In Acts 16, God called the Apostle Paul to go to Macedonia which is a territory that is commonly today called Greece. Paul followed God’s call and went to the city of Philippi which had received its name from Philip of Macedon (the father of Alexander the Great).
Philippi crowned a steep hill encircled by two rivers and was near coveted gold mines. In Paul’s day, Philippi was known because it was near where Mark Anthony and Ocavian (later to be the Emperor Augustus, in whose reign Christ was born) had defeated the armies of Cassius and Brutus, thus avenging the murder of Julius Caesar.
Notice that In Acts 16 Luke calls Philippi “a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony.” One of the ways Rome ruled the world was through her colonies. At strategic points on the map Rome founded Roman colonies, where Roman citizens set up outposts for the empire. Such colonies promoted the Roman way of life within a given culture. These colonies became outposts of Roman values. Thereby Rome could have dominion within cultures all over the world.
Paul discovered that Philippi was not only important to men but it was important to God. Later Paul would write to the Church of Philippi the following: “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3: 20). Augustine, in the 5th Century, taught that all Christians have dual citizenship: one in the city of man in which they live but also one in the City of God in which we live forever.
God had led Paul to a strategic location in Europe to establish an outpost of God’s Kingdom. Philippi was not only an outpost in the kingdoms of man but it was an outpost of the kingdom of God: an outpost of God’s values, the Christian worldview, the biblical way of life.
All churches are intended to be manifestations of God’s Kingdom: growing and converting and discipling the nations. Churches are outposts through which Christ rules and reigns and brings all his enemies under his footstool.
Indeed, we are God’s ambassadors to this region. Our church is an outpost, a community within the community, a counter-culture. We are a community of faith within the community of sin, bringing the gospel to bear on people personally, socially and culturally through word, deed and community.
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Jason Robertson is a husband and a father and a pastor. He is dedicated to leading and equipping his the Church with God’s word and biblical theology for life ministry, using a combination of pastoral, church planting and evangelism experience. He holds a Master of Divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is experienced in church planting, evangelism, missions, and the training of pastors and Bible teachers.
Jason has been preaching the gospel since 1985, serving the first ten years of ministry as a Southern Baptist itinerant evangelist out of Milldale Baptist Church in Zachary, LA which ordained him in 1993. He has preached in hundreds of churches in over 30 States and 4 countries. He planted churches in Siberia, Russia in the summers of 1993 and 1994. He founded Murrieta Valley Church in California, which he planted in cooperation with the SBC NAMB in 2001. He also teaches ministry students at California Baptist University.
You can hear his sermons and read his manuscripts on sermonaudio.com. Just follow the link to "sermons" at the top of this page.