Sep 9, 2026 · 26 min · 8 segments
Who we walk with shapes who we become. In this Oak Hill College Chapel message, Chris Howles (Director of Cross Cultural Training) leads us through Acts 4, 9, and 11 to examine the cumulative portrait…
Chris HowlesHost
It's quite unusual in Oak Hill Chapel to do a kind of multi-passage character study like this.
We nor- more commonly preach through a single passage, rightly sitting under its context and arguments and so on.
These kind of character surveys, jumping across chapters or even books, can risk becoming selective or sentimental or, God forbid, shallow.
Um, Barnabas's New Testament portrayal is fantastic, but do we know him? [laughs] He's named 33 times in the New Testament, more than Titus and Stephen and Andrew combined, for example, but he's so dispersed, uh, a- across at least 10 different events and, and activities, mostly in Acts but a bit in the Epistles too, that many of us only ever see a snippet of him here and there.
And so without this sort of testament-crossing, book-hopping, multiverse intentionality, we so easily miss this rich cumulative portrait that Luke and others give us of this remarkable saint.
Luke's center is always the risen Lord Jesus, uh, advancing His words by His Spirit, crucially, by the power of His grace.
So we wouldn't be right to lionize Barnabas, and I strongly suspect that that's not what he would want us to do anyway.
So the focus here isn't this kind of striving and straining to emulate, uh, this great man, but are rather enjoying and hopefully experiencing that very same transforming grace of God that is so powerfully at work in him.
So let's take our first step, uh, of several steps we'll be taking on this walk with Barnabas.
It's quite unusual in Oak Hill Chapel to do a kind of multi-passage character study like this.
We nor- more commonly preach through a single passage, rightly sitting under its context and arguments and so on.
These kind of character surveys, jumping across chapters or even books, can risk becoming selective or sentimental or, God forbid, shallow.
Um, Barnabas's New Testament portrayal is fantastic, but do we know him? [laughs] He's named 33 times in the New Testament, more than Titus and Stephen and Andrew combined, for example, but he's so dispersed, uh, a- across at least 10 different events and, and activities, mostly in Acts but a bit in the Epistles too, that many of us only ever see a snippet of him here and there.
And so without this sort of testament-crossing, book-hopping, multiverse intentionality, we so easily miss this rich cumulative portrait that Luke and others give us of this remarkable saint.
Luke's center is always the risen Lord Jesus, uh, advancing His words by His Spirit, crucially, by the power of His grace.
So we wouldn't be right to lionize Barnabas, and I strongly suspect that that's not what he would want us to do anyway.
So the focus here isn't this kind of striving and straining to emulate, uh, this great man, but are rather enjoying and hopefully experiencing that very same transforming grace of God that is so powerfully at work in him.
So let's take our first step, uh, of several steps we'll be taking on this walk with Barnabas.
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