Furlough – Acts 14:24-28

There is no way of knowing for sure how long this First Missionary Journey took.

I don’t know why they say it, but a lot of scholars declare that Acts 12 ended in about 44 AD.

And then most of them say that Acts 15 took place in the year 51, although I read where one said 53 AD.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that someone assumed those dates,

And then some others repeated them, and then their students repeated them,

Until it was decided that those dates must be true because they are repeated so often.

If that majority opinion is the case, then the First Journey took about five years,

With an additional couple of years spent back in Syria and Judea.

Is it important that we know these dates? Not at all.

But they do suggest a couple of things:

Since there were 5 major communities evangelized on that trip,

We might assume that there was the average of a year spent in each one and its surrounding areas.

Certainly a lot of evangelism, growth and development could have taken place in a year.

Secondly, some people might see a pattern here for how long a missionary should be on the field before returning home on furlough.

I’m not saying that WE HAVE a pattern here, but some people MIGHT SEE one.

And again, we have no way to confirm these dates and years.

So Paul and Barnabas retraced their steps through Lystra, Iconium and Antioch back to Perga.

Perga was the capital of Pamphylia, built on the Cestrus River about 7 miles inland from the coast.

That apparently was the place where their ship from Cyprus had landed two to four years earlier.

But chapter 13 doesn’t actually say that the missionaries stayed in Perga any length of time.

“Now when Paul and his company loosed from Paphos, they came to Perga in Pamphylia:

And John departing from them returned to Jerusalem.

But when they departed from Perga, they came to Antioch in Pisidia.”

Although there was some shipping in and out of Perga,

There was a port on the Mediterranean where most of the shipping in the region took place.

The name of that port city was Attalia.

I am told that it was the major Mediterranean sea port for the entire area of Turkey.

In our scripture tonight, it appears that Paul and Barnabas were looking for a ship to take them to Seleucia, the port for Antioch in Syria,

But there didn’t appear to be any going that way from Perga itself, so they walked down to Attalia.

It is guessed by some that they had obtained a sailing schedule and knew that they had several days,

So while they were waiting, they preached in Perga and Attalia.

The scriptures only say that they PREACHED in Perga,

There is no hint that a church was started in either town or that the evangelism was very thorough.

Why didn’t they return to the Island of Cyprus to strengthen the brethren and churches there instead of going directly back to Antioch?

Some scholars say that the need wasn’t as great in Cyprus,

Because the churches on the island were primarily Hebrew rather than Gentile.

Some say Paul knew that there were other missionaries already following them and ministering there.

We have no information to help us answer that question.

But I wonder if the fact that Paul didn’t want to return to Cyprus, the birthplace of Barnabas, was a part of the rift between them?

Later Barnabas did return to Cyprus, while Paul and Silas went back to Lystra and Derbe.

I have called this message: “Furlough.”

“Furlough” is a word that is often used to describe the time that a veteran missionary spends back in his home country, with his home church and visiting his supporting churches.

You might say that Paul and Barnabas were returning home on furlough, although that isn’t exactly true.

Furlough is supposed to be a time when the missionary and his family can rest and be refreshed,

But it’s often spent traveling 50,000 to a 100,000 miles,

Refreshing the relationship that missionary has with the churches which send him money every month.

Having been a missionary myself, I have mixed feelings about “furlough” and missionary “deputation.”

First, it is a shame that a missionary has to have 50 to 100 churches supporting him in order to have enough money to remain on the mission field.

Ideally, his home church should be financially strong enough to meet all his expenses,

But this is rarely, if ever true, today.

Thus, the poor missionary has to spend 2 or 3 years gathering enough support before he leaves,

And then every 4 or 5 years, he has to spend another year revisiting those churches.

That is, if he doesn’t want many of them will drop his support.

Deputation is exhausting and highly stressful work, not only for the missionary, but especially for his family.

On the other hand, it is a blessing to those churches, and sometimes essential to keep the subject of missions before the members of those churches.

It’s one of those proverbial “Catch 22’s.”

When he should either be resting or working on the field, he is wearing himself out on deputation.

And while is he RAISING money, he is SPENDING gobs of money traveling, staying months in motels or renting motor homes or travel trailers.

This is why I always try my best to make sure that a good missionary gets a great love offering.

As I was thinking about this scripture I saw three things about these missionaries’ furlough:

They were RECOMMENDED to the grace of God, they REHEARSED the Lord’s blessings,

And they REFRESHED themselves with the rest of the disciples.

Paul and Barnabas returned to the church which had RECOMMENDED them to the grace of God.

What a strange and wonderful phrase that is: “Recommended to the grace of God.”

Unfortunately, it loses some of it’s mystique when we read it in Greek:

Luke says that the church in Antioch “DELIVERED their missionaries to the grace of God.”

“Recommended” is the Greek word “paradidomi” ( par-ad-id’-o-mee )

It means: “to give over into the hands of someone else.”

But that is still a wonderful thought, isn’t it?

It’s very similar to what we read in verse 23:

“And when they had ordained them elders in every church, and had prayed with fasting,

They COMMENDED them to the Lord, on whom they believed.”

The other day, I started watching the 4 hour long PBS documentary “Lewis and Clark.”

In the first few minutes, the narrator pointed out that when our astronauts first went to the moon,

They had some idea of where they were going,

But when Lewis and Clark and their 4 dozen adventurers starting pushing their way up the Mississippi,

They really had no reliable information about where they were going or what they were going to find.

Paul and Barnabas were not going into unexplored wilderness as far as geography was concerned,

But in some ways they were adventuring out into a ministry that no man had ever traversed before.

Did those missionaries know that their ministry was going to change from Hebrew to Greek to Pagan?

Did Paul know that he was going to be stoned and rise again?

The saints in Syria equipped their friends as best they could, but then put them in hands of God’s grace.

That phrase carries a little more than just to say they commended them TO GOD;

They recommended them to the GRACE of God.

So many people use the word “grace” only in regards to salvation, and then never think about it again.

Most of that kind of people have little real understanding of what grace really is.

The fact of the matter is that every day is a day of grace, and every blessing we ever experience is because the Lord is kindly disposed toward us.

Not only was it due to the grace of God that people, like Sergius Paulus, were born again,

But it was by the grace of God that the missionaries weren’t stoned in Antioch or Iconium.

And then it was by the grace of God that Paul was raised from death after he was stoned in Lystra.

Every meal that they ate was by the grace of God, and every sunny day was because of God’s grace.

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”

Those people in Syria, realized how dependent THEY were and how dependent THEIR MISSIONARIES were upon the constant free favor of the Lord.

When they couldn’t be there to help Barnabas and Saul, they trusted that the grace of God would meet their needs.

And, you know what? They were right and the Lord did bless.

There is something else in that phrase which I think is important and suggestive.

“They had been recommended to the grace of God for the work which they fulfilled.”

There is nothing particularly special about the word “work;” it’s the common Greek word “ergon” (er’-gon).

But the way that word is used, doesn’t it suggest that there was a plan involved?

Couldn’t there have been an itinerary planned by the missionaries and elders of the church, before Saul and Barnabas ever left Antioch?

“They had been recommended to the grace of God for the work which they (in turn) fulfilled.”

Would there have been anything particularly wrong for the church to tell their missionaries, exactly what they wanted them to do and where they were to minister?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Was that what happened?

I can’t tell you that it was, but our scripture doesn’t demand that it wasn’t.

And I think that there is one other thought behind this phrase:

If the church recommended them to the grace of God,

I would think that the church would have continued faithful in prayer for their missionaries as well.

They would have CONTINUED to recommend them to the grace of God.

We receive reports from our missionaries pretty regularly.

There is one missionary, however, which disappoints me, because regular to him means twice a year.

The reason that this is disappointing is because it appears that he doesn’t think that our prayer is important, or at the very least that it’s not necessary that we pray intelligently.

I think that he’s making a serious mistake in not encouraging the prayers other believers.

Only eternity will tell how important the Antioch recommendations of grace was to the ministry of Paul and Barnabas.

The second thing that we see about this missionary furlough was that the missionaries REHEARSED all that God had done with them.

I know that it’s a matter of semantics – just words –

But I don’t think that the Holy Spirit minds it when we stress the language that He inspires.

The missionaries rehearsed or retold the things that GOD DID with them.

They weren’t reporting the things that THEY did, but what GOD did.

I know that in the work of missions there is a blending of these two,

But a lot of missionaries tend to forget that without the Lord they can do nothing worthwhile,

And so they end up trying to make themselves look good without much reference to the Lord at all.

The proto-missionaries of the Book of Acts diligently kept first things first.

Secondly, it goes without saying that their report was THOROUGHLY HONEST.

During my 30 years in the ministry, both on the mission-field and at home, I have seen and read a multitude of missionary exaggerations.

In some cases there have been out and out lies, but more often it’s been a matter of stretching truth.

But exaggeration is really nothing more than a lie anyway.

And I’m not saying that I think that the reports were only embellished; I have had proof of outright lies.

Is a missionary who can’t be trusted to honestly report to his supporting churches be trusted with support?

Sometimes those missionaries report things that they don’t understand, or refuse to understand properly.

I just finished the biography of a Japanese evangelist, named Matsuo Fuchida.

He commented on this very problem.

He said that he was in meetings where missionaries asked for a show of hands from those who were trusting Christ.

And the missionary then counted those hands and reported that they represented real converts.

But the Japanese man knew that 90% of the hands were raised out of politeness, because the crowd didn’t want the missionary to be disappointed.

In missionary reports sometimes it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not.

Paul and Barnabas wisely rehearsed WHAT IT WAS THAT GOD was doing, not just what THEY thought.

Most particularly, Paul referred to the fact that God had opened the door of faith unto the Gentiles.

That statement points out a couple of different things:

First, that part of their ministry was among people who were still out and out Gentiles and heathen.

For some time the gospel was being spread only among Jews and proselytes,

But during that first missionary trip God was touching and saving hardened pagans.

A second important concept is that, once again, God had opened the door of faith.

What would have been the result if the Lord had not opened that door of faith?

Would it be incorrect to say that those Gentiles would never have believed?

Don’t we have another scriptural hint that saving faith is the gift of God?

The third thing that I see in this scripture is that furlough is a time of REFRESHING.

“And there they abode long time with the disciples.”

As I said, some scholars think that Paul and Barnabas were in Antioch and Jerusalem for about two years.

I don’t know if that is true, but I do know that a “long time” is more than two weeks, or two months.

Were those veteran missionaries sitting around idly during that time?

Not at all; I have no doubt that they were teaching, preaching and doing some traveling.

But the stress and strain was definitely not the same at home as it had been in Iconium or Lystra.

I think that not only should God’s missionary serve the Lord properly on the mission field, but his furlough ought to be scriptural as well.