Day 4 of 6 — Glow in the Dark. About 3 minutes.
And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.
Acts 13:3
On the thirteenth of August, 1727, a small community of refugees in Saxony called Herrnhut met for communion, and what happened among them that day they spent the rest of their lives trying to describe. What came out of it was a prayer meeting. They cut the day into hours and assigned them out, so that somebody from that village was praying at every hour of the clock, through every night, in every season. It ran without a gap for a hundred years. Five years in, in 1732, a potter named Leonard Dober and a carpenter named David Nitschmann sailed for the island of St Thomas in the West Indies and landed there that December. Within twenty five years that one village had sent more than two hundred of its own people to the ends of the earth.
Antioch did the same thing on a smaller scale and Luke records exactly how it looked. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away. The hands on the shoulders were not magic and they gave those men nothing. The Holy Ghost had already called them in the verse before. It was a church saying out loud, in front of everybody, that these two belonged to them and that they stood behind this.
Then come the words that cost something. They sent them away. The phrase means to release, to let go. And look at who Antioch was letting go of. Barnabas was the man who had come and built that church up in the first place. Saul was the man Barnabas went and fetched to teach them for a whole year. These were not spare people. They were the two best Bible teachers that church had, and Antioch opened its hands.
A church only ever sends what it is willing to lose. That part does not go on a missions poster. Herrnhut lost two hundred of its own inside a generation, and they were not surplus either. They were the potter and the carpenter, the people a small village could least afford to be without. One day this church may have to let go of somebody. It might be a young person you have watched grow up here. It might be your own son or daughter or grandchild, and on the day it will not feel like obedience. It will feel like losing them. Settle with God now what you intend to say when it comes.
Growth principle: A church only ever sends what it is willing to lose.
Take it with you: Settle with God now what you will say if He calls someone you love to go.
Pause and pray: Lord, I want to be generous with You right up until it costs me somebody I love. Open my hands before that day comes, and make me glad to give rather than grudging. Amen.
From Sunday’s message: A Church That Sends (Acts 13 and Philippians 4) · Sunday, October 11, 2026
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