Teaching Summary: What Now? (Acts) Antioch

Acts 11

There’s an old novel called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and in it a tree grows up behind a tenement building, in a vacant lot full of ash and broken glass. It has no business growing there, and yet every year it grows taller than the year before. That tree is what the kingdom of heaven looks like. God’s rule and reign is breaking through the surface of our world in places nobody expected, and heaven isn’t waiting for life to end before it begins. Heaven is here, now, because Jesus brought it with him. His death and resurrection started something that is still happening today, and it will keep happening until the day he returns and makes all things new. He’s doing this work through ordinary people like you, people given the same Spirit that was alive in him, sent on the same mission he started.

We pick up the story in Acts 11, and the first thing to notice is what’s missing. No apostles, no commission, no meeting in Jerusalem, no vote taken. Just ordinary men from Cyprus and Cyrene, refugees really, running for their lives after Stephen was killed, and as they run they start telling Greeks about Jesus. Nobody told them to. Nobody trained them for it. We don’t even know their names. What we do know is that the Lord’s hand was with them. Cyprus and Cyrene aren’t Jerusalem. They’re the edges of the map, not the center where the temple stood and the apostles taught. That’s not a small detail, because the kingdom doesn’t usually break through first at the center, where everyone’s watching and everyone already agrees on what counts as normal. It breaks through at the edges, among people who were never fully at the center to begin with. Most of us live at the center. We know the right language, we’ve settled into what counts as a normal Christian life, and centers have a way of protecting themselves. They get good at recognizing who’s in and who’s out. Jesus wasn’t from the center, and he hasn’t called you to the center either.

Think back to the beginning, when God put the first humans in a garden that was already alive and told them to work it and take care of it. That was our vocation from the start, before sin and death ever entered the story. We were made to notice what’s already growing and give it what it needs. That’s exactly what happens in Antioch. Nobody forced anything to grow there. A group of scattered, unnamed people paid attention to what God was already doing among unexpected people in an unexpected place, and they put their hands to it.

When word reached Jerusalem, they sent Barnabas to check it out, and he could have gone in with concerns about doctrine and order, about whether this was even allowed. Instead he shows up and sees the grace of God, and he’s glad. Barnabas himself was from Cyprus, the same place some of those unnamed men had come from, and the one Jerusalem sent to inspect this movement turns out to already know what it is to live far from the center. He didn’t plant what was growing in Antioch. He simply watered it, encouraging these new believers to stay true to the Lord, not to Jerusalem, not to himself. Then he went and got Saul, because a movement this alive needed more hands to cultivate it, not more control to manage it. They stayed a whole year, and God caused it to grow.

Look at the fruit that produced. The church in Antioch was mostly Gentile, and the believers in Judea were Jewish, two groups who one chapter earlier couldn’t even eat at the same table. Now Gentile believers are pooling money to feed Jewish believers they’ve never met. The gospel didn’t just cross a boundary in Antioch, it turned into shared wallets reaching all the way back to Judea. And it’s here that the disciples were first called Christians, not because of ethnicity or certificate, but because of what was actually growing in them.

So here’s what this looks like for you this week.

First, look for signs of growth. The Lord’s hand was already on Antioch before Barnabas ever noticed it, so open your eyes to what’s already ripe around you: a coworker talking about something real, a marriage holding on through a hard season, a friend trying to get sober, a neighbor who needs help. The kingdom rarely announces itself as heaven. It usually looks like a normal Tuesday.

Second, support what’s growing. Ask what the thing in front of you actually needs, not what’s easiest for you to give. Barnabas means son of encouragement, and one of the simplest ways to encourage someone is just to tell them what you see: I see God working in you.

Third, stay. If Antioch needed a whole year before anyone thought about moving on, that should tell you something about your own patience. Leaving too early is its own kind of neglect. Stay until the Spirit tells you it’s time.

Maybe you’re wondering if God actually uses people like you. You’re not educated in this stuff, or you’re a tradesman, or you’re retired, or you’re young, or you don’t say much. You’re the only kind of person God uses, because there is no other kind. The kingdom of heaven is breaking through in your general vicinity right now. Jesus didn’t just rescue you from something, he restored you to something: the very work you were made for in the beginning. You are a cultivator. A greenhouse maker. And there is no greater joy in all of life than being set free and restored to a life of meaning and purpose.