Turning the World Upside Down

When Paul, it's from Acts 17, 1-9.

When Paul and his companions had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue.

As was his custom, Paul went into the synagogue and on three Sabbath days, he reasoned with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead.

This Jesus, I am proclaiming to you, is the Messiah, he said.

Some of the Jews were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a large number of God-fearing Greeks and quite a few prominent women.

But other Jews were jealous.

So they rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob and started a riot in the city.

They rushed to Jason's house in search of Paul and Silas in order to bring them out to the crowd.

But when they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some other believers before the city officials shouting, these men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here.

And Jason has welcomed them into his house.

They are all defying Caesar's decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.

When they heard this, the crowd and the city officials were thrown into turmoil.

Then they made Jason and the others post bond and let them go.

Disruption.

ICM is a disruptor.

Disruption is a word sometimes used in business about someone who doesn't play by the old rules.

They introduce something so new, so bold, that the entire system has to change.

Uber were a disruptor, weren't they?

Who were some of the other disruptors that come to mind?

Netflix were a disruptor.

Certainly, the smartphone disrupted everything.

But it's not just technology.

Truth is a disruptor.

Amen?

Truth changes our foundation.

It disrupts and overturns and transforms, and it's exactly what happened in Acts 17.

I think it was a great point you make.

Exactly what we read there has been happening in the Philippines through ICM.

In Thessalonica, Paul and Silas walk into town.

They don't have any budget.

They don't have any building, no social power, just the gospel.

And they preach the gospel, and in within days, the city is in uproar.

It's a genuine disruption, which is interesting.

The gospel does that, doesn't it?

When the gospel is truly preached, when it's truly accepted, it changes lives.

And exactly as says in verse 6, they have turned the world upside down.

History tells us that when the message of the gospel is preached with clarity and conviction and courage, empowered by the Spirit, idols topple and whole communities are changed.

So that's what we will see in Acts 17.

Often we look at Acts 17 at Mars Hill and that part at the end, but this is a really interesting portion of it.

So we're in the last message.

Thank you to the Lord, we've made it.

We always say, Lord willing, and we came to the end today of our series in Acts.

We looked at the Spirit being given in the beginning at Pentecost, and there was required patience in the church.

And they learned that the scope of God's plan was so much bigger than what they thought.

And then Mike preached on boldness from Acts 4.

Does anyone remember Mike's message?

It was a cracking message.

If you haven't seen it, please check it out online and the four Rs of stepping out in boldness.

Last week, we looked at Acts 10, and we were learning about how God does not show favoritism.

It's extraordinary, the inclusivity of his desire to reach the whole world with the love of Christ.

And so now we're in Acts 17, and we'll see that the Gospel is a message that confronts.

It is a confronting message, and it produces a movement that grows.

Sometimes we can think in history and periods of history that it's not something that grows, it shrinks, but that's not true.

The movement that is produced by the Gospel certainly grows and it unites, and it also incites typically resistance.

And so, we'll see these three aspects in the text.

Let me read again the first three verses.

It's a message that confronts.

When Paul and his companions had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue.

As was his custom, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days, how long does that mean he was there doing this?

Three weeks.

Three Sabbath days, he reasoned with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead.

Then this Jesus, I am proclaiming to you, is the Messiah.

Thessalonica is a large city, probably the most important city in Macedonia.

Macedonia is, if you go to Athens and sort of head up the eastern coast of what we imagine, Greece, heading north, you'll come to Macedonia.

And Thessalonica was a major city there.

It was known as a free city.

It was a free city because it was so devoted to Rome.

They were allowed many liberties that other cities didn't have because they had demonstrated that they were just deeply loyal to the empire.

As a free city, you can just imagine how it would be deeply disruptive to have a message come in to that place that there's another king.

It's not Caesar, it's actually King Jesus.

And they were also strongly religious as Greeks with polytheism, and the Roman gods, the Greek version was Zeus, Dionysus, Artemis.

Obviously, we hear of Artemis of the Ephesians, but they loved their gods.

They were polytheists, and they also, many of them were followers of the imperial cult, which believed that Caesar was god and he was worshipped.

So, Paul preaching a gospel to say there's one god, and his son, Jesus, walked on earth as god man.

That he is lord of all, it's going to cause a stir, and it did.

The gospel is a message that confronts.

So, what does it confront?

It confronts assumptions.

It confronts false foundations.

We discovered that we have built on the scaffold of our truth, with maybe an understanding of how life works.

That's just false.

Can I ask you, who would agree that typically, if you were using a pump to blow up a tire at the garage station, or a pump to blow up a ball, you would typically push it down, you'd stick it on the valve, and then push it down like that.

Is that what you would do?

That's my assumption.

So I went downstairs and found the pump that was in the tool shed.

And I, because the trolleys are terrible when they're flat, the wheels, the pump up wheels, moving around ten chairs, it's probably a bit dangerous.

So I thought, I'll get on to that.

And I couldn't pump them up.

It's too hard for me.

And I'm like, what's going wrong with it?

This is a broke, pumps are always broken.

This is my false assumption.

And so then Maxi is, he's often working around the place.

And I saw him this week and I said, hey, the pump downstairs is broken.

Could you see if there's some way to pump up the wheels?

Or could we change them for hard wheels on the trolleys that move the chairs?

And he said, no, it's fine.

I think he said, I bought that from Bunnings.

It's fine.

I said, no, it doesn't work.

So we went down, brought it up, and I go to put it on.

He said, no, it doesn't attach like that.

It attaches upwards.

I'm like, what pump attaches upwards?

They always attach downwards.

But there's just a classic example, isn't it, of a false assumption.

My world says, this is the way things are.

Imagine when you get the truth of what life is all about wrong.

Of course, it has everlasting impact.

Paul confronts the deep assumptions and the false foundations of his hearers, both Jewish and Greek.

So what are the Jews holding on to that's false, that needs to be corrected?

Well, they're thinking that their God, Yahweh, is going to finally send a political liberator, a Messiah who would set them free from the tyrannical rule of Rome.

But Paul came and declared a crucified Messiah, who sets people free through death and dying to oneself and faith in him as he died and rose again.

The gospel turns assumptions upside down.

What about for the Greeks?

The Greeks had this understanding that there were many gods, and that had to be confronted that there is one God and his son Jesus and the Holy Spirit, one God, three in person.

But the Greeks also loved their wisdom.

They were, and you can, got to give it to them between, what was it, 470 BC and 320 BC, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, some of the greatest minds that ever lived.

Out of that incredible pool of wisdom and philosophical thought in Athens, came things like democracy.

So much we understand about society, Western society, came from the teachings of Athens.

So they thought they were pretty sorted in knowledge.

Jesus came in the gospel, and they were told, Jesus is Lord, not Caesar, and he's the way to truth and knowledge.

The gospel confronts, and it confronts us.

It's confronting.

The gospel will confront our assumptions.

The assumption that many people still have, I guess, in this room, that if you're good enough, God will accept you.

If you have a loved one who dies, I don't know how many times I've heard from good Christians, they were a good person.

I think they'll be okay.

That's an assumption that is confronted by the gospel.

No one's good enough, only Christ, and faith in Christ brings us to a place of eternal salvation.

The assumption that many of us can have in today's society that truth is relative.

You make up your own truth.

It's something that's confronted by the gospel.

What about personal freedom without accountability?

That there's no moral accountability for our lives in an eternal way.

The gospel confronts that, or the comfort of religious routine without real surrender.

The gospel says, no, Jesus is both savior and lord.

He's asking for everything.

He wants your whole life.

Have you found that the gospel, and when I say gospel, I'm talking about the good news of Jesus, so it's Jesus through the gospel is confronting?

Like, it just confronts.

You think you've got things sorted, and then it comes at you again from another angle, and the spirit says, I want you to lay down that aspect.

There's an idol that you're worshiping in a high place.

Give that over.

So we should expect to be confronted by the gospel, and I think as we share it in mission, we should expect to be confronting.

It's a confronting message, and it's a movement that grows.

Verse 4, some of the Jews were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a large number of God-fearing Greeks and quite a few prominent women.

Some of them were persuaded.

This is not just an intellectual change of mind.

It's like repentance, a full transformation of allegiance.

Sometimes we think that the gospel in the first century was like a fringe sect.

Now, it was in some ways, but you can see as you read Acts and the New Testament, it took hold, didn't it?

It wasn't just fringe.

It turned communities upside down.

It was inclusive, yet exclusive, and quite radical in that way.

The world was turned upside down in many ways, but one of the ways was through the unifying effect of the gospel.

It was so unique.

Men and women were separated in so many ways in the first century.

It brought them together.

Some prominent women, we're told.

Others were poor.

It brought classes together with different backgrounds.

Belief systems were melded.

Paul wrote, There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.

It's radical, this gospel that we believe, isn't it?

It unites people that were uneducated with educated, and old and young and rich and poor and conservative and progressive, the indigenous and the immigrant.

It's incredible.

And yet, we can often think we're on a losing side in the West.

It's not a movement that's growing.

Did you know, I only learnt this in the last few weeks, there's a revival in Gen Z happening right now in the UK.

Who sort of knew that?

People seeing that on the news?

It's fascinating, in the UK, church attendance among 18 to 24 year olds, that's part of Gen Z, has quadrupled in the six years from 2018 to 2024, from 4% to 16%.

The surge is in a group that you probably wouldn't expect, young men.

Their attendance to church has grown from 4% to 21% in the same period.

They are seeing dreams and visions consistently.

There's a radical move of the Spirit.

They're coming from all nations because that's what the Spirit does.

Amen?

He causes the kingdom to grow.

And in a way that is wonderful as it unites people together, a movement that grows that is unexpected in its capacity to unite, even for those who hate each other.

That's the power of this gospel that turns the world upside down, turns communities upside down.

Many of us, I'm looking around, were old enough, I'm sure, to watch with horror in 1994 the unfolding genocide in Rwanda.

Remember that?

A million people were killed in a hundred days.

And we, at the church I used to be at, we had a bit of a connection with them over many years through a church and a partnership of mission.

And so we were sort of quite up close to the process of the kingdom coming, of the gospel confronting and growing and uniting.

And we would hear stories, extraordinary stories of unity and forgiveness, where, and this was just told so many times, like a Hutu woman who had their parents killed by a guy in the church, a Tutsi, and serving communion to one another.

And not just on a surface level, to somehow gain access to heaven, at a deep level because they had been transformed both by the grace of God, that upturns society.

It's incredible, isn't it, the gospel?

What it does, it doesn't just grow in revival times, but it grows through evangelism and new people come into Christ, but it unites in a wonderful and different way.

It's, to be honest, it's too radical for words, isn't it?

It's just too radical for words, what the gospel can do to people's hearts.

And isn't that why we're excited to give to mission?

Well, we've been here on this corner, by God's grace, for over 120 years, and our job is week after week, like Paul went to the synagogue on Lord's Day, just keep proclaiming the gospel in word and deed.

And it's also our privilege to partner with people who have been called by God to go further than across the street, but even around the world.

And so, when we are raising money, $60,000 this year, it's so important for us to put that in context.

It's because we believe with all our hearts that this gospel needs to go to the whole world, amen?

That's why we dig deep.

Some of us, we can't give this year, we've given in the past.

Others, God is saying, yeah, let's give, because we support groups like ICN, which I've said before, is one of the top missions groups in the world for just being effective and making an impact by God's grace.

This gospel is a message that confronts, it's a movement that unites and grows, and the gospel produces always a resistance, a predictable resistance that rises.

There were other Jews who were jealous as the gospel made an impact.

They rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob, and started a riot in the city.

They rushed to Jason's house in search of Paul and Silas in order to bring them out to the crowd.

But when they didn't find them, they dragged Jason and some other believers before the city officials.

If you just become a Christian, it's like, whoa, this is real.

And they shouted, these men have caused trouble all over the world.

They've now come here.

That's not a bad rap to get told in front of you, is it?

Like, this gospel is not sleepy.

It's not just some sort of impotent thing over in the corner.

It's, no, this changes people's lives and impacts communities.

Now it's come here.

Verse 7, Jason has welcomed them into his house.

They're all defying Caesar's decree, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.

When they heard this, the crowd and the city officials were thrown into turmoil, then they made Jason and others post bond and let them go.

Turning the world upside down creates a reaction.

Is it doing it in our experience of following Jesus?

Stirred up a mob.

Why?

Because the gospel just confronts and changes people.

It was outlawed in the Roman Empire, wasn't it?

It was just too much of a disruption.

They loved the Pax Romana.

They loved the piece of Rome, the Romans.

And they're like, no, this gospel, it's got to be stopped.

And so the Christians, they faced so much marginalisation and misrepresentation in the early years.

The gospel is beautiful, but it's also dangerous.

In the second and third centuries, the Roman Empire, you might have read of this or heard about it, but they ruthlessly persecuted Christians.

It was terrible.

They threw them to lions, burned them as living torches, imprisoned them, publicly mocked them, all because they refused to say, Caesar is Lord.

Instead, they said, Jesus is Lord.

And of course, the Romans thought they could crush this church.

But as Mike talked about in the Middle East, when you try to crush the church, what happens?

Tertullian's words from many, many centuries ago come true.

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

Amen.

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

God's kingdom grows in the midst of resistance.

Every time a person even lost their life, that blood became literally something that was the fuel in the soil for a new work of God to be planted.

The gospel turns the world upside down.

What's it doing for you?

What's the gospel and Jesus through his gospel doing for you right now in this season of your life?

Because the gospel confronts.

It disrupts.

And when it disrupts, are you resisting or surrendering?

Has anyone found that the disruption is not always welcome?

It's like, really?

If I just turn a blind eye, I think, Lord Holy Spirit, you will go away.

And he keeps coming back.

Because God loves us too much to not let us understand that certain idols in our life need to be surrendered.

When Jesus enters a life, a city, a culture, he doesn't ask to blend in.

He wants to take over.

He wants to take over completely.

He topples idols, unsettles routines, dismantles false securities.

So, in Thessalonica, the Gospel caused such a stir that people accused the Christians of turning the world upside down.

I wonder, can we believe for that?

I think often as I get older, one of the greatest challenges I have in the church is just to believe it's as radical as I used to believe it was.

Because over time, it sort of feels more and more normal, and I look at my own life, and I think, it looks pretty normal.

But then there are these snippets of just hope, aren't there?

Where God does amazing things, like Ben finding a phone down in the local park, and then being led to someone who comes to youth and then makes a commitment to follow Jesus and gets baptized on Sunday night of Easter, Resurrection Sunday.

All the time, God is at work, amen.

He's up to something.

He's up to something.

May Mission Month has been a celebration of some of the things that we get to do, but a lot of what other people are doing around the world, and we just get this privileged, distant position to love them, partner with them, pray for them.

So good.

I don't know, can't remember if Leanne mentioned, but Phil's back.

So good to have you back, Phil.

Welcome back.

Give him a clap.

Phil's been over in Vienna working for about three months with the TCM.

We heard that, watched the video last week.

Can we give it a solid crack to raise $60,000?

Can we give that a good go like we always do?

Wouldn't it be great if next week we can say, well, we've raised that because we so believe in the privilege of partnering in gospel work with people around the world.

And it's just a practical reality that involves money.

So we're committed to these extraordinary partners who take the message as we do in our context to the world, and it's a confronting message.

It requires courage.

But it's a movement that unites and grows as the kingdom comes in power, amen?

And that's what's exciting.

Jesus said, pray, your kingdom come.

And it does.

It's coming.

And yet there is a resistance that rises, and we shouldn't be just surprised about that.

So I wonder, could we stand?

And our small band is going to come and lead us.

Did you know Stephanie's not led before in the morning worship space?

And so I appreciate the two of you guys making it happen so beautifully before.

Let's pray together.

In Jesus' name, may we disrupt the world through His grace for His glory.

In Jesus' name, may we disrupt for the one who turns the world upside down to set it right.

May we walk with courage.

May we speak with grace.

May we live with the kind of love that unsettles darkness and awakens hope.

May the Spirit make us bold.

May the Gospel keep us grounded in the kingdom of God, be made visible in your life and mine, and through the ministry of this church, by the grace of God.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.

I know what people said.

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