Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Our Lord was teaching his followers about what he values and rewards in life.
[00:00:18] And he said this.
[00:00:23] When you saw me and I was in need, you helped me.
[00:00:32] When I was hungry, you fed me.
[00:00:35] When I was thirsty, you gave me a drink.
[00:00:39] When I was naked, you gave me clothes.
[00:00:42] When I was in prison, you visited me.
[00:00:46] When I was sick, you showed concern for me.
[00:00:52] And his friends said to him, we've never seen you hungry or thirsty and gave you a drink.
[00:00:59] We've never seen you naked and giving you clothes, and we've never seen you in prison or sick.
[00:01:09] Jesus said, as much as you did it to one of these, the least of my brothers, you did it for me.
[00:01:18] Christ said, I take it personally.
[00:01:21] And that's why we have love week. We have love week. So every year we have an opportunity to please Christ by going out and helping other people in his name.
[00:01:35] I'd like you to sign up for love week. Some of you come every year, and may the Lord bless you richly for it. Some of you have never done it.
[00:01:45] You've just never taken an extra day of your life and just given it away to help somebody for no other reason than you love Jesus Christ.
[00:01:57] I'm telling you, you can't do anything that's more valuable and that God will reward more than serving those in need.
[00:02:06] So I invite you to sign up for love week.
[00:02:11] I'm sure it will be meaningful to you.
[00:02:15] Our dear heavenly Father, you have great ideas about living well, but we get misguided and we let the world distract us and our values fade.
[00:02:32] And so I pray that you can remind us again this morning that to live the life you created us to live, we have to have quality friendships, and I pray that you would trigger our heart for that today. In Christ's name, amen.
[00:02:52] Many times the Bible teaches us by an example.
[00:02:59] Instead of giving a principle, the Bible gives an example. And we can see what God wants by looking at the example.
[00:03:10] And I see that in the life of Paul, we think of Paul as this incredible guy. But if you read the book of acts the way it wants to be read, Paul didn't do anything alone.
[00:03:24] Paul had friends, and his friends went with him on absolutely everything he did.
[00:03:32] In fact, he had a very good friend named Luke.
[00:03:37] Paul called him the beloved physician.
[00:03:41] And when you read the book of acts, anytime Luke says we, he was with Paul.
[00:03:49] When he says they, then he wasn't with Paul.
[00:03:53] And the passage we're going to look at today, Luke was with Paul through one of the most difficult times of his whole life.
[00:04:02] So, in the book of Second Corinthians, we learn that Paul took an offering from the churches that he started. He took an offering from the church at Ephesus, Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, and Corinth.
[00:04:16] And then he chose some trustworthy people, and they went with him to take this offering to Jerusalem, because the church in Jerusalem was struggling.
[00:04:28] Well, when he did that, Luke went with him, and they took the offering, and they gave it to James and the elders in Jerusalem. And if you read the chapter, they never even said thank you.
[00:04:43] They were so fixated on something else. Paul takes this big offering, gives it to them, and they don't even say thank you. They go, yeah, put the money over there. By the way, there's a bunch of people here who are really angry with you, and we're feeling pressure about that, and we want you to do something about it.
[00:05:03] They were angry with Paul because he was preaching the gospel and not the law.
[00:05:09] So James, another one of his harebrained ideas, said, here's what we want you to do.
[00:05:17] We've got four guys here, and they're all ending a vow.
[00:05:23] We want you to take them to the barber and have their head shaved, and then we want you to go to the temple with them and offer the sacrifice that you're supposed to offer for ending a vow. And then everybody will see that you follow the law, and the pressure will be off us.
[00:05:45] Paul takes them to the barber shop, pays for their haircuts, takes them to the temple. They offer the sacrifice. And then Paul went from where you offer the sacrifice to another area, another court by the temple, where people commonly prayed.
[00:06:03] And while he was praying there, some people who didn't like him saw him, attacked him. They literally started yelling. They ran up and grabbed him and drug him out of the temple. And they were dragging him through the streets of Jerusalem. They intended to stone him, and people were punching him and kicking him. Well, the roman tribune saw it happening because the Antonio fort is elevated. And he took a bunch of roman soldiers. They fought their way through the crowd, and they put shackles on Paul. And the tribune said, what's going on here? You people are going to have a riot, and I'm not going to have it.
[00:06:51] And one person shouted one thing, and another person shouted another thing, and nobody really knew what the problem was.
[00:06:59] So the tribune had the soldiers pick Paul up and carry him on their shoulders. How humiliating for a full grown man to have to be picked up and loved around by soldiers.
[00:07:15] And they took him to the fort of Antonio.
[00:07:21] They had a trial. They couldn't figure anything out. Paul's life was threatened by a coup of 40 men who wanted to assassinate him. So the tribune sent Paul to Caesarea Maritina, where the roman government had its headquarters in Israel, and he was there for two years. Finally, he had to appeal to Caesar. In roman law, if you thought you were getting ripped off by a local judge, you could appeal to Caesar, and you would be sent to Caesar's court.
[00:07:55] So Paul appeals to Caesar, and this gets us to acts, chapter 27, where the story is, I want to tell you it's October, and it's dangerous to sell on the Mediterranean in the winter, but they wanted to get this done. So the centurion named Julius and his soldiers took Paul and several other prisoners and got him on a boat to sail to Rome.
[00:08:32] And wouldn't you know it, Paul's friend Luke bought a ticket to be on the same boat with him.
[00:08:41] Luke said, I don't want Paul to have to do this all alone. And he bought a ticket and got on the same boat as Paul, and they sailed together.
[00:08:52] Well, the wind wasn't for them, and it was hard to get there, but they finally got to Crete.
[00:09:00] And when they got to Crete, they sailed to the south side of the island to a place called Fair harbor. Sounds like a good place to.
[00:09:14] But it turns out the captain of the boat, the owner of the boat and the centurion, didn't like the little town next to Fair harbor. It wasn't a place they wanted to spend the winter.
[00:09:28] So they talked together, and they said, as soon as we have a good day, we're going to sail from Fair harbor to a nicer place to spend the winter called Phoenix on the island of Crete.
[00:09:41] And Paul said, yeah, I don't think you ought to do that.
[00:09:46] He said, I think it would be a big mistake for you to sail in winter. In fact, I'm going to tell you, if you do that, you're going to lose your boat.
[00:09:56] Well, the captain said, what do you know?
[00:10:01] You don't sail boats.
[00:10:03] The centurion said, you don't even like to have fun.
[00:10:09] We're not spending the winter here. We're going to go the winter.
[00:10:12] So they waited, and it looked like they had a good day to sail.
[00:10:19] There was a gentle breeze blowing in the direction they wanted it to, and they got everybody on the boat, and they started for the harbor of Phoenix.
[00:10:35] But they weren't on the boat very long when a northeasterner blew in out of nowhere, and it was typhoon winds. And the wind was blowing so hard that they couldn't turn the boat into the wind. And they had to turn the boat and run with the wind because they couldn't control the boat unless they just let it go with the wind.
[00:11:04] All right, now, I want you to imagine you're on this boat with Paul and Luke.
[00:11:09] There were 276 people on the boat. And if you look at these ancient boats, these roman boats, they are not like modern boats.
[00:11:20] There's no viking cruise line cabins, and there's no fancy restaurants. In fact, they were open boats, and they were exposed to the weather. All right, it's October.
[00:11:38] It's cold. The water is cold. It's raining. There's no place to hide from the weather. And here sets our buddy Luke next to his friend Paul, shivering cold because friendship mattered to him.
[00:11:57] I learned a lesson about friendship in this it's one thing to be somebody's friend when things are easy and nice.
[00:12:07] It's one thing to be somebody's friend when you're sitting on the beach and the sun is shining and everyone's happy.
[00:12:16] It's another thing to be somebody's friend. When you say, I'll set in the open boat with you when the wind is blowing and we're all shivering to stay warm, you're my friend, and I'll go through hard times with you.
[00:12:38] You know, brothers and sisters, the scriptures teach us that friendship is a divine idea, and good friendships make our life better.
[00:12:56] I hope you've learned by now that you can't live your best life without quality, other quality people in your life.
[00:13:06] And if you're gonna have other quality people in your life, that means you gotta be the kind of person who sticks around when it gets hard for your friends, when your friends are having difficulties, when it's not fun, when the pressure is on, when things are unpleasant, that's when a friend sticks closer than a brother.
[00:13:31] So the wind is blowing, it's raining. Water is splashing onto the boat.
[00:13:43] Everybody is shivering. Everybody is trying to wrap themselves in whatever they can wrap themselves to stay warm.
[00:13:52] And they had a little skiff, a little lifeboat, and they were barely able to pull it on board. And they took some of the ropes from that little boat, and they started wrapping them around the big boat to brace it against all the wind and the waves.
[00:14:17] And then it got, the weather got even worse, and they started throwing the ship's tackle overboard.
[00:14:25] They needed more buoyance that was taken on water, and so they started throwing the tackle overboard, and they're feeling desperate and in the middle of all this, Paul speaks up.
[00:14:50] Paul could be a little odd. Can we agree with this? You know what he said? The first thing he said, I told you so.
[00:14:58] I told you we shouldn't do this. This is exactly what he said, men, you should have listened to me and not set sail from Crete and incur this danger and loss.
[00:15:17] And he said, you know, we're going to run aground somewhere.
[00:15:25] This boat is going to crash on an island somewhere.
[00:15:32] I'm sure that didn't make the people around Paul happy.
[00:15:39] Nobody likes to hear, I told you so, but I'm guessing Luke being the kind of guy he was. When Paul sat down, Luke said, good job, buddy.
[00:15:57] I believe Luke was an encourager.
[00:16:01] I believe Paul could always count on Luke to encourage him and say encouraging things to him.
[00:16:09] When no one else wanted to say an encouraging thing, Paul could count on Luke to say something encouraging.
[00:16:17] Church, are you an encourager?
[00:16:22] Would your friends say that you are an encourager?
[00:16:31] Often we feel the impulse to give our friends advice when what they really need is encouragement.
[00:16:42] Right.
[00:16:44] They don't need one more person to tell them.
[00:16:48] What they need is somebody in their life will just say a few encouraging things. Church, sometimes the best thing you can say is not telling people, your friends, how to fix their problems. Sometimes the best thing you can say is, you know what? I'm here for you.
[00:17:07] I got your back. You can count on me.
[00:17:11] I'm going to be praying that God will help you through this. Church, a good friend is an encourager. And when we are encouragers, and we have encouragers in our life, we live a better quality of life.
[00:17:27] When we're trying to do this all alone, when we're living with the myth that I don't need anybody, I got this handled. When we're living with that myth, we are never going to live our best life.
[00:17:42] I encourage you to do a self examination on yourself and say, am I an encourager?
[00:17:53] When you think about the life group you're in, are you an encourager? When you think about the people you work with, are you an encourager?
[00:18:03] When you think about people who are going through difficult times, are you an encourager?
[00:18:09] Encouragers live a better life and they make the world a better place for everyone else.
[00:18:16] So the storm is blowing, everything is bad, people are miserable.
[00:18:24] And the sailors take out the ropes that they measure the water depth with fathoms. And it turns out these ropes had a knot tied in them about every 6ft two inches.
[00:18:41] And so they would throw the rope in and they would count the number of knots and they would know how deep the water was. So they threw the rope in and they found its depth. They waited about 15 minutes. They threw the rope in again and it was much shallower so they could tell they were coming up on something.
[00:19:08] And the Bible says they threw out four anchors and everybody prayed for dawn.
[00:19:22] If you've ever worked the night shift, you know what it means to pray for Don.
[00:19:29] Could dawn just get here please?
[00:19:37] And Paul said, God spoke to me last night.
[00:19:43] The angel of the Lord appeared to me last night and he spoke to me and this is what he said.
[00:19:51] He said, the boat's gonna crash and you're gonna lose everything.
[00:19:55] But for your sake, Paul, I'm gonna save everybody on the boat.
[00:20:02] Everybody on the boat I'm gonna save.
[00:20:08] When Covid hit and I happened to be having my devotions in this passage, I said a prayer. I said, lord, would you save everybody in the Christchurch boat, would you please save everybody in the Christchurch boat?
[00:20:27] Would you please look on us with favor?
[00:20:36] And God was very gracious to us.
[00:20:40] He didn't save everybody on the boat, but our church went through it very, very well.
[00:20:49] In friendship we all bring something unique to the table.
[00:20:55] You see, Luke was a physician and Paul tells us several times in the Bible that he was not a healthy man.
[00:21:09] He tells us several times in the Bible that he had some serious health problems. And here's Luke, his friend, saying, I've got the skill to help you be healthy and take care of you. Even in a traumatic time like being in this storm and in this boat. You know, you bring something unique to every friendship.
[00:21:34] Every person has this God given uniqueness. Every one of you can do something a little bit better than other people and you bring that to your friendships.
[00:21:49] Friendship is not about getting out of doing something. Friendship is about sharing what is best of who you are and what you know how to do with other people.
[00:22:00] Can you hear me, church?
[00:22:03] So then Paul says, okay, we're gonna go in the water. And I think regardless of what the lifeguard said, I think everybody should have something to eat before this boat crashes. So Paul got, they brought the food out and Paul stood up, said a prayer in front of everybody and started eating a big loaf of bread and it encouraged other people and they began to eat and they all had a meal and now they're ready for the next big problem.
[00:22:43] So they finally see the island and when they see the island they say, we're going to try to take the boat to that island. They could see a bay there. And so they raised the sail again.
[00:22:57] They took the ropes off the rudders so they could control the boat, and they started sailing into the bay. But what they didn't know was there was a sandbar in the middle of the bay, and they weren't going to be able to get to the beach because the boat got stuck in the sandbar.
[00:23:17] And when the front of the boat got stuck in the sandbar, the back of the boat was being beaten by the waves. And everybody could tell that the ship was starting to break up. Between the storm and between being stuck in the sandbar, everybody knew the boat was going to break to pieces. So the soldiers said to Julius the centurion, we're going to have to kill everybody, because if anybody escapes, we have to take the punishment for them. This is how the Romans worked. If you were a roman guard and you were guarding somebody and they got away, you had to take their place. Whatever they were charged with, you were charged with.
[00:23:58] So the soldiers say, we gotta kill everybody. But Julius had come to like Paul, and Paul. And Julius wanted to save Paul's life.
[00:24:10] And so Julius said, nope, we're not killing anybody.
[00:24:15] This is an island. If somebody tries to escape, we'll hunt them down.
[00:24:20] And Julius said, if you can swim, now's the time to jump in and swim to the shore.
[00:24:28] If you can't swim, then as the boat breaks apart, you grab ahold of something that floats and paddle as hard as you can toward the beach. All right, now, remember, this is still winter. The water is cold. This is not going to be any fun.
[00:24:46] And those who could swim jumped in and started swimming for the shore. And those who couldn't swim got something that would float, and they started paddling. And Luke tells us when he writes this story that everybody made it alive to the beach just exactly like Paul said they would.
[00:25:07] There is safety in numbers.
[00:25:10] Do you hear this? There's a proverb that says, if you're all alone, it's not hard for people to overcome you.
[00:25:21] But two people, they put up a better resistance.
[00:25:26] And a cord, a rope of three cords is not easily broken. You know what the Bible is saying. There, life is better. When you do it with friends, you're safer in life. When you do life with friends, there is strength in numbers.
[00:25:57] Are you doing the kind of things that make it easy for other people to be your friend?
[00:26:06] Are you uniting with people in the way that it makes it easy for them to be your friend? Or are you like a little porcupine and you got too many things sticking out, and it makes it hard for people to be your friend.
[00:26:25] Some of you say, man, I'd like to have some good friends join a life group, man, my life group. We enjoy each other's company.
[00:26:39] I enjoy Tuesday morning rolling around.
[00:26:42] My life is better because I have the strength of friendship.
[00:26:52] So the boat crashes. Everybody makes it to shore.
[00:26:57] The people who are on the shore, they crash on the island of Malti. The people who are on the shore, they take pity on the people in the boat wreck, and they help them get a fire started because it's winter and everybody's shivering.
[00:27:11] So Paul's out with Luke and they're picking up sticks and they're picking up driftwood to keep the fire going.
[00:27:18] And Paul brings in a load of firewood to the bonfire, and he throws it in the bonfire.
[00:27:26] Well, Paul's eyes weren't so good, and he had picked up a snake.
[00:27:32] Snakes are reptiles, and when they get cold, they get real dormant. He had picked up a snake and thought it was a stick. And when he threw the the wood into the fire, the snake got warmed up and it jumped out and grabbed him by the hand. The snake bit right into his hand.
[00:27:56] People being what people are, they immediately said, he must be a murderer. He couldn't escape justice. He escaped the justice of the sea, but he will never escape justice. Now this venomous snake is going to kill him.
[00:28:12] So Paul kept his head and he shook his hand a couple of times, and the snake flew off into the fire. Now everybody's staring at him. They're expecting for his hand to swole up. They're expecting for him to fall down and have a convulsion and die.
[00:28:32] It's real uncomfortable to be stared at like that. But everybody is staring at Paul and nothing happens.
[00:28:45] And then the same people who said he must be a murderer and justice is hunting him down now they started saying, he must be a God.
[00:28:57] They misjudged him on the bad end. They misjudged him on the good end.
[00:29:01] Can I tell you something about friendship? We don't misjudge each other on the bad end or the good end. Do you hear this? Ah, ah.
[00:29:12] We don't. Good friendships are not built on judging each other.
[00:29:19] Good friendships aren't built on, I'll be your friend if you do these good things. But if you don't do these good things, I like, I'm not gonna be your friend. That's not friendship. That's being a mercenary.
[00:29:32] Friendship says, I'm not judging you in this matter. You're my friend, and I accept you.
[00:29:41] I know you've got good things going for you, and I know you're not perfect, but either way, you're my friend. Church good friendships are not judgmental.
[00:30:06] And then they stayed on the island of Malta for three months.
[00:30:12] And while they were there, the governor of the island of Malta, a man named Publius, his father got sick.
[00:30:23] He had a fever and dysentery. And someone told Paul, and Paul and Luke went and visited Publius, father.
[00:30:33] And the Bible says that Paul prayed for him, laid hands on him and healed him.
[00:30:44] What a beautiful thing.
[00:30:48] When I read this story, I think a unique part of Luke's friendship with Paul was they did life adventures together.
[00:31:03] They did adventures together. Do you know good friendships have adventures together?
[00:31:10] Good friendships, they don't get boring. They do interesting things together.
[00:31:16] They enrich each other's life. They share good experiences together.
[00:31:23] I guess one of the most beautiful things about friendship is you have somebody to share the delights of life with. You have someone to be on an adventure of life with.
[00:31:35] You're not living a boring life. You're living a life that has adventure in it.
[00:31:41] The last thing I want to say about friendship is Luke and Paul model what it looks like for friends to serve God together.
[00:31:53] Luke and Paul are an example of what it looks like for friends to serve God together.
[00:32:03] I have a suggestion for you.
[00:32:05] I'd like you to consider this.
[00:32:08] What if you invited a friend to do a serve day project with you, and you just go and do it as friends?
[00:32:18] You sign up and you say to your friend, let's sign up and let's do a project together.
[00:32:25] Let's serve God together in some way as an expression of our friendship.
[00:32:33] Paul and Luke served God together, and their friendship gets passed down generation after generation through the book of acts that Paul wrote.
[00:32:48] I mean, that Luke wrote, forgive me, what if you wrote in the book of the acts of your life, a service project with a friend where the two of you, the three of you, the four of you, as a part of your friendship, said, we're going to do a service project together and we're going to serve God together in this love week, adventure.
[00:33:21] Friendship is a divine idea.
[00:33:25] Paul lived a better life because he had a friend named Luke.
[00:33:31] I believe if you're going to live life to the fullest and you're going to be the person God created you to be, friendship has to be a necessary part of that.
[00:33:44] And that's all my throat can say today.
[00:33:48] Dear heavenly Father, thank you thank you for your favor.
[00:33:55] Thank you for the good idea of friendship.
[00:33:59] I pray that we would be better friends to others.
[00:34:02] I pray that we'd be more thoughtful. I pray that we'd be better encouragers.
[00:34:08] I pray that we'd help each other when it's hard.
[00:34:14] I pray that we could do adventures together.
[00:34:17] But most of all, I pray that we would have the faith to include serving Christ together as part of our friendship.
[00:34:27] And I ask this for Jesus name sake. Amen.
