Paul, Silas, and their missionary team were 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. 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. To a word bent on it’s own destruction,
however, that can be upsetting news—it means things are about to change.
Paul and Silas were upsetting Christians. It’s all through
the Book of Acts. 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 the full 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—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 OK. 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 his or
her sin because of your pure life? Is anyone ever confronted about his or
her 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. ”
