Love Beyond Survival (Part A)

Have you heard someone say, well, you know, I got burned in my last church so I don't go to church. That doesn't give you a pass. That doesn't mean you're, it's acceptable.

What if everybody did that? Oh, my toes got stepped on. If anything, God is investing in you, teaching you something. Maybe it was your fault. Maybe you need to keep your feet out of the way.

Maybe it was somebody else's fault. You need to learn how not to be bitter, how to forgive, how to keep loving. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher, Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Book of Acts.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Now, let's join Pastor Rick for a brand new study called Love Beyond Survival in Acts chapter 28. Acts chapter 28 is where we are. We will take verses 11 through 16, but we will read verses 11 through 15.

Acts chapter 28 verses 11 through 15. After three months, we sailed in an Alexandrian ship whose figurehead was the twin brothers which had wintered at the island. And landing at Syracuse, we stayed there three days. From there we circled round and reached Regium. And after one day, the south wind blew, and the next day we came to Petioli, where we found brethren and were invited to stay with them seven days. And so we went toward Rome. From there, when the brethren heard about us, they came to meet us as far as Apai forum and three inns. When Paul saw them, he thanked God and took courage.

Please be seated. Love Beyond Survival is the central point of this consideration. If you are not familiar with what has been going on, the Apostle Paul is on his way to Rome. He is in protective custody.

Essentially, he is a prisoner. And to get to Rome from Israel, they took ships, several different ships. One of them got caught in a storm for two weeks. And that ship ended up shipwrecked on the beach at Malta. Surviving that, Paul remained there on Malta, as we just read, for three months.

But now it is sailing season again, and they are going to continue their journey. And as I pointed out in the previous sections, Paul surviving the storm, the swords of the Roman soldiers who were ready to kill him, lest he escape, and other prisoners. His surviving the shipwreck and then the serpent's bite is not enough.

We are called on to do more. There is more to our Christian life than surviving storms and swords, shipwrecks and Satan's attacks. The Apostles of Jesus Christ did not die for hearsay. Twelve of those men are believed to have been executed for testifying that they saw the risen Lord Jesus. And to them it was not hearsay.

There is no way to account for this. There is no such thing as this mass hallucination that is in total agreement. If groups of people are going to hallucinate, those hallucinations are not going to match. And so there is not hallucination, and when Peter says, I did not follow cunningly devised fables when I made known to you the power of his coming was an eyewitness, not hearsay for me. We on the other hand, not hearsay, it's testimony.

It's based on evidences. Paul also did not suffer these things for Christ out of hearsay. He met the risen Lord. And everything he is going through is because of Jesus Christ. He could have avoided all of this and remained an arrogant Pharisee there in Jerusalem. But truth would not let him do that. Serving Christ like this and suffering these things, just that we covered so far in Acts chapter 28, because he had already written 2 Corinthians and there in that 11th chapter he posted many other things that he had to endure for Christ. He never became bitter, and at least we have no knowledge of it.

No indication of depression, discouragement is not depression. No indication of anxiety or anything else that would have painted his faith in a bad light. That would have damaged his ministry and we wouldn't have what we do have through the Holy Spirit using this man. Don't tell that to the psychiatrist and don't tell this to the psychologist that Paul prevailed without them. Because if Paul can serve beyond survival in this way that we meet him in the scripture, then I can too. He did it, yes through his faith in the Lord, but also because there were those who loved him, who also loved the Lord, which is critical. I think much of what is applied to the Christian life from the pulpit can sort of pitter out on the teens, because you've not yet faced these things.

Sometimes there are exceptions. Don't let that be you. Understand that you are going to face things in life for Christ and you're either going to pretend to be a Christian or you are going to persevere as a Christian. The choice is entirely yours. It will come to a point where no one can help you, just you, you and the Lord. Start making plans for that now.

Be ready. You should not be caught flat-footed by Satan or your carnal desires or the influences of this lost world. To be Christ-centered is to understand that surviving physical or emotional trauma is not the end of your purpose in life. Our purpose in life is not to survive. Oh, that's part of it, but it's also to survive, to do something. You've got to do something once you get to your destination and that is to have this testimony for Christ, to be able to preach Christ with words and life alike. After all, many Christless people survive trauma and they go on, many of them, to be heroes of the world. Why should they get to outshine us when we have the truth?

Why should they get to overcome hardships and broken lives without Jesus and we don't? You know, once the feelings take control, they tell your brains to shut up and go sit in the corner and then it's going to be messed up for everybody, you included. I don't want to go through life like that. I take my feelings very seriously.

Sometimes they're very good and I'm dancing right along with them. Other times I've got them at gunpoint, keeping them off of me because they will forsake me. They will not allow me to serve the Lord the way I'm supposed to serve. And so to learn this is from Christian maturity, to learn when to dance, when to rejoice, when to weep, and when to put yourself in place and check the carnality that we're all stuck with.

I don't like it any more than you do, but that does not give me a pass to not deal with it. And so here he is still serving heroic Bible characters, all of them. They did not skip through life emotionally unscathed. James said, Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. And sometimes I have found that Christians think that pastors don't have a nature like theirs, that we cannot get upset or be hurt or whatever.

Well, that's not true. We're just like you. We have our assignment and we try to do it.

You have your assignment and hopefully you're trying to do it also. And if you don't know what your role is in Christianity, find out. It's a short trip from your knees to the throne of God. Find out. If you are not following the basics, the fundamentals of Christianity, then it's going to be very difficult for you.

And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine, in fellowship, in communion, in prayer. You take away any one of those that's a complex arrangement. They go together like an old watch.

It's not one gear inside that watch that makes it tell time. It's a few of them. There are other parts.

They're the screws that hold it. It's a complex system. Well, so is Christianity. And if we can remember to try to stop treating our Christianity like it's magic, I think it would be a lot more effective.

Take our hits when it's our turn and keep moving forward, knowing that we are loved by God and that love is to flow not only to us but through us, that agape love. Not only is there more to this story, there's more people in this story that we've not yet met. And while Paul and the company that's with him, mainly Luke and Aristarchus and any others that aren't mentioned, while they went through their two-week saga, 400 miles away from Malta, where they shipwrecked, was Rome. And there in Rome were other Christians who knew Paul. He knew they were there, but he had no idea how much they loved him and were going to show it. He's busy surviving his trip to get to Rome to preach to them, to teach them, to pastor them. But they were very eager to see him and come under his authority.

They didn't have hangups about pastoral authority as we encounter often here in the United States. When word reached those believers in Rome that Paul arrived in Italy, they scrambled to come out to meet him as far as 40 miles on that last leg of the Appian Way to Rome. And so we look now at verse 11 and keeping hopefully all that in mind because it's part of the story. After three months we sailed in an Alexandrian ship whose figurehead was the twin brothers which had wintered at the end. Now I've given you the heart, the bravado, the courage part of the message. There's a heart part, too, coming up. Not part two, but also.

In addition to, hey, there's more to our life than surviving, there is that other side of the heart, and we'll get to that. But here in verse 11, they had been about four months, it had been about four months since they parted Jerusalem and fair havens where they were supposed, Paul advised them to stay and they did, and they wanted to make the short 50 mile trip by sea to Phoenix, and that's when it all fell apart. And when they did shipwreck on Malta, these three months, they were waiting for the winter no-sail season to go away and the late winter, early spring season to come, and now it is here. Other ships had been harboring there, clearly this ship, this Alexandrian ship is one of them.

The twin brothers referenced here is from Greek mythology, the Greek twins, Pollux and Castor. These were lucky charms of the ancient sailors. A lucky charm is that which has no basis in reality. Other ships had considered these to be the patron gods of the marina and went to the bottom to Davy Jones' locker.

So evidently it didn't work all the time. But man is incurably religious. Man must show his spiritual awareness in some way towards something bigger than himself.

Whether it's an idol fashioned in the heart, whether it is worshiping oneself, assigning self-status that did not deserve, or whether you're chasing UFOs and extraterrestrials because you believe there's something out there that's going to give you hope, or it's the true god. Man is incurably religious and here's evidence of their religion, or at least the shipbuilders, that these two brothers, these Gemini brothers would somehow protect their ship. Well it did because they harbored and they didn't protect it, but the ship was protected because they had sense enough to harbor there on Malta. Verse 12, and landing at Syracuse we stayed there three days. Now they're in Sicily about 100 miles across the sea. Verse 13, from there we circled round and reached Regium and after one day the south wind blew and the next day we came to Pitioli. Now they're in Italy. Regium is right at the tip of the boot if you, you know, Italy is said to look like a boot on the map. And they're right at the tip about now, 330 walking miles from Rome, from Regium to Pitioli, 215 miles. So there's a lot of walking going on.

I don't think that they could get a cart that easily, which there's too many people in the group and it's not like, you know, the metro line or something. After one day the south wind blew. Now last time we read about this south wind was in chapter 27 and it blew softly there.

But it was in sailing season and they discarded that and got on board and suffered the shipwreck. But now the south wind is blowing, but it's okay because this is the season for open sea travel. The next day we came to Pitioli, seven miles north of Naples. It's Naples, you could say that. Just 15 miles away is Pompeii. And maybe, oh, in less than 20 years Mount Vesuvius there overlooking Naples is going to blow and wipe out Pompeii. Verse 14, where we found brethren and were invited to stay with them seven days and so we went toward Rome.

Now the story's heating up. We've gotten boilerplate information out of the way in those first few verses and now we're getting back to the people events that I'm interested in because I'm one of the people. And all they had to do there at Pitioli is say, hey, is there a church? Are there any Christians here? They probably wouldn't have used the word church, but they would have.

Are there any believers in Jesus as Messiah? And someone evidently pointed out, how refreshing. Invited to stay with them seven days. Despite Paul traveling under Roman custody, he still had a lot of freedom thanks to the centurion Julius. This seven day delay allowed news of Paul's arrival to reach Rome because you have to account for how did these Christians from Rome get to him? How did they know he landed?

Well, here it is right here. It's about a two, three day walk out from Rome here to Pitioli and then there's plenty of time for that with the seven days. You know, someone going forward, letting them know, hey, Paul has landed. And unbeknownst to Paul, evidently they dropped what they were doing and marched towards him wasting no time because you have to account for the time, for the word to get to them within this seven day period and then for them to get to Paul. So there had to be haste, no delay.

Love doesn't play around. When it has its opportunity, it leaps. And this is what they did. They're going to intercept him at the market of Apai.

This is going to be a beautiful story. And so he went to Rome. Back to work, Paul.

You survived the shipwreck. You got to get to Rome. You've been assigned a preaching job there in Nero's court and everywhere else you stand. All the while the threat of Caesar's doom hung over his head, looming. We could have been found guilty and executed. He doesn't know the outcome.

These are unstable people in Nero's court. But he's not concerned with what might happen. You know the little what ifs that live under the bridge? You try to cross over in life from one point to another point and the what ifs come out.

What if this and what if that? And you can turn tail and run. You can hide. You can lose your witness. Or you can remain focused on the mission as a servant to testify to Jesus Christ. And so as Caesar is going to hear the gospel, hell is scrambling also. They've tried to stop Paul from getting to Rome because they feared if Paul was turned loose in Rome, what would happen?

I'll comment on that later. From his jailhouse letters we see that his love for Christ, for Christians, and for the Christless did not fade. He did not have ministry slapped out of him. Have you heard someone say, well, you know, I got burned in my last church so I don't go to church. That doesn't give you a pass. That doesn't mean you're, it's acceptable.

What if everybody did that? Oh, my toes got stepped on. If anything, God is investing in you, teaching you something. Maybe it was your fault.

Maybe you need to keep your feet out of the way. Maybe it was somebody else's fault. You need to learn how not to be bitter, how to forgive, how to keep loving, how not to, if that's all it took or somebody offended you, and now you don't go back to church, or now you don't serve. I'm telling you, the world could do better than that.

There are people, they get fired from their jobs, they go get another job, and they do well oftentimes. In Ephesians, which he hasn't written this Ephesian letter yet, but I'm going to read two letters that he has not yet penned at this point, which indicates years after this shipwreck, the serpents, the swords, the storm, he's still in it. He's still making hell shake. Ephesians, he writes, but God who is rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us. Wait a minute, he loved you Paul? He let you go through all of that? Plus, 2 Corinthians 11, he let you go through all of that and you're still thinking he loves you?

Yeah. It was Mrs. Job that said, curse God and die. And Job, of course, rebuked that thought. You take the good and the bad from the Lord. Then he writes to Timothy in his second arrest, and there he says to Timothy, you have followed my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, love, and perseverance. Still kicking.

You just couldn't stop the man. He's not the only one again, he's not the only one. Jeremiah was this way, Peter is this way, Thomas is there, the others were this way. Now verse 15, looking at, well go back to verse 14 a moment, he says, where we found brethren, stayed with them seven days, invited. That's important. We don't invite ourselves to stay with other people. I'm here.

Some of you might do that and you, why don't they like me? But anyway, back to verse 15, and from there, when the brethren heard about us, they came to meet us as far as Apai forum and three ends, when Paul saw them he thanked God and took courage. There is Rome, and from there, when the brethren heard about us, when they heard about them from Rome. Incidentally, this is the church in Rome, not the church of Rome.

Huge difference. So Paul, he wrote his letter to these believers that are going to come out, that are coming out to see him, and his letters testify that he knew no less than 22 of them. In that Roman letter in chapter 16 of Romans, verses 3-15, he greeted no less than 22 believers by name. Two of them were his beloved Aquila and Prisca. They were very special to him. Paul likely expected a reception of, from the leaders when he arrives in Rome. I don't think he expected this outpouring of love that's coming his way. When the brethren heard about us, verse 15, they came to meet us. Again, with the seven day time period there, they've got to be scrambling.

If they're going to come out 40 miles, they're likely carrying with them fruits and flowers. You just don't show up empty-handed. Just love doesn't do that. He had no idea that God would rally the people of God to escort him to jail. That is just what's happening. This outpouring of love was arranged by God in the hearts of Rome's church-going Christians.

This is how you do it. Now when we saw Peter in the Gospels try to take off the head of Malchus, one of the servants of that party that came out to arrest Jesus, Peter was trying to cut his head off, but he missed. He got the ear. And Jesus, of course, had to do damage control and clean up that mess, and he rebuked Peter. Well, that was misguided love. That was human love. It was love for Jesus. Jesus did not need his protection, nor did he want his protection, but he understood that this was human love, not agape love. What we're looking at here is agape love. We're looking at spiritual. They're not trying to come, you know, put together an ambush and free Paul from the Roman troops.

They're just coming out to show love. You've been listening to Cross-Reference Radio, the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. As we mentioned at the beginning of today's broadcast, today's teaching is available free of charge at our website. Simply visit crossreferenceradio.com. That's crossreferenceradio.com. We'd also like to encourage you to subscribe to the Cross-Reference Radio podcast. Subscribing ensures that you stay current with all the latest teachings from Pastor Rick. You can subscribe at crossreferenceradio.com or simply search for Cross-Reference Radio in your favorite podcast app. Tune in next time as Pastor Rick continues teaching through the book of Acts, right here on Cross-Reference Radio.