerful and instructive: “These
men are throwing our city into an uproar.” They weren’t being obnoxious
about it. They were just announcing that in Jesus forgiveness and freedom
and real life had come. But to a world bent on its own destruction, that can
be upsetting news, because it means things are about to change.
Paul and Silas were upsetting Christians. It’s all through
the book of Acts. But they were upsetting Christians in the very best way.
Could that ever be said of us? The need that this text illuminates is our
need, based on our commission of Jesus, to have an impact on this world through
the faithful announcement of the Gospel in word and deed. This text causes
us to evaluate the ways in which we are “upsetting” the world to
see their need for Christ.
Jesus prayed for us: “Father, I do not pray that you take
them out of the world but that you protect them as they work in the world.”
That’s what Paul and Silas were doing. They were powerfully engaging
their world. They were upsetting things not because they were pushing a personal
agenda of confrontation. They were upsetting things because they were announcing
the truth and people were being set free! God’s answer for finding our
evangelistic effectiveness in the world is not to isolate from the world,
or to stand off and criticize the world. The Jesus-style strategy is to engage
the world redemptively.
This way of living got the first missionaries into deep trouble.
They were thrown into jail for it, but when the culture began to make things
tough for them, their response was not to retreat or to become bitter about
the society. Their response was to praise God, to embrace their plight realizing
that God can even work with a jail sentence. What do we do when our culture
begins to make things tough for us?
Our lives should be so powerful and so disconcerting to a lost
world that people are regularly asking us the jailer’s question, “What
must I do to be saved.” Then we announce the gospel: “Believe in
the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and all your household.”
(for a complete manuscript
of this sermon go to www.preachersmagazine.org and click on “Sermons”)
This sermon confronts some of the ways in which contemporary Christians imagine
what it means to make a difference in the world. Some Christians imagine that
we save the world by working to make civic systems work in ways that are advantageous
to Christians. They become vehement critics of culture and offer only a negative
voice to the dysfunction of society. Others want to completely isolate from
culture, believing that the best we can do as Christians is to survive until
Christ returns and judges the sinful world.
This text speaks to a third way—that of engaging culture
in redemptive ways. There is confrontation, but not repugnance. They are simply
announcing the gospel and receiving the consequences with the grace and peace
of Christ.
Our culture believes that a little religion kept in its place is okay. But when you start “disturbing the city” you’re out of bounds. You’re becoming an upsetting Christian. If you live authentically, you will be upsetting to the world. My pastoral questions in this sermon would be, “Are you upsetting anything? Does anybody in the world notice that you are a Christian? Is anyone ever brought under conviction about their sin because of your pure life? Is anyone ever confronted about their selfishness because you proclaim the gospel of self-sacrifice? Is the world upset at all because you are a Christian? If not, we really need to ask ourselves why.”