Dennis Tuuri

# Acts 27:1-3

And when it was determined that we should sail into Italy, they delivered Paul and certain other prisoners under one named Julius the centurion of Augustus’s band. And entering into a ship of Adramyttium, we launched, meaning to sail by the coasts of Asia, one Aristarchus of Macedonia of Thessalonica being with us. And the next day we touched at Sidon. And Julius courteously entreated Paul and gave him liberty to go unto his friends to refresh himself.

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Let us pray. Almighty God, we thank you for your word and we thank you for the gift of your spirit. We thank you that you’ve given us your spirit that we might understand this word because you love us, because you sent your son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to die for our sins and to be raised for our justification and to ascend into the right hand of you, Lord God, in the Godhead from whence he now rules.

And Lord God, we thank you that your people indeed are his emissaries, his ambassadors on this earth. We desire nothing else but to serve him. And to that end, Lord God, we pray that you would bless our understanding of this text. May your spirit, Lord God, help us to understand the spiritual truths contained herein and the rest of your word as it relates to friendship and to the refreshment of friends.

And help us, Lord God, to leave this place with songs of praise upon our hearts for you and intents in our minds to do your will relative to this text and the related texts we will look at. Lord God be with us in this time. Comfort us with your spirit and instruct us in Jesus’s name we ask it and for the sake of his kingdom. Amen.

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It’s a pleasure and a refreshment to myself to be in the context of the saints today here at Reformation Covenant Church.

Last Lord’s day I was at home resting up the leg that has had some trouble and as the day drew on and I knew I wouldn’t be able to come here. And when the afternoon came, I almost for a second got a bit panicky over the fact that I hadn’t been here in a couple of weeks. And to be in the context of friends and those who are in the providence of God, the ones primarily responsible and used by God in my own growth and hopefully all of us toward each other, mutually encouraging each other in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Sabbath, the day of convocation in the presence of God and with his friends, is a tremendous privilege we all have and I have missed that privilege for the last couple of Lord’s days and God has made me more appreciative of it through that absence as is so often his way.

You know that the previous Lord’s day two weeks ago my wife and I were in Florida. We went there with our older daughter Lana for a leadership conference for homeschoolers put on annually by the National Center for Home Education and the Homeschool Legal Defense Association.

And it was interesting being there. It was a tremendous blessing. Today, instead of questions and discussion about the sermon, I’m going to be using the time after the sermon to give some remarks on my trip to Florida and kind of give an overview of it and kind of fill you in on what happened. But it was a wonderful trip, a very blessed trip from beginning to end. It was a great joy to myself, my wife, and our daughter Lana.

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We went there for the primary purpose of attending this conference as I mentioned. And you know, it was sort of like being at the old reconstruction conferences for those of you who have been here a number of years and used to go to those kind of gatherings of the clan, et cetera. And it was fun.

Now at first though, you know, I don’t know a lot of people from across the country—very few of them really. My wife and I were there first evening and got there a little late and felt a little isolated and whatever.

And the next morning as the first speaker came up to speak I, of course being who I am, went to the very front row so I could see good and listen to what he was saying and into it. And Dick and Dorothy Carman, who are heads of Ocean, kind of one of the two Christian umbrella support organizations for this state’s homeschoolers and their support groups, who were the ones who had encouraged us to go to this conference came up and sat next to us up in the front row.

And afterwards, they introduced us to Chris Clicker and Doug Phillips, who was Howard Phillips’s son and very involved in the work of HSLDA and the National Center. And Dick and Dorothy really took it upon themselves to make sure we felt very comfortable. They had their, I think, 16-year-old daughter there who took Lana and got her meeting all these other girls that age group, et cetera.

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And I mentioned this not just to let you know what happened in Florida. Not even primarily for that purpose. I mentioned this to say that Dick and Dorothy Carman refreshed us by their taking care of us and reaching out to us in the context of a setting in which they knew we probably wouldn’t know many people, might feel a tad uncomfortable. And they really were a refreshment to us.

And my topic for today from the text is the refreshment of friends. Paul is refreshed. At the beginning of his journey, the first stop, he goes and sees friends and he’s refreshed by them. And friends have a tremendous ability to refresh people. And Dick and Dorothy did that for us in Florida.

This last Monday, a whole group of men—million men, whatever it was, 400,000 people, whatever it was—a great number of men met together and one of the reasons why people get together and convocate and why they did was to refresh each other and to encourage each other and it was a different sort of a gathering.

The thing shared in common was not homeschooling or the Christian faith such as in our convocation every Lord’s day. The Christian faith was rather a gathering of race, quite frankly, and while it may be encouraging to them, it was a different kind of refreshment. There was a refreshment of friends, I’m sure, that happened in Washington DC last Monday and yet it was quite different from what the scriptures speak of when we’re refreshed by our friends.

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As I was contemplating this and I don’t know if any of you watched Lewis Farrakhan’s two and a half hour address last Monday but I will probably reference it today. I’m sure I will and I may well in the next few weeks and months to come as well. It’s a very significant event and I talk about it in terms of the refreshment of friends. That’s why people convocate. But we’ll talk about other things involved in that march as well.

The first thing I want to say here at the beginning is that if you compare what we went through in Florida and then what happened with those million men in Washington DC, refreshment of friends occurred in both contexts. So when we talk about refreshment of friends, the refreshment that friends can bring us or we talk about any topic from the scriptures, we always want to remember and keep in the front of our minds that it’s in reference to the God of scriptures, Jesus Christ, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

It’s a distinctive truth. In other words, what you don’t want to do is end up taking biblical principles, abstracting them from the person of the Godhead, and saying they’re good in and of themselves. It is not good in and of itself for friends to refresh one another if that refreshment is in isolation from the God of the scriptures or in the case of a lot of people last month, today is in the context of another god.

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See, so when we talk about the refreshment of friends, I’m going to talk in the context of this talk, whether I get done today, next week, whenever it happens. I’m going to talk about some discrimination in the context of that topic as well. It’s not just any friends—particular friends.

Now, you know, we’ve been singing a few new songs here since family camp. And I as I thought about it, I watched Mr. Farrakhan. It’s an important thing to call him Minister Farrakhan, you know, because he is a minister. He is self-consciously a minister. And it’s very important that you remember that when he talked and when many people spoke last Monday, they talked about and they would throw these phrases together. Supreme Being, God, Lord, Allah. I heard that mentioned several times. Those never the Lord Jesus Christ. The term Lord abstracted from any personal name.

And Allah used distinctively. Allah is the God of the Qur’an. Allah is the God of the Black Muslim nation, the Nation of Islam, who believe that white people are some kind of aberration. You may be okay, but you got no souls. Allah distinguishes the faith of those people who proclaim his name.

And when we sing Psalm 150, and decide sometimes in singing instead of just the word Lord the name Yah—or some people talk about Jehovah—you know, the actual name in the Old Testament is Yahweh. We use the letters YHWH and in your English translations you’ll see that referenced and God was asked what his name was. He said “I’m Yahweh. I’m the one who exists. I AM that I AM.” And Yahweh is the particular covenant name to Israel by which God identified himself.

God is Elohim. He is the mighty, strong, powerful one. That’s what Elohim means. But there are many Elohims. Okay? There are many powerful ones. And in fact, men themselves and civil rulers are referred to as Elohim in the plural, gods, in the psalter. Say, “My son’s name is a reminder of the names of God.” And when you hear my son’s name or when you read about Elijah in the scriptures, it’s important to think about the names of God and what they tell us.

Elijah comes from Elohim contracted down to Eli and Jehovah or Yahweh more properly contracted down to Jah or Yah. Eli Jah—Elohim, my strong one, is Jah or Yah, the covenant God of Israel, the one, the name by which God identifies himself. You see, it’s a distinction from others who claim to be Elohim. It is a distinction from Allah is no God.

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And if this culture is moving back to a tribal identification with a breakdown of empire and monarchy and now tribal formulations, we’re in a time when who is God is the central question. And it should not surprise us that when secular materialism is the nation, the kind of religion of our nation, it isn’t good enough. People at the end of the day are not happy just with a lot of money. People need something bigger. They need a god.

And when Lewis Farrakhan rises to popularity of 53% among black people, which he did this week by having a distinctively religious message, that should not surprise us. People will turn to a distinction of God as history now moves on away from this secular materialism.

If you compare the speeches of Bill Clinton and Lewis Farrakhan last Monday, Bill Clinton’s speech was a cartoon and Lewis Farrakhan’s speech was one filled with meaning in volume and depth. Wrong volume, wrong content, wrong depth. But it was distinctively religious. And man is made in the image of God. Man is religious and he knows when he’s hearing something aimed at his religiousness and he will respond because that’s who we are.

I probably talked about this too much already. I didn’t mean to do that. But see, it’s important that we understand what’s going on here. And I think that Lewis Farrakhan’s speech last Monday was, among other things, God slapping it in the face of the Christian church for failing to address public policy issues and the culture of our day from a distinctively biblical Christian religious perspective.

We always want to take our message and make it traditional or conservative or cultural, whatever it is. You see, God wants prophets. I’m going to talk next week about the voice of Paul. We’re going to talk about that several times in the weeks to come. But right now, what I want us to think about is one of the reasons we sing Psalm 150 the way we have lately is to use the distinctive name of God instead of just saying “the Lord” this and “the Lord” that because everybody has a lord and the word Lord doesn’t really mean much anymore.

God gives us a distinctive name. I think I was reading Psalm 150 and I thought, isn’t it great that I have memorized this particular translation pretty much and I can at least read this text and sing it at the same time.

Praise Yah, Alleluia. Praise the mighty one in his sanctuary. Praise him in his strong firmament. Praise him for his mighty acts. Praise him for his immense greatness. Praise him with blast of trumpet. Praise him with lute and harp. Praise him with tambourine and dance. Praise him with strings and flute. Praise him with sounding cymbals. Praise him with clashing cymbals. Let everything that breathes. Praise Yah. Praise Yah. Alleluia.

No music on the page. You can do that probably yourself already. If you’ve sung this song a number of times here in church, you can put music to the text and that’ll help you memorize the text. I now know the Nicene Creed. You know, for years I’ve tried just memorizing the Apostles’ Creed by sort of, and you can sort of get it, but you put something to music and you can memorize it. Then we can memorize large portions of scripture. It is a long nine creed as you’ve sung it. Try it yourself at home this afternoon or the weeks to come as we continue to sing it. You’ll memorize it. So it’s good to do this.

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But praise Yah. When we talk about the refreshment of friends, we want to talk about it in a distinctively Christian context. Okay? And it is good to identify the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the name of God gave to his covenant people, which is us, which is Yah or Yahweh. Okay, it’s good to do that. It’s good to identify that name so that we can declare who we are in contradistinction to those who declare the name of Allah.

Farrakhan is a highly moral, disciplined, religious man and he is demonic. See, we think “Oh well, you know, Freddy Krueger—that’s a demon for you. That guy’s bad news. He’ll tear you up. He’ll shoot you full of weird needles and stuff. He’ll give you bad nightmares.” Well, demons can do that. But I’m telling you that the Islamic faith and particularly the Nation of Islam and Lewis Farrakhan in this example is demonic. They take all the biblical messages and put it in the context of praising not Jesus Christ but Allah or Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad, or Lewis Farrakhan. That’s demonic. It’s the teaching of the demons.

So we want to talk about the refreshment of friends, but we want to do it in a distinctively Christian perspective, which means according to the scriptures.

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Now the text before us is the beginning of a long—not real long but sort of long—account of a ship voyage by Paul. Let’s think about where we’re at in the book of Acts. It’s been a couple weeks. We finished up chapter 26. I spent five weeks, I think, on chapter 26 because it is the summation statement of what Paul is all about.

Paul occupying the greater portion of the book of Acts. And Paul says the same thing that Peter does. There’s a correlation between Peter in the first half of the Acts, Paul in the second. They’re related together. We’ve seen these different ways that God relates them together in the text. And Paul’s height of his message, so to speak, is laid out for us in chapter 26. We spent a lot of time talking about that.

And now, the book moves on. I think of them as appendices almost, as Paul goes to Rome. We never hear Paul’s defense in Rome. We don’t hear what he has to say in front of the civil rulers in Rome or what happened there. The book has kind of an odd ending to remind us that history moves on. It doesn’t end with Paul in Rome. It moves on with you in your Rome—in Salem, in Oregon City, in Gladstone, in Portland.

And so the message has come up. It’s been fully developed by chapter 26 and then 27 gives us some stories that happen in the context of Paul’s voyage to Rome. It’s a story that’s printed out for us and it’s important. It’s almost can be seen as a summation of the entire book.

Paul goes as a prisoner but he has no chains on him. He goes as a prisoner who is at liberty. This very first few verses here says that Julius entreated Paul, treated him very nicely. The word is the same word as the basis for Philadelphia, brotherly love. This—the centurions in the book of Acts are always helping God’s people. It’s amazing, you know, and this centurion is no different.

Paul is a prisoner. He’s making his appeal to Rome. We know that. But what’s so important for us to keep in mind is he has liberty even though he’s a prisoner.

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Now, I would say that there’s at least an illustration there of the Christian life. You’re a servant. Paul would write later that he was a bondservant of the Lord Jesus Christ. You’re a servant of Christ. You’re at liberty to do things. And so Paul, at liberty as a servant ultimately of the Lord Jesus Christ, is on this boat trip to go to Rome and that’s where his ministry has been headed—pointed to, because he wants to see the conversion of the whole world. So Paul’s mission is the Great Commission and he wants to accomplish that by going to Rome.

And so Paul finds himself now in this big long voyage on this boat. And if you’ve read chapter 27, if you haven’t, read it. Read it a couple three times this next week. Get ready for the next set of sermons because we’re going to come out of 27 and 28. And there’s going to be a number of them because I don’t want to go through it too quick. I think there’s really good illustrations here for us of the Christian life.

And one of the first things we read about as this ship begins its voyage, as they make their first stop and Paul gets off and he goes and visits his friends. Now, he’s a prisoner. And yet this centurion remarkably lets Paul off the ship to go be refreshed by his friends. So how does the book of Acts start?

The book of Acts starts in the first couple of chapters with the church, servants of the Lord Jesus Christ, experiencing the refreshment of friends as the gospel is proclaimed and the church is built up and people attend to the gospel, to the doctrines of God, and they attend to the fellowship of the saints and the prayers. Communion and fellowship is stressed in those first few chapters of the book of Acts and it’s stressed here in this concluding appendix of the life of Paul being pictured almost in this one voyage to Rome.

At the beginning of that is his refreshment of friends and so it’s very important to talk about that today and maybe next week. And Paul gets back on the boat and the boat then experiences a lot of difficulties. We’ll talk about this, but there’s big storms that come up and they think Paul is going to die.

And Paul tells them, “Well, you know, I don’t think we should set back out into this storm.” The voice of Paul comes to men and is rejected by them. And the voice of the Christian church should be heard in Washington DC instead of the voice of the Nation of Islam. We have a prophetic ministry to this world.

And this world, whatever it goes in the context of storms and difficulties and shipwreck—which is where our country is headed—should hear the prophetic voice of God’s people addressing it and saying, “Turn back. You’re going the wrong way. You continue in that direction, there’s going to be a crash.” That’s what Paul does in Acts 27. They said, “Well, we know better. We got some—we don’t want the corn to go bad. We got to get the top price of this stuff. Monetary interests drown out the voice of Paul.” And they continue on and they get into big trouble and they think they’re going to get killed.

Judgment, manifestations of judgment, plague them. And then Paul’s voice comes to them again. Things get so bad they got to tie up the ship to keep the hull from busting up. It’s that bad. Bad storm. And then the voice of Paul comes to them again and they hear the voice. And as a result of hearing the voice of God’s messenger and prophet, then salvation is brought to everybody on that ship.

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It’s a fascinating story. They eventually end up on an island and Paul goes to the island and they’re all out there and they’re going to get a big bonfire going because they’re cold and wet. They’ve come through this terrible, terrible, terrible storm and they’re going to make a big bonfire and Paul involved in that bonfire picks up this what he thinks is a stick and it turns out to be a snake and it bites him. It’s going to kill him. Now it’s one of these poisonous snakes. But the poison has no effect on Paul.

See, we see Paul moving from the fellowship and communion of the saints to doing his prophetic ministry and speaking forth the word of God into a situation amidst manifestations of judgment, just as he had in Jerusalem, just as he had at the various cities, just as he’s going to do in Rome, just as he did to the Roman emperor, just as he did to Herod Agrippa.

He speaks that prophetic word. See, and they and Paul is attacked. It’s attacked by this serpent. But the attack has no effect upon Paul. He has the blessing of God upon him. The protection of God. And Paul is attacked throughout his trip to Jerusalem. How many times has he been rescued by God from those attacks? And it’s a picture to you that as you go about your work of proclaiming the truth of God’s word, being refreshed by the friends who are the church, the Lord Jesus Christ.

God will protect you from those things that are going to be detrimental to your ministry. He’s not going to let you die before it’s your time. He’ll protect you. Your blessing—his blessing is upon you. The protection of the Lord God is upon you. The serpent’s bite has no effect upon God’s people. We trample the head of the serpent. He doesn’t kill us, but we’re in Christ.

And so there’s a lot of pictures here played out in the context of a simple boat trip that’ll be very important for us to make application into our lives.

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Then he ends up at Rome. Of course, there’s thanksgiving at the end of all much of that journey. There’s thanksgiving given. There’s communion, et cetera. There’s all kinds of neat things pictured for us.

And you know, as you read an account like that, many people read that account and they say, “Well, you know, what’s the big deal, Dennis? I mean, he got off the boat and he saw some friends and then he had some trouble. There’s a lot of troubles in the world and, you know, he ended up safe at Rome. Who cares?”

But, you know, you think, “Well, it’s the word of God, so maybe in God’s word, those kind of accounts are important and maybe Dennis you’re right—maybe in terms of God’s word we should listen to those kind of things.” But then when you read the history of our country or you read about your personal history or you go through trials and difficulties this last year or this week or whatever it was you think of those things as not being all that important. It’s just “stuff happens,” you know. “Dennis, why I make big spiritual lessons out of everything?” We’ve been trained through the public schools of this country—which are godless to the center.

We have been trained to think of facts and history in isolation from God. We’re trained to look at why people hate history because it’s just “one darn thing after another,” as they say, and that’s all it is if you don’t put meaning and purpose to it. It’s a bunch of dates you got to memorize for no good reason. History is boring because the system we have been raised in the context of have ripped God right away from it and with no meaning or purpose to the rise and fall of nations. “Well, who cares? Who cares?”

We’ve been trained to think in isolation from the perspective of God. We don’t have that “sers and corta” going on when we read our history books. And maybe some of you don’t have that sers and corta going on even when you read historical accounts in the scriptures. But I’m telling you that there was a day and there will be the day again when all history is interpreted as the providence of God moving mankind to his praise. That’s what history is.

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You see, one of the reasons why, you know, Reformation Party’s coming up and, you know, one of the first thing we ever did at our family—in the providence of God, I found a copy of Dobyns’s history of the Reformation. At that time, it was a nice big old copy. I’d never even heard of the guy, you know, really, but I seem to remember the name. Rushdoony had talked about Dobyns on one of these tapes.

And the reason Rushdoony talked about Dobyns—Chalcedon Dobyns is who I’m talking about. He wrote an account of the Reformation. And the reason why Rushdoony and he talked about Dobyns and why you should know his name is that he is an example of a providential historian. When you read Dobyns’s account of the Reformation, it’s not a dry set of events and facts and stuff going on. He’s always saying, “Well, then God decided to do this and God’s purpose was to accomplish this.” He’s seeing God’s hand at work in all of history.

You see, providential history is what Dobyns writes and what we need to do and train our children to do because we’re never going to do it very well being raised for twenty years in the context of a system that said “that’s ridiculous. That’s spiritualizing things.” What we need to do and train our children to do is to think of history providentially. Why did these things happen to Paul? God has a purpose. Why are they recorded in scripture? Must be a pretty important purpose for us. So glossing over all these details.

Calvin, commenting on this particular text, says this. He says, “Luke sets down Paul’s voyage by sea most of all to this end that we may know that he was brought to Rome wonderfully by the hand of God and that the glory of God did many ways appear excellent in his doings and sayings, even the very journey which did more establish his apostleship.” That is, Paul’s apostleship. Calvin was a providential historian when he came around to interpreting the historical acts of the book of Acts. He says, “Well, God has a purpose in this and God wants us to know how wonderfully he brings his people to deliverance and how he establishes Paul as an apostle.”

By way of application, he establishes the church of Jesus Christ when it does like Paul did, when it is refreshed by friends, instead of being in isolation from community, and when it speaks forth the word of God to the culture around about it as it suffers, and it looks like it might suffer shipwreck, and then it does suffer shipwreck. Our purpose is to speak the voice of God.

And this is an encouragement to us that if we do those things, if we don’t forsake the assembling of ourselves together, if we attend to the fellowship of the saints, if we attend to the apostles’ doctrine, and then we speak forth that truth of God’s word into our culture, that God’s going to establish us as the church of Jesus Christ.

I pray for the day when men go to the White House, not so they can, you know, be patted on the head by the existing president and used for his political purposes and put a benediction upon the inauguration as one Christian leader did of a man who would within hours sign an executive order allowing more babies to be killed in the womb.

I pray for the day when Christians will go to Washington DC in a prophetic moment—Road Lewis Farrakhan pointed at that White House. I stand right there in front of it and he pointed to the White House and he said, “Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets. Washington DC has plotted against,” and he named a whole bunch of people. And you know, for the most part, he’s right. You know, I mean, Washington DC, the halls of power in our country today have no interest in the kingdom of God. They have an interest in suppressing the truth of God’s word.

Now, like I said, God uses an odd messenger to deliver this message to us and to rebuke the Christian church for its failure in prophetic voice in terms of public policy issues or what goes on in the halls of Washington DC. But I pray that we’ll be obedient to God in proclaiming his word. And that’s what these texts are about.

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Now I want to start though by looking at these first couple of verses. And before we get to the voice of Paul next week or the week after, let’s talk about the refreshment of friends. I said that’s what I wanted to talk about. I haven’t done it much yet. Well, we read here in the text that he was led off the ship and he went to be refreshed by his friends.

This word refreshment, in particular Greek word that’s used here, is only used—actually this particular form of the word is the only place it’s used. The root of this word, however, is used in a couple of other places. It’s used twice in the account of the Good Samaritan. You know, the man who’s beaten up and then the guy comes along and takes care of him. He refreshes him. It’s the same word. He dresses his wounds. He helps him out. Some people have speculated on the fact that maybe Paul here was going to get medical attention because this particular word is used, which was often used for, you know, bandaging somebody’s wounds.

I’ve got this leg wound up here. You know, I have a bruise is what’s happened and it got infected and you know, it’s not painful. I got to keep it up. Most of the times the blood doesn’t, you know, drain down there and all that sort of stuff, but it’s really it’s an inconvenience, but it’s God’s way of teaching me some things. But it has to be dressed. I’ve got to go in every day or two to my doctor and they clean it out and put more packing in it and it’s going to go on for weeks.

See, I’ve got to be refreshed by my doctor. That’s what this word means—be dressed, taken care of. See, refreshment of friends in this case means Paul’s refreshed. But we know it wasn’t really medical attention. We can be pretty sure of that because Luke in the account that we’ve just read says that we went on this ship. He includes himself with the Apostle Paul and he mentions Aristarchus. So Luke’s position was with him.

So we can assume that he didn’t go off to see these people just to get his medical help. He already had that. I think that there’s another very important occurrence. The only other occurrence that I know of besides the Good Samaritan incident of the basic base word here in scripture and that is in the context of the qualification for elders given in 1 Timothy 3:5. “If a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?”

See, elders are required to be able to run their household so they can take care, give refreshment to the church of God. Now, I’m not going to bandage. If you have a wound like this, I might, you know, Chris W., go talk to Chris. He might be able to bandage it for you if you don’t want to go to your doctor. Elders aren’t going to do that. So this isn’t talking about medical attention. But this is talking about refreshment and care of helping you in whatever way the church of God needs help.

The elders are to assist it, to refresh it, to give it help and care. Okay. So while the word has a medical connotation, it’s a lot broader than that.

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Now we can take that medical connotation and say that the church of God and the individual members thereof need care, right? I mean, if the elders have to be able to care for the church, then the logical corollary of that is that you need care individually and corporately. See, we may not know it. You know, it used to be and I think in the ordination service we’ve used occasionally for elders and deacons in the English tradition, the term “doctor of souls” was one that was applied, or physician or curer of souls, to elders or priests because they recognized that, you know, things like around my leg here—they’re just pictures in a sense, not just they’re real, but they’re pictures of spiritual problems we develop.

Now, I didn’t take care of this leg for a couple weeks. I banged it up real hard and I didn’t take care of it. I just sort of let it be, you know, for a couple weeks and by then it was infected and I had to, you know, more—you know, an ounce of prevention would have been worth a pound of cure, and now I’m going through the pound to cure. Well, the same thing’s true of our sin.

Sin begins to manifest itself in our life and if we don’t take care of it, it can produce real problems and you can get sick. And you know, most of you here know what I’m talking about. You know that you have been sick at various times in your spiritual walk, your walk as a Christian, because you haven’t dealt with sin and then things start throbbing. Your leg now is real puffed up. Your spiritual life is really crummy and real problems start to ensue.

What is going on? I never took care of that sin. I didn’t root it out. Well, the elders are here to help you, to refresh you, to assist you in terms of the development of potential sin in your life and to keep that from becoming a major abscessed wound. It’s going to take a lot of draining and surgery, maybe even cutting off the foot or something.

So this word refreshment of friends means care of them. And notice here in the context of this then that we’re talking about people that care for others. We’re talking about the elders caring for the church. But Paul doesn’t go to refresh these friends. Now, he’s the bishop, right? I mean, he’s the apostle, but he goes to be refreshed by the friends.

You know, he wrote in terms of his desire to go to Rome, which is where he’s headed now. He says, “I long to see you so that we may be mutually encouraged in the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ.” It’s Romans chapter 1. You know, I memorized that years ago, probably twenty years ago, and it’s stuck with me as such an important truth for all of us to recognize that while there are, you know, parent-child relationships, there’s elder-layman relationships, there is civil governor and those who are ruled relationships, and there’s bosses at work and people that work for them—those relationships are not implying that the assistance and care doesn’t go both ways.

Maybe largely Paul has refreshed others, but he knew that he was also the recipient of mutual encouragement or refreshing himself. And so, as you hear these words about the refreshment of friends, recognize the fact that it is not Paul’s leaders here that’s giving him refreshment. Nor is it his people that he says—the congregation that he was in charge over. It’s friends—the word says that he’s receiving refreshment from.

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And I think that this tells us that friendship—friends in the context of the Christian church friendship—okay, is disposed from just you know getting together with people of the same race. Race in Washington DC—those kind of friends—it produces a refreshment to us and a care for us. It’s quite important for us. So that’s the way the word is used and it helps us to understand a little bit.

Now you know, in contradistinction from the elders that are to care for the church of God, Jesus said the hireling does have no care—same related, it’s a related word, not the same word, a related word—the hireling, the pastor who comes in just as a hired gun, he doesn’t care for the sheep.

See, so the distinction between people that care and refresh is made between those who are really called to office and those who are just doing it for money. And then of course we could throw into that the fact that God says you can cast all your care upon him knowing that he cares for you. Pastor and his care, the friend and his refreshment of you, is a picture of the refreshment and care that God has for you.

Now God doesn’t need you. He doesn’t need me to bring refreshment to people or to care for them. He doesn’t need a doctor to fix this leg. But in the providence of God, that’s the way he’s chosen to normally do it. And if you think that, “Well, I don’t need anybody. God can take care of me himself.” Well, that is true in its ultimate sense, but it’s probably not true of you. Probably not true of you.

God has decided to work through means in terms of the church—that’s elders—in terms of the basic Christian walk. And Paul here is an example. We need the refreshment of friends. Paul already had some friends, by the way. He had Luke and Aristarchus on this voyage, doesn’t he? He’s got those two guys with him. But still, it’s refreshing to him to go to these friends in this city of Sidon. Okay.

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Now, this message of the refreshment of friends, and I’ve I know I’ve spent way too much time by way of introduction. I’ve kind of been, you know, you can forgive me perhaps. I you know, I’ve been kind of pent up for a couple weeks now thinking about all this stuff probably too much.

The message of the refreshment of friends is one of great joy to us. It should bring an ease of application. You know, if you’re going to talk to us about friendship, Dennis, that’s a good topic. You know, because we want friends, we want to be friends. And it’ll be good to get the biblical truth on that. I’m going to give some biblical examples of what friendship is here and what it tells us about it. But, you know, there’s something that we probably wouldn’t necessarily talk of much openly with each other, but the message of a message geared around the idea of Christian friendship also brings with it the potential for great sorrow.

For a couple reasons. You know that as I start to trot out some verses here and some truths from God’s word about how you should act as a friend, you know that you’re going to fail. You know that you’re going to act unfriendly. You know probably even maybe today yet with somebody and you’re going to fail either by ways of omission or actually commission and do something you shouldn’t do if you really want to be a friend of the people in this church or the people that you’re thinking of.

It’s also friendship can also be a message of sorrow because we don’t have friends. You know, one of my favorite commentators in the Proverbs, in fact, my favorite commentator in the book of Proverbs is a guy named William Arnot who lived I think in the 1800s. And in one of his lessons from the Proverbs on friendship, he talks about how friendship is like if you go in a desert and a river has failed—given up or the well’s head of a spring has stopped bubbling up—and then down the brook there’s a couple of puddles here and there left in the riverbank and he said that friends in the context of our life for the most part are like those little isolated puddles.

We know from the scriptures that friendship and Christian fellowship should be a great gushing stream. And we know it will be. We know that in the consummation of all things that the waters will flow completely freely. They won’t be pinned up by men’s sin or inattention. But we also know, you know, the older you get probably the more you realize this, or the more difficulties you go through, the more you realize this, that in this life we do not have the amount or quality of friends that our heart yearns for, that we don’t have a whole lot of brooks to drink from.

We’ve got an occasional puddle. And those puddles are nice. They’re refreshing. You know, in a dry land, in a desert, little puddle here and there’s a good thing. You know, you can take refreshment from it. You can cool yourself by it. You can drink of it. That refreshment’s good. But it’s it can be a sorrowful subject because we know we can fail in being friends and we know that people have failed us time and time and time again.

You know, particularly the older you get. Bible says, you know, rich men have a lot of friends. Rich men has a lot of friends. When times are good, you got a lot of friends. When times get tough, you don’t have very many friends. Well, the truth of the matter is you never had friends. Not very many of them. The truth of the matter is, as Arnot said, we’re we’re often like little children who like to have a room filled with mirrors of themselves. You know, little kids like to see themselves in mirrors.

And if they can have their way, they have a couple mirrors sitting in the room there and look at themselves. That’s nice. And so often with us, when we have friends, it’s like gathering mirrors around us. It’s simply to reflect ourselves. That we choose people out more like us because we really love ourselves, not the other that friends represent. And when difficult times come, those mirrors all get broken. See, things don’t reflect us as well. When other people have troubles, when we have troubles, they all leave.

We realize, “Oh, we didn’t really have the right perspective on this friendship thing.” Christian community, I mean, you could you could say in one sense that it is marked more by disappointment and sins against friends than it is by true Christian friendship. I hate to say it, but I think that’s true. I think the scriptures teach us that.

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Now, it’s good for us because when we enter into those kind of relationships, even when people fail us, it’s a reminder how much we fail them as well. And it’s an incentive by God to make us to where we’ll be better at it. So, you know, this message that we’re going to talk about today and maybe into next week is one that can bring great joy, but can also bring great sorrow.

And I don’t want you to feel sorry really. I want you to sorrow, but not unto despair. And I want you to try real hard to work at being good friends. And I want you to hope and pray that people will be friendly to you and give you that refreshment along the path.

And I want to mention here again a couple of things that Lewis Farrakhan said. You know, God uses who he wants to say things. Lewis Farrakhan in his speech last Monday quoted the speech of a guy named Willie Lynch who was a slave trader back—I think in the 1700s. And he gave a speech right in Washington DC to slave owners. You know, he had these black slaves coming in, pretty powerful fellas, and you want to keep them under control. How do you do that? And Willie Lynch says, “I’ve got the way to keep your people under control. I got in my bag the tools you’ll need to keep your slaves servile to yourself.”

Willie Lynch said that what you want to do with your slaves is to use three things with them: fear, distrust, and envy, one toward the other in the context of your slaves. You get your slaves to distrust each other, to fear each other, and to envy each other—to want what everybody else has—then your slaves are going to be able to be controlled by you. In other words, divided they fall. United they could make you fall. Well, you keep them divided. And Willie Lynch said, “The way you keep them divided is to stress the differences: tall versus short, heavy versus light, dark-skinned slaves versus light-skinned slaves, slaves of the field, slaves of the house. You plot them against each other.”

And you know, and too often in the Christian church, that’s just what we do. We notice our differences and pick at each other because of the differences. And Satan keeps us from being united and speaking with one voice to our culture, which God requires of us. And if you have engaged in some of these sins, I’m sure you have. Recognize that we’ve talked about the great thing about sin is it can be forgiven.

Again, I want to talk. Lewis Farrakhan said there were eight steps to what he wanted to see as the Nation of Islam move toward a more perfect union. Listen to these steps and you tell me if the scripture don’t taste the same thing. One, a problem. He said what you want to start with in the context of the problems of the black community or any other problem is reflection upon your situation.

Two, to acknowledge the sins or errors that you have made in that situation through reflection. Three, to confess that sin as sin. Four, to repent, to have a change of mind about that particular sin. Five, to make atonement. That was the day of atonement. The atonement was the big model. Their march and atonement is doing something about that sin. We would call it fruits worthy of repentance or fit for repentance. Atonement—do something about it.

Six, that leads then to forgiveness. Seven, that leads to reconciliation. And he said, you know, the seventh step is always a leading to do again. Well, you can’t stop. You got to go to do again. And it’s like our conception, the early church fathers, that the number eight, it brings the seven to complete. Okay. And so it leads on and reconciliation is not enough. It leads toward a for perfect union.

And he was quoting the constitution or the declaration of independence or something. But those same steps are true of us. And as we sin against each other relative to Christian friendship and as we bring desert into the life of each other instead of the streams of God’s blessing and as we move away from refreshment and produce disrefreshment and staleness to each other—what we want to do is go through these same steps.

These are biblical steps. Only the problem is that in terms of his atonement, it’s you doing something that saves yourself instead of relying upon the atonement of Christ. There’s a big difference. It’s a demonic message because it’s a works message. But understand that it is a good counterfeit because it is such a close counterfeit of biblical truth.

What I’m telling you is in terms of friendship as we look at some of these texts, which I keep promising that you’re going to reflect upon them, acknowledge where you have sinned in those areas through reflecting upon them honestly and letting the word of God do its part in your heart. Reflect upon it. Acknowledge your sins. Confess your sins. “Yes, God, that is wrong for me to have done that.” Repent of those sins. Have a change of mind. “I don’t want to hurt my brother in the Lord. I want to help my brother.”