God’s Grace in Exile

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Jim Davis

   I don't feel like a token Baptist, I can tell you that. I love what Sola is doing, what the White Horse Inn has done for many years. I can't help but tell a story. How many of you went to Mike Aitcheson's breakout yesterday? Mike Aitcheson is a dear friend. He planted a multiethnic PCA church closer to downtown, and there was one Sunday I wasn't preaching.

2. 00:35

   Jim Davis

   We were in town, and I told my kids, 'Let's go see Mike Aitcheson's church.' So we went, the whole family. He brings so much of the great Black tradition into his PCA church — he was wearing African garb, not even as part of the singing, but as part of the liturgy. He was singing the culture, and the church was singing back. There's an organ up there.

3. 00:57

   Jim Davis

   So we finish, we get in the car, and I ask the kids, 'Well, what'd you think?' My second-oldest son said, 'Well, it was different.' Then my oldest turned around and said, 'Collins, that's because they're Presbyterian.' I love being able to experience all the different blessings and expressions of the church. It really is a joy to be here with y'all. As I've worked on this Great Dechurching project over the past few years, there's one theme that has particularly captivated me and helped me understand what we're looking at in many ways.

4. 01:50

   Jim Davis

   That theme is exile — specifically the phrase chosen and exiled. This is a theme we see all throughout the Bible. It is true: we are chosen, and we're exiled. But when we really think about these two words, they can seem counterintuitive at best and illogical at worst. How does chosen and exiled fit together? Talking about the topic of exile isn't comfortable. It isn't popular.

5. 02:31

   Jim Davis

   I think it's gotten even more complicated in the midst of what is now being called the vibe shift in the United States. But let me start by simply explaining exile. When I define exile, I'm defining it as living away from home. That's what exile is, and it can be experienced in many different kinds of ways.

6. 03:06

   Jim Davis

   I remember in 2020 I gave a sermon, and in it I said something I didn't think would be very controversial. Turned out it was. I made the statement that if, Lord willing, I get to pastor for the next twenty years, I think a large part of my ministry will be walking Christians — particularly male, white Christians — through the loss of power in our society. I did not realize the way this would fly all over the people in our congregation.

7. 04:02

   Jim Davis

   White Christian men have held the seat at the table of power for a long time in this country, and I think I underestimated the fear that comes up when certain people think about losing power and privilege in society. But exile doesn't always mean we're forced to leave the land we grew up in. I have a good friend, a pastor in New Mexico, and his family has been there for generations — they're Mexican American. He often says, 'We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us.' His people have been in the same place for generations, but the culture around them changed completely. So exile can look a lot of different ways.

8. 05:14

   Jim Davis

   Every Christian is chosen by God and lives in exile away from our heavenly home. That exile is felt most acutely in this fallen world when the things happening in our lives, in our hearts, don't happen the way we feel they should. In those moments we feel the exilic nature we live in. We have categories, as hard as it might be, to understand the natural trials of living in a fallen world — trials like losing loved ones, unemployment, underemployment, financial stress, health issues, even struggling and straying children. We have some category for the fact that life in this world isn't going to be the way we want.

9. 06:31

   Jim Davis

   My wife is a counselor, and she says that when we're younger we think life is a long line of stability and comfort with blips of trial and discomfort. But the older we get, the more we realize life is actually a long line of discomfort and instability with blips of comfort and stability. What do you do when the safest places in this life are no longer safe — when families or churches that are instituted and blessed by God fail us and hurt us, when a pastor or church leader either neglects the sheep or preys on the sheep, or maybe you're a pastor and the sheep bite back? We can all feel acutely that we are not at home, that things are not the way they're supposed to be. We look around and we desire calm, but we see chaos.

10. 07:17

    Jim Davis

    We desire shalom, and all we feel is stress. But what I want to argue is that as citizens of heaven living in this world, exile is not abnormal. In the West, we're experiencing a return to what has been the norm for Christians for thousands of years, and is currently the norm in the global East and the global South. The norm for God's people is exile until we die or Jesus comes back. We see the first exiles in the Garden of Eden — Adam and Eve were exiled from the garden. Abraham was exiled because of the promise God made him.

11. 08:39

    Jim Davis

    Because of God's promise to Abraham, he would be a foreigner and a sojourner in a foreign land for the rest of his life. Israel experienced exile in Egypt and later in the wilderness; when the Babylonians conquered Judah, they carried off Daniel and many others — Israel knew exile. But it didn't stop in the Old Covenant. The early church understood and experienced exile under the rule of the Roman Empire, and also at the hands of Jewish leaders who had perverted the faith handed down to them, arresting and even killing those who embraced the Messiah they had rejected. But as God's chosen people, he has not abandoned us in this state. There are blessings in exile that I would argue we wouldn't experience outside of exile.

12. 09:36

    Jim Davis

    So what I want to do is go back to the early church — specifically Acts 11 — and look at a group of people chosen by Jesus whose life, as a result, got very hard. They felt their exilic nature acutely as the civil institutions and religious systems of their day turned against them. Many of these early Christians were forced to leave Jerusalem because of the oppression they experienced there, and they fled to a new life in a Gentile world that hated them for a whole other set of reasons. All of them were experiencing exile.

13. 10:22

    Jim Davis

    In the midst of real pain, sorrow, anguish, and uncertainty, God's grace not only sustained them but caused them to flourish in a way I don't think they otherwise would have. I want to do this by going to Acts 11 — we're going to see six blessings of exile there. But before we do, I'd like to read eleven verses. If you have your Bibles, open them up, and if you're able, stand as I read God's Word. Luke writes: 'Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who, on coming to Antioch, spoke to the Hellenists also, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord.'

14. 11:14

    Jim Davis

    'The report of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a great many people were added to the Lord. So Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul. And when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. For a whole year they met with the church and taught a great many people. And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians. Now in these days prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch, and one of them, named Agabus, stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world. This took place in the days of Claudius. So the disciples determined, every one of them according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea, and they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul.' This is God's Word. You may be seated.

15. 11:57

    Jim Davis

    So, six blessings of exile from these eleven verses. The first is that exile promotes the advance of the gospel. In the first three verses, we see that men and women were scattered all over the empire because of increased persecution, specifically following Stephen's execution. People who had lived in Jerusalem for generations, where they had experienced autonomy, power, and privilege even under Roman rule, lost all of that when they decided to follow Jesus — to the point that many actually had to flee their hometown because of their faith. That's one kind of exile. You read this, and on the surface it can feel bad, it can look bad.

16. 12:55

    Jim Davis

    Culture change, especially when it's thrust upon you, is hard, confusing, and scary. But we can't miss that the net result of the exile in this passage is kingdom fruit. In verse 21: 'And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord.' We see this a few different ways. First, the people went — the gospel isn't going to go where it currently isn't if people don't go.

17. 13:34

    Jim Davis

    We also see an increasing willingness to share their faith. I'd argue it's a common thread throughout church history that the more Christians lose in this world for Jesus, the more willing we become to talk about Jesus. I'll say that one more time: the more Christians lose in this world for Jesus, the more willing we become to talk about Jesus. When we enjoy social comforts as Christians, the logical result is that we become more timid in sharing our faith, because we risk losing that comfort if the people we share with don't affirm what we're communicating.

18. 14:19

    Jim Davis

    As we lose those comforts, that hindrance to evangelism decreases. Likewise, I think the more concerned we are with maintaining power and privilege in a culture, the more focused we become on ourselves — and our desire for other people to know Jesus decreases as a result. What's interesting is that we also see, in this passage, increased innovation in how the gospel is shared, because of exile. Up until this point, the new Christians in Jerusalem, and many of those scattered because of persecution, still primarily shared the gospel with Jews. Even though Peter, in chapter 10, had opened the door to Gentile conversion, they were still very focused on Jews up until this moment in Antioch.

19. 15:42

    Jim Davis

    This is a major shift in how the early Christians thought about evangelism. Not only do we see Gentile converts, but, remarkably, these Christians don't require them to become Jewish before they become Christian. This is a major gospel innovation that would shape the whole future of the faith. You can begin to see this parallel between exile in the New Covenant and exile in the Old Covenant. There's a scholar named Walter Brueggemann — and while I don't endorse everything he writes — who has a great line about exile and innovation.

20. 16:30

    Jim Davis

    He says, in effect, that for Israel, exile did not lead to an abandonment of the faith or to utter despair; on the contrary, exile was the impetus that inspired some of the most creative literature and daring theological articulation in the Old Testament. So it has been a theme for God's people that in exile we see increased innovation in understanding and sharing what we confess to believe. But above all, verse 21 makes clear that there was something supernatural supporting and guiding all of these events. Luke records that the hand of the Lord was with them.

21. 17:16

    Jim Davis

    They weren't alone in exile. It doesn't matter what's happening, how scared or confused we might be, how much we might miss home and comfort — God is with us. These early Christians, according to Luke, saw that and felt that, and the gospel went forward in a more powerful way than it ever had before. So exile served to promote the advancement of the gospel. And if that's true, then I think we can logically say that not feeling and experiencing our exilic nature in the United States over the past few hundred years has hindered the progress of the gospel in this country. Now, I want to be clear — I'm not saying we should desire persecution, or that we need to become masochists.

22. 18:27

    Jim Davis

    But I am saying we need to understand and embrace our exilic nature, whatever the culture feels like at any given moment. Churches in the twentieth century may have been full — that was the high-water mark for church attendance in the United States — but that doesn't mean they were full of Christians.

23. 19:54

    Jim Davis

    Now that the tide is turning, as we are officially in the largest and fastest religious shift our country has ever experienced, I would argue we're seeing a purification happening in the church in America, and that's a good thing. Shockingly, the main reason people go to church today is Jesus. Gone are the days when you went to church to help your business thrive, or to run for office, or for good social standing, or good clean fun. Increasingly, the pews are filled with people who are there because of Jesus, and I think that's good for the advancement of the gospel in this country. So when you enter a church today, I think it has more of the purity we see in this early church in Acts 11 — less of the culturally synchronized, and I'd even say polluted, American church we had in the twentieth century.

24. 20:50

    Jim Davis

    This is a return — I shouldn't say a return to exile, because we are always exiles — but a return to really seeing, feeling, and experiencing the exilic nature we have because we are called and chosen by Jesus. And I think the more we embrace our exilic nature, the more the gospel will fruitfully advance in our culture. That's the first blessing, and they're not all as long as that one. The second blessing is that exile confronts our idols of power. In verse 22 we read that the report of what was happening in Antioch came to the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to investigate. Many commentaries point out how uncomfortable this news would have been to the Christian leaders in Jerusalem.

25. 21:46

    Jim Davis

    It would have been uncomfortable for a few reasons. Many in Jerusalem wanted these Gentiles to become Jewish before they could become Christian, and they wanted the Gentile males circumcised, which I imagine would have really slowed the mission. I think they also probably felt threatened. At the very least — and I want to be as charitable as I can — the leaders in Jerusalem were concerned about gospel faithfulness in Antioch. They didn't have a phone; they couldn't video call and see what was going on. But I also think they felt threatened, because as the church in Antioch grew, and now that the apostle Paul is there in Acts 11, we see a shift from Jerusalem being the center of Christianity in the world to Antioch.

26. 22:35

    Jim Davis

    That would have been significant. Every bit of the power, influence, and authority these Jewish Christians in Jerusalem had enjoyed is confronted in this passage. Not only had they already lost so much influence and power in the old Jewish culture, but now they're losing influence in this new Christian culture as well, because Jerusalem isn't the most influential church in the world anymore. I don't think anyone can know exactly how these early Christians in Jerusalem dealt with this kind of loss, but they did have to deal with it. What we do know is that Barnabas was the perfect person to send to Antioch.

27. 23:19

    Jim Davis

    Barnabas is humble. He's more concerned about the kingdom of God than having power in this world. He isn't concerned about these new Christians being conformed to his culture; he's chiefly concerned with them being conformed to Christ. Going back to my statement about walking Christians — mainly white male Christians — through the loss of power in society: not only did people in our church get mad at that statement, nearly everyone I can think of who reacted that way eventually left. There's always something I can own — maybe I minimized the fear, maybe I could have been more delicate. I'd probably say it differently now. But it doesn't change the main point.

28. 24:03

    Jim Davis

    These brothers and sisters would ask, 'Jim, how can you say something like that? It's good for Christians to be in power, because that protects our society.' And I want to hear a measure of truth in what they're saying, because we as Christians are called to be salt, and salt is meant to have some preservative quality in whatever culture we live in. But that has always happened most effectively from a posture of humility, not power.

29. 25:12

    Jim Davis

    Over the course of church history we've seen this continually. No historian I'm aware of questions that this loss of power, and this exercising of influence from the margins, was the impetus for the explosive growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire. The truth is that we can be that city on the hill without being on Capitol Hill. In the Old Testament, God tells the Israelites through Jeremiah that when they go into exile, they are to be a blessing to the people to whom they are sent. This is Jeremiah 29:4, and I'm mixing it with verse 7: 'Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.' The fastest rate of Christian growth I'm aware of over the course of church history happened when Christians were the lowest in society.

30. 25:56

    Jim Davis

    This was certainly true of the early Roman Empire two thousand years ago, and I'd argue it's true in places in the global East and global South today. My hope is that as this cultural transition happens, Christians and Christian leaders can be leaders who give gospel hope for the blessings we have as our culture changes around us. The United States may go to pot, and I hope it doesn't. I have hopes, as Paul says, to live quiet and godly lives so that the gospel may flourish. But our hope isn't dependent on the future of the United States. Whatever happens to whatever country we live in, the kingdom of God is going to be just fine. In the words of Alistair Begg, the kingdom of God is unsmashable, and it has an embassy in your neighborhood — we call that the church. I love the picture of the church as an embassy for us in our exile.

31. 26:39

    Jim Davis

    I'll be the first to admit that we get to some complexities here when we look at the vibe shift in the United States. People might say, 'Jim, sure, everything you said — we felt that two years ago. But isn't the resurgence of conservatism proof that things are changing, that Christians are gaining power again?' That's a lot to process, and it's outside the scope of my time here, but let me say that dechurching hasn't just happened on the secular and political left. In the 1990s, the large majority of dechurching was happening on the political and secular left.

32. 27:16

    Jim Davis

    But today, dechurching on the political and secular right outpaces dechurching on the left by a factor of two — not only catching up but now surpassing the total number who have dechurched from the secular left. If that's true, and I can make a lot of arguments to support it, then while there is a resurgence right now in what we might call conservative politics, I don't think we'd be wise to think this is a true resurgence in Christianity. It might create some freedoms for us, maybe in the short term, maybe the long term — I don't know — and we should be thankful for those freedoms. But I can't forget the words of Ross Douthat, who said, almost ten years ago, that if you don't like the Christian right, wait till you meet the post-Christian right. There are challenges ahead of us even in the midst of this vibe shift, and we can't let the illusion of political and cultural power dilute or pervert who we are and what we're called to be and do.

33. 28:43

    Jim Davis

    This very naturally leads to the third blessing of exile: exile is where we depend on the Lord. When Barnabas arrived at Antioch, he saw the grace of God on these people, and he wasn't jealous — he was glad. He was full of the Spirit, and he gave them one exhortation: remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose. That's their only hope in exile.

34. 29:10

    Jim Davis

    I have three teenagers and a ten-year-old, and my kids are all at the age where they're not always sure I know what I'm talking about — they don't always like the instructions I give them. There are times I really feel like they think they'd be better off out on their own, until a thunderstorm comes, or they have a bad dream, or the power goes out at night, or they get lost at Disney, or a girl breaks their heart. Do you know what they want most in those seasons? Their parents. It's not that they didn't need us before — they just feel that need more acutely when things get scary. Sometimes we have to be in a more difficult situation to be reminded of where our ultimate hope comes from.

35. 30:14

    Jim Davis

    Difficulty can and does quickly reorient our priorities — the things we cling to for strength and sustenance. Exile does bring difficulty, and I don't want to be naive about that; it has cost, and is currently costing, Christians in the East and global South not only their freedoms but their lives. But it reminds us where our ultimate hope is. Many of you are probably familiar with Joni Eareckson Tada. She's been in a wheelchair for over fifty years, the result of a diving accident when she was young.

36. 30:57

    Jim Davis

    She wrote something that has stuck with me in the most uncomfortable way. She said, in effect: I sure hope I can bring this wheelchair to heaven — I know that's not theologically correct, but I hope to bring it and put it in a little corner of heaven. And then, in my new, perfect, glorified body, standing on grateful, glorified legs, I will stand next to my Savior, who is holding out his nail-pierced hands, and I'll say, 'Thank you, Jesus,' and he'll know what I mean, because he knows me — he'll recognize me from our fellowship in his sufferings.

37. 31:36

    Jim Davis

    And I'll say, 'Jesus, do you see that wheelchair? You were right when you said that in this world we would have trouble, because that thing was a lot of trouble. But the weaker I was in it, the harder I leaned on you, and the harder I leaned on you, the stronger I discovered you to be. It never would have happened had you not given me the bruising blessing of that wheelchair.' Her suffering is a result of living in a broken, fallen world. We are exiled from the garden and not yet home with our Lord.

38. 32:20

    Jim Davis

    Wheelchairs or not, we are spiritual people exiled into broken bodies because of our sin. But one day we will be brought back from this exile in renewed bodies, because our exile is temporary. When we are most aware that the world we live in is not our home, that it is not going to treat us the way we feel we should be treated, in that moment we are most dependent on him who has made a home for us and who is bringing us there. Let me say something to those of you who have even been hurt or abused by the church — whether as a congregant or as a church leader, because church neglect and hurt goes both ways. We often have categories for things like persecution.

39. 33:26

    Jim Davis

    We have categories for things like wheelchairs. But when the church, instituted and blessed by God, the very embassy he has designed for our flourishing in exile, fails us — that can really mess with our heads, our hearts, and our souls. We have an enemy who will do anything to take us out of the community we were called and baptized into, and I think using the church to discredit the church might be his most brilliant strategy. But in the words of Augustine, we can't judge a philosophy by its abuse. If a church has hurt you, you are more than justified to leave that church — in many cases you should leave that church. And you are more than justified to feel hurt, sad, confused, and even doubting. Those are very normal responses when the church fails us.

40. 34:33

    Jim Davis

    But that, too, is a product of our exilic nature. You read Paul's epistles, and those churches weren't all rainbows and puppy dogs. The Lord wants to comfort us in these times and lead us to a safer, healthier embassy that will nourish us in our exile. The gathered church is actually one of the most powerful reminders we have of the home we are designed for and long for. My wife and I lived five years overseas, and every now and then we'd get to go onto a U.S. Army base.

41. 35:18

    Jim Davis

    As many of you know, when you go onto a U.S. Army base, you are on U.S. soil, and what I learned is that it's not just a technicality — you feel it. You hear English, you see Americans, you use dollars, you have fine-dining establishments like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, you get free refills.

42. 35:39

    Jim Davis

    And to the glory of my ears, the police cars and fire trucks have sirens that make the right sounds. Even though you're thousands of miles from home, in that moment you feel like you're home. You have a taste of the home you miss, that you long for. God has designed us to depend on him together — that's his design. The Book of Acts has no category for lone-ranger Christianity. He designed us to worship him together, and when we do, even though we're acutely aware of how far we are from the home we long for, we taste it. We get a glimpse of it.

43. 36:29

    Jim Davis

    Coming together as a church and worshiping serves as a kind of fuel that causes us not merely to endure our exilic state but to flourish in it, and to bless others, the way God told the Israelites through Jeremiah that we should. Number four: exile shows us our new and better identity. As we continue reading, we get to this fascinating verse where Luke says that in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians. Have you thought about that? Why in Antioch — why just now? The name Christians was actually given to them by non-Christians. The Christians of that age had names for themselves — they called themselves the disciples, or the Way — but it isn't until this point that unbelievers gave them the name Christians.

44. 37:43

    Jim Davis

    Up until this point in the Roman Empire, there were largely two groups of people — Jews and Gentiles — and nothing in the culture really encouraged those two groups to interact civilly. But now there's this rising group of people comprised of both Jews and Gentiles. This was confusing to the surrounding culture; it was radically countercultural. So the unbelieving Gentiles in Antioch gave them a new name — Christians, meaning 'Christ ones.' They were no longer identified by their ethnicity.

45. 38:29

    Jim Davis

    They were identified by their association with Jesus — so much so that even non-Christians could see it. God's people have always been identified with God over their context. God gave Israel her identity in the wilderness at Sinai, when he made a covenant with her — not once Israel made it to the Promised Land. This is really important, because it means Israel's identity was not conditional on entering the land.

46. 39:07

    Jim Davis

    And if that's the case, then they couldn't lose their identity when exiled — and neither can we. God didn't make us his people when we were at the height of social power and influence; it wasn't because the church became popular in the West that God decided to make us his people. So we can't think we're going to be any less his church when we lose social status and privileges we were never promised to begin with — we were actually warned to the contrary. These early Christians' identity wasn't in Rome, or in their strength, power, or security, because they had none.

47. 39:57

    Jim Davis

    Their identity was in Jesus, so much so that the people who weren't even Christians gave them the name Christ-ones. The identity we have in Christ has been given to us by God. When we trust in Christ, God no longer sees our sin and brokenness — he sees the righteousness of Jesus Christ. He sees perfect sons and daughters.

48. 40:31

    Jim Davis

    There are cultural narratives out there I constantly want to correct. It isn't that God loves some future version of you and merely tolerates you now — that's not what the Bible says. And it isn't that God the Father is perpetually angry with you but God the Son came to temper that anger — that's not the gospel either. The gospel is that God the Father loves us so much that while we were still enemies, he sent Jesus to die for us, to redeem us, to claim us, and to save us — not because we deserve it, but because he loves us, and not because we've earned it.

49. 41:12

    Jim Davis

    He earned it for us. And if this is true, then in the church we must develop a culture where we look at each other the way God sees us. One of the things we really battled in the early years of the church I pastor now was what we call the hermeneutic of suspicion — always wondering, what are you really thinking, what are you really doing, what's really going to happen here. The best way I can explain it: my kids have been convinced for a couple of years now that anyone who drives a white van is a criminal.

50. 42:08

    Jim Davis

    If you drive a white van, you may be a beautiful person, but my kids will look at you as if you were a kidnapper at best and a murderer at worst, and there's no convincing them otherwise. We were driving to school one morning, and there was a white van next to us — it was a service that takes special-needs people from one part of the city to another. If there's a better use of a white van, I can't think of it. My daughter looked at it, saw the sign, and immediately said, 'See, it says on the side of the van, "We will take you."' There was no convincing her. This is exactly what happens in the church when our exilic nature drives us to a fear-based, walled-off church culture, where we're so afraid of the outside world seeping in that we begin to assume the worst in each other, even when we have little evidence for it, and often plenty of evidence to the contrary.

51. 43:16

    Jim Davis

    It's a culture that develops when we fear the outside world — the very world we've been sent to bless. In 2020 and 2021, tensions came into our society and into our churches; ours was no different, and racial tensions were certainly one of them. In that season, a man came to me during some of our Imago Dei conversations about race in the church and said, 'Jim, there are other churches for those types of people' — meaning people who are not white, or not culturally like him. I don't know if there's a more unchristian thing you can say, because it undermines both this passage and the gospel of Jesus Christ — that we have a new identity, and that it brings down all the barriers that stood before we believed in Jesus. I confronted this man, and then he went and got in his white van and left. We have an allegiance so great that it becomes our identity.

52. 44:42

    Jim Davis

    An allegiance that becomes our identity, greater than any other allegiance or identity we have — even greater than our own ethnicity. This new identity is true whether we live on the throne of Christendom or not, but we feel it in exile even more. Exile has a way of stripping us of anything we might cling to for hope and comfort as our chief identity. When our social status is ripped away, when our national identity is stripped, when even our money, freedoms, and security are taken from us, our one true identity in Christ becomes clearer and sweeter to us, because we feel the nature of our exile. In the midst of real pain and trial, we can honestly say we are in the center of God's will for us — not just say it, but feel it and experience it. But there are some really important cautions Acts 11 gives us if we're going to flourish in exile.

53. 45:54

    Jim Davis

    Which leads to the fifth blessing of exile: exile requires discipleship. In verse 25 we see that Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul and bring him back, and together they taught the church for a whole year. Every time I read about Barnabas, I like him more — he's humble enough to admit he's in over his head in Antioch and needs help, and he thinks about who's the best person to get. He goes after the apostle Paul, whom Luke records here as Saul — a good reminder that Paul's name didn't change; it was simply based on what language they were speaking at the time, one Greek, one Hebrew.

54. 46:32

    Jim Davis

    So he goes and gets Saul. Barnabas knew that discipleship was so important to this early church, to all these new believers, that he went all the way to Tarsus to get the best teacher he could find. They taught this church together for a whole year. When I think of the world our kids and grandkids will likely grow up in, whatever the politics of that moment, I don't know how any of us — much less they — are going to thrive without true Christian discipleship, the kind Barnabas and Paul modeled here for an entire year.

55. 47:30

    Jim Davis

    This is why we need to invest so much in our children's discipleship and our adult discipleship. This is why, whatever fun we want our youth to have, the main goal needs to be discipleship. The flashiest, most entertaining worship in the world is not going to do what discipleship does. Our people don't need candy — they need meat. One of my oldest, at fifteen, was invited to a really fancy, flashy church's youth group. He asked if he could go, and of course I said yes.

56. 48:17

    Jim Davis

    Deep down I thought, oh great, he's going to come home with his Chick-fil-A cards, having played the coolest new video games and heard cool Christian rock bands, and he's not going to want to return to our very basic, discipleship-based youth group. He came home, and I said, 'Hey buddy, how was it?' He said, 'It was interesting. I don't think we're trying to do the same thing.' I said, 'Really? Tell me about that.' He said, 'It just felt very immature, and I like what we're doing better.' I don't know if I was wearing my dad hat or my pastor hat at that moment, but I was over the moon — I wanted to give our youth director a hundred percent raise. Entertainment isn't the primary need of our youth, and entertainment is not going to get the next generation to a place of Christian flourishing.

57. 49:14

    Jim Davis

    In any culture, discipleship is. Our hope should be that our churches are places of true worship and real discipleship, because the more our culture places us in exile, the more we're going to need it.

58. 50:10

    Jim Davis

    Which leads to the last blessing of exile, at least the last one in Acts 11: exile makes us generous. If you need evidence that we are explicitly called in exile toward generosity toward the places we're sent, we probably need not look further than the Jeremiah passage I read — we're called not only to bless the places we live but to find our own good in their good. But our passage fleshes this out further. We read that some prophets came from Jerusalem to Antioch, one named Agabus, full of the Spirit, and he foretold a great famine that in fact did come to pass — it's well recorded — under the reign of Claudius. Poor Nile flooding damaged the Egyptian harvest, and as a result the cost of grain in the Mideast skyrocketed.

59. 51:31

    Jim Davis

    So every Christian, according to their ability, gave relief to the Christians who needed it most in Jerusalem. I've read — though I don't know for certain — that this may be the first recorded act of non-governmental humanitarian aid in human history. If you're in exile, all alone, who's going to help you? Exile not only brought generous hearts to these early Christians — I'd argue that exile, properly understood, can't help but produce generous hearts, because we can't live in exile properly understood and feel, at the same time, entitled and selfish. Those things don't go together. And as history shows, this unusual generosity didn't just help other believers — it also brought new believers into the kingdom. Unbelievers saw this radically different value system, where these people weren't living primarily for themselves but for Jesus and for others, not primarily for this life but for the next, and people were drawn to it.

60. 52:27

    Jim Davis

    As I said at the beginning, this exile in the early church set the stage for such explosive gospel growth that within four short centuries even the Roman emperor himself would claim Jesus as Lord. So, back to the main question: can we flourish in our exile? Yes. I'm convinced God purposefully uses exile for his people to be sanctified and strengthened, and for his kingdom to grow. It's not just that God is going to get us through the exile and the pains we experience — he's using those things for our good, for his glory, and for the growth of the kingdom. In Isaiah 24, God prophesies the shaking of Jerusalem: he shook his people's earthly city to pieces so they could see that their heavenly citizenship was unshakable.

61. 53:44

    Jim Davis

    When we trust in God's goodness in exile, we can do so because we know that no one has ever known exile more than Jesus himself. Even the worst of our exilic lives here does not come close to the exile Jesus experienced for us. No one has ever left the glory, comfort, fame, and honor of the throne room the way Jesus did, and no one has ever sacrificed more — taking on flesh, becoming a man, leaving glory and comfort and honor to live a life marked primarily by pain and shame, even the shame of dying on the cross as a criminal, where, at that moment, he was fully exiled from the love of God so that we could receive, in his place, the wrath we deserve. No one has known exile the way Jesus did, and he did that so that we could get through our exile.

62. 55:03

    Jim Davis

    Jesus's exile means that while we may experience exile in this world, we will never experience exile from God's love for us. He is always going to be with us, and he will one day take us to a home from which we will never be exiled. That is the promise of the gospel — the reason for our temporary exile now, and the hope of our eternal security in our heavenly home with our Savior. That reshapes the way we understand all the pains, strifes, and griefs of this very short life, and it's why we can understand how we are both chosen and exiled, and why they don't have to feel counterintuitive — they very naturally go together. In the gospel of Jesus Christ, even when the battles seem to be turning against us, even when the church seems to be turning against us, our God remains good, faithful, and supreme. The gospel of Jesus Christ is how broken exiles are bound and brought home.

63. 56:25

    Jim Davis

    Would you pray with me? God, we all come to you this day with deep thanksgiving that you don't make us endure some exilic state to prove our worth to you and earn your favor — you have set your favor on us, and it is in the exilic state that we feel it and see it more deeply and clearly. I pray for all of us, whatever hurts, sadness, or confusion is in our lives, that you would renew us with the hope of the gospel of Jesus Christ — the exile that our Lord and Savior endured — that we might never know an exile from your love, and that we may be part of churches that foreshadow and give us tastes of the home we long for, and one day will go to. God, we love you, we thank you. We pray this in the power of your Holy Spirit and in the name of your one true Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.