Addressing Conflict

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here this day as we celebrate the end of our series. We said from the beginning, the historical reality is that the Jesus movement exploded, grew explosively for the first three centuries in, you know, A.D. And the question is kind of why. Historians have always asked that question and they can't come up with a good reason for it because, well, other than it's true, or, and the disciples believe the resurrection actually happened and Jesus is who he said he was. But it's really, you know, it's just a reality, it exploded. And it didn't explode because it was comfortable. It didn't grow rapidly because it was widely, easily accepted by everybody and everybody go like, oh yeah, of course, that makes sense. It all fits together. No. In fact, we find here in Acts chapter 17 today that it was counter-cultural and it actually was troubling to the powers that be, both the religious and the political economic powers of the day and age. And in Acts chapter 17, we're at the city of Thessalonica. Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica where there was a synagogue of the Jews and Paul went in as was his custom and on three Sabbath days, he reasoned with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead and saying, this Jesus whom I proclaim to you is the Christ. And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women, but the Jews were jealous and taking some wicked men from of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar and attacked the house of Jason seeking to bring them out to the crowd. And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities shouting, these men who have turned the world upside down have come here also and Jason has received them and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar saying that there is another King, Jesus. And the people in the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things. And when they had taken money as a security from Jason and the rest, they let them go. So you see here, there's quite a bit of opposition to Christianity in Thessalonica, a part of Greece. And why do Christians face opposition? First of all, sometimes it's because it's been misunderstood historically, especially back in the early centuries. I don't know if you realize this, but the Romans looked at Christianity as a cult at the time and actually as an atheistic cult and you go like what? Yeah. You know why? Because the normal accoutrements to religion, priests, temples, sacrifices were all missing. Think about it. There was no priesthood except everybody. There was no sacrifice of animals anymore. They were used to that at all. And there were no places, temples dedicated to do any of this stuff. So they thought, well, they must believe something that's totally different than any other religion and so it's not really a religion at all. They're atheists. So they were misunderstood for that and they were also sometimes misunderstood as being cannibalistic. I don't know if you've heard that, but it's because, well, they talk about eating the body and blood of their savior, Holy Communion. So that was another misunderstanding, right? And we understand that. Now there's also times that Christians have faced opposition, not because of the gospel itself or a misunderstanding, but because of, sadly, the behavior of many Christians. David Kinnaman wrote a book called Un-Christian a few years ago. We've kind of shared some of that and that was not about those people out there. That was about the Christians in the church, that people that were not Christian looked at Christians and said, they're not acting anything like Jesus. Now that's a problem. But today, what we're really looking at is in Thessalonica. We see that there is an irreducible, inherent opposition to the gospel of Jesus Christ in the hearts and lives of human beings. In Thessalonica, we find there's opposition from religion and opposition from power and politics and the economics of the day. Now they may have exaggerated, but they did understand that the proclamation of Jesus' death and resurrection, the proclamation that Jesus is Lord, was turning things upside down and inside out in a way that did not fit well with the status quo. We've got to deal with that. We've got to understand what that means. So today we're exploring this inherent opposition that we can expect in this world, that we should expect in this world, and we will see in this world. And it's going to be under these three points. First of all, how Christianity is in conflict with religion. Then also how it's in conflict with power. And then h...