Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants please Visit our website GlobalServants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: All right, if you have your Bibles one last Wednesday night turn to Acts chapter 13 this this fall series.
Let me just ask. I know I met the two chaps for here tonight from Boston. I've got some here from Mexico and elsewhere. But if this is your first one of these fall Wednesday nights, would you raise your hand so that I can just see if I need to do very much explaining? Well, not much then. Just a so the fall series has been about moving past theoretical spirit filled Christianity. What does it mean in a practical level to live the Spirit filled life. I wanted it to be a series, not a theological teaching on the person and work of the Holy Spirit, but on the Spirit filled church.
The healing presence of Christ, the sanctifying witness of Christ, the the things that God wants to be and do in us.
Now in this closing one I want to look at what does a spirit filled church look like? What does it act like? Now we dealt some weeks ago on eliminating some of the negatives. If you'll remember, I spoke on the Hebrew phrase lashon hara, evil speaking, getting gossip and wicked speaking and those kinds of things out of our minds. But this is a more positive thing.
What does God have in mind for his church? What is the church in God's mind? What does it look like?
Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers, Barnabas and Simeon, that was called Nigeria, and Lucius of Cyrene and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch and Saul.
And they ministered to the Lord and fasted. The Holy Ghost said, separate me or separate unto me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, they laid their hands on them and sent them away.
Now lay your hands on your Bible, Heavenly Father, in the next few moments I pray that your Holy Spirit will so quicken our hearts and minds, so enliven us that we may receive what you have for us this night as if there would never ever be another moment of ministry for any of us. What do you have to say tonight? Make us that hungry, that receptive, that willing to hear and receive and believe.
We believe you for it. We thank you for it.
In the wonderful name Jesus, the strong son of God.
Amen.
Have you ever gone into a grocery store and not only could you not find what you were looking for that you forgot what you were looking for?
Has anybody ever had that experience? If you have, will you raise your hand? Comfort me. Thank God.
Those of you that did not raise your hand, let me just say to you it's coming.
I wonder sometimes if the church in certain places can be like that.
People in the store, we're in the right place. We know we're there and we.
What were we looking for?
What did I come in here for?
What am I supposed to do? What is this supposed to look like?
This is a brilliant and powerful, a stark statement of God's understanding of how the church operates.
At this church, which Dr. M.G. mcLuhan used to say the church in Antioch was probably the first.
And at the church at Antioch, God. It seemed as though God had assembled the dream team, this powerful staff and people that were there. Look at the names.
Barnabas, the son of encouragement, Simeon, who was Collegia Lius of Cyrene, by the way.
I'm not going to do it tonight, but I think I can make a very solid biblical case that he is the son of the man who carried the cross for Jesus, Simon of Cyrene, that this is his son, Lucius.
And Manaen, who was raised with Herod, he was a palace brat.
And Saul, who is. We as readers know he is to become Paul the Apostle.
But even there, he is a celebrity preacher.
He's a guy with this extravagant testimony of being struck down on the road to Damascus and struck blind and being healed in the back room of a house on Straight street in Damascus and then escaping over the walls of Damascus in a basket and going to Jerusalem and being rejected by the apostolic community and sent back to Tarsus and fetched by Barnas and Barnabas and brought to be a part of this powerhouse team.
And on the outside, it seems like we would say, wow, God, what are you going to do here?
And God says, break it up.
What?
It seems to me that the one immutable reality about the church that we daren't forget is that God owns it. God caused it, God sanctified it, God runs it. And God has the right to redistribute his personnel and his resources as he wills. As he wills.
It seems to me that it.
I don't know that these people were so sanctified, holy that they weren't so unlike us.
Was there anybody in the place that said, lord, we got a great thing going here.
This is something let's don't do you want to tamper with this?
And God says, yes. See? He says, here's the thing. You forget. I'm like, see God and all now.
I have struggled with it at times in my own life where it just seemed like a thing is so good, it's working so well. Why. Why would God tamper with the. Why does he tinker with the dials?
And I think God is predisposed to that.
I think God is a God of.
That likes transforming things and changing things and messing with stuff.
You remember when you were a kid. Anybody here ever build house of cards, take playing cards? I'm in a room full of Pentecostals.
Do you know what playing cards are?
Have you ever seen your wicked Baptist friends with a deck of cards stack the cards up and make a house of cards like that. And you get a couple of floors. That's about all you could do. Two, maybe three floors. And you get it all there, and it looks so cool. And then your baby sister comes and shakes the leg of the card table.
I feel like that's kind of like God, that we say, lord, look what. Look at what? I've done this great. And God says, whoa, that's wonderful. Watch this.
You can sense it throughout the Book of Acts in terms of theological or theological experiential reality. Every time the apostolic community seems to get it figured out, God blows away the card house.
They think, yes, God's got Pentecost for us. Yes, this is for Pentecost for Jews in Jerusalem. And then he sends them to Samaria, and they say, okay, God, Jews and Samaritans, we're okay with that. And he sends them to Caesarea, and it's Jews and Samaritans and Romans. Not just Romans. Roman centurion, the most hated of all Romans, short of Caesar himself. It's as though God seems to say all the time, I. I just want to keep moving you out, further, wider, deeper. Every time you settle in on your lees, I'm going to shake the house. I'm going to shake the table.
But we are so inclined to turn in on ourselves.
I've had people ask me this, and I wonder if you've ever asked it. I hope you never will again.
Why should I give money to foreign missions?
Isn't there anybody unsaved in Buford?
Isn't there anybody that has a need in Buford? Isn't there anybody in Georgia that has a need? Why should I send money to Ukraine or to Kenya?
I have felt that at times in another way, when I was doing so much overseas travel, so, so hard, we weren't running a high octane jet set ministry. It was a shoestring operation deep in the third World. I was spending sometimes a month at a time in Indian villages in the Amazon basin that were on the edge of the Stone Age and elsewhere. I can remember one time in particular flew to New York, changed planes, flew to London, changed airports, flew into Heathrow and had to change to Gatwick. Flew from Gatwick down to Kaduna, change planes in Kaduna, fly to Kano, fly from Kano to Lagos, change planes at Martalla Muhammad, fly over to Accra, then take a public transport, a bus up to Kumasi, get in a truck and take Kumasi to Bogatanga, right on the border of Burkina Faso.
Take and go in a beat up old car out to do a village crusade in some little tiny village without electricity. And we crank up a kerosene generator on a little handmade platform. And the generator is so loud that you have to have the microphone to shout over the noise of the generator. It's not so the people can hear you. And we string a string of naked light bulbs over the little platform and it draws every insect in West Africa and they're flying around you and down your nec.
You do that. The Pentecostals say, oh, he's under the anointing.
And I can remember standing on that shaky little platform under those light bulbs and thinking, God, I left Atlanta.
There's no heathens in Atlanta.
Not one, not one lost person in New York.
I spent six hours in the New York airport. Nobody in New York needed an evangelist.
London, God, London, really, I've been to London. We got some unsaved people in London and some great hotels.
Kaduna, Kano, Lagos, the largest black city in the world. Lagos, Nigeria. Did God call me there? No.
Accra, the capital of Ghana? No, not there. Not Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti region? No. Bolgatanga, the largest little town on the edge of the Burkina Faso? Or no. To this remote village with no electricity between Atlanta and here?
How many lost people did I fly over?
And I said, lord, why am I here?
And he said, because I said so.
This is the bottom line reality of the church at Antioch, because God said so.
A church that was in fasting and prayer and seeking not more for themselves, but God's will and direction and purpose. They just didn't want to forget why they were in the grocery store.
They said, what do you have for us?
God has the right to redistribute his people, his personnel and his resources in ways and listen, this is important for us to know he didn't have to check it out with us.
Not only does he not have to, he's not going to.
He doesn't need our approval or our advice.
And this church breaks up this dream team for people that, that they don't know, they don't understand their, their in terrible places. The island of Crete, Asia Minor.
These are places that they've never been. They don't really know anything about them, nothing. And they send out two of their top hands empowered and they must have paid for it. They didn't send them out empty handed.
So this the redistribution of God's resources and people by his sovereign will discerned through prayer and fasting.
So what does that tell us about us?
It tells us that we are to be a church.
The church sensitive to the will and direction of the Holy Spirit and yielded in obedient passion to serve Him.
I, I've lived most of my life in the United States coming and going, but most of my life I've lived in the United States. But I was actually born in the Republic of Texas. And one of the childhood memories that I cherished the most was going to the rodeo. I loved rodeo and I saw multiple times, more than once. But one time I saw one of the biggest, best demonstration of a cutting horse that I've ever seen. I don't know if you are familiar with a cutting horse, but let me indulge you in a little bit of an explanation. Even if you know what it is. A cutting horse is a horse that is trained to cut a calf or cow out of the rest of the herd.
So the inclination of the animal is to get with the others for safety. They want to cluster, but you want to pull this one out and brand him or whatever it is.
So the rider on this cutting horse is to.
They zigzag with the animal, with the cow or the calf. They chase it this way.
This guy that night at the rodeo at Sulphur Springs, Texas, he got on the horse, somebody came behind him and tied a blindfold around him and then tied his arms behind his back and the horse did the whole thing.
And I was so, I was so amazed. I thought, how does the horse even know what is it?
And my, my grandpa who was there, I said, how does that horse know what he wants? He said, the Rider is still guiding him. The. The rider can hear the hooves of that calf, and he steers the horse. I said, no, his hands are tied behind his back. Papa. He said, he's using his knees.
He just nudges him with his knees. Just the slightest nudge, and that horse instantly responds.
I think how many times in my life God has had to jerk the reins on me until the bit in my mouth was just jerking me.
What I really would like is to be where he could just nudge me, just nudge me, just the slightest hint where God could just nudge me slightly, one direction or another.
It's not that God needs our stuff.
That is not it. It is that he wants us to know that we are yielded to Him. He needs us to know that we are yielded to him at such a level that he can call upon us, send us, claim us, choose us, ask us for anything, and that at the slightest nudge, that he would. That we would yield.
I shared this story here some months ago, and I just. It's on my heart, and I want to share it again.
It's funny, but it was important.
Many years ago, Dr. Charlie Sinath was the pastor at First United Methodist Church in Marietta. And he asked me to come and preach a revival. He wanted me to preach every night on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Every night. And we were just. It was. God was really moving.
I was staying, as you did in those days, not in hotels, but I was staying in the home of a family there, a couple. Married couple, quite. I mean, palatial home, beautiful house.
And one night, a cold, cold night as it can be in early February in Georgia. And the wife of the couple where I was staying, I was in my 30s and she was in her 60s. She came forward to the altar to pray for the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
And I said, are you ready? She said, I want to be ready, Brother Rutland. I want to be. But she said, I'm afraid.
I said, you don't have to be afraid. The Holy Spirit's not gonna hurt you. She said, no, no. I'm afraid of what he'll ask.
I said, what are you afraid he'll ask? She said, I know it's stupid.
She said, I have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of antiques in my house.
I've assembled over a lifetime of marriage. I'm afraid God will ask me to give away the antiques.
And I said, that house of antiques is standing between you and the Holy Ghost.
She said, yes. I said, we'll give it to him.
Just give it to him. Let's get it over with. She said, all right, Lord. If you want them, take them. We prayed, and God filled her with the Holy Spirit was wonderful. And we were standing there. The husband kind of came around. He said, I'm going to go on home and take care of the dog. It's freezing. I'm afraid the dog will freeze. And she said, just get a blanket or something and leave him in the garage and cover him with a blanket, and I'll bring Brother Rutland home when I come. So we stayed. We talked, shook hands, prayed with people. We drove into this mansion that was staying in, drove up the driveway, and the lights hit the garage. And the lady stopped the car and put her head over on the steering wheel and just started laughing and. And laughing. I said, what's so funny? She said, the dog. The dog.
I said, ma', am, I don't.
What's funny? She said, that dog. The quilt.
I said, ma', am, I'm just not getting this. She said, I sent my idiot husband home to put a blanket on the dog. It's a $5,000 antique quilt.
And I said, well, do you want to go and get it? She said, no, I gave it to God at the altar. If he wants to give it to the dog, that's up to him.
Now, actually, actually, you see, that's.
That's actually very real.
Once you give it to God, if God wants to give it to the dog, he really has the right to.
So we say, God, I give you. I give you everything I have.
And then there comes a nudge. Okay, give me that. Well, okay, now.
Everything but that, or I'll give you that, Lord, but not right now, or I'll give you that, Lord.
But there's some things I don't want you to do with it.
You can't give it to the dog.
So you can search the entire book of Acts, and you want to really understand the character and nature of the spirit filled church. It's the first few verses of the thirteenth chapter of Acts that God moves and empowers. These lives have been dramatically changed. Wouldn't you love to hear the conversion experience of the guy that grew up with Herod?
He grew up in the palace with Herod. I'd love to hear his testimony. We know Saul's. We know he's to become Paul the Apostle.
What about Lucius?
When his dad came home and said, boys, today I carried the cross for the only righteous man I've ever seen.
Imagine this is a.
This is a powerhouse church and a powerhouse Team.
And God says, do you think I've done all this for Antioch?
Antioch is not the destination. It's the launching pad.
So many, many years ago, many years ago, I was just 29 years old and a boy in my youth group was involved in an accident that killed a man.
His dad was a very powerful and wealthy man that owned a big company here in Atlanta.
And if I said the company, many of you would know it and therefore his name.
And it ate this kid up.
But his dad got him off.
He stole a vehicle, run him from the cops. He hit another man and killed him.
And he got off. He never spent a night in jail, but it ate the kid up.
One night, that young man gave his life to Christ and was filled with the Holy Spirit.
Wow.
It was so powerful.
And he. He clicked on to God. He clicked on.
It was one of those moments in youth work where you just.
Wow.
About three months later, his dad, this rich man came in my office and leaned over on my desk and he said, if you ever try to contact my son again, he said, I will come after you with everything I've got.
He said, I've forbidden my son to talk to you, to attend this church, to have anything to do with you. And if you attempt to reach out to him, he said, I'll use all my power, every ounce of money that I've got in a bank of lawyers, and I'll come after you. Do you understand?
I said, yes, it's clear. I understand.
And I'm going to do what you want. He's yours. He's a minor, so I'm going to do it.
But I want you to tell me why.
Why your son killed a man.
And he was dying with guilt and fear and condemnation. And he saved. He said, I'll tell you exactly why.
When my son would come home, we would have a cocktail together in the evening, and my son won't drink with me now.
And he said, you are ruining my relationship with my only and first begotten son.
And he said, I don't ever want you to reach out to him again.
To me, it has been through my whole life the most quintessential picture of selfishness of anything I've ever seen in my life. He would rather his son have been riddled with the guilt of a homicidal wreck than to make him feel guilty about whether or not he drank alcohol with his son. This is not a sermon about alcohol. If you're hearing that, you're not paying attention.
It's about selfishness. And that Frustrates. The will and purpose of God. What was God's plan for that boy?
What was God's plan for that boy?
I've always wondered about that.
It haunts me.
What if that boy was supposed to be the next Billy Graham?
And you, you stand between a child of yours and God's plan in order to. To satisfy your own personal priorities. God have mercy on your soul.
And it can happen so subtly.
We can just get so happy and content and self satisfied in Antioch that we forget that God has others out there.
Sammy o' Donnell and I did a crusade in West Africa one time and it just went so great. We decided to stay one more night and that made us have to leave late and drive. We were driving down to Accra, so we're trying to get through the crowd. People are all around in the little cars, pushing through the crowd, you know, and people waving to us. Everything was very emotional. And then it was hot in the little car. And so I rolled the window down and an old lady reached her hand in and grabbed my arm, her little hand like a CL claw on my arm like that. And she spoke to me in tree so fast I couldn't understand any of it. And I said, sammy, what's she saying?
He said, she's saying, tell them we're here.
I never forgot that.
Just tell them we're here.
She just wanted wherever I went to and called home, I told them I was leaving.
She said, when you get there, tell them we're over here.
Tell them we're hurting, tell them we're in need, Tell them we're here.
Now, here's the thing.
God knew all those places where that evangelistic team from Antioch was gonna go. He knew everything that was gonna happen. All the persecution they would experience, the shipwrecks, the stonings, the trials, the rejection. And he knew all of that. God, God wasn't sending them into those things. And then later on say, well, I didn't have any idea that we're going to be mad at you.
God knows all of that.
God has the perfect right to send us into sacrificial places, dangerous places, places that will cost us everything, people that we love.
God has a perfect right to it.
Not only to break up the power team at Antioch, he has the right to send that power team into places where they would suffer and be hurt and be damaged, shipwrecked, beaten, bitten by snakes.
It's good. God doesn't reveal to us the journey up front because we wouldn't do it.
He just says, when you Feel my nudge. You turn.
When you feel the witness of the Holy Spirit, you. You turn. You obey.
That's the. The one great secret of the Apostolic Church in the Book of Acts is that they were so sensitive to the Holy Spirit. And when he spoke, they obeyed. They went where they were supposed to, they endured what they were supposed to, and they passed it on.
Paul says to Timothy, at the point of his death, endure hardship gladly.
Do the work of an evangelist. Preach the word, follow me. He doesn't say, oh, man, this has been bad.
Go home, get a real job. The ministry is not worth it.
He doesn't. The last letter that he writes is to pass on this, the instantaneous, sacrificial obedience of the apostolic community to the next generation.
He says, whatever you've seen me do, do it.
Whatever I've endured, endure it.
Whatever I've suffered, suffer it.
Whatever I preached, preach it.
And he says, when you feel the Holy Spirit move, then obey.
Well, let me close with this.
So, not too long ago, I did an interview. I was at a. On a panel, and this guy asked me. He said, Dr. Rutland, I want to ask you a personal question.
He said, have you ever figured out what you do?
He said, I feel like you're a guy who's trying to figure out what he's going to be when he grows up.
I said, well, what do you mean? He said, well, I've looked at your life. He said, you pastored in the Methodist Church, you pastored in the Church of God. You pastored in the Assemblies of God. You've been a missionary, you started children's home, you built school, you worked in the jungle in South America. You've been the president of two different universities. He said, what do you do?
I said, I've always, ever only done one thing.
I haven't changed.
He said, no, you did all these things. I said, no, I've only ever done one thing. And he said, well, what is it?
And I said, what I'm told.
That's all we got.
That's all we've got.
Never decide hither and no further.
Never decide this and nothing else.
Never decide that you've given the last thing you're going to give. Never decide which of your children you won't yield to the mission field. Never decide where the frontiers are, because God hates frontiers.
Just do what you're told.
[00:31:55] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on X at Dr. Mark Rutland or visit his website, DrMarkRutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
