Grace Received, Grace Invested: The Radical Leadership of Barnabas (Part 2) | Chris Howles

So this is the second of two talks about Barnabas.

I hope you remember last week we began with Proverbs chapter 13, which says, walk with the wise and become wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm.

And we thought about how the people we walk with will always leave a mark on us for good or for ill.

And in these readings and talks, we're focusing, of course, on Barnabas.

We're chasing through his character and his convictions.

And we want to see in him what happens when the grace of Christ works powerfully in and through a real person.

And we're walking with him.

with the aim that we too might be wise, that we might be marked or moulded by that same transforming gospel grace that was so powerfully and evidently at work in Barnabas.

Our aim, as I said last week, is not to lionise him.

Luke's centre is always the Lord Jesus Christ and ours should be too.

Last week, a quick recap.

We looked at chapter four.

You don't need to turn there, but we saw that wonderful description of the church where Luke tells us that God's grace was powerfully at work in them all.

Barnabas sells a field and lays the proceeds of that at the apostles' feet.

And because he had received from Christ what he could never earn and could never lose, it does seem that he is freed to release his grip even on his possessions.

That powerful grace at work in him, that costly grace.

We then looked at Acts 9 and we saw this new convert, Saul, who comes into Jerusalem.

And we saw how the Christians there and the apostles were afraid of him.

After all, this was, or in their minds might still be, the high priest hatchet man, persecuting and imprisoning and killing Christians.

So they don't easily accept him.

But along comes the grace-filled Barnabas, who doesn't naively overlook Saul's past, but because he knows grace, he can recognize it, and he stakes his entire credibility, his life even, you might say, on Saul, trusting that through the powerful work of grace in Saul, the old has gone and the new has come.

And of course, he was right.

And then again last week we saw in chapter 11 how the apostles were apparently bemused and confused by all that was taking place up in Antioch, where a large number of Gentiles were coming to Christ and this unprecedented intercultural church was forming, all of it outside the control and leadership and direction of the church in Jerusalem.

Humanly speaking, this was a moment of enormous significance.

Will the church remain fundamentally centred on Jerusalem and bound by Jewish cultural identity? Or will it be released to become a multicultural, polycentric, decentralised, global people of God? The apostles needed someone with grace-filled eyes and grace-filled heart to see God's bigger purposes.