Before we tackle the next essential activity of the Church, let's look at a leader in the first century who practiced these essentials, an example of how we should conduct ourselves today.
Barnabas
If you are the head of a group, Barnabas is your
model of right conduct. If you are working behind the scenes in relative
anonymity, he is likewise your example. In the greatest game ever, he was a
total team player: a leader at his best and a follower second to none.
Barnabas was not one of the twelve disciples. He
is never mentioned in the four gospels and, as far as we know, never met Jesus
face to face. When the time came to replace Judas, his name was not included on
the short list of candidates. (Most likely, he had not yet become a Christian.
Even if he had, he would have been disqualified because he was not an
eyewitness.) But he quickly rose to prominence in the infant church and was
instrumental in the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. To the
average churchgoer, he is the least familiar of the New Testament giants and
has never received the credit due him.
Barnabas had many wonderful personality traits.
First of all, he was a charitable person. As recorded in the fourth
chapter of Acts, he sold a plot of land he owned and gave the entire amount as
an offering to the young Jerusalem church. He was also a compassionate
person. Indeed, his public embrace of Saul was the deciding factor in the
acceptance of the persecutor-turned-Christian by the Jerusalem fellowship. Like
Saul, Barnabas was a cultural person. A native of Cyprus, he had
experience with life and people beyond the borders of Palestine. With such
broad backgrounds, these two cosmopolitan men were the natural choices to carry
out the church’s first missionary enterprise. At the time of commissioning,
everyone referred to the team as “Barnabas and Paul,” a testimony to the
former’s importance and respect.
With this, we come to the most commendable
attribute of Barnabas: his consistency. More than any other person in
the New Testament, he remained the same no matter the occasion. When Paul's
charisma and public speaking brought him greater and greater acclaim, Barnabas
never wavered in preaching the gospel. It seemed of no consequence to him when
people began to refer to the duo in reverse order, as Paul and Barnabas. When
Barnabas' cousin and assistant, John Mark, quit during that first missionary
journey and went back home, Barnabas went steadfastly on. When the same John
Mark, in sincere remorse, asked to rejoin them for the second journey, Barnabas
welcomed his company, exhibiting the same compassion toward him as he had
toward the young convert Saul. Unfortunately, Paul—in perhaps one of the lowest
moments of his marvelous career—refused to give the quitter a second chance.
Barnabas, forever consistent, split with Paul over the matter. He took John
Mark with him to his home country of Cyprus to preach the gospel. Nothing is
known today of what transpired there or afterwards. After the split from Paul,
Barnabas fades from history.
Paul, on the other hand, continued to grow in
influence and importance. During his second and third missionary journeys, he
replaced Barnabas with Silas, and together they spread the gospel to the
European soil of Macedonia and Greece. Along the way a physician named Luke,
the same man who later recorded the life of Jesus and the growth of the early
church in a two-volume work, joined them. Guess who else eventually was at the
apostle’s side? In one of his later epistles, Paul mentions as one of his
companions none other than "Mark, the cousin of Barnabas" (Col.
4:10), an indication that eventually he did extend the hand of forgiveness to
the quitter. And, yes, this is the same Mark who later wrote what scholars
believe to be the earliest of the four gospels.
If Barnabas had not come to Paul’s defense, the
great apostle’s ministry and correspondence may never have happened and Luke’s
two volumes may never have been written. If
Barnabas had not forgiven his cousin and invited him to minister in Cyprus,
there may have been no gospel of Mark. If you do the math, that's sixteen of
the twenty-seven New Testament books for which Barnabas, at least indirectly,
was responsible. That few Christians today give him his due is, in my opinion,
a tremendous oversight. Something tells me, however, that Barnabas would have
wanted it this way.
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