JUL 2 2023 | Paul’s Third Missionary Journey S1E5 | Artemis Worship

Sea Change Church · Paul's Third Missionary Journey S1E5 · "Artemis Worship" · July 2, 2023
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

The book of Acts chapter 19 verses 23 through 31. About that time there arose of great disturbance about the way a silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought in no little business for the craftman. He called them together along with the workman in related trades, and said, men, you know, we receive a good income from this business.

And you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole province of Asia. He says that manmade gods are no gods at all. There is danger. Not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess, Artemis will be discredited and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world will be robbed of her divine majesty. When they heard this, they were furious and began shouting.

Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Soon the whole city was in an uproar. The people seized Gaius and Aris Starke. Paul's traveling companions from Macedonia and rushed as one man into the theater. Paul wanted to appear before the crowd, but the disciples would not let him. Even some of the officials of the prophets, friends of Paul sent him a message begging him not to venture into the theater.

This is the word of the Lord. If you have your Bibles open to Acts 1923 through 31, we are still in Ephesus. And the Apostle Paul has made his way and started quite a ruckus in the city by just preaching the name of Jesus aloud and, uh, talking about who Jesus is and that idols are that Gods cannot be made with human hands. This caused a problem, uh, for the people and the tradesmen that were in that area.

We're gonna see that the entire city, which was a pagan city, it had been a pagan city for 700 years, got a picture of the temple of Artemis, I'll show you right there, that had been there not in that form for about 700 years, was the center of worship in Asia. And there was other cities that were festival cities and places people would go on pilgrimage, but this is one exactly.

And they believe that Artemis was a goddess who fell from the sky. Now, who do we also know who the Bible says fell from the sky? Well, that happens to be Satan. Uh, and he, uh, we believe that after being in Babylon, cuz the enemy, Satan can only be in one place in one time. He's not omnipresent like God had actually set up camp in this city under the guise of Artemis.

And Paul comes in and just through telling the good news of who Jesus was and speaking the truth, um, creates an entire culture shift. And it's something that actually the up the, the, the craftsmen say in this passage, they actually say, you know, he's actually caused people in all of Asia to turn away from, from Artemis and begin to follow Jesus, just this one guy.

Now there's other things that are happening at the same time, but it's just amazing. You take a city that is 700 years old, steeped in paganism for, for hundreds and hundreds of years, one guy shows up, starts sharing the good news of Jesus and the entire culture, all of Asia, according to this group of people, all of Asia was turned upside down and people began to change and follow Jesus.

And we know the result of that was 2000 years of people following Jesus. I put in Acts 19, Paul gives a masterclass on demolishing spiritual strongholds and taking cities for Christ. Lemme say it again. In Acts 19, Paul gives a masterclass on developing spiritual strongholds and taking cities for Christ. Now, there's a scripture in, uh, book of Corinthians that says that our battles not against flesh and blood, it says that there's things in the spirit realm. We do believe in a heaven, we do believe in a hell. We believe in a God, we believe in, uh, angelic beings.

We believe in demons. This is, this is normative to Christianity. And it says that our battle is actually not against each other, but the things that the enemy is trying to do in the heavenly realms. And in that verse, like shared it a few weeks ago, it says that our, that we have these spiritual weapons like prayer and all these other weapons that we use to pray against those things, that these, that this, um, you know, uh, strongholds might be demolished.

What we see here is a, something that looked really strong and powerful was easily demolished by Paul, by just speaking the truth. Now, what does that mean to us? What it means to us is, uh, us understanding as believers, how are we going to live in a world that is acre increasingly more pagan, uh, that is increasingly, um, looking for, for, for spiritual truth.

And the world will always be looking for spiritual truth because we have eternal questions that'll never be answered. So no matter how scientific we get, and we talked about the main center for science was right down the street from this Artemis temple. It was a library. I don't know if you can get that picture up, Al I told you I wasn't gonna use it, but if you do happen was a library that had 12,000 scrolls.

And so there was all this science going on, but at the same time as there was all this, um, paganism that was going on, I spoke in our culture that in, uh, 1991, according to Newsweek, there was 9,000 Wiccans in our country. That's witches. Uh, and by 2017 there was 1.5 million outnumbering Presbyterians actually. Uh, so we have a bigger denomination of Wiccans, and now there's over 2 million wiccans that are in our country.

So people are looking for spirituality. They're looking for something beyond what a scroll can answer or something beyond what science can answer. And so we're increasingly living, and I think in a neopagan world, we're moving back and you'll see in culture that cultures rise and fall and they go back to, um, things that are, that they have done before.

And so you're starting to see many of the things that you saw in Ephesus. I'm gonna speak about what those are. And you're starting to see these in our culture today. Now Tim Keller made a really, he's, he just passed away his incredible preacher theologian, man of God. And he gave, um, one of the most profound statements, uh, and it's, um, something that I, I hadn't thought about before, but it really caused me to pause this week, week.

And this is what he said in 2000 years, we've never learned how to do missions in a place that was post-Christian rather than pre-Christian. If you are in ministry, it's going to take all of your life to help the church figure out how to do this. It's actually true. The church has never had to recover for a loss, uh, recover for a loss of its faith and, and bring back the traditions and the message of Jesus Christ after it had once taken hold and then fallen. Every time missions has been done, it's gone into a culture where there be Europe, China, Africa, places like this.

Every time it's gone in, it's gone into an unchristian and oftentimes pagan culture. Like in the sixth century when, uh, Pope Gregory sent, uh, believers into England and Christianized England in the sixth century, they used it by bringing, you know, uh, they weren't German at the time, but German Christians and um, Christians from Ireland to actually come and change a culture.

And they did that in a bunch of different ways. And so us as believers, it's actually really confusing. Um, I actually, it's really hard to speak about something, uh, after you can see some of its mistakes because Christianity hasn't been perfect, right? It's made some mistakes. Uh, when you came into an area like Paul did before he was bringing something new, he was bringing something fresh. We're not bringing something fresh.

We're oftentimes bringing something that is seen as stale and then trying to refreshen it to try to take that stale loaf of bread and try to make it fresh once again, which is difficult. We're gonna talk about Artemis real quick, kind of set you up on Artemis. This is our last week that we're in Ephesus. And then I'm gonna talk about the key point for the day is Paul's effectual persuasion. Paul was persuasive.

He preached a Christ that drew people in. You're gonna see this in this passage as we, as we get to it, um, that when Paul was speaking, he brought people in and says he led them and he convinced them. He didn't plunge them over the head. Uh, with Jesus, he convinced and he was persuasive. I think that the gospel going forward has to be persuasive.

It has to be something that is loving, something that talks about a God who cares for you, something that reaches to the deepest part of people's loneliness and hurt and pain and the things that are in their lives that they are missing. And so this is what we're gonna speak about quickly. Let's look at Artemis, who Artemis was. If you look at your notes, who was Artemis? Well, she was a supposed goddess of fertility.

And one thing about Artemis as it's the, uh, it's the Greek version, excuse me, the, um, the other version, I believe it's the Roman version of her was Diana. And so Artemis was a, a, a female fertility goddess who was virginal. So this entire temple, as we'll see in a moment, was set up upon sexuality, but it was under the guise of purity.

There was a lot of things that were going on in that temple we'll see in a moment that were not pure, but it was set up. Satan oftentimes comes as a a, a, it says an angel of light. He'll come looking at something pure and all the good things you can see from it. But behind it there was all this debauchery. The other thing that you'll know about Diana or Artemis is that she's a huntress. So you'll often see her with a bow, you'll see a picture there of Artemis and you'll see her with a bow.

So not only is she sexual, she's predatory. And so you see sexuality and you see a predatory nature. Now you just see her as a huntress here and she's getting game and all those other things. But one of the things you'll see when a pagan cult is set up upon sexuality, it oftentimes is predatory and it'll continue to prey upon people as you see here. And they were making a lot of money because of people being preyed on.

Their emotions were being preyed on and people didn't have anything else to believe in. And so they were moving towards this sexuality. They came under the understanding of this is a really pure thing, but behind it it was de botcher is, and behind it, it was predatory. Next thing you see is, uh, the worship that was happening in this temple.

If you wanna see the, the temple again there al if you can put it up. The first thing is it had priest and priestesses. And so all the females were virgin priestesses. You couldn't, you couldn't make the cut if, uh, to be a priestess in Artemis temple unless you were a virgin. So it had to be virginal. Um, and then the second thing, if you're a male, you had to emasculate yourself.

So there had to be some form of self-mutilation where you would be emasculated and you had to be a eunuch in order to become this, you know, pure version. And so you see a self-mutilation that is happening with the men here in order to conform to the ideas of sexuality that was happening in that temple, which was really, really interesting. Yes, the women, the priestesses were virginal, but you could buy one of the priestesses before you got married if you wanted your wife to be fertile.

So you would buy one of the virgin priestesses and then you would go in and you would, you know, have her as a basic concubine. She would no longer be a virginal priestess at that point, she would just become a temple prostitute. And so there was temple prostitution that was happening here and people would pay. And for lesser some you could just be with one of the, one of the priestesses. And so this was a constant, every single day was a constant orgy. This is what was happening.

But under the guise of this virginal Diana, this virginal Artemis that would promise you fertility and all these different things, it was a moneymaker. Let's look at how it was supported. The colt brought great wealth to the citizens of Ephesus because the temple of Artemis became the world's largest bank during that time. So people would come in, it would, they would give money and the majority of the money that was happening, it was the main part of culture was actually it started working as a banking system. One of the things you see in why this riot happened, one things in culture, especially pagan culture, begin to begin intermix.

They will, the, the, the power sources will begin to intermix. And so you have the banking system here begin to intermix with the religious cultic practices. And when the cultic practices fell apart, I talked about those demolishing of the strongholds. What else happened? You had banking failure. It's the craziest thing that when this started to fall apart, when it started to become questions, um, question when people started doing a self boycott. So, you know, it says in this passage that people stopped buying the idols, right?

They stopped buying the Artemis idols to the point where they, it wasn't like Paul ever got out there and said, Hey this Artemis, we gotta boycott those idols guys. Let's, let's get everybody together and get a boycott going. That's a good idea. We'll just change the world through boycotts. He didn't do that. He preached the message of Christ. People believed in Christ and they thought, this is no longer useful to me.

They left the things that were darkness in their life A couple weeks ago we talked about, hey, what are those things in your life? Those sacred things that you say are, you know, we need to get rid of those. We need to say put light upon those and say, those have no value to me anymore. And so what happened was, without calling for a boycott, without ever preaching about Artemis, cuz I don't see where he ever spoke about Artemis, all Paul said here in this passage was, Hey, these idols that are made by human hands can't be God. If human hands made it, it can't be God.

Jeremiah 10 or 12 says the same thing throughout the Old Testament. So you see, when one of these areas starts to collapse, they all start to collapse. And so you see that happening here. It was the center of bank. And then the final thing before we get actually into the scripture, and sorry for the long setup, but I think it is important as we kind of look at our culture and say, is there any tie-ins here? Um, what was the spiritual life like?

It says devotees can't, devotees came from all over the world to worship and celebrate. During her festivals, huge processions honored her statues. So they'd have these parades. So in the city they would have these huge parades where they would just parade through the city with Artemis. There they were held with music, dancing, singing, dramatic presentations, chanting of a allegiance.

Now imagine coming into that city as Paul imagine you, we showed some of the pictures as if you walked into that city back in the day. Imagine coming there and your mission, you've been sent out by us to go to Ephesus and to see Ephesus turned for Jesus Christ. To see actually Ephesus not really turned or taken over, but people introduced to who Jesus is.

It would be absolutely overwhelming. But for Paul, it wasn't. Paul looked at the world around him, which was very easily to be overwhelmed, to be feel like you're being attacked or so, you know, overwhelmed by the, the, the perversity of the society. But yet Paul had hope. And what was that? That we'll see. Go to verse 23. Let's dive into the scripture.

About that time there were rose, a great disturbance about the way verse 23, Paul's effectual persuasion. I wanna give you a basic template on how to be effectual, to be an effectual Christian, to change your workspace. Even if you only have a small cubicle to change the uber car that you drive to change your realty practice, to change your pickleball court to make a difference for Jesus in the world.

It's very simple. The first thing is Paul was public in nature that says there began a great disturbance. I wanna say the gospel is meant to be disruptive. Now disruptive in a different way. It's, I don't believe it's meant to be disruptive. Like, hey, you're not preaching the gospel, we're gonna burn your shop down. I don't mean that, I don't think that's the kind of disruptive gospel, but God's love is disruptive. God's call is disruptive, God's presence is disruptive. And if you live with a sense of his calling, if you live with a sense of his presence and his purpose, you will be a disruptive believer of Christ.

When you walk in to say you ever walked into somewhere and some people you're there and they walk in and they just hit a little different than other people. Somebody's grumpy. I was up the street yesterday and I was getting ready to, you know, drive my car and someone pulled up and their face was so angry. I was like, and I didn't do anything. It wasn't me.

They were upset at somebody else. And I was like, oh, you can just feel that. You know what I'm saying? What about that other person that walks in? They're like, Hey, how you doing? You know, it's good to see you. Oh, I'm just, you know, blessing people, caring for people. It's disruptive. We are meant to be disruptive. I'm gonna say, how disruptive are you and your culture and is it disruption for the right reasons?

Has the presence of God in your life has what you read in the scripture during the day has God's presence because you worshiped all day, uh, you know, something that had happened? Has that ever disrupted an area? Hey buddy, what's up my man? Has that ever disrupted? And that's a great sense. Do that. Whatever that kid's doing, go do that.

There you go. Let's go get him a donut. I got donuts out the back. They're free. All right. I would say Paul had a public nature. Paul was public about his faith. There is this thing of like, hey, just as long as you keep your faith in your churches, as long as you keep your faith in your house, then you're good. Say that's not Christianity. This is God's world. The kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Our job is to rip the culture of heaven and to disperse it amongst the pickle courts of La Jolla. No, all over the world in any way that you do, it's disruptive. Do you pray? I would say, do you pray in public ever prayer in public's disruptive at this point? Like if, if you were to get like six dudes together for a men's Bible study and you're in a coffee house and you guys hold hands, which that would just be disruptive enough, you hold hands, you close your eyes and you pray for let's say 3.6 minutes. Okay?

And I'm not saying you get up, Lord, we just bless this place and just fall upon the Starbucks workers. No, I'm not saying that just quiet. We used to, when I was living in Australia, we used to go down to the center of the town in the, in the bars at night, like at midnight, 10, 11 o'clock at night. We would get a little circle outside on the street somewhere and we would just face each other and we would just worship the Lord like 15, 20, 25 of us.

You know, we'd let people by, we wouldn't like hold them off or whatever. We would just worship the Lord out in public in a place where people needed the amount of people that like stopped and watched or asked questions or started crying or we were in distress and needed help. We weren't yelling at anybody, we were just focusing all facing in each other, just bringing the presence of God to that place. It was disruptive. Now, I'm not saying you do that, that might be next level for you.

But what about just carrying your Bible with you when you, where you go? How about just keeping it on your, you know, your dashboard or wherever it just be. Paul was disruptive. He had conversations, he started conversations, he answered questions. People knew that he was a believer. If people don't know you're a believer, where are they gonna turn to when they're desperate for help in a pagan world that doesn't offer him the forgiveness and love that Jesus Christ offers.

Knowing that you are a believer matters. There's people sitting here today that I can see them right now in the audience, other people in the society have saying, Hey, I know this person. They go to your church, they're awesome. They're, and they mentioned to me that they're a believer and they tell me that they like my church because of you. There's multiple people that are out, out yourself outing yourself as really big these days.

Do it out yourself as a believer. Ask people, Hey, I'm going home. Is there anything you need prayer for? That's a great thing. Can I pray for you? You can just ask some or bless people. You know, when I, whenever I get a coffee or whenever somebody helps me or whatever, I always say, Hey, may God bless you today. I just pray you'd be blessed. Hey, bless you today. And I, if I'm, if I'm feeling real feisty, then I'll say, Hey, is there anything I can pray for today? Not now.

And then sometimes I'll be like, you know what, can I pray for you now? Cause I can just feel I try to follow the spirit. Just pray for him right then. It's crazy what will happen when you begin to unleash the Holy Spirit in your life. Next thing is this, it's disruptive. The other thing, go to verse 26 and you see and hear how this, now this is, this is um, the uh, the craftsman.

I think his name was Demetrius I think is what his name was. Yes, Demetrius great craftsman name in in Ephesus. Demetrius said, and you hear and how, how hear how this fellow Paul has convinced, circle, convinced and led astray. There's two words there. Circle led astray, large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole provinces Asia. He says, this man made that manmade gods are no gods at all.

That's all he said. That's super powerful. Turned everything upside down. I think he was speaking in hyperbole at the moment that he had changed all of Asia, but he was on his way. Well on his way. The first thing by being public, two Greek words I wanna look at here and I had to circle 'em. Paul was accused of influencing and leading others away from what?

From Paganism. Yesterday I was driving, I was out in East County where I'm from. I'm out myself. I'm from East County. I grew up in East County. Didn't wanna tell anybody, but it's true. I grew up in East County and I was driving out and I saw something I expected to see in East County, no offense, east County, there's a dude, he's all in neon.

He's got big letters on his shirt and he has a sign and the top word said God hates. And then I had to kind of squint and it said innocent blood and then it got smaller and smaller. He couldn't read it. And he was on the 67 and he was holding it and doing this on the 67. And I'm driving by and I'm just like, man, I'm not sure that's the way to do it.

Do I think there are people that will see that? Well there are people in heaven. Hey, who got saved here because of that dude's neon sign. Probably gonna have a couple hands raised probably, you know, God love them. But I don't see that in the gospel. I don't see anyone starting out with God hates. Now in the Old Testament I see a lot of that cuz they were under the law.

But even John three 16, if you know the most basic verse in the Bible, for God so hated the world. No. For God so loved the world, they started the front foot of our evangelism is God's love. The front foot of our evangelism is God's love. Gotta say, the front foot of Satan right now is love. Satan is evangelizing the world.

He's been doing it for a long time. And the thing that he starts with is love. You get that. Everything is based on the argument that everything is okay as long as love is, is for the purpose of love. We can't start with hate. I gotta tell you, if I'm looking at both of those messages and I'm like, oh, you got Satan over there with love and Jesus with the hate.

I don't think I'm going with Satan over here cause that love looks good. We see that here in this passage. There's two words. The first word when he le when he leads them is patho. Patho means to persuade, to induce one by words, to believe and to make friends of wow that when they use that word, Demetrius himself. When speaking about Paul was using a Greek word that said Paul was making a bunch of friends. I don't know how many friends you're gonna make.

Start with the front foot of God hates you or hates this thing you're doing. Paul was an influencer because Paul made friends. Paul went into a community. He was a tent maker. He made tents, he went to the different places. He talked to people, he was well known and he was often well liked. The people he wasn't well liked by mostly at first were the religious people. Now, when he destroyed the trade, he actually didn't destroy the trade. He just told people this little God.

I mean the thing that Demetrius made over here is a god. I mean that guy Demetrius made this and that's a God. Like that's all he did. It actually destroyed this entire area. But he was persuading people not with hate, but with love. And so he was persuading people where, where are you creating inroads of friendship? Where are you saying, I wanna make a friend with this person?

There's too much of like them and us to step into them and begin to say, what's your name? What's your story? Where do you come from? Then he persuaded them with God's love. That is the message. And in a pagan culture and a neopagan culture that is probably closer to paganism in the mainstream culture than it is to Christianity.

That's the way you do it. The next word that he had is meth. I practiced this word so much. Methe. Matomy, that's it there, I got it. Next word is matomy. And that is that word that carry away. It says to transpose, transfer or remove from one place to another. Paul was able to take someone who was living in this deep foundation of paganism and through influence, they transferred it, said that they were moved, they transferred to a new way of thinking in a new way of believing.

And he did that through the, through the um, relation to the bridge of relationship. He was able to change them. He didn't pick them up and move them. He didn't force them or use sinners in the hands of an angry God to try to guilt people to come over and you're gonna go to hell and all these things. Paul made friendships and through that they were persuaded to believe. You know, it's the same thing Jesus did. I mean, if we want to be followers of Christ, then we want to follow in the way that he did things.

And the way that he did things was to care for people, to love people. One of the great prayers that you can pray for yourself as this, God help me love people more. Let me be a lover of people. This has been a prayer I've been praying for a long time. It's a prayer I really needed because I didn't start out as a lover of people unless that person was named Adam. I love that guy a lot. Um, and I just eventually I realized that the line of ministry and work that I chose really wasn't in alignment with just loving yourself, didn't work real well.

And I said, God, I need some help. I wanna love people. I want to care for people no matter where they come from, no matter what their name is, no matter what they believe, no matter what side of the political aisle they're on, I want to create relationship and be there and care for those people. And so patho and matomy, which is transpose.

And the final point is this. Don't think this is in your message, in in your notes, but I put this in verse 26. Paul says this. He says, Demetrius says, he says that manmade gods are no gods at all. That's it. Demetrius didn't do 15 pages of a treaty. This is what Paul says. Paul says this and then this, and then this really complex treaties and go through what he says. Look how, how many words are in that sentence? Paul says the, let me see, manmade gods are no gods at all. Eight words.

Paul had a simple argument. Paul's message was simple. Eight words. I'm now granted he was going and having deeper conversations. But you could summarize it in one thing. And this eight word sentence is what Demetrius says by his own account. That is turning Asia all upside down and breaking down the entire strongholds. I would say the most effective gospel is a simple gospel. You know what?

God loves you. You know it's a great thing. Do you know you? You go, you know, if you have a conversation, the opportunity, do you know that God loves you? Or you know, you know that one of the things you can say is not only God loves you, but do you know that God has this incredible plan for your life? I know that that became really rote, but everyone's forgotten it.

So you can use it again. Now you can just say, Hey, you know what God, I believe God loves you and has an incredible plan for your life. Or you can ask PE something people with something as simple as how are you? Or you know, a question, but whatever this most simplistic, Jesus loves me, this I know for what the Bible tells me. So to tell someone, I know Jesus loves me to get to these very simplistic things.

And then what I would try to e encourage you to do is cuz what they're gonna come back with. What about this? What about this? Why is there suffering in the world? Why? And they always go to these massive questions. I say this a lot, you know, I'm not sure I can answer all those questions, but Jesus has made himself so real to me to change everything about the way I think, believe about myself, my future, my eternity, my family.

He's been so good to me and proven his love to me in such a powerful way. That's all I can tell you. I just keep going back to that. And you know what it does? It diffuses a four hour conversation about the intricacies. Intricacies of why is there war and suffering in the world? To go back to a simple gospel. If you want to be effective, let me tell you how to do this. One, be public. Two, make friends. Number three, have a simple message of who Jesus is.

You don't need to be Thomas Aquinas and write the, you know, the, the Summa Theolog. Because even at the end he said, you know everything I ever wrote? He goes, it was like straw. I should just burn it. Anyways, he had a dream where he went to heaven. He came back and he's like, I just burned that book. I just, that whole thing I wrote, simple. The message people need is God loves you.

Jesus died for your sins, that you might live with him forever. God loves you so much. This is the front foot. This is the tip of the spear. This is how we change a neopagan culture. Amen.