Red Stone Church
Do Not Fear
go to Acts, chapters 27 and 28, and follow along. Otherwise just sit back and listen as I tell you this amazing story of Paul's journey from Caesarea to Rome. Now the Apostle Paul had a tremendous experience with God that radically changed the trajectory of his life. He changed from being a zealous defender of the law to a tireless proclaimer of the freedom from the law and Jewish tradition. And he didn't actually make a lot of friends with many of the Jewish leaders, the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Sanhedrin, and he was constantly trying to convince them of two things. As you read through the book of Acts and I've been reading through it several times lately. But there were two things he kept on emphasizing. That was Jesus is the Son of God and secondly he is the Messiah, the Christ, the One who they were waiting for. But many of the Jewish leaders were so steeped in their tradition, their old Jewish traditions, and saw Paul as a threat to their way of life. It got to the point where some of them even made a vow that they were going to see that Paul was killed and in his life in his ministry. Acts 21 through 28 tells us this story of Paul constantly defending himself before both the Jewish and the political leaders of that time. But God, isn't that a great phrase? But God. I want you to look here at Acts 23 verse 11 because here's a but God. The following night the Lord stood by Paul and said, now notice this, it wasn't the angel of the Lord. It was the Lord himself stood by Paul and said, take courage, be confident, maintain your bold bearing. That's what that word means. I like that phrase maintain your bold bearing. For as you have testified to the facts about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome. Now that word testify, we've seen that before. Remember in Acts 1 and 8 when Paul says when the Holy Spirit comes on me on you, you will be my what? Witness that same word. And it's that Greek word martyros, which means martyr and interesting when he says, you will testify before me in Rome, you will be my witness in Rome. Yes, you may even be my martyr in Rome. And Paul says, okay, how about us? Are we ready to say okay to that? Are we ready to say okay, God, wherever you want me to go, I'll go. That's a tough one, isn't it? To just completely surrender our lives to God. But there's a secret here in the life of Paul that I want us to grab because God worked this out amazingly on his trip to Rome. And beginning God says to him, Paul, I want you just to boldly maintain your course because I am going to be with you. So he was brought on trial. He went to Jerusalem against the Council of guidance of those around him because he says, I'm ready to die from my life. He went to Jerusalem and there he was put on trial. And because they were, he knew that they were going to have a wrong trial for him. They accused him falsely. He had to make an appeal to Caesar. Now, God says, take courage because you're going to Rome. Paul says, I don't have a cent in my pocket. And God says, no problem, I'll work that out. So Paul appeals to Caesar and guess who pays his passage to go to Rome, the Roman government. Isn't that great? God works things out when they think that they are not. So he gets on a ship in Caesarea and Luke who wrote the book of Acts, he constantly uses the word we so we know Luke is with him. And then the Bible says this guy, Aristarchus from Thessalonica. And the three of them are on the ship leaving Caesarea and heading for Rome. Okay, so here's where the interesting part comes because I just ran out of my notes. So now we're going to talk. Let's look at the map. So here's Paul's trip to Rome. So God says, I want you to go to Rome. And he gets on this ship in Caesarea and they go to Sidon. And then they head off for Myra. But right away in the beginning, the winds are wrong. It's the wrong time of the year. And with great difficulty, they go from Caesarea to Sidon around Cyprus. They stay close to land because it's just a real difficult journey. And then they get to Myra and they get on a ship that's going to Rome from there. And in Myra, Paul says, guys, now, he says, I don't think we ought to go. And Paul had done a lot of missionary journeys. He had been on a lot of ships. So he kind of understood some of the weather patterns. And he says, this is the wrong time of the year. The fact Toma Day is already gone by and they're getting into winter. Now, I haven't traveled a lot by ship, but Nadia and I have traveled a lot by plane. And we understand factors, for example. If you're going from the west to the east, a lot of times the air currents behind you are helping you go and you can probably get there a little bit earlier in your plan. But if you're going from the east to the west, you're going against those wind currents and usually takes longer. And Paul says, this is the wrong time of the year to travel. And he said that to the centurion that God had also provided this centurion by the name of Julius, who was a pretty important man. And he found for whatever reason, for whatever reason, God is with him, right? He found favor. Paul found favor in his eyes and he treated Paul really well and later on we'll see. He even saved him from being killed. But they decided that they needed to go. So they got on their ship in Myra and once again, they're heading along the coast with great difficulty and all of a sudden this wind called the north easterner just comes up and just blows them and they can't even control, they can't even control the ship. They just have to let it go and it goes with this and they go around Crete and they come to Fairhaven and they're thinking about maybe staying there, but Fairhaven's not a good port for staying. So they take off from Fairhaven and they head off hoping to winter and Phoenix, but they can't get there because this wind just blows them. For 14 days from there to Malta, they're being tossed to and fro. The waves are huge. During these 14 days, they're not even eating because if you eat it and you're being tossed by these giant waves of the ocean, guess what's going to happen? Anybody here ever had seasickness? Have you understand that? I've never had seasickness, but I went to Brazil. My first wife June and I went to Brazil when we were in Bible College and I got the dysentery and I don't know where it came from. I know the family we're staying with weren't the cleanest family in the world, but I'm telling you is the worst thing that can happen to you. In the middle of the night and you have to go into the bathroom, you don't know whether to kneel or to sit because it's coming out both ends, my friends, at the same time. Nasty stuff. Can you imagine those soldiers, those sailors? 14 days. They never saw the sun. They never saw the stars day and night. The ocean was pummeled thing and throwing that huge ship and it was a big ship because there were 276 people on board and it was a cargo ship. One of the writers said that they were carrying corn from Egypt to Rome for food and that thing was just being tossed around like a toothpick in the ocean. And the Bible says that they feared. It got to a point where they feared for their lives. I'm telling when you get the dysentery, I was 22 years old and after about the third trip into the bathroom, I said, "God, take me now. I'm done. If you want to take me now, I'm ready. Just get me out of this misery." Well, God got me out of this misery and guess what? God got them out of their misery too. Go to this next passage here in Acts chapter 27 verse 24. Let me read 23 and 24 because Paul says this, "For this very night, there stood before me an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I worship." Now verse 24, and he said, "Don't be afraid." Have you ever governed by fear? Anybody have any fears that you struggle with on a regular basis? Angel of the Lord says to Paul, "Don't fear. Don't be afraid." You must stand before Caesar and behold, God has granted you all those who sail with you. Here's God's solution for fear. If you are purposely living your life to fulfill the will of God, God takes care of you. And fear, even though we may have it from time to time, I have fear, but it doesn't grip you. It doesn't determine you. It doesn't keep you from doing what God has designed for your life. And that's what the angel said to Paul. And that's what Paul believed. And that's what Paul said to the soldiers and the sailors on the boat. And he said, "Don't be afraid. God is with us and God is going to take care of us." And then he makes this bold claim. He says, "Not a person on the ship is going to lose their life." In the ship, they end the next morning after 14 days, they look and they see a beach. And the captain of the ship says, "Head for the beach." So they designed to ship the head to the beach thinking they could stop on the beach, but before they get there, they hit a reef. And then the waves start beating the back of the ship and it starts coming apart. This is after they have already jettison thrown a lot of stuff off the ship, a lot of the cargo of their own food, everything to try to save their own life. And then the soldiers decide to kill the prisoners. And once again, God is in charge. So Julius, who has found favor, Paul has found favor in his eyes, says, "No, we're not killing the prisoners." So the captain says, "All of you can swim, jump in and head for the beach and the rest of you find a piece of the ship and hang on to it until you get to the beach and all 276 of them get to the beach." Now God had said to Paul, "I want you to testify before me in Rome." And Paul says, "Okay, but look what has already happened for Paul to get there." Do you think living for Jesus is a piece of cake that everything ought to go all right and everything will be fine? No, God has a purpose in all of this. And he's teaching us and he's helping us to understand. And I can see where Paul might have said, "God, you said I'm going to testify before you before Caesar, but look at it, it's so difficult." Then they get on the beach and the natives are friendly toward them. They build a fire because it's cold and it's raining and they're trying to help them. And Paul decides to throw some wood on the fire and a snake comes out and grabs on to his hand and all the people are saying, "Aha, this man really is a murderer because he didn't drown in the sea, but now he's going to die from the snakes by." So they're watching him. They're watching for his hand to swell up and it doesn't. They're watching for him to fall over dead and he doesn't. And then he said, "Oh, maybe he's not a murderer. Maybe he's a god." And then Publius, the chief guy on the island, takes them and entertains them for three days and Publius's father is sick. Guess what he adds? The disability. And Paul lays his hand on him and he's healed. And others come and they're healed. My friends, the journey of serving God is not without problems, but God is with us through it all. We were invited to go to Guinea-Bissau in Africa. And the missionary there, it was when the church in Brazil was starting catching the vision they had received the gospel from missionaries from different parts of the world and God began to lay on the hearts of the leaders of the church in Brazil. Now it's our turn. Now we send out missionaries and actually that's how the work in Mozambique began because the churches in Brazil sent a couple clever and jurisemeter to Mozambique and through 25 years some 100 village churches have been planted there. And there was another young man. He was the son of a pastor who went wayward for a while, but then God called him back and sent him to Guinea-Bissau. And he invited us to come and and do a seminar there because when we retired, retired, you know, you will never find the word retired in the Bible. Do you know that? So even when you're retired, you live your life on purpose for God, right? And so when we retired from the church in Green Bay, we said, "Now what?" And both Nadia and I had cross-cultural experience and we decided we were going to visit missionaries from Brazil on the field and encourage them. And that's what we have done. And we still go back to Brazil to do that as well, living our lives on purpose. So we were invited to go to Guinea-Bissau, so we went. But before we even got out of Green Bay where we were living at the time, Nadia looked in her purse to make sure she had her green card. She didn't have an American passport at the time. She just had a green card and she couldn't find it. I was saying, "Oh, no, now what do we do?" So we called the church and there was a lady in the church who had had a dream that in Guinea-Bissau there was a truckload of people and we were in a dangerous situation. They said, "We don't think you ought to go." Now there's sometimes you need to listen to the council of others, but there are other times you need to make sure you're listening to God above all else, right? Because sometimes God allows us to get into sticky situations. And it's okay because God's in charge. When we are doing the will of God, He takes care of us. Then Jesus says something like that. We're supposed to do that. What did Jesus say? "But seek first." What? "The kingdom of God and His righteousness." And guess what? I'll take care of you. So we debated and we prayed, "Do we go? Do we not go? What's going to happen?" We decided to go on down to Milwaukee where my sister was going to take us to Chicago to catch her international flight and see if we could get a green card. But then on the way, an edgy founder or a green card. It's amazing that women find anything in those purses today, isn't it? But she found it and we went on and we got on our flight. We went over there. We went to Bissau the city and the whole city, it wasn't a very big city, but the whole city was governed by a generator. Now see if you young young people like this one, 10 o'clock at night, they shut the generator down and nothing worked, television, nothing. And if you didn't have some kind of battery-powered system to even keep lights on in the house. So we were sleeping there and at my age, I wasn't as old as I am now, but I was still kind of getting there. And I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of night. Now you're in a strange house. There is absolutely not a bit of light anywhere. I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face like this. That's how dark it was. The only way I got to the bathroom was putting my hand on the wall and following it until I got to the bathroom. That's how dark it was. And then we gathered this group of pastors. There were some 30 pastors from 11 different churches denominations and we were able to study the church. What is the church, the nature of the church? It was a great time. But then on Sunday, it had been a weekend holiday and in the missionary, his name was Luciano. He said we're going to go to the ocean because a lot of the people in the church went to the ocean for the weekend and we're going to go. We're going to meet them there. There's going to be baptism. We're going to do the Lord's supper together and we said great, let's go. So we got in his car and we headed off into the woods and there were two tire tracks that there was no road, just two tire tracks that he was following. And every once in a while, we'd come to a Y. And I'd look at him as though wondering if he knew who he was going. Later on, he confessed he had no idea where he was going. He just prayed, "Lord, help me." And then he made a decision and went and we actually ended up at the beach. It was great. But where we parked a car was about 500 yards from the beach. And so we were bringing lunch for the people that day. So Luciano says to his wife, "You guys go ahead and find the group and send a couple people back to help me carry lunch." So we go to the beach and his wife, what was her name? Andrea. She decided to go down, I mean, there were hundreds of Africans. Now get the picture, hundreds of Africans and one white man. So she goes down in front of everybody, looking up at all those Africans to see if she could find the people from the church. And all of a sudden I hear somebody holler out, "Look at the white man. Throw on the white man in the ocean." And I said, " Andrea, I think we ought to go around to the back and look this way and see if we can find our people." Anyway, we found out that the people were down the beach and to get away from all the drinking nonsense that went on the night before. And we gathered with them, had a great time, had lunch. There were some people who were baptized. We had the Lord supper together right there on the beach and just a great time of fellowship. But I don't know what happened. I don't know if there was, it was like a whistle went off. Around 4.30 in the afternoon, everybody decided to go home, not just us, the whole bunch on the beach. And to get there, there were these single-file bamboo bridges across creek beds that were full with mud. And going, there was no problem. But on the way back, of course, we just all bottlenecked right at those single-file bamboo bridges. And we were going along, and all of a sudden, I hear somebody hop around, "Oh, look at the white man. Throw the white man in the mud." And I'm getting a little nervous if you get a mask. And so, Luciana speaks up to my defense, and we got back. When we get back to the parking lot, here's this big truck full of people on top of it, like the woman had saw in her dream. But it wasn't dangerous. We got in our car, we went home, and I'm standing here before you today, because when you are in the purpose of God for your life, he takes care of you. And a martyr is also taking care of you, right? Because I don't know about you, but here in America, I don't think we look forward to heaven so much. Where's the dog gone comfortable? We just think it's great. Come, Lord Jesus, come, well, yeah, but not today, Lord. Heaven is the most amazing place you could ever imagine, and I can't even imagine. So why are we afraid to go to heaven? Why aren't we ready to go to heaven? Why aren't we ready right now? Like this Chinese lady I read about who prayed, "Lord, let me die for you today." That would be the greatest thing if I could die for you today. Ever had that prayer? That's God for people, my friend, because the truth is that when we are living our lives in the will of God, what is 1 John 4, 18? I think we have that up here, says, "Perfect love. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love." God is on His throne. God has called you and I to be His servant, or as Paul says, His slaves. And my friend, when we live our lives where the kingdom of God is an absolute priority, God takes care of us. I want us to get that because God has a purpose for your life and I can testify to you this morning when we live our lives on that purpose. God takes care of us. Let's live for Him. Let's give it all to Him. Let's pour out our life for Him, because He is faithful. My favorite song at this stage of my life is, "All my life you have been faithful. All my life you have been so, so good. God is good, my friend. And that's why we can jump up and down in worship. We can say, "Praise God." You know, we don't have to go crazy, but just let our hearts lead us out of gratitude for a God who loves us, who took Paul from Caesarea to Rome through all kinds of difficulties, but God was with Him and took care of Him. Let's pray. Father, I'm so grateful, grateful for this opportunity to be together with your people. Worshiping you, declaring your holiness, your greatness, your power, and your majesty. And Lord, I pray that you give us a vision of that today, not just intellectually in our heads, but very meaningfully in our hearts. But God. Yes, Lord. We may be on journeys and plans and things that we think we want to do with our lives, but God will speak to our hearts. Will you speak to our hearts today, Father? Show us direction, guidance, help us to live our lives on purpose and to truly seek first your kingdom and your righteousness, knowing that you'll take care of everything else. Thank you, Father, for such tremendous love. That cast out on fear and just guiding us, loving us each and every day. We praise you. We worship you today in Jesus' name. Amen, Lord. So God's people gather on the first day of the week and we know that the very center of who we are and life is Jesus, the Christ, the one who lived his life. The one who did not live in fear, not even of death. He recognized the pain of it, he recognized the difficulty of it, but he knew it was God's will. And then he also celebrated the victory of resurrection. That's going to be amazing, isn't it? The victory of resurrection? We got that hope in Jesus, my God. That's why we meet around this table and we take that little piece of bread and we say, "Yeah, this is Jesus' body that was crucified, that was broken for me. In my place." And then we drink the cup that saves the blood of Jesus. That cleanses me from all unrighteousness.