Paul (2)

16But arise, and stand on your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose: to appoint you a servant and a witness both of the things which you have seen, and of the things which I will reveal to you; 17delivering you from the people, and from the Gentiles, to whom I send you, 18to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive remission of sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’ 19“Therefore, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, 20but declared first to them of Damascus, at Jerusalem, and throughout all the country of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, doing works worthy of repentance. 21For this reason the Jews seized me in the temple, and tried to kill me. 22Having therefore obtained the help that is from God, I stand to this day testifying both to small and great, saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would happen, 23how the Christ must suffer, and how, by the resurrection of the dead, he would be first to proclaim light both to these people and to the Gentiles.” 24As he thus made his defense, Festus said with a loud voice, “Paul, you are crazy! Your great learning is driving you insane!” 25But he said, “I am not crazy, most excellent Festus, but boldly declare words of truth and reasonableness. 26For the king knows of these things, to whom also I speak freely. For I am persuaded that none of these things is hidden from him, for this has not been done in a corner. 27King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe.” 28Agrippa said to Paul, “With a little persuasion are you trying to make me a Christian?” 29Paul said, “I pray to God, that whether with little or with much, not only you, but also all that hear me today, might become such as I am, except for these bonds.”

Paul had believed until then that the law he had learned from the rabbis was the truth, and so he did his utmost to persecute Christians. But after he met Jesus, as though repenting of those years, he preached the gospel to the last moment so that many souls would receive Jesus Christ. God’s love and authority were in every word he preached, so prayers of repentance from souls shut in darkness, asking God’s forgiveness, rang out like praise. Disease withdrew from everyone Paul laid a hand on in Christ’s name, and the people who heard the Word never stopped working at being born again as children of faith. From the standpoint of a pastor who preaches God’s word, seeing what a great and humble man Paul was brings shame ahead of envy. The apostle Paul was a man with the same nature we have, and how he could turn this completely around after receiving Christ is simply astonishing.

Understanding why the apostle Paul never forgot the grace he received once and stayed loyal to the death becomes easy if you know how Jews think about past and future. We think the past is over and gone, so it lies behind us; and so however great a grace we receive from God or from people, we think of it as a thing gone by. And the future lies ahead of us, so we fear a future we cannot see.

But Jews think the past lies ahead and the future behind. Look at the Bible: God always told them not to forget the exodus. The reason is that if you do not forget the God who pulled you out of suffering and you live by faith, you become a life recognized and protected as one of God’s people, and so you receive a greater grace rather than an uncertain future.

The present you are living in now becomes the past immediately, and that is why the astonishing grace you have received from God is finally a past that will decide your life. Only when the past is in front of you will you remember the time you received grace and not betray it, and even suffering brought on by sin can serve as a mirror in which you show God a good faith. If we keep the experience of our lives always in front of us and work at giving thanks, devoting ourselves and not betraying him, the future cannot help being bright, and we are not afraid even when we cannot see it. So Paul, looking at his past self and his present born-again self, could hold a faith that nailed his own life to the cross the instant he met Christ.

After receiving Christ, the apostle Paul went to Arabia and stayed three years in prayer before going to Jerusalem. Giving himself to prayer for three years, he worked at being sanctified even in his time alone, in order to meet fully in the Holy Spirit the Christ he had met in a light and a voice. If you empty out worldly thoughts when you are alone and fill up with God’s grace and love and word, you can grow much faster. Isolation is the method God uses most often to grow a person spiritually. People who won spiritually always cut and shaped themselves when they were alone, and worked at living by God’s will. Isolation does not mean living completely cut off from the world; it gives you the opportunity and the time to grow, because once the training in faith is over you must go back out into the world and become a vessel that devotes itself to the saving of souls.

Paul was expert in the law, and once he came to see in detail what connection the law has with Christ, he became certain that salvation is believing in Christ and not a matter of works, so he proclaimed the gospel boldly. These days a false gospel has more power than the truth. Even believers think about God the way people serve an idol for worldly success. The truth teaches that sin must be repented of, while the false gospel teaches that if you believe God zealously and attend church you will receive worldly blessing. Only when the churches built on this earth teach Christ’s word rightly can believers grow in the truth while attending them.

God does not command believers to change the world. What God wants is for you, one person, to be born again. Just as many Gentiles received Christ because one man, Paul, repented, if you, one person, change, this country and this church and this home will change.

2 Corinthians 12:7

7By reason of the exceeding greatness of the revelations, that I should not be exalted excessively, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, that I should not be exalted excessively.

Paul testified that he had been to the third heaven, and this testimony was not meant to boast of his own power. He had no choice but to testify about paradise to the people who persecuted him, saying he had no standing as an apostle, because only then would they believe in the living God.

Paul received the blessing of going to paradise and hearing and seeing the secrets of heaven, and he received the power to heal every disease in other people; and his own illness went unhealed. Paul was probably all the more certain because of this justice of God’s. Through God’s even-handed grace and his own weakness, he knew naturally that the power he exercised was God’s power. If he had been able to raise the lame and survive a snakebite, and use that power freely for himself, he would not have leaned on God alone.

But every time Paul prayed for his illness to be healed, God answered that his grace was sufficient for him. Each time he received that answer he would have come to see that he could not keep his faith without God’s absolute help. If you were the apostle Paul, would you not have thought, if God would only heal this illness, I could preach the gospel to so many more people in a healthy body?

Paul must have been disappointed and discouraged by God’s continued refusal, and he was also able to meet a deeper spiritual world through it. Only then did he know that the weaker he is the more God’s power is made perfect, and the more lacking he is the more Christ’s power is with him. The pain in his heart before he grasped Christ’s will and could endure it must have been very great.

When you are ill and poor and weak, what prayer do you pray to God? Do you truly believe, lacking as you are, that Jesus Christ is the God of salvation, and preach the gospel to people boldly?

The faith God wants is a faith of *even so*. Ill, even so; poor, even so; busy, even so; living well, even so; healthy, even so; in bad circumstances, even so — a faith toward God that is full, even so. That is a believer who has grasped the truth.

If Paul’s body had grown healthier right after his conversion and he had earned more money, people would have seen his worldly success and believed in Jesus. But God does not use worldly methods like that to open the door of heaven. God wants people to come into heaven by faith, which is why he wants believers to grow into children who truly know their Father’s will and do it. If you pray, God will gladly solve the problem; but faith comes first, so if you pray while showing him a life lived by faith, you will receive a greater grace.

Paul knew perfectly well the heart of the God who would not answer him about his illness, and so he preached the gospel just as he was, lacking and shabby. A Paul who owns nothing, a Paul with not one thing to show the world, is walking Christ’s road with the gospel alone.

God will lead into heaven the people who heard the gospel preached by that utterly shabby Paul and received Christ. Does looking at a God this fine not make your heart beat faster with joy? You walk with a God who saves the people who heard the gospel from you and me and received Christ, and you are still afraid of the future?

Jesus did not hold this world’s power for the sake of salvation, and every word he preached was the life that saves us. The truth does not change. As long as it does not change that God is absolute and that Christ atoned for sin, the gospel and the truth cannot change. And as long as the truth does not change, the promise that you who are saved will dwell in God’s glory does not change either.

For example, no one who is entering the palace in a few days to become queen weeps at leaving a small thatched cottage behind. She will not fret over giving a battered bowl to a neighbor, or fight to keep the rice left in the jar. The heart of a woman who is to be queen gives it all away freely and rejoices at the thought of living in the palace with the king. The apostle Paul is living in exactly that spirit now.

Paul went up to the third heaven and saw and heard an astonishing sight that human eyes can never see. His spirit and body were separated, of course, and he met God and experienced the world of glory, as the apostle John did. Paul did not record it in detail, so we cannot know what he saw and heard; but looking at the prophets of the Old Testament who saw God and heard his word, he too would have heard and seen everything that was to come. His confession that a thorn was put in his body so that he would not grow proud, because the revelations he received were so great, tells us so.

I have thought that one of those many revelations may have been seeing the hundred and forty-four thousand singing a new song. Paul would have seen the hundred and forty-four thousand saved believers looking on the glory of the Lamb and singing the new song God had granted. In the mouths of those believers there would have been no lie, and a holiness without blemish. They could stand with Christ on Mount Zion because they had kept the chastity of their faith through every suffering in the world and every temptation of Satan. Paul saw with his own eyes the believers who had believed and followed Christ the Lamb offering God a truly beautiful praise.

Listening to that beautiful praise, Paul would have wanted to sing a new song there himself toward Christ the Lamb. To stand in that place with the hundred and forty-four thousand believers, he would have resolved to live as one who died with Jesus on the cross.

Paul was preaching the gospel in Jerusalem when he was arrested and dragged in chains before the council. Seated there were King Agrippa, Festus, who had taken up the post of governor, Agrippa’s wife Bernice, and people of high standing in Rome. Before the king Paul preached the gospel boldly, not shrinking at all, telling them how he had lived and why they must believe in Jesus.

If you were bound as a criminal and told to preach the gospel in a place where the president and every politician sat in a circle around you, could you do it? Could you tell them to believe in Christ and repent and be saved, when they had said they would kill you if the gospel did not make sense to them?

The boldness to preach with confidence comes only from being certain that Christ is the savior and that the truth you know is the real thing. Paul had met the King of kings, so a king of this world did not frighten him; those people of high standing simply looked to him like pitiful souls who had not been saved. Paul said boldly that Christ had told him to be an apostle to the Gentiles, and that he had received the command to preach the gospel to souls under Satan’s power.

Believers must serve as a bridge between God and the people of the world. People of the world are spiritually blind and do not know they are shut in darkness, so a believer is exactly the person who does the work of opening their eyes with the light of the gospel and helping them get to God.

Acts 26:29

29Paul said, “I pray to God, that whether with little or with much, not only you, but also all that hear me today, might become such as I am, except for these bonds.”

The apostle Paul, arrested as a criminal, told a king of this world that he wanted him to have the same faith in Christ, apart from these chains. Do you see the apostle Paul, in his most shabby state, daring to tell a king of this world that he wants him to become like himself? David was a king and was not proud; Esther saved the Jewish people from the queen’s place; Daniel carried his calling from a minister’s place with his mind made up to die. Look at Job being a rich man, and you see that being a child of God does not mean you must give up parents and brothers and property and suffer imprisonment as Paul did. After meeting Christ, Paul did not avoid being bound, being stoned and being shut in prison, so long as he could preach the gospel through it. And now, not content with that, he stakes his life before a king of this world and preaches — and I applaud that bold faith without a shred of doubt in it.

King Agrippa held worldly power, so a man with no strength like Paul could die on the spot at a word from the king. A Paul in filthy, shabby clothes and in chains, telling the powerful of this world that they must believe in a Jesus who died on a cross in order to be saved — the thought alone is pitiful. A believer preaching the gospel and the world hearing it look like Agrippa and Paul: the world in a king’s seat and the believer in shabby Paul’s.

If you were the king, would you believe a criminal in ropes telling you that you can live only by believing in the God he trusts? What do you think Paul had to say to a king who held all the power and glory of this world, for that king to listen to him? This question is a very important matter for believers.

You must wrestle with it as Paul did in order to evangelize. The king who heard Paul’s words cried out that with a little persuasion he would make him a Christian. But Paul had his hope set on heaven and was living as a dead man, so the king’s shouting did not frighten him, and even bound and mocked he did not fear death.

Friends! The Word is proclaimed. It is not begging someone to believe; it is telling them that if they will not hear this gospel I preach, they will suffer forever in hell. Have you ever seen a country beg people to keep martial law when it declares it? Have you seen it plead with people to be careful because they will die if they do not follow the law? When martial law is declared, whoever breaks it is judged according to the law.

Right now Paul is in filthy clothes, ill and poor, and preaching the gospel to a king and to the powerful. If a child of God, the King of kings, is ashamed of owning less than the person in front of them and so does not preach the gospel, they have already lost their standing as a believer. Salvation cannot be bought with money, and it cannot be seized by power. You have received exactly the same blessing as Paul, and looking at a Paul who preaches the gospel with his life on the line, you must make your resolve.

You know God’s secret; if you were standing in that place with a Paul who is preaching the gospel alone, what do you think you would do for him? The question is whether you have the courage to say aloud, as Paul did, that only by believing in Christ can a person receive eternal life. What many churches today have come up with, afraid of being disadvantaged as Paul was, is to preach the gospel looking much like the people of the world.

Pastors and believers have stripped off Paul’s shabby clothes, undone his chains, dressed him in new clothes, and begun setting expensive marble on church buildings. They have filled the sanctuary with costly instruments, gathered as many people with worldly power as they can, and begun packaging living well in the world as what God wants.

But how good it would be if we changed our thinking and made an atmosphere where people could sincerely come to church and worship, and praised the holy Lord with all kinds of instruments as David did, and preached a true gospel. The reality, though, is not that. In a building decorated so as not to be shamed beside the world, the pastor becomes a king and the elders and officers become nobility, and a church that thinks it can now take on the world has thrown out the Word altogether and preaches only worldly blessing.

What is there left to preach? Wipe away all the blood he shed on the cross, sew up the spear wound in his side until it is invisible, put a splendid robe and a jeweled crown on the Lord in place of his filthy clothes and his crown of thorns — and then what Jesus will you preach? Jesus said that only when the old self is nailed to the cross and the body of sin dies do we stop serving Satan as slaves. And after gilding the cross in order to boast to the world, what God can you preach? A tomb whitewashed so splendidly that people will not tread on it still stinks of rot the moment you come near it; and just so, the church and the faith of believers have become a tomb whitewashed splendidly on the outside.

Worship should be reverent worship that God can receive, and instead we offer splendid worship that gathers people into a church. However splendidly a tomb is decorated, no one wants it badly enough to pray for it. However dear a child is, once they are dead they cannot be held; and just so, a child of God who has not taken off the old self cannot be held either.

Only when believers first take off the body of sin on the cross can they preach boldly, as the apostle Paul did, even before a king of this world. But the sad thing is that many pastors preach only a worldly blessing with no Christ in it. Many pastors do not preach repentance and suffering and devotion and loyalty; they cry out that living well in the world is the blessing God gives. As though a believer’s duty were living by the morals and ethics the world has fixed, every sermon is set to the world’s standard and preached that way. Friends, keeping morals and ethics is the lowest baseline for a believer. Only by keeping the world’s laws and preaching the gospel from there do you avoid being hindered in evangelism.

Think of Stephen, who was stoned to death. Did he die because he did not live morally and wanted worldly blessing? Of course there is no need to be poor or ill on purpose in the world. But do not compromise the truth for the sake of worldly blessing.

Where are Christ’s eyes turned right now? May you be standing with Paul in the place where Christ’s heart and eyes rest. Do not envy the rich lives and pleasures of the people of the world; look only to God, lean on him and walk with him, and you will be able to dwell in the land of Canaan. When all this training is over, God will give you eternal rest, as the apostle Paul entered the eternal kingdom, and he will restore you spiritually and physically, as he restored the suffering Job.

May you stand boldly toward the world as believers who have overcome sin, and humbly toward God as those who are alive, and preach the gospel, and become people of the eternal kingdom of heaven.