Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Acts 22:1-29, where Paul shares his testimony before a hostile crowd. He emphasizes the power of personal stories in sharing faith and highlights that our past does not disqualify us from serving God. The sermon encourages believers to recognize their identity in Christ and to be bold in sharing the gospel, even in difficult circumstances, as Paul did when he invoked his Roman citizenship to protect himself. Ultimately, the message calls for a commitment to witness and serve others with the grace received from God.
Welcome and Housekeeping
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Amen.
Great singing choir. Thank you for participating in worship with us. We're going to be in Acts chapter 22 this morning, Acts chapter 22, verses 1 through 29.
We're going to do almost the entire chapter, but the last verse this morning. And thank you for being here with us.
Thank you for listening well and being a part of the service. I did take my coat off.
If, darling, if you want my coat, I will bring it back there to you. But I am a little warm this morning, and so we're going to take it off and see where the Lord takes us this morning. But in Acts chapter 22,
verses 1 through 29, we'll stand out of reading of God's Word.
It's a longer passage, but if you are willing and able to stand, let's stand out of reading of God's Word. The Bible says,
Brothers and fathers, this is now Paul preaching after he was now taken into custody as we looked at last week. He says, Brothers and fathers, listen now to the defense before you.
When they heard that he was addressing them in Aramaic, they became even quieter. He continued, I am a Jew born in Tarsus of Caesarea, but brought up here in this city, educated at the feet of Gamaliel, according to the strictness of our ancestral law.
I was zealous for God just as all of you are today. I persecuted this way to the death,
arresting and putting both men and women in jail, as both the high priest and the whole council of the elders can testify about me. After I received letters from them to the brothers, I traveled to Damascus to arrest those who were there and bring them to Jerusalem to be punished.
As I was traveling and approaching Damascus about noon, an intense light from heaven suddenly flashed around me.
I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And I answered, who are you, Lord? And he said, I am the Jesus of Nazareth, the one you are persecuting.
Now those who were with me saw the light, but they didn't hear the voice and the one who was speaking to me. And I said, what should I do, Lord?
The Lord told me, get up and go to Damascus and there you'll be told everything that you've been assigned to me to do.
And since I could not see because of the brightness of the light, I was led by the hands of those who were according there with me and went to Damascus. Someone named Ananias who was there, who was there,
the devout man according to the law, who had a good reputation with all the Jews living there, came and stood by me and said, Brother Saul, regain your sight.
In that very hour, I looked up and saw him and he said, the God of our ancestors has appointed you to know his will, to see the righteous one, and to hear the words of his mouth. Since you will be a witness for him to all people that you have seen and heard.
And now, why are you delaying? Get up and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name.
Verse 17, after I returned to Jerusalem and prayed in the temple, I fell into a trance and I saw him telling to me, hurry and get up and go to Jerusalem quickly because they will not accept your testimony about me.
But I said, Lord, they know that in synagogue, after the synagogue, I had those who believed in you imprisoned and beaten.
And when the blood of your witness, Stephen, was shed, I stood there and gave approval and guarded the clothes who killed him. And he said to me, go, because I send you to a far away to the Gentiles. They listened to him up until this point.
I think it's important we know that. And then they raised their voices shouting, wipe this man off the face of the earth. He shall not be allowed to live.
As they were yelling and fighting aside, flinging aside their garments and throwing dust in the air, the commander, according to him, to be brought into the barracks, directed him to be interrogated and scourged to discover the reason they were shouting against him like this.
As they stretched out him for lashing, Paul said to the centurion standing by, Is it legal for you to scourge a man who is a Roman citizen and is uncondemned?
When the centurion heard this, he went and reported to the commander saying, What are we going to do? For this man is a Roman citizen. And the commander came to him and said, Tell me, are you a Roman citizen? Yes, he said.
The commander replied, I brought this citizenship for a large amount of money, but I was born a citizen. Paul said to those who were about to examine him, and he withdrew from him immediately.
And the commander, too, was alarmed when he realized Paul was a Roman citizen and he had been bound. Lord, we love you.
Thank you for your reading of your word. Lord, go before me as I preach. Help me have the words to say as I preach your message this morning. In your name we pray. Amen. You may be seated. Thank you for standing for an extended period of time.
Overcoming Fear in Sharing Faith
As I was studying through this, often people will come to me and they'll say, Pastor James, I get really nervous when it comes to sharing my faith with other people. I don't know what I'm going to say. I feel like I'm going to get tongue-tied.
I feel like I'm going to make a mistake. And I think if we look at this example of Paul, what he is saying here,
Paul begins in this moment where he stands up before the people that literally just killed, were trying to kill him. He stands up before them and all he does is one simple thing. He shares his story.
I've said it in here before. I've said it many times even after this. The power of our story is an incredible thing. We relate to people when we tell our story. People can relate to us when we tell them what we have went through.
And when we get this boldness to share what God has done in our life, God will take our story that he has destined to be a certain way and impact those that are around us.
2 Corinthians simply talks about that we go through trials and tribulations so that we can help others who are going through certain trials and tribulations in our time.
I can remember vividly there were years and years ago when me and Allison first started dating. Her dad was in the middle of a divorce and her stepmom had left and it was a horrible time.
And I remember going to that passage and saying, Allison, you're going through this right now and I know you're going through a hard time, but God is going to use this in a mighty way in the future. You're going to have a teenager, you're going to have someone,
a teenage girl that's going to be struggling with that issue and you're going to say, hey, I can relate to you. I've been through this moment of life.
I've been through an abandonment and a divorce and you don't understand why now, but in the future God is going to use this in a mighty way. The same is happening here with Paul. He is saying, listen, I'm bound.
I'm coming to you in your own tongue and let me share what God has done in my life. I was trained with you guys. I've been through this and now I'm going to share my story with you.
And this is important for us to know when we get to this point in our life.
I was reading a story this past week of an incident that happened not long ago, a story that made headlines and you can look it up if you want to, but it was an American tourist who was overseas
and had gotten arrested for a minor misunderstanding. He was terrified. He couldn't speak the language.
He didn't know what was going on. He began to not know what was going to happen. And almost out of desperation, he sort of said, I'm an American citizen.
And in this moment, he pulled out his passport and he began to show them that he was an American citizen in that moment. Why did he do this? Because our citizenship matters. And Paul understood this as well.
Paul understood that his citizenship was a weight as well. He was in a similar situation surrounded by angry mobs, people that were wanting to kill him, people that were coming against him, people that were literally on the verge of killing him.
And he couldn't really understand the reason for their hate. And Paul quietly just says, is it lawful for you to scourge a Roman citizen?
Is it lawful for you to do this? And the soldier freezes and everything begins to change in this moment. This moment reveals something deeper about Paul.
It shows us that his citizenship may have saved his life, but that wasn't his greatest identity. His greatest identity is what he started with about his knowing Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. And understanding that belonging to Christ does not take away pain in our life.
Oftentimes people will say, I trusted Jesus. Why am I going through this?
Why am I going through cancer or difficulty or divorce or things in my life? I thought that Jesus was going to be there with me and I wouldn't go through these things. And Paul very clearly lays out, yes, he's there with us in all things.
He doesn't alleviate the pain that comes with those things.
And so when we begin to realize where our citizenship lies, when we begin to ask ourselves, am I with Christ and standing firm with him?
Or am I out here on the ether trying to figure out this whole life of Christ and what that looks like? Paul gives his defense.
And I think it's important he does this not to save his reputation. He does this because he is just simply trying to tell his story of how grace transformed a persecutor into a preacher.
And it reminds us that our allegiance first and foremost is to Jesus and then to everything else that goes on in our life.
And so as we walk through this passage, I want to show both sides of the story as Paul gives his defense, his sermon that leads to his salvation, but also his citizenship. So our first point is Paul's sermon, verses 1 through 21, the bulk of our message.
Paul uses this story as a sermon not to defend himself.
And I think oftentimes people will get to the point where we think we're trying to defend ourselves, but ultimately it's to exalt Christ.
I've been in many meetings where I'll be attacked for something or someone will come at me for something that I may have done or said.
And if I know what's not true, I'm typically, if you'd asked me 10 or 15 years ago, I'm going to be the one that's going to go at them and try to defend myself.
But there was a situation just a couple of years ago and someone came at me and I knew what they were saying was not true. And I just let them talk. I wasn't going to defend myself.
I wasn't going to let the Lord defend me. And in that moment, someone else said, hey, why don't you defend yourself?
And so by me just laying out the facts and laying out what it was, it was exalting Christ in my life in that situation.
I think sometimes it's to the point where we just need to tell people what is going on out of courage to say, I'm going to do this because of my identity in Christ, because of what Christ has done
Using Our Stories for Impact
for me. And this is the story that God has given me.
Our story is so powerful and we're going to keep going back to this the entire time of how are we sharing our story with others? How are we telling them what God has done for us to exalt Christ, not ourselves?
As you study through the life of Paul, there's a moment in one of his later books where he was writing and he said, I didn't exalt myself and tell you all the horrible things that had happened to me until I'm at the end of my life.
And he said, 14 times I was almost beaten. Seven times I was almost killed and I was shipwrecked and all the different things that he went through. And he said, I'm not telling you this to look at how bad my life is. He said, I'm telling you this because I'm trying to glorify God.
And in our life, as we go through things, we have to ask ourself, are we using our story as a sermon to lift Christ up?
The first thing he does in verses one through five is he brings up his past. Our past, oftentimes we want to avoid it. Our past is messy. And Paul, in his past, was a zealous persecutor. He was someone who killed the saints.
He would have been someone who came in this room and would have arrested each and every one of us for gathering on a Sunday, thrown us in prison, and even tried to kill some of us in here because, specifically me, for standing up and preaching God's word.
He starts with his past because it builds credibility with where he was at. He starts by saying, listen, I was a devout Jew. You guys out here who were coming at me, I was one of you just a couple of years ago.
I was standing where you're at. I was the one that had the papers from the Jewish synagogues.
I had the training from Gamaliel. I was the one that was the chiefest of all of you, and I was over you. And he said, I once stood where you stood.
And I think it's important for us to not forget where God brought us from. I think as we go through our past, as we go through our life, oftentimes we can get to a place where we think, you know, things are really good. God's been blessing me.
And we forget that God once put us in a gutter, and God once, we were abandoned, and we were lost without him. And God said, by his mercy and his grace, he sent his son to come and die for us so that we could accept him and have eternal life.
Oftentimes, as we go through our life, we forget about the bad times. We forget about the hard times, and we forget about the past. And it's easy to do. I'm one of those guys. But oftentimes, it is good for us to meditate and remind ourselves where we once were.
Just yesterday, we made a little fire. We were out cutting limbs and branches. And Hudson was me.
And I told Allison, I said, if you would have been out there, you would have been having a heart attack. Because Brody has all the dry leaves are around. Brody's got a stick, and it's on fire, and he's waving it in the air.
And so Hudson wants to do the same thing, right? He puts it in there, and so he's waving it. Well, there wasn't a fire this morning, and he decided to go out there and touch one of the logs that was still hot because fire just doesn't go out and burn his finger.
But I said that to say this. Oftentimes, when we're looking at our past,
some of the beautiful stories of a past is, and I talk to firefighters often, is talking to a firefighter who once was an arsonist, right? He once was going out, and he was burning things down, and he was doing things. But then he had this radical transformation.
It may have been he got caught, and bad things happened, and his life got reformed. And so he's now on the straight and narrow, and he's trying to do the right thing. And he goes from being an arsonist to using his abilities to put out fires and become a firefighter.
But he doesn't forget where he once was at. And this is Paul. He said, I was once a prosecutor. I was once coming after people, but now God has turned my life around, and he has made me a preacher.
He has made me a proclaimer of the gospel. I often want to ask ourselves this question is, why do you think God often uses our past failures as a platform for his grace?
As God looks down and he says, listen, you're going to go through some difficulties and trials so that when you go through these times, you can use that platform to be able to help other people and to grow in other areas of your life.
I'm here to tell you this morning, your past doesn't disqualify you.
The things you did in the past, the things that you've done that was when you were a young person does not disqualify you from the ministry of serving the Lord.
All it does is it defines the depth of God's grace in your life and how you can stand up and you can testify by saying,
look, once I did these things, once I was a young teenager and once I was a young adult who made these mistakes, but by God's grace, he came in and he worked in my life.
And now look at where God has done. Look at what God is doing in my life. Look at how God has redeemed my life for his sake.
And oftentimes we want to put the past away, but Paul tells us, lean into that a little bit.
Show the grace of God as we begin to go through our life because people today, more than any else,
I'm a believer of more than any other time in all of human history, need the hope and the help of the gospel through God's grace.
And when we can stand up and we can say, look at what God did in my life, it can be a blessing to someone else. He starts with his past and then he goes through the transformation. This shocking encounter with Jesus.
He was on the road to Damascus and he said that the light of the world stopped Paul in his tracks.
I love the personal confrontation that he includes here. He goes back and he uses his old name before Jesus changed his name to Paul. He goes back and he says, Saul, Saul, why have you persecuted me? He does this in a couple of different reasons.
He does this because he wants the Jewish people there to remember who he was, but he's also using it as a reminder to him, I once was Saul.
I once was dead in my trespasses of sin, but then there was this moment where God came into my life and it changed my life and it transformed my life into a new person, a new creature, a new creation as Colossians says, as Paul writes in Colossians.
He says, all things are passed away. Behold, all things have become new.
And in Christ, we are this new transformation, this new creature who gets to stand up and say, it's not because of what I have done, but it's what Christ has done in my life.
His first words after meeting Jesus, I think this should be our daily prayer. You ask me, how do I live my life? How do I go through my life when I don't know what to do? Live in this prayer right here where his very first encounter after meeting Jesus, these five words are said, Lord, what shall I do?
Lord, what shall I do today? Lord, where do you want me to go?
What are the steps that you want me to take? How are you wanting me to live my life? What is it that you want me to do today?
This is Paul's transformational moment in his mind where he says, what do you want me to do, God? What is it that you want me to do? Where do you want me to go? C.S. Lewis described this conversation or conversion moment as this.
Paul was being surprised by joy and he was being ambushed by grace.
Someone who was a persecutor of Christians, when he is acquainted with God and God's mercy and grace, he doesn't look and say, oh, well, this couldn't have happened to me.
No, he's surprised at the joyful experience that he has with God and then the overmounding amount of grace that comes into his life. All he can do is say, God, what do you want me to do? God, where do you want me to go?
God, who do you want me to go talk to? Where do you want me to go? And how can I live my life? Have you ever been so certain?
As I was talking through with some guys this weekend, I've continued to live in this thought of the experience that I had this weekend with some guys in a God-ordained moment. But as I went through this, this question came to my mind.
I sent it to a buddy of mine and I said, oftentimes this is me. And it was convicting as the Lord brought this question to my mind. Have you ever been so certain that you were right? Only to have Jesus stop you and show you that you were wrong.
Have you ever been so certain that you were right only to have Jesus stop you and show you that you were wrong? I've been there.
Trust me. I say this often. I'm not perfect. You guys think I am, but I'm not perfect. I do make mistakes.
But oftentimes we can be so right in our own heart and our mind until we get to this point where Paul says, Lord, what do you want me to do? I think I'm doing the right thing, but Lord, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing what you've called me to do?
Am I doing the thing that you've called me to do? And this is where true conversion happens. It begins when our pride is broken down and we bow before Christ's authority.
As we looked at it, our time of revival, as John came and preached to us and he said these words of holy, holy, holy. How the angels 24-7, they sing and they shout.
And he said as Isaiah is recording this, he says, As the angels are proclaiming holy, holy, holy, the foundation of heaven is shaking because they are bringing about the glory to God of what he has done. When we stand in that moment,
the three writers that he mentioned, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and John, all three of them, they say that they have to bow their heads because they aren't even worthy to look at the throne. Is that how we are when we come before God, where we begin to bow ourselves?
Transformation and Purpose
We put our pride away. We put our own selfishness away and we say, God, what is it that you want me to do? How is it that I can serve you today? So we see his past. We see his transformation.
But then the third thing, we see his calling in verses 12 through 16. This is the commission of Paul's life in his witness.
Ananias restores his sight. We preached this passage months ago and he says this, that you will be my witness. God doesn't just save Paul from his sin, but he saves him for his service.
And this is an application for each and every one of us to apply to our life. We are not just saved from our sin, even though that is a wonderful thing that we get this redemption grace from God to go to live with him one day in heaven.
But there is this intermediate time in our life where he has saved us from our sin and yet we're not yet in heaven. And so what do we do here in the middle?
And God says, I've saved you from your sin so that you can go and you can serve me so that you can go and be a witness. Look at verse 16. He says, arise and be baptized.
Wash away your sins, calling on the name of the Lord. Go out and do what God has called us to do and live your life in the service that God has called us to do. Take every opportunity that God gives you to share the gospel,
to serve other people, to love other people as we're here on this earth.
There's a song that was written many, many years ago. I don't even know how many years ago.
It came to me last night and I haven't had time to look it up. But it's called The Touch of the Master's Hand.
And it talks about how there's a fiddle and there's this fiddle that's sitting up on stage about to be auctioned off. And the fiddle, as it's about to be auctioned off, someone comes and they begin to auction it for a dollar and two dollars and three dollars.
And it doesn't go for a lot. But then there's a moment where the auctioneer stops and the master comes up and polishes off the violin and makes it right, tunes the strings and then begins to play this amazing song with it. And the auctioneer stands up and says, now who will give me 1,000, 2,000, 3,000?
And it's this beautiful picture of when the master touches something, the value goes up. The value goes up so much that it's unimaginable at how beautiful this is.
And all of a sudden, when the master comes into our life and touches our life and uses our life in a way that we never even thought possible, our value goes up in God's eyes and he says, thank you for doing this.
I have come into this world to live a certain way so that you can live a way as well. We're using our story as a way to help others through the gospel.
Oftentimes, we shrink back in fear of hiding, of saying, well, what are they going to think about me?
If I share with my coworker, if I share with this person at Walmart, or if I share with the waitress at Randy's where we went on Friday nights and we begin to share the gospel with them, what are they going to think about me?
They may get mad at you. I'm not going to lie to you.
They tried to kill Paul. They stoned him up until death.
And then he stands up and starts just preaching again. The crowd gets mad. They take him and they say, hey, let's go and scourge him and see what's going on here. It may not be what we think.
But in the end, God gets the glory. We have all been commissioned by God to share our story of salvation, all sides to all people,
to share and to serve as we go through our life. So there is this past.
There's the transformation. There's this calling. But then in verses 17 through 21, there is this vision. The moment where Paul's life being this even moment where he's got the crowd calm. I mean, I want you to imagine this picture. They tried killing him. They tried torturing him.
And the Bible says that they almost tried to kill him to death.
He gets up. He speaks in their language. They begin to get really quiet. He's got them in this captive audience like you guys are today. I love it. You guys are paying attention.
I mean, he could have easily just said, hey, just keep listening to me. Listen to how great I am. This is awesome.
But no, he gets this point where he transitions to say, listen, I have this vision to go to the Gentiles, to go to the ones that you guys don't want to go to. And this command was radical in this moment of time.
And all of a sudden, all the Jews that were listening intently broke all of their expectations. They're like, this is the guy. We've been listening to him for the last 20 minutes. I can't believe this. Let's throw our clothes up in the air. Let's throw dirt up in the air.
The Gospel's Global Mission
Let's not let anyone listen to him. But Paul's whole mission here was to say this.
The gospel was never meant to stay local. The gospel was never meant to just to stay where we're at and stay in our household, but to go in other places and other villages and other tribes and tongues and to go and to share the gospel with those who would hear.
The gospel is like a river that they try to dam up a river. And as they dam that river up, it begins to overflow and begin to spread out. That's the gospel. It can't be held back. It overflows its barriers and it goes to where the greatest news can go.
It goes and tells others about it. A couple of months ago, I challenged you. It was probably before the summer. And I challenged you to write down five names.
Five names that the Lord had been working on in your life that some of you, I said, maybe you don't have five. Maybe you've got three or two or one.
But I said, write down some names that you can be a witness to and begin intentionally praying, God, give me the opportunity to talk to so-and-so about the gospel. Give me an opportunity to invite so-and-so to church.
And this is where we're at in our life where we have to say, am I still praying for those people? Has the Lord continued to work in that?
And has any one of those five been able to be reached with the gospel? I want to re-challenge our minds and refocus our minds. This is Paul.
He's saying, Lord, send me. Tell me where to go. And this is our prayer saying, God, these are the people I want to witness to.
Maybe before the year's end. Six or seven weeks left of the year. Where are the opportunities that I can use to invite them to a church service? Where's the opportunities that I can use to give them the gospel in their life?
God is calling often in our life, stretches us beyond our comfort zones. I like to be comfortable. I don't know about you. When bedtime comes, I like to have my pillows right.
I like to have my blanket right. When I go and I sing to Jade, she likes to have her.
She has a green pillow that I think her Nana bought her a couple of years ago. She's got it laying just right on her bed. And I make it a point every night to move it to a different location. And she gets so mad at me. And I'll say,
well, what do you mean?
That's how it was when I got here. No, it wasn't, Dad. Dad, it's where I wanted it to be and it's moved. It's not in the right place. Why is that?
We like to be comfortable. We like to have everything the way we want it. We like to have our schedule perfect and nothing to be changed. And God says, oftentimes I'm going to stretch you beyond your comfort zones
to share the gospel with someone else. Paul didn't want to go to the Gentile people.
You can see it even in this moment of his transformation if you look through it. It wasn't something where he's like,
yes, Lord, send me to the Gentiles. Send me to the unclean people. But he was willing to say, Lord, wherever you want me to go, I'll go. And he was willing to be stretched outside of his comfort zone.
And sometimes being obedient to God is going to be misunderstood by other people.
Other people are going to look at you and they're going to say, why are you doing that? Why are you living that way? Why are you sacrificially doing things for the church?
Why are you living this way? This is not the way the culture tells us to live. And oftentimes when we're obedient to Christ, other people are not going to understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. But ultimately it's for God's glory and his glory alone.
Let's look at the number two here. The second portion of this passage is Paul's citizenship, verses 22 to 29.
You see, Paul, as he's preaching this message, the crowd now begins to reject his message. And in this moment, Rome steps in. The crowd's getting mad. Rome didn't like riots. They didn't like things not going the way they wanted to do.
Rome wanted to control everything. Okay. There's a book by Joseph Flavius where you can read the Roman victories. And he records all these times he goes through and he looks at the different victories that Rome went through. And it's a Jewish historical record of the books of how Rome's empire was there.
And he lived during the time of Jesus. And you can see some beautiful pictures of things.
But Rome steps in because Rome has to be in control. Rome has to be the one that's going to be the authoritarian. And God uses an earthly citizenship of Paul and an earthly kingdom of Rome to fulfill his heavenly mission.
I want us to think about this because oftentimes we say, how can this happen in this world? Or how can these things go on? And oftentimes God is behind the scenes. I say oftentimes every time God is sovereign.
He is behind the scenes and he is working things out. We may not understand why this specific thing is happening. But God says, listen, I'm using it in a way to bring the gospel to fruition. If it will just continue to go forward in him. So Paul's citizenship was huge.
Let's look at the first thing, the crowd's rage. There was a blind zeal without understanding.
Verses 20 through to 24, the Jews erupt in fury when Paul mentions one word, the Gentiles.
Now he would have used the word the unclean Gentiles, the barbarians. These would have been the natural terms which he would be describing us in this moment. And they erupt, they get mad. As a pastor, as a guy who talks on a podcast often on legalism, legalism often reacts violently to grace.
When we have our own man-made religion and we have our own man-made rules and ideology and grace comes in,
violence happens. We want to protect what's ours. Because grace begins to level the playing field. Grace comes in and he says, you know what? God loves everyone.
Jew and Greek both. You don't have to do certain things to come to the gospel, to come to the saving knowledge of Jesus. It's just repent and believe that Jesus is Lord. That's all it is. And the Jewish people didn't like this.
They wanted people to look like them, act like them, conform to their ideologies.
And Paul says, no, no, that's not what the gospel is. The gospel is just coming as you are and repenting of your sins and trusting in the Lord. The Roman officers here in this moment, they were confused. They didn't understand what was going on. The crowd was now quiet. They were listening.
And now they're turning against him. And they say, hey, the only thing we can do is take him away.
Let's beat him. Let's interrogate him. Imagine Paul in this moment. I like to really put yourself back in the story. He just got beat to death almost. He's now preaching to a crowd. They're really quiet. They're listening. The crowd gets mad.
The Roman's idea to solve this is, hey, let's go beat him again. Let's go take him to a dungeon, a barrack, and let's beat him again. It's like Paul, he can't catch a break. Everything he's trying to do, he's just one step after another of just hard times and difficulty.
The question we have to ask ourselves is, how do we respond when difficult times come in our life? Things don't go the way we want them to. Things don't go the way we planned them to go. And now all of a sudden, our life gets up in arms differently than what we thought.
How do we respond? Paul responds with grace. He looks at them, the ones that are about to beat him, with grace in his eyes. And he says this wonderful question of, I'm a Roman citizen. Can you do this? And letter B, the Roman intervention happens in 25 to 29. The power of his dual citizenship.
The power that he has in this moment. Because Paul now reveals that he is a Roman citizen.
And he uses it at the right moment at the right time. And I think this is vital for us to know that we can use some of our benefits that we have at the right moment at the right time. But there's a balance here.
He starts by saying he's a citizen of Rome. But he begins not with, look at me, I'm a Roman citizen. He begins with God. He begins with the grace that God gave him.
And then when push comes to shove, he then says, you know, I'm also a Roman citizen. I'm also part of this world as well. I think it's good for us to identify and to know that his earthly identity served his eternal purpose.
He had an identity that was a Roman, but it was using it to serve an eternal purpose.
This is not the last time or the first time that Paul uses his citizenship here on earth to do things for the glory of God.
As I opened up the illustration this morning of someone who was misunderstood, but then pulled out his citizenship of the United States as a passport, it was defining who he was.
It was defining his mission. Paul used both the passport of his earthly life, but also his heavenly life of what God had done for him to simply share the gospel, to be stepped outside of his comfort zone to share with others how they
Concluding Thoughts and Challenges
could also know this man named Jesus who died for their sins.
As Terry comes, I'm going to conclude with just a couple of applicational statements and conclusion, but I want to challenge us to know that God places you where you're at. God has placed you in Clingman or Ronda for a specific reason and a purpose.
He has placed us in our citizenship here in America for a specific reason and a purpose.
I believe that God puts us in our careers and our jobs for a specific reason and purpose because there's someone around you that needs to hear the gospel, that needs to hear the good news of Jesus Christ who
came into this world to redeem us of our sins so that we could have eternal life. He puts us in that specific area for a reason. And sometimes he'll change those careers for another specific reason.
I also believe that God puts us in communities for a specific reason to open the doors for us to share his glory with other people. Now, I want to challenge us. Have the eyes and the vision that Paul had. Look into your community.
Look into the places God has put you so that you can say, God, what is it that you have desired for me to do? Those five words, Lord,
what is it that you want me to do? Lord, what is it that you want me to go and tell someone else about? How is it that you're using my life in this moment to be a faithful witness? You see, Paul's story is not ancient history. It's modern day history.
This is what is happening in today's day and age. He's a model for us to be faithful in a hostile world. In a world that has turned its back on God, has turned its back on religion.
As I mentioned, Tim, who I spoke with this past weekend.
Tim was in his 50s and he looked at me and he said, I don't believe in organized religion. I don't believe there's a God. And there's definitely no such thing as Jesus.
And I had a two and a half hour conversation with him until 2 a.m. Just sharing who this Jesus is because he had been through so much hurt and so much pain and so much difficulty with his three-year-old daughter 13 years ago who had something horrible done to her.
And he just had turned his back on all that God could be.
He said, if there's a God, there's no way there is because a loving God wouldn't allow this to happen to my daughter.
And I looked at him and for two hours I shared the gospel with him and I shared what God has done in my life and through him because I knew that there is a God.
I know there's a grace that's there. And by the end of that, the next morning he came in for breakfast. He walked straight up to me and he gave me a hug. He said, I still don't believe in God.
But yeah, last night's conversation was the best conversation I've ever had in my entire life. And I said, Tim, you've got my number. He's in Greensboro. He's been in Greensboro 40 times this year. He lives in Pittsburgh.
I said, I don't know why God allowed us to meet. I don't know why God allowed us to have a conversation, but I'm here. And if you need me, I can be in Greensboro in about an hour and a half. I can be there.
We can hang out. We can have a cup of coffee. We can get dinner because I understand who God is and what he's done.
And God allows moments to happen in our life. And are we willing to step through those moments? Are we willing to say, God, what are you going to use me today? How are you going to use my moment of my life today to help someone else out? What is your story?
How are you surrendering your story to God and saying, God, let me share my life with other people? When your life is on trial before the world, what will your testimony be?
And how are you going to give your testimony? Father, we love you. We thank you for what you've done for us. Lord, help us to be faithful to what you have given us. Help us to be faithful in your word.
And help us to be faithful to share our story with other people so that they can share in this wonderful grace that you've given us.
Closing Prayer and Farewell
The grace of salvation through your son. We love you. In your name we pray. Amen.
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