Latest / Sermons | FBC Boerne / Recharge | The Global Church: Christians of Rome

Transcript

Recharge | The Global Church: Christians of Rome · Sermons | FBC Boerne

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good evening.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's good to see you all again.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't know me, I'm Chad.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the missions pastor here.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I was out the last few weeks and Jason took care of you guys, I've heard.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: So uh a little bit.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're gonna jump in tonight into a little bit different couple weeks here.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna we're gonna move from the New Testament narrative about what God was doing in the early church, and we're gonna spend a few weeks looking at some examples of some church history of people who are important and some things that they did along the way.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: You might remember that we're looking at the global church and how God has been calling the nations from the very beginning of time to Himself.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: We we started a long time ago, several weeks ago, looking at how God even called uh Adam and Eve to be fruitful, multiplied, to fill the earth.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And even from there you get this idea that God's vision for the ideal is that one day there will be an earth full of people that reflect his glory.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: An earth full of people who are seeking to honor and bring glory to the Father who made them and created them.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: And as we go and went through the Old Testament looking at these different scriptures, and then we stopped and looked at stuff in the New Testament.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Last week, I think Jason was talking about the Ephesus work, what God did in Ephesus, and how and how it just over overwhelmingly uh impacted a city.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was one of the few places in the New Testament where we see uh an immersive experience where so many people in the city are impacted.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in Acts 19 says it tells us that every Jew and Greek that lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, if you ask mystiologists and they they they look back and try to think about all the demographics, they guess that there was around 10 million people living in the province of Asia at that time.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes you ask the question: how can 10 million people hear the gospel in roughly two years in one region of the world?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Today we call that place Turkey, by the way.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not Southeast Asia like we think of Asia, it's Asia Minor.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the country of Turkey today, I was there just last week, is uh 63 million Turks and only 8,000 known believers.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Think about the numbers there.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about a tiny portion of people that know the gospel within their population, that know the heart of God.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so, how can you even think about a verse that says, all the Jews and Greeks in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord, except that God was doing something unique, that the people who heard the gospel took it wherever they went and shared it with whoever they saw.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because Paul didn't preach to 10 million people in two years.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: But the people of God immersed throughout the region, and Ephesus, the city of Ephesus, was powerfully impacted by it.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's places where Paul talks about that exact thing, but uh, before we jump into that, I want to tell you there's a beautiful verse in set in Daniel chapter 2 that says this.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: It says, Praised be to the name of God forever and ever.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Wisdom and power are his.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: He, who's he?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's God, right?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: God, look at this.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: He changes times and season, he deposes kings and raises up others.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you, as we talk about God's plan and his movement throughout history, we have to acknowledge that he is the one that's in charge.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And he's never not on his throne.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: He's always in charge.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: We we can be confident that the God that called us, that loves us, that saves us, he's not gonna forget us.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Even though sometimes the circumstances around us may be may make us and tempt us to wonder if he's listening.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: So as you get to the end of this Acts, the the that we were talking about last week, Acts chapter 19, later it ends in verse 20, chapter 28.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: I want to show you a graph, and this picture is what the what the church, the spread of the church looks like around the end of the first century.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so what you see here is a map of the Mediterranean Sea, and the number one and the two on your far right is the movement of the gospel from Jerusalem all the way up to Antioch.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then you see there's a bubble that goes over across the island of Cyprus.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then you see number three is the area of Galatia that represents Paul's first missionary journey.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you look at four, it's Paul's second journey.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: He ends up in Thessalonica and down there in Corinth and that number five.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then his third journey, Paul spends almost all of his time in Asia there in Ephesus.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then at the end of his time in Ephesus, he sends a group of people to Rome who plant the church in Rome without him.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so that number seven circle is focused on that church planting movement that happened in Italy in Rome underneath Priscilla and Aquila.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at uh at uh um Romans chapter 15, Paul writes about, he writes to those people in Rome, and this is what he says to them.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to this.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is towards the end of Paul's life.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's chapter 15, verse 17.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Paul says this, therefore I glory in Christ Jesus in my service to God.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I've said and done.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: He said, by the powers of signs and wonders through the Spirit of God, so that from Jerusalem, which is all the way down by number one, okay?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: He says, From Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, Illyricum is just across the water from Italy, all the way to the top, 2,500 miles.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what that word, what that means.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Paul says, From Jerusalem to Illyricum, I fully proclaim the gospel of Christ.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: He said, It's always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so I would not build on someone else's foundation.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if you skip down to verse 23, he says this, but now there is no longer any more place for me to work in these regions.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Can you think about what that means?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Guys, have you shared the gospel in your neighborhood?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Would you be bold, so bold to say that there's no longer any house in my neighborhood where I have yet to share the gospel?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's no longer any room in Saddlehorn.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've gone through the whole thing.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, I need to go somewhere else.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: So Paul's saying, from Jerusalem to Illyricum, I can't find any place where the gospel's not known, so I want to go through Rome on my way to Spain.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Paul's saying here.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I want you to see this picture because in the in the short 15-year window that Paul has done these missionary journeys, the gospel has exploded throughout the North Mediterranean Sea.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: You see that?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so now we're gonna jump ahead.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's at this point significant persecution uh impacts the church, and there's a lot of crazy reasons why.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: But the biggest is that the gospel is spreading so quickly among the Roman Empire that it's a threat to the Roman emperors.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, think about the power dynamics at play here.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: How much power would you need to have for the work of the gospel among you to be a threat to the very political leaders of our country?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: You think about why in the world Christianity would be a threat to the Roman Emperor Nero?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Why would he feel the need to arrest Paul and Peter and put them to death on the same day?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Why would he be so threatened by these two guys who are representing a God from a little place like Jerusalem inside the great and massive empire of Rome?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Why would that be threatening?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what happens is the gospel begins to move and multiply so rapidly among the population that the emperors feel threatened by this movement.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the historians say that the movement wasn't among the powerful, but it was among the poor, among the servants.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: They said, even among those women.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: They said, we can't stop it because it goes beyond power structures.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's not sectioned out to one class or one group or one ethnicity.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's just moving throughout the empire, and they can't stop it.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the thing the threat is because the Roman emperors believe that they're gods and they require worship from the people, and they have to do sacrifices to the Roman emperors as a part of their worship to the Roman gods.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And these Christians are refusing to worship the emperor cult, and it's making the emperors so mad that they begin to persecute them in heavily ways.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, first off, you hear about the persecution of Nero.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you've never studied it, it's a terrible thing.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: He was hanging Christians on poles and lighting them on fire and lighting the city with it is a horrible thing.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: But it was relatively small numbers, some hundreds, maybe a thousand.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: But a few years later, another guy named Domitian decided he needed to eradicate Christianity, and they start killing Christians on much larger numbers.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so Christians begin to flee from the cities and end up in places like we visited last week in this uh in Turkey, this place called Cappadocia.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And Cappadocia is a place of limestone, and they dug holes into the limestone and lived in these caves because they could hide away from the Roman, uh, the Roman Empire at the time.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're gonna jump all the way to the third century.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: So uh about 303 AD, there's another terrible emperor named Diocletian.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Say Diocletian.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you want a name for your kids, don't call them that one.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Diocletian decided that this Christianity has to be stamped out.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And his persecution is called in history the Great Persecution.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Some estimates are as high as 25,000 Christians are killed in just a few years throughout the Roman Empire.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he tells all of the leaders throughout the Roman Empire that you need to eradicate the Christians.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: So they kill some, they drive many out of their homes, they take their businesses away, and Christians flee.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: They lose everything, they're terrified.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then look what happens.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And in 311, a new emperor named Galerius issues what's called the Edict of Toleration.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: And what it does is it makes it possible for Christians to live out their faith openly without any chance of persecution.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: So within just eight years, that goes from the great persecution and all these Christians dying to the first protections that were given to them in 311.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in 312, there's this big battle, and one of the there's four emperors who are in different parts of the world, and they begin to fight with each other.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: They want to consolidate power, and one of them was named Constantine.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Have you heard about this guy?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so Constantine is on the brink of battle, and he's about to fight with his other guy named Maximilian or Maximus or Maximilius.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: I can't, no, I'm kidding, it's here.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just done.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Max Entius is his name.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And on the on the eve of battle, he has a vision of a cross over the sun, and he has a vision during his dream that night that Jesus said to him, in the dream, conquer by this sign.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: So he wakes up the next morning and paints crosses on all of his soldiers' shields, and they win the battle.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this guy, Constantine, says that they won the battle by the Christian God Jesus.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then the whole segment of Christianity changes almost overnight.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: The edict of toleration makes it possible for them to be believers without having to flee.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: But this changes because now the emperor of Rome says that the God of the Christians delivered him, and then 40 years after his death, they actually make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a whole lot in history.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you read this or if you want to study it, you find out that there's a lot of different competing opinions on what happened here.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Did Constantine really have a vision?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Did he really become a Christian?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Did he really follow Jesus?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really, really messy.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because he refused to be baptized until his deathbed so he could continue to sin.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: So he calls himself a believer and he honestly does a lot of things that elevates the Christian people.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And he calls together the Council of Nicaea, where they argue about whether Jesus was fully God or fully man.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And some of our greatest theological principles come out of this council.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: He presided over the council, which brings us to a warning, by the way.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: When the strongest governments on the earth intertwine themselves with spiritual power, it makes for a really messy thing that typically ends with people's great detriment.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Very few of this type of marriage between a political and spiritual system causes human thriving.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: It typically ends up with extreme corruption.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And you see some of that as you keep moving forward.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: So some people say the conversion of Constantine is the best and the worst day in Christianity.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: The best because it brought peace.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And people didn't have to worry about dying for their faith.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: What a good thing.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: But the other thing it did is it made Christianity normal.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it didn't cost you anything to be a Christian anymore.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so people were able to be popular by becoming Christian.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Could you imagine the difference between the people who before them had to risk everything for following Jesus, followed by a group of people who could who were literally empowered because they followed Jesus?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Think about the difference between people who are accepting Christ before Constantine and those who follow Jesus after Constantine.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so we look at this and we see what I want you to think about is how God has been moving from the beginning.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: He's calling the nations to himself.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: And what I want you to see is there's another slide here.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And think about that picture I showed you a little while ago of where those big circles were.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: It basically is the first half from Jerusalem to Rome.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: But by the end of the fourth century, by the end of the third century, 400 AD, basically Christianity is now in all of these places because it has encompassed the entire Roman world.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's the reports that Christianity had gotten as far as Britain and into North Africa, where some of the early church fathers like Augustine and others are writing and you're hearing all these stories about what God is doing, but it's all because the gospel has spread throughout this entire region in a relatively short time.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: So why do we why do we talk about it?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: What's the point here?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Where are we going?
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you as we close that in 380 AD, the Edict of Thessalonica, the Emperor made it possible for every person in the Empire to convert to Christianity together.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: It became the official faith of the Roman Empire.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think of that?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a good thing?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a bad thing?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a the answer is really messy.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to know.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: If we requ if we require all of you to become Christian, does that mean you all become Christian?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: What if you need to own property or sell property and you have to be a Christian to do so?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Does that mean that you're this is where you get to a point where you realize so many of us today, we live as cultural Christians.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: We grew up in it.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's a tradition.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: But in the same the same way, if we don't choose to follow Jesus and reflect him in the way that we live, we may be Christians in name only.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so this what this is what leads us to what we call the dark ages of middle history, right?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: From the 600s to the 1200s, things are really difficult.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And and we could describe the situation here, but by this time, everyone in the Roman Empire is required to be Christian.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: And listen to this.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: None of them could read scripture in their own in their own tongues.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: There were a few people that could read Latin and Greek, and those were the people that could read scriptures for themselves.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And even then it wasn't combined in a nice little Bible like you have.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: So people had the name Christian, and they had some stories about this Jesus that were circulating the empire, but they didn't and couldn't read the scriptures for themselves.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: So what do you think about the depth of their understanding of who Jesus is?
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or guys, it's really recent.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's just the last couple hundred years that the scriptures have been so available that everybody can read them for themselves.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: And even now, about half of the world's languages have an accurate transition of the scriptures.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I want you to see this because God's been moving.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: He's been drawing the nations to himself, he's been working throughout history, but it hasn't come without a cost.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Many cultures and many generations suffered and continue to suffer to pursue God and their culture, their country, and their place.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Last week when we were in uh Turkey, we met with uh a missionary couple.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: The husband is from Iran, and he uh he fled Iran because he was a political dissident.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: He was he didn't like the government, and he got arrested and they threatened him, and so he left the country, and after leaving the country, he became a Christian.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And now his desperate goal is to share the gospel with the people of Iran.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: He's led his family to faith over the phone.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: They've come out, he's training them, and now God is using him to lead and be a part of leading what is called the fastest growing church in the world.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is an incredible thing, but it doesn't come without a cost.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, guys, I just want to encourage you.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: As you enjoy the peace that God's given us, as you enjoy this Christianity that you have a hold of, this Bible that you get to read day in and day out, don't take it for granted.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And also know that it's come at a cost.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Many generations have paid the price for you and I to have the freedoms to follow Jesus with our whole heart.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I encourage you.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, learn learn some of these old stories.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Next week we're gonna talk about St.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Patrick.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: He's a crazy guy.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about leprechauns or pinching anyone, definitely not about four-leaf clovers.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it'll be a great story.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully, it'll encourage you as well.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Father God, we love you.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we pray that as we look at these stories from history and we see that you've been at work since the very beginning of time, we pray that you would burden our hearts to serve you with all that we are in the time that you give us.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: We pray that we would be your hands, your feet in this world.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: God, thank you so much for First Baptist.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: We pray that you would use us for your glory in this community in Jesus' name.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Have a wonderful night.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: God bless.