LESSONS FROM ACTS 15:36-41 (PART 1)
Some years back, Bill and Gloria Gaither wrote a song entitled ‘Feeling at home.’ The last stanza of that song has stuck with me for a long time and has helped shape my Christian identity. The verse in question says:
“Feeling at home in the presence of Jesus Needed and happy and free
Just feeling at home, Feeling at home
Feeling accepted, loved, and forgiven A part of His warm family
Just feeling at home, I’m feeling at home.”
If I were to choose a portion of this stanza that blesses me the most, it would be the line that says, “Feeling accepted, Loved, and forgiven A part of His warm Family.” Sometimes we get too caught up in doing religion such that we forget that religion is primarily about who you belong to before what you believe. Knowing and understanding who it is you belong to, helps shape not only what you believe but also how you practice it.
One story in the scriptures that magnifies the importance of belonging is that of Paul and Barnabas in Acts 15:36-41. Just as a reminder, Paul and Barnabas had taken a young man by the name of John Mark on their first missionary journey. It appears that the young John had been knighted under the sacred order of the coward, and so for one reason or another, he decided to abandon ship and go back home. Leading up to the second missionary journey, Barnabas suggested that they take John Mark with them, but Paul would not be convinced of it. The wound from the first abandonment was still too fresh to ignore. Therefore the two church leaders had a nasty verbal argument.
There are several lessons that I think are worth learning from this short story, but I am going to share and focus on three. We will talk about the first lesson today, and the following two will be spaced out over the following two weeks.
Please do not hesitate to write to us with some of the lessons you have learned from this story.
A LESSON ON THE STANDARDIZATION OF CHRISTIAN IDENTITY
The first lesson I draw from this story concerns the dangers of standardizing Christian identity and practice. The truth about missions and our Christian identity is that we all have different approaches because God created us different. While Paul was all about planting churches and profound theology, Barnabas was all about people. We are not saying that Barnabas didn’t care about church planting or theology, but that people and relationships were the lenses through which he viewed ministry and what it meant to be a Christian.
It was Barnabas who first brought Paul to meet the disciples (Acts 9:27). And some years later, when the church in Antioch was growing, Barnabas went to Tarsus to call Paul to ministry (Acts 11:19-26). The church doesn’t need a thousand Pauls or Peters, but an intricately knit web of very different people. There is strength in our differences! Let us not use them to discriminate against each other.
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