Sometimes we get everything right. Sometimes we serve God in a way that explodes in the best way possible. Lives are changed; communities are made whole. And then sometimes, just when things seem poised to grow even further, God comes and interrupts what we are doing for Him to call us in a new direction. Why would He do such a thing? Today, as we wrap up our teaching series, When Life Gets in the Way, that is exactly what we are talking about. Thanks for being here throughout this journey. May you be better prepared for the interruptions you will yet face as you journey toward His kingdom. Here’s the message.

Redirection

In 2016, we thought we were moving. We had been serving our little, country church for several years, and things were going really well. But then another church reached out, and as we prayed through it and considered all of the various factors involved, it really seemed like this might be something God was doing. We inched our way through their process, but it was quickly clear that things were moving ahead pretty smoothly. It was not easy to wrap our heads around the idea of moving. The church we were serving was the first church we had ever served. They had taken a chance on a young guy fresh out of seminary. Our boys were all three born in that community. The church loved us well. But the further we moved forward, the more we got our hearts and minds wrapped around it, and the more excited we got about the prospect of what God seemed to be doing. 

And then it was over. That was a tough moment. It was doubly hard because so many of the people who could have been the ones to help us walk through something emotionally hard like that couldn’t know about it without jeopardizing our ministry where we were still serving. Yet at the same time, things really were good there. They were good for the church. They were good for our family. They were good professionally. The church was growing. New people were connecting. Families were getting involved and invested. There was no reason for us to go anywhere. Then, about a year later, I got an email from this church in a small town I had never heard of called Oakboro. And it soon became clear that the recent past was prologue, and that God was indeed up to something, namely, preparing us to leave behind a really good situation, completely interrupting all that we were doing there, to go in a new direction. And…here we still are—and loving it—all these years later. 

This morning finds us in the sixth and final part of our teaching series, When Life Gets in the Way. For the last several weeks we have been talking about the various ways our lives get interrupted and what to do when we find ourselves in those situations. Interruptions come in all different shapes and sizes. Some come from God, some come because of the interference of others, and some we manage to set ourselves up for by the choices we make. Thankfully, because interruptions in whatever form they take are so very common, and because the Scriptures present us a pretty honest look at life, we can find examples there of people dealing with all sorts of different interruptions, how they handled them, and some wisdom for how we should proceed when we face similar situations. 

Way back at the beginning of our journey, we looked at times when God interrupts our lives in some way. Abraham experienced a good bit of this over the course of his life. While Abraham didn’t always get it right, he did grow as he went to trust God more and more. His story helped us see that when God interrupts our lives, we can trust what He’s doing. In our second stop, we surveyed the story of Joseph, Abraham’s great-grandson. Joseph’s life was interrupted again and again by those seeking to do him harm, or people simply being neglectful of his needs and situation. And yet, as Joseph remained committed to the path of righteousness no matter what the shape of his circumstances happened to be, he kept finding himself right where God could use him in powerful ways to advance His purposes. We discovered here that even hard interruptions can place us where God can use us. Rounding out the portion of our journey rooted in the Old Testament, we looked at a snapshot from Moses’ life. Moses’ story really gets underway when he makes a terrible, sinful choice unleashing brokenness that seemed like it was going to sideline him forever. Yet God redeemed him from that place and used him anyway to accomplish incredible kingdom-advancing work. This reminded us of a simple, but profound, idea: God can redeem our brokenness. No matter how bad things seem, God is bigger and stronger, and His goodness is more powerful. We can trust in Him. 

A couple of weeks ago, we shifted gears to the New Testament to look at a story from Jesus’ ministry out of the Gospel of Luke. And while we talked about the non-sinful interruptions that other people bring to our lives, we focused our attention more on how we should respond to the people than actually dealing with the interruptions. Our response to the people will often determine how we will deal with the interruption. What we saw as Jesus kept responding with graciousness and hospitality to a whole string of interruptions—and interruptions to His interruptions at that—is that God-ordained interruptions call for a sensitive heart. We need to be open to what God might be doing and ready to pivot in the direction He is calling us. Things that look like interruptions may turn out to be invitations into Gospel-advancing work. Our sensitive response will help determine how the situation turns out. 

Just last week, then, we talked about the interruption that comes when the thing we felt like God was preparing us for doesn’t arrive when we expected it. When we are all set for action and wind up having to wait, that can be a pretty severe interruption to the order of things we imagined would be stretching out before us. At the beginning of Acts, Luke tells us about a time the apostles experienced this. They were ready to get to the work Jesus had given them to do, but the time was not yet. As we discovered, they used their unexpected gift of downtime wisely so they were prepared for what God had planned for them to do. In the same way, we can use unexpected downtime to prepare for what’s next. 

The last interruption we are going to talk about this morning actually brings us full circle. We started out talking about times when God interrupts our lives by calling us in a new direction. Today we are going to look at the same basic thing, but through the lens of the apostle Paul’s story. You don’t need to hear the same affirmation to trust God again, though. What today will be is a reminder that God’s decision matrix for when and where He calls us to move isn’t the same as ours. That’s not always particularly fun or easy to find out, but it’s important to know, because unless we do, we just might miss out on what He has planned for us. 

Paul was the greatest missionary in the early church, and it wasn’t close. Through his letters we see bits and pieces of his missionary work, but the majority of our knowledge of where Paul went and what he accomplished comes in the second half of Acts where Luke shifts gears from telling us about the growth of the church in Jerusalem and the surrounding regions to Paul’s attempts to bear witness to the resurrected Jesus to the ends of the earth. Paul’s missionary journeys make for some pretty wild stories. It is to one of those stories that I would like to direct our attention this morning. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy, join me in Acts 16. 

Paul’s first missionary journey was a mostly regional trip that saw him plant several churches and then return to his home base in Antioch. Luke relates some of the details of that trip in Acts 13-14. Paul’s Gospel work sparked some pretty serious conversations back in Jerusalem, which was still the center of church gravity at this point. The believers were seriously wrestling with how all of the Gentiles Paul was proclaiming the Gospel to were going to be received into the church. This all culminated in the first recorded church business meeting in Acts 15. It wasn’t perhaps quite so formalized as ours are, but its conclusion is what matters most. Jesus’ brother, James, the highly respected leader of the church in Jerusalem declared that they should make it as easy as possible for Gentiles to start following Jesus and join the church. In other words, Paul could keep doing what he was doing. Paul immediately headed back out on a second trip that was more ambitious in its scope than the first. He visited the churches he had planted on his last trip, and then sought to take the Gospel to more and more new places, planting more churches as he went. This is where our story for the day picks up. 

He started to go with Barnabas again, his traveling companion on his first trip, but the two got into an argument over whether they should bring Mark (who later wrote the Gospel bearing his name). Mark had bailed on them last time, and Paul had no interest in bringing him again. The argument grew heated enough that Paul and Barnabas parted ways. From here—in Acts 16:1 now—“Paul went on to Derbe and Lystra, where there was a disciple named Timothy, the son of a believing Jewish woman, but his father was a Greek. The brothers and sisters at Lystra and Iconium spoke highly of him. Paul wanted Timothy to go with him; so he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places, since they all knew that his father was a Greek. [And I know that seems like a funny thing for Paul to have done to us, but this was about preparing Timothy to be able to share the Gospel with more people by conforming him some to one of the major cultural traditions they were going to be working in.] As they traveled through the towns, they delivered the decisions reached by the apostles and elders at Jerusalem for the people to observe. So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers.” 

So, again, Paul was visiting churches he had planted, bringing them the official teachings from the apostles in Jerusalem, and encouraging them in the Gospel work they were doing in their respective communities. We often think about missionary work as little else other than sharing the Gospel with people who have never heard it and planting churches. Yet while that most definitely is missionary work, it also involves a great deal more than that. Missionary work can include encouraging local church leaders and members, equipping them to do their work more effectively and efficiently. It can include providing support to missionaries who are already in the field, making sure they have what they need to do the work God has called them to do. It can even include praying for those missionaries who are serving in the field from right here at home. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be ready to go when God calls us, but let us not imagine that we can’t be a part of the church’s missionary effort unless we actually uproot our lives to go somewhere we’ve never been before. 

This same kind of thing applies in the context of the church. Too often folks imagine that serving in the church only looks one way: teaching others about Jesus. And yet, while serving in the church certainly does include that, and we are always looking for people God has called to teach, there is so much more that goes into making the church work than that. Do you know how many trips to Sam’s (or Costco, if you’re one of those people…whom we love dearly) it takes to make the Gathering Place work? Some of you do because you’ve made them. Many of you don’t, though, because you never see it. It just works. We have three buildings, one of which is 70 years old. It takes a lot of work to get and keep those up to speed. There are grounds to keep and tables and chairs to move and literature to sort and deliver and offerings to count and prayers to pray and members to be visited and on and on it goes. Just because you aren’t gifted in a particular way doesn’t mean God doesn’t still have a vital ministry role for you to play in the church. 

Well, what Paul was experiencing here was what we might call ministry success. Listen again to that last thing Luke said: “So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers.” Everything he touched turned to gold. No, it wasn’t always easy as he would write about in his second letter to the Corinthian church (which he would plant later on this same missionary journey), but it was working. More people were following Jesus. The church was growing. This would seem like the moment when God would want to just let Paul loose to keep doing all the good work he was doing. Why slow the train when it was humming along so smoothly? Yet look at what happened next? 

Verse 8 now: “They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia [the latter being the region to which Galatians was directed]; they had been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. When they came to Mysia, they tried to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.” 

So, what is this? Well, Paul and Timothy kept trying to advance the Gospel into new places, but the Holy Spirit kept stopping them. Why did He stop them? We don’t have any idea. We don’t know either how He did it. But that He did it is not in question. What gives? Why, if Paul was experiencing so much ministry success, would the Holy Spirit keep shutting doors to further advancement in the region? Again, we don’t know. We don’t know except to say that He wanted Paul and Timothy to go somewhere else. That somewhere else turns out to be Macedonia. “Passing by Mysia they went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision in which a Macedonian man was standing and pleading with him, ‘Cross over to Macedonia and help us!’ After he had seen the vision, we [notice the switch from third-person pronouns to first-person pronouns here; Luke evidently joined the group in Troas] immediately made efforts to set out for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.” 

All of Paul’s success was great, but Paul’s success wasn’t the primary determining factor in the Holy Spirit’s directing his work. God’s sovereign plan was. Now, Paul would later return to the region where God refused to let him do any ministry and plant at the very least the church in Ephesus, but that wasn’t what God wanted him to do now. He wanted him to go into Macedonia. 

The next part of the story reveals at least some of why. Come back to the text with me in v. 11 now. “From Troas we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, the next day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, a Roman colony and a leading city of the district of Macedonia. We stayed in that city for several days.” Philippi, of course, became home to one of the churches with whom Paul was the closest. They were some of his most devoted supporters, providing critical aid to him later in his life when he needed it most. Had God not blocked Paul’s path in Asia, the Philippian church might never have existed. 

In what comes next we actually get to see the Philippian church get its start. “On the Sabbath day we went outside the city gate by the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and spoke to the women gathered there. A God-fearing woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth [indicating she was very wealthy] from the city of Thyatira, was listening. The Lord opened her heart to respond to what Paul was saying. After she and her household were baptized, she urged us, ‘If you consider me a believer in the Lord, come and stay at my house.’ And she persuaded us.” Lydia became one of the most significant leaders of the church in that region, even hosting the church in her home. When Paul was willing to follow the Lord’s interruption of his work even when it didn’t make much sense, the results were pretty incredible. 

So then, why did God block Paul’s progress—not once, but twice? Because He had somewhere else for him to be. He had something else for him to be doing. But what about Paul’s success? What about it? You see, the thing is, God doesn’t consider our success when directing us here or there to advance His kingdom. He puts us where He wants us without any regard to what we count as success. He sees things from an entirely different angle, a wider lens, a higher elevation. He can see what we can’t. He knows what we don’t. He’s playing by an entirely different set of rules than we are using for ourselves even when we have tried to align our rules with what we think we see Him doing around us and through us. We assume that just because something seems to have worked we should do it forever the same way, and look at how awesome we are. Okay, maybe we don’t say that last part out loud, but we are sure tempted to think it. That’s not how God operates. When it comes to the direction our ministry should go as followers of Jesus, God is the one who establishes the plan and not anyone or anything else. God, not success, determines our direction. 

Now, there is some pretty broadly applicable wisdom to this idea, but can I talk for just a minute to followers of Jesus in this church? If that’s not you, listen in because there’s going to be something for you in a second, but this next part is just for insiders here. You may be doing something in the church that seems like it’s doing really well to you. If you are, that’s great. But there’s a warning in Paul’s experience here that we are wise to countenance. God, not success, determines our direction. Just because something seems to be working doesn’t mean God wants you to do it forever. If He comes and interrupts what you are doing, you have to be ready to pivot and go with Him in a new direction. We talked several weeks ago about the fact that you can trust Him. Let me add another piece to that puzzle today. Trusting God necessarily means having the humility to let go of good things sometimes so that He can put something new and better in our hands. 

The ways this might play out are pretty varied. It may be a season of ministry in the church that you need to bring to a close in order to serve in some new capacity. It may be a connection with another church that you need to formally sever in order to make a formal connection here because this is where He has moved you. That’s never easy, and it most definitely should not be done lightly. But sometimes God moves us in new directions, and that’s okay. Some of you are here for that very reason. It may be something you have been doing in the community that you need to transition away from, handing the reins off to someone else, so that God can put you to work in something new. Those previous things may have been good or even great, but God, not success determines our direction. Remember: ministry isn’t about us. It’s about advancing God’s kingdom. 

Now to everybody: This idea doesn’t just apply to ministry. There are all kinds of things in our lives that we fall into doing because we do them really well and most people appreciate our doing them. We all experience success in different ways. Success is a fine thing to enjoy, but it can also tempt us down the path of pride where we start thinking we need to be doing whatever it is because nobody else can do what we do. We start to think we are valuable above and beyond the inherent value we have as God’s image bearers. The world needs us to be doing what we are doing. God needs us to be doing what we are doing. We couldn’t possibly go in another direction because what we are doing is just too valuable. Friends, God, not success, determines direction. 

And, as Paul soon discovered, if God puts up roadblocks to our forward progress because He is actively trying to lead us in a different direction, when we follow Him faithfully in that new direction, we will find the work He has already planned and prepared for us to do. Committing ourselves faithfully to that work, even if our previous work was good, will see us experiencing even greater kingdom success than we were before. Notice I said “kingdom success” there, and not success more generally. In the world’s eyes, leaving behind something successful to head off down a new path is crazy. It doesn’t make the first bit of sense. This judgment becomes all the more pronounced and self-confident when the new direction doesn’t quickly yield the kind of fruit we were enjoying before. But when advancing God’s kingdom is our goal and not our own, success is going to look and be measured very differently than if those two things are reversed. God, not success determines direction. 

When we let success determine our direction, we commit ourselves to a path that God may not be walking. We can gain the world that way, but it just may come at the expense of our soul. That’s not a worthwhile trade to make. It’s not worthwhile because this world and all of its fruits will one day come to an end. God’s final kingdom will arrive with the coming of its king, the old will be made new, and efforts to advance His kingdom will be highlighted and celebrated as they never were in this world; in this life. If we want to be on the winning side of that equation, sticking with God even when He seems to completely interrupt what we were doing in His name and to His glory, will always be the better decision. When we follow Him, He will always lead us in the right direction. God, not success, determines direction. 

So, like Paul, let us have the humility and courage to live open-handedly, ready to let go of all we have and all we think we are to receive what God has to give us and pursue the advance of His kingdom even at the expense of our own. God, not success, determines direction. Let’s follow where He leads and always remain on the path that leads to life and the advance of God’s kingdom, not our own.