Welcome to Madison Church Online. I'm Stephen Feet, lead pastor. And as Kyle mentioned last week, and I intended to mention it two weeks ago, but I didn't, but he mentioned it and I was grateful that he did. The book of Acts, which is what we've been studying, it gets very dense, very quickly. We are at that point in Acts where it feels like we're getting into the weeds, and it's gonna stay that way throughout. Luke, the author, is going to cover large stretches of time and geography much more quickly. And as such, we're also gonna move through Acts quickly. As a matter of fact, you're gonna see that we have that's like 10 or 11 chapters left, and we're gonna finish it in the next month. Okay, so the next four weeks, we're gonna be going two, sometimes three chapters a week. Because Luke is no longer laying a foundation. There aren't these big milestone moments of Jesus' last words, the Holy Spirit coming down, Stevens killed, the scattering. All of a sudden, as Kyle brought up last week with the map, in just a matter of a chapter, Paul went to boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. If you remember the map that he had, he went to all of these places. And it happens again today. It's his second missionary journey where we could throw up a map and say he went to all of these places, but I'm gonna skip all of that. I'm gonna tell you it's all in there. If you have your own Bible, you flip to the end of that thing and you have a series of maps, and you can check it out for yourself if that interests you. But we are gonna take what is a rare pause in the density of Luke's writings from a couple weeks ago and as he continues to the end. He pauses here because there is a sharp conflict between two mature, influential Christian leaders that ends with them not agreeing, not aligning, and going their own separate ways. And it makes sense why you would slow down here, right? Because up until this point, you've been a relatively unified group. I mean, even last week in referencing that message, we saw them have some conflict. The church is starting to grow, and there's conflict, but it's the kind of conflict that us in the West, and specifically the Midwest, are comfortable with. Yes, there was disagreement. We couldn't avoid it, we had to deal with it, but it was theological and communal. They were able to come together and listen to one another and open up scripture and see what scripture says. And over time, the Holy Spirit led them to clarity and shared direction. Conflict led to consensus. And that's the version of conflict. Every single one of us in the room believes what happens if we do things the right way. Like if we do things the right way in conflict, isn't that going to be the result? Greater unity, more alignment, better strategy. If we talk it out and if we pray hard enough and we listen to one another carefully, I mean, really listen to one another, eventually we'll all end up on the same page, right? No. And Luke's gonna show us like adamantly, no. And it's not an immaturity thing, it's not an irresponsibility thing, it's not a blame thing. It's a thing that happens. Sometimes conflict does not lead to consensus. Sometimes conflict leads to separation. And that's what we're talking about today as we go to Luke chapter 15. I'm gonna start reading in verse 36, where we see Paul and Barnabas have their falling out. After some time, Paul said to Barnabas, let's go back and visit each city where we previously preached the word of the Lord to see how the new believers are doing. Pause for a second. So we've been following Paul and Barnabas, and you might remember how they initially came together was that this church in Antioch, this really big city, is starting to grow, and they need some sort of a disciple there, somebody who's who knows the apostles, who's from the church in Jerusalem to make sure things are kind of heading in the direction they should. Barnabas shows up, things are going really well, so well that Barnabas recognizes his own need for help. I need help here with this church. So he goes off and he finds Paul and he brings Paul back. And Paul and Barnabas, they're in Antioch, they're teaching for a while, but then they begin to travel with one another. And so when Paul says, let's go back and check out the cities, he's this is a partnership. We've been doing this. Those churches we started, bud, let's go back and check on them to make sure they're doing well. Barnabas agreed and he says, but hey, let's take along John Mark. But Paul disagreed strongly, since John Mark had deserted them and had not continued with them in their work. Their disagreement was so sharp that they separated. Their disagreement was so sharp they went their separate ways. Barnabas took John Mark with him and sailed to Cyprus. Paul chose Silas, and as he left, the believers entrusted him to the Lord's grace. That last line, if you're kind of like a theological nerd, that's important, right? This is the first time Paul's going out without one of the Jerusalem homeboys. With because up until this point, Barnabas has been able to kind of watch over, make sure Paul isn't doing anything too crazy. But now the church has recognized that not only is Barnabas capable of leading and traveling on his own and having a companion with him, but now so is Paul. And the church sends them both off in different directions. And what birthed that wasn't strategy, but disagreement. It wasn't like they got together and they said, let's break this band up because we're going to cover more ground. But rather it was an interpersonal conflict that they had. This is one of those passages where I think that the natural like inclination is to try to read in between the lines. What happened? What occurred. And there's a lot of speculation out there. If you jump on Google, you can look it up, and lots of scholars will have opinions. But for us at Madison Church, I want to do what we almost always do, which is focus on what is actually written in the passage and see what Luke wants us to pull out of it. The first thing, as I've already kind of been talking about, is that these are not new believers. These are leaders. This is Paul and Barnabas. They love God deeply. They've been together for years. They trusted one another. They shared history and they had a lot of freaking success with each other. A lot of fruit in the church world. They aren't immature. But all of that doesn't mean they're immune to conflict. All of those things, it doesn't mean that they were like somehow above conflict. Luke is very clear about a few things. He tells us what and really who this disagreement was about. It was about John Mark. And he says that this was such a serious conflict that did lead to the separation of two close colleagues. But Luke leaves out all this other stuff. Like, why it happened? You know, like what were the motives? What were the arguments? Luke also doesn't blame anyone. He doesn't say, well, you know, Paul was really zealous, or, you know, Barnabas was too encouraging. Those are two things we know about both of those guys. He doesn't comment on any of them. Instead, Luke keeps our attention on what matters most. What happened next? Two faithful men, deeply convicted, go their own ways, and the work of the gospel continues to flow in them and through them and be on them. And Luke moves on, and he lets these two truths sit side by side without resolving a tension. And the tension being that faithfulness doesn't always end or result in agreement. You and I, we can be really faithful. I mean, us in the church upstairs can be really faithful. Us in the church down the street, we can be really faithful and still not agree. That's what we see in Paul and Barnabas, and as the story goes on. Sometimes what faithfulness looks like are two people earnestly seeking out God's will for their lives, going in different directions, but still trusting that God is at work beyond them and fruit that backs that up. The mission doesn't fracture after their disagreement. That might be what we think. When we think of leaders like Barnabas and Paul separating, we might think, oh my gosh, the church is split down the middle, and half of them go with Paul, and half of them go with Barnabas, and that is not what happens as you continue reading. Paul continues his mission with Silas. And you see as they go on their journey, a young man named Timothy joins Paul, and we've got a couple letters in the New Testament written by Paul to Timothy. He becomes a man who leads the church. Plans are made and then redirected by the Spirit as we become accustomed to. Some doors close and other ones open. The gospel moves into new cities, new oppositions, new resistance, but new communities are taking shape. And while Paul and Silas are doing all of that, John, Mark, and Barnabas are over here doing similar things. What had been one team now became two. And the work continued and even expanded as their own personal relationship strained. And what Luke wants us to see, or what we can deduct today, is that God's mission is resilient in ways that our relationships sometimes aren't. Okay, God's mission is resilient in ways that our relationships sometimes are not. This passage is not about resolution, it's about continuation. And Luke is entirely comfortable just letting the story move on without trying to make you feel better or those first readers feel better. Oh no, they they eventually worked it all out. I mean, as a matter of fact, you can skip to the end and you can see Luke never, ever revisits this again. The last time Luke is going to write about these two guys are right now. They break up, they go their separate ways, and there's no, they worked it out, they became buddies later. There is no update. However, Luke would have known that there was. Luke is a traveling companion of Paul. So as Paul's traveling around, Luke is with him. And as we back out of Acts and we look at other letters in the New Testament, we see that Paul and Barnabas, they do work again. They do work together again. After some time apart, they come together and they begin doing things once again. Paul's view of John Mark, Mark changes. And at the end of Paul's life, he specifically, when he's writing from prison, he writes, send Mark to me as he has been useful to me. Paul has some things at the very end of his life that he's like, you know who I want to see? John Mark. Whatever Mark did earlier, whatever disagreement, it didn't define him, it wasn't written off, and he was not remembered for his worst moment. And Luke, knowing that there was this reconciliation, it begs the question for us today why didn't he mention it? Remember, Luke isn't just a historian, he's a theologian, and he's writing a history of the church, and he's trying to show sometimes really faithful believers are gonna disagree and they're gonna go their separate ways, but God's mission will continue. And as a matter of fact, Mark, this guy that Paul's like, I can't even travel with him, I can't count him on at all. This is the Mark that becomes the gospel writer. Okay, so he writes that gospel, the biography of Jesus, Mark. And the reason that this is kind of cool is because Mark ends up being one of the sources that Luke uses in his own gospel. So we know from when you're looking at ancient texts that Luke explicitly stole things from Mark. Mark bounced back. Mark has contributed to our faith in an amazing way. And it's like, on the one hand, Paul goes off and he starts all of these churches and writes all of these New Testament letters, and it's amazing, and we're grateful for that. And at the same time, I mean, Mark wasn't a slacker either. After he travels with Barnabas a little bit, Peter, the uh the apostle Peter asks for Barnabas to come be with him. And that's what spurs on the gospel that Mark writes. Mark writes the gospel based on what Peter tells him of his own life. Peter says, this happened and this happened, and Mark is writing it because as Peter's getting old, he's getting ready to die. He says, We need to pass this message on. And that is what Mark does. Early church historians also tell us that Mark established the very first churches in Alexandria, Egypt. That he established the very first churches there. This was not a minor role, this was foundational. And the point isn't who was right and who was wrong. You're missing the point, if that was the point. They all went off and did great things for God's kingdom here on earth. And it's not to say that disagreements don't matter either. The disagreement, I think Luke is saying it did matter. But I think what Luke is trying to show us is that God is patient with unfinished people. Because in that moment that Paul refuses to take John Mark, perhaps Paul's a little unfinished there. But maybe he wasn't wrong because maybe John Mark wasn't reliable because he was a little unfinished too. And not to let Barney Barnabas off the hook here, maybe Barnabas was over evaluating what John Mark could bring to the mission. Maybe he was taking an unnecessary risk by bringing John Mark. But God is patient with unfinished people and he is faithful long after them. Long after them. For some of us right now, today, hearing a passage like this can bring up old wounds. Perhaps you grew up in and around the church, or you've been a part of the church, and you've been a part of church conflict, and that church conflict wasn't handled well. Okay, that can bring up some pain talking about this subject today. Relationships in the past that have ended without care. Moments where faithfulness was demanded, but safety was not given, or safety was missing. And if that's you, just understand that this passage isn't here to like reopen those wounds or tell you what you should have done differently. That's not what Luke does. I'm not about to give you five steps to like biblical conflict resolution. That's not what this text is about. Rather, this text tells us that unresolved endings are not evidence that you failed God. Unresolved endings are not evidence that you failed God. There are no instructions from this passage. Do that. Rather, what we get from this passage is permission. Permission to live faithfully in the midst of unresolved tension. And I know, I know most of us are living with that. At home, at work, at church. We're trying to be faithful with all of this unresolved tension. And I think that the passage, though, it does kind of lean into a few things for us that we can glean today and take into our homes and workplaces in church. And the first is that this passage invites us and gives us permission to let go of our need to be right. Some of us deeply feel that need. But notice that Luke never tells us who won the argument because he doesn't seem to care. That doesn't seem to be the point. Who was right, who was wrong. Faithfulness is not always immediately vindicated. I'm sure for the first few months of their separation between Paul and Barnabas, there were some side eyes between the two camps. Wonder how they're doing, huh? I wonder how they're doing, huh? But obedience to God mattered more than their agreement. Other times the most faithful thing you can do is to stop trying to prove your side and just trust God with the outcome. At some point, Paul and Barnabas, they don't keep arguing at the church in Jerusalem. They go on their separate ways. We're gonna just, at this point, God's got this. We're gonna, we're just gonna try to be faithful. And that's harder than it sounds because for a lot of us, being right is not about ego. It's not about checking a box, I always got to be right and I can never be wrong. That's sometimes the case. But for a lot of us in the room, being right, this is kind of like about safety. We we just want clarity. Well, clarity's safe. We want justification. How about the reassurance that you didn't waste your time? You didn't waste energy. You weren't stupid, you didn't put trust somebody that shouldn't have been trusted. We want to know that our instincts as human beings, that our efforts, that they mattered. And yet, there are moments when you've done the work at home, at work, in church, you've listened, you've prayed, you've tried to understand, you've stayed longer than comfortable, and you still arrived at an impasse. No clean resolution, no shared clarity, no affirmation that you did it the right way. But this passage leaves us with a quiet question. Can you remain faithful even if you're never proven right? Can I remain faithful even if I'm never proven right? The story in Acts says yes. Absolutely, positively. We're reminded of a God that doesn't require us to win or to have success for us to remain faithful. God is not waiting to see who is correct before continuing his work. He is looking for people willing to obey, even when those outcomes remain unresolved. Now, this kind of faithfulness is quieter, it's less visible, and oftentimes it goes unnoticed. But make no mistake about it, this is a deep and mature faithfulness that both Paul and Barnabas possessed. Second thing is that this passage teaches us to name separation without baptizing it as failure, and I'll explain what I mean. Some relationships, as you likely know, change shape. Some partnerships reach their limits. Some seasons end not because somebody stopped loving God, but because the situation itself shifted. And those kinds of separations are rarely clean. Those separations carry grief, unanswered questions, conversations that will never get finished. What I found in my own experience, and I wonder if you can relate, is that there's often not a dramatic breaking point, just the slow realization that the path forward continues to get narrower. And continuing as before, we require us to pretend something's true that isn't true anymore. If you find yourself in that situation today, what Luke is telling you is the separation isn't betrayal. And sometimes the separation isn't even the end. It's just something different. Paul and Barnabas don't walk away from the mission that God has put on their lives and they don't undermine each other. They don't recruit sides, they go their separate ways, and the gospel continues to move, which tells us something important. In other words, separation is not the same thing as abandonment. Separation can be faithful, but it doesn't have to be final. Sometimes faithfulness looks like releasing control rather than forcing togetherness. Trusting that God will keep working in my life and through my life and beyond my life, even when a relationship or a season no longer fits the way it used to. And finally, I think the passage calls us to trust God with unfinished people, including ourselves, because we are all unfinished people. Mark's story himself, I don't want him to get lost in the weeds between Saul and Barnabas or Paul and Barnabas, but Mark's story reminds us that early failure, limitations, and unreadiness do not cancel out calling. Formation takes time. Growth isn't linear. God works on a longer timeline than our conflicts, our disappointments, and even our worst moments. And one of the most challenging parts for us of that for us is our Our lack of patience. Our lack of patience. We are impatient, I believe, because we care a lot. Most of us are impatient because we care a lot. We want the people in our lives to grow and we want them to do it now. And we want the church to be healthy and we want it now. We want things to move forward yesterday, right? But often, and I'm going to read this. I think I got it for the screen. Oftentimes, our sense of timing is shaped less by the spirit and more by our anxiety. Pause right there. To let that sit. Our sense of timing oftentimes is shaped less by the Holy Spirit and more by our anxiety or our need to control outcomes or by the efficiency-driven assumptions we've absorbed about how quickly things should change. It's kind of a confronting question that could lead to what I think is a good kind of conviction when we're looking at our own lives and our plans and our strategies and what is occurring. Are we relying on the Holy Spirit or what's most efficient to my strategy? Or, man, this would alleviate the anxiety if this just happened and it needs to happen now, so I feel better now. Or is it my sense of, man, this could go really bad if I'm not all in and controlling this? Mark in the story does not become useful overnight. He doesn't write a biography of Jesus in the next verse, in the next chapter. It took years and years and years and distance and you and failure and trust needed to be rebuilt between him and Paul, and it was, but none of that in the moment as the years went by meant that he wasn't trying. When we grow impatient with one another, we often confuse slowness with disobedience. I know I do. It's like, well, you know what you should do? Just go do it now. We often confused incompleteness with a lack of faith. Well, if you just believed harder, they would be different. And we forget that the spirit's work in people is often and usually quieter and slower than we prefer. And this matters not just with them, the person you know you're married to, or the person you're sitting next to, or your boss, or your coworkers, or the people who report to you, or here at church, it matters to you. Because in your life, progress goes slower than you hope. Because in your life, old patterns don't disappear on your timeline. Because in your life, when you wonder if everyone else has moved on without you, and you're like, man, I'm stuck. And everyone else is growing, but not me. Or everyone else is growing so much faster, but not me. Am I slowing everyone down? Acts tells us, Luke tells us, God's patience is not a sign of low expectations, but rather it's a sign of deep commitment. God is deeply committed to you no longer, no matter how long it takes. I want to say this in closing that patience in Acts is also not about tolerating harm or ignoring truth. It's always important to throw that out. If you find yourself today or you're listening online in an abusive relationship of any sort, Acts is not telling you, Luke is not telling you, stick it out longer. God doesn't want that for you. Don't misconstrue the words that I've said today. What this passage shows us is that the gospel can move forward in multiple ways. Sometimes it moves forward through consensus and shared clarity, as we saw in the passage that Kyle taught on last week. Other times it moves forward through separation, disagreement, and unresolved tension, as I've talked about today. It moves forward, this gospel mission moves forward in moments where everything makes sense, but it also moves forward when things don't make sense. It moves forward with people who are really mature and responsible, and it moves through people who are really immature and irresponsible because it has to do with God and not always us. Now, for some of us, the story does touch a more tender place, especially if you find yourself committed deeply to this Madison church community. It's no lie if you've been here for more than a year or two that our community changes. People come and people leave. People leave for lots of reasons. They discern different paths for their lives, not always out of conflict, not always out of anger, a lot of times because of hope or timing. Sometimes it's because callings don't align. But I bring that up because for those of us who continue to be part of this community, that change, when people leave for whatever reason it is, it causes grief and pain. And on the one hand, while we still remain deeply committed, on the other. And if that's you today holding both, part of the past, hope of the future, scripture doesn't rush you past your pain. It allows you to name it, to honor it, to sit with it. And it reminds us that faithfulness is not measured by speed, but trust. And it's important to say this that we are one church of many. And the story that God is writing is way bigger than Madison Church. We might be a footnote when it's all said and done. When people leave our community, it doesn't mean that they're leaving faith or that God is done with them or with us. Just like Paul goes this way and Barnabas goes that way. God is at work in places we cannot see, in ways you cannot control, and on timelines you do not get to choose. Paul writes in Philippians, I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns. Not that Christ Jesus, not that God, through Christ Jesus, will work fast, that it'll be clean, that it'll be painless, that there won't be any setbacks if you do the right things. No, God will be faithful to finish what he started, including the setbacks, including the dirt and all the slowness that comes with it. And that becomes an invitation for you and I today to trust God with the people you cannot fix. An invitation to trust God in the season of life that you cannot control. To trust God with the story that is still unfolding called your life. God is still writing that story. And just because something isn't finished yet doesn't mean it's failed.