SPEAKER_00: Well, Providence Family, it's so good to see each of you.
SPEAKER_00: As we were singing, as I thought about this passage, just want you to know I still find it absolutely amazing that the gospel has reached us.
SPEAKER_00: I think it's so important to not take that for granted.
SPEAKER_00: You think about where all this started, not just our own study, but in Acts, we're told where it all started that Jesus came to the earth and he literally came here.
SPEAKER_00: And he lived in these tiny, obscure villages.
SPEAKER_00: He lived for 33 years on the earth, roughly, three years of which he was in public having a ministry.
SPEAKER_00: Three-year ministry.
SPEAKER_00: Most of his time was spent seeking to disciple just 12 men.
SPEAKER_00: And yet to those 12 men, he told them to do something.
SPEAKER_00: After he rose from the dead, they obviously had something to talk about, but he said this: I want you to pray.
SPEAKER_00: Don't go preaching, I want you praying.
SPEAKER_00: I want you praying, and this is why.
SPEAKER_00: He says, You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
SPEAKER_00: And as they prayed and as they went and as they persuaded, what took place is the gospel made it to us.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're studying.
SPEAKER_00: Acts is the true story of real people, the first followers of Jesus Christ, who prayed and were empowered and became persuasive.
SPEAKER_00: They prayed and they took the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: They were literally a moving people, constantly moving with the gospel and persuading people to believe.
SPEAKER_00: They were making disciples, and those people would make disciples, and then those people would make disciples all the way down to us.
SPEAKER_00: And it was 40 weeks ago that I stood right here and I said that we will know as a people if the book of Acts really gets into us, if in 40 weeks we are a people who are praying for power and moving with the gospel and growing more persuasive in order to make disciples who make disciples.
SPEAKER_00: And I just want to say, thank God for you and what I see in you.
SPEAKER_00: I see so many of you doing just that.
SPEAKER_00: It's one of the most encouraging things to me is to be able to see people who love Jesus taking him at his word.
SPEAKER_00: And my encouragement to you is to excel still more.
SPEAKER_00: Tonight, we're gonna break.
SPEAKER_00: We do these about every six months, and where we have a lot of service projects in the city, and we're gonna meet here and we're gonna gather and we're gonna scatter.
SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna seek to be a blessing to our city in the hope that they would ask, Why are you doing this?
SPEAKER_00: And we could tell them.
SPEAKER_00: And if you have a Bible in your hand, I want to ask you to turn with me to Acts 25.
SPEAKER_00: Because not only do we want to be a people who pray, and not only do we want to be a people who move, but we also want to be a people who persuade.
SPEAKER_00: And Acts 25 and 26 is a story, amazing story of persuasion.
SPEAKER_00: So let me pray.
SPEAKER_00: Father in heaven, we bow before you, and I ask that you would speak through weakness.
SPEAKER_00: I ask that you would take control of my thoughts and our thoughts, my words.
SPEAKER_00: I pray, Father, that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our heart will be pleasing to you.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, give us a holy curiosity, an interest, and a courage to apply what we see to our own personal life.
SPEAKER_00: I pray for those who are here who are not yet persuaded to believe in Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: I pray that you would use Acts 25 and 26 to do just that.
SPEAKER_00: And I pray also for those who have been persuaded.
SPEAKER_00: I ask that you would use Acts 25 and 26 to make us persuasive.
SPEAKER_00: And so we ask for help.
SPEAKER_00: We look to you now, we pray in Christ's name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Well, in this passage, uh uh, there's a man named Paul, and Paul is the central figure in this passage that is outside of the Lord God Himself.
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna read, we're gonna read his name a bunch of different times.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul was an early follower of Jesus Christ who was completely changed.
SPEAKER_00: He went on three missionary journeys that are all recorded in the book of Acts.
SPEAKER_00: They compiled roughly 12 years of his life, 7,000 miles, most of which he walked in order to take the gospel to people who had never heard.
SPEAKER_00: When I say the word gospel, I mean God's love for us, that he would send Christ to die for us, to rise from the dead, and everyone who puts their faith in him can be forgiven of their sin.
SPEAKER_00: He wanted, because Jesus wanted, everybody to know.
SPEAKER_00: And so he went.
SPEAKER_00: And at the end of his third missionary journey, he comes back to Jerusalem, where false reports had circulated about his rejection of the Jewish people, the temple, and the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: So when he gets there, six days later, some Jews from Asia, they see him, they're so furious by him that they begin to beat him with the intent to kill him.
SPEAKER_00: Well, the Romans rescue him and they say, we need to get him out of town after a brief hearing.
SPEAKER_00: And so they send him off to Caesarea, which is roughly 70 miles north of where he was at.
SPEAKER_00: So he gets there and he has a trial.
SPEAKER_00: There's a man named Felix, he's the governor, and he says, You know what?
SPEAKER_00: I'm pretty convinced that this man is innocent.
SPEAKER_00: He shouldn't be in prison.
SPEAKER_00: He certainly shouldn't be killed, like the Jews want him to be killed.
SPEAKER_00: And yet it says to do him a favor, that is, to do a favor to the Jewish people, because they hated him so much, in order to accrue favor with the Jewish people, he said, It's just one guy, I'll just leave him in prison in my dungeon underneath my palace.
SPEAKER_00: And so for two years he stayed there.
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, Felix was deposed of his power, and a new governor came to town.
SPEAKER_00: His name was Festus.
SPEAKER_00: And Festus didn't know Christianity, he didn't really even know the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: He certainly didn't know Paul's story, and he was really unfamiliar even with the Jewish way of life.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul recognized that he was not going to get a fair trial.
SPEAKER_00: And so, as a Roman citizen, he literally played the card, which is like the nuclear option, and he said, I appeal to Caesar, which meant that he had to be sent to Rome.
SPEAKER_00: He appealed to the highest court in the land.
SPEAKER_00: Well, Festus says, Okay, I'll send you, but here's the problem.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what you've done, and I can't send you without some written record of the accusations and the crimes that you committed.
SPEAKER_00: And so I don't know what to do.
SPEAKER_00: Well, about that time, King Agrippa comes to town to visit.
SPEAKER_00: He comes to Caesarea.
SPEAKER_00: Now, that might be confusing to you because you think, wait, king is the highest, but not here, okay?
SPEAKER_00: In this empire, you had Caesar.
SPEAKER_00: He was the emperor, he was over everything, and he had six client kings, where he gave some of his authority to six different kings who ruled different parts of the empire.
SPEAKER_00: Underneath those kings were these uh men like Festus.
SPEAKER_00: And so what you have here is very high-ranking officials in the Roman Empire, but second and third level of leaders.
SPEAKER_00: And he hears that King Agrippa is going to come to Caesarea and he goes, Oh, this is my opportunity.
SPEAKER_00: You can help me.
SPEAKER_00: You're more familiar with this stuff, you can help me to write up the charges.
SPEAKER_00: And this is how it goes.
SPEAKER_00: Look what it says in chapter 25, verse 23.
SPEAKER_00: So on the next day, Agrippa and Bernice came with great pomp, and they entered the audience hall with the military tribunes and the prominent men of the city.
SPEAKER_00: Then at the command of Festus, Paul was brought in.
SPEAKER_00: And Festus said, King Agrippa and all who were present with us, you see this man about whom the whole Jewish people petitioned me, both in Jerusalem and here, shouting that he ought not to live any longer.
SPEAKER_00: But I found that he had done nothing deserving death.
SPEAKER_00: And as he himself appealed to the emperor, I decided to go ahead and send him, but I have nothing definite to write to my Lord about him.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore I have brought him before you all, and especially before you, King Agrippa, so that after we have examined him, I may have something to write, for it seems to me unreasonable in sending a prisoner not to indicate the charges against him.
SPEAKER_00: So Agrippa said to Paul, You have permission to speak for yourself.
SPEAKER_00: And then Paul stretched out his hand and made his defense.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what he said.
SPEAKER_00: I consider myself fortunate that it is before you, King Agrippa, I am going to make my defense today against all the accusations of the Jews, especially because of the because you are familiar with all the customs and controversies of the Jews.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore I beg you to listen to me patiently.
SPEAKER_00: My manner of life from my youth, spent from the beginning among my own nation and in Jerusalem, is known by all the Jews.
SPEAKER_00: They have known for a long time, if they're willing to testify, that according to the strictest party of our religion, I lived as a Pharisee.
SPEAKER_00: And now I stand here on trial because of my hope in the promise made by God to our fathers, to which our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they earnestly worship night and day.
SPEAKER_00: And for this hope I am accused by Jews, O king.
SPEAKER_00: Why is it thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead?
SPEAKER_00: Then he returns to his story.
SPEAKER_00: I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things in opposing the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
SPEAKER_00: And I did so in Jerusalem, and not only locked up many of the saints in prison after receiving authority from the chief priest, but when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them, and I punished them often in all the synagogues and tried to make them blaspheme, and in raging fury against them I persecuted them even to foreign cities.
SPEAKER_00: In this connection I journeyed to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priest.
SPEAKER_00: At midday, O king, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, that shone around me and those who journeyed with me.
SPEAKER_00: And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?
SPEAKER_00: It is hard for you to kick against the goads.
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Who are you, Lord?
SPEAKER_00: And the Lord said to me, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting, but rise and stand upon your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles, to whom I am sending you, to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins in a place among those who were sanctified by faith in me.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but I declared first to those in Damascus and then in Jerusalem and throughout all the region of Judea, and also to the Gentiles that they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance.
SPEAKER_00: And for this reason the Jews seized me in the temple and have tried to kill me.
SPEAKER_00: To this day, I have had the help that comes from God.
SPEAKER_00: And so I stand here testifying both the small and great, saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass, that the Christ must suffer, and that by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles.
SPEAKER_00: And as he was saying these things in his defense, Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, you are out of your mind.
SPEAKER_00: Your great learning is driving you out of your mind.
SPEAKER_00: But Paul said, I am not out of my mind, most excellent Festus, and I'm speaking true and rational words.
SPEAKER_00: For the king knows about these things, and to him I speak boldly, for I am persuaded that none of these things has escaped his notice, for this has not been done in a corner.
SPEAKER_00: King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets?
SPEAKER_00: I know that you believe.
SPEAKER_00: And Agrippa said to Paul, In a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian?
SPEAKER_00: And Paul said, Whether short or long, I would to God that not only you, but also all who hear me this day might become such as I am, except for these chains.
SPEAKER_00: Then the king rose, and the governor, and Bernice, and those who were sitting with them.
SPEAKER_00: When they had withdrawn, they said to one another, This man is doing nothing to deserve death or imprisonment.
SPEAKER_00: And Agrippa said to Festus, This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar.
SPEAKER_00: Now perhaps you noticed in that account, I know it was long, but perhaps you noticed in that account that he doesn't really act much like a defendant.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't cry about the injustice or plead for mercy.
SPEAKER_00: There's been three things that have been accused of him, which we saw back in the first trial with Felix, and that was treason and heresy and sacrilege.
SPEAKER_00: And he doesn't break any of that up.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't seek to defend himself from those charges at all.
SPEAKER_00: What was interesting is the king noticed this.
SPEAKER_00: And here at the end, we're actually told that the king actually discerned what Paul was trying to do within this trial before him.
SPEAKER_00: And he says it in verse 28, he says, Wait a minute, in a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian?
SPEAKER_00: In other words, what he's saying is this, wait a minute, is this what you're really doing?
SPEAKER_00: You're using your trial right here, right now, to try to convert me, to persuade me to put my faith in Jesus Christ?
SPEAKER_00: And Paul looks at me and he goes, Yes.
SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm trying to do.
SPEAKER_00: But not only you, all of you.
SPEAKER_00: So what I want to do is show you just a couple things that are answers to one question.
SPEAKER_00: And the question is this to what does the Holy Spirit, as we pray and we're powered by the Holy Spirit, to what does the Holy Spirit lead us to appeal in order to become more persuasive in people in our life who don't know the Lord, that we desperately want them to come to faith in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: The first thing I want you to see is the Spirit leads us to appeal to our personal transformation.
SPEAKER_00: Our personal transformation.
SPEAKER_00: Similar to the trial that we read and studied in Acts 22, Paul tells a story, his testimony.
SPEAKER_00: And the arc of this story is what we've talked about many times, and that is he begins by saying, This is what my life was like before Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And then this is how Christ saved me.
SPEAKER_00: And then this is what happened since he saved me.
SPEAKER_00: And we could trace that arc once again because that's precisely what he does here.
SPEAKER_00: But because we've already done that twice, I'm not going to do that this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, what I want to do is I want to look at what Paul said that Jesus gives to his people, including Paul, to cause a transformation in our life, that our life would become part of the evidence in persuading others to believe in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: So what does Jesus give to us to transform our life that we find in his story?
SPEAKER_00: Well, first we're told here is that Jesus gives a freedom that restores humanity.
SPEAKER_00: A freedom that restores our own humanity.
SPEAKER_00: Now, Paul certainly looked human.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, he looked like he was realizing his full potential as a human being.
SPEAKER_00: He was a Roman citizen, which meant that he had special privileges.
SPEAKER_00: He was a Pharisee, which meant that in his own religion, he was regarded, he was respected, he was educated.
SPEAKER_00: This was somebody that when he walked in the room, people thought, this man is living.
SPEAKER_00: And yet the words within the Bible tell us that he was living a subhuman life on the inside.
SPEAKER_00: We're told in Acts chapter 8, verse 3, there it says that Saul was ravaging the church, a word in the Greek that's often used to speak of a wild boar that is tearing up a beautiful vineyard, or digging through the ground in order to eat the seeds.
SPEAKER_00: He's ruining things, but he's animalistic.
SPEAKER_00: And then in chapter 9, verse 1, after in chapter 8, saying that he was living the subhuman life, in chapter 9, verse 1, he says that he was breathing out threats and murder.
SPEAKER_00: To breathe murder, think about that.
SPEAKER_00: It's like the oxygen of the soul is violence and killing.
SPEAKER_00: You're like breathing it in and exhaling, and like that's that's not that's not purely human.
SPEAKER_00: That's not how we were intended to live our life.
SPEAKER_00: It's to live a subhuman life.
SPEAKER_00: And then in our passage in chapter 26, verse 11, he says there that towards the Christians that he was persecuting, it says that he had this raging fury against them, raging as madman.
SPEAKER_00: It's literally like I've lost my mind in my fury towards them.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, what he's doing is he looks at the king and Bernice and all these people, and he says, I want you to know something.
SPEAKER_00: And that is that before Jesus Christ changed my life, on the outside I looked like I was fully human, because I was human.
SPEAKER_00: But on the inside, I was not living up to my human potential.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, my attitudes and behaviors and thoughts and impulses were subhuman.
SPEAKER_00: Became like an animal.
SPEAKER_00: Now, who's he talking to?
SPEAKER_00: A lot of people who obviously don't know the Lord, but two people in particular, we know their names, Agrippa and Bernice.
SPEAKER_00: And you may look at that and go, oh, married, husband and wife.
SPEAKER_00: No, not married.
SPEAKER_00: This is brother and sister.
SPEAKER_00: This brother and sister had another sister.
SPEAKER_00: Her name was Drusilla.
SPEAKER_00: If you remember when we studied Felix, it was Felix's wife, Drusilla.
SPEAKER_00: And so Herod, Agrippa I had three kids: Herod, Agrippa II, which is this one, Bernice, which is this one, and Drusilla.
SPEAKER_00: But these two were siblings who shared a bed.
SPEAKER_00: If you need a look, they were incestuous.
SPEAKER_00: He's looking at people who are insatiable for pleasure, who have put aside all restraint, who have put aside the yoke of God that would say something is right and something is wrong.
SPEAKER_00: And as such, they were living an animalistic life, not only sexually, but even in violence towards people.
SPEAKER_00: They were like wild boars tearing everything up.
SPEAKER_00: But this is amazing what he does.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't point to that, he only points to the reality in his own life.
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes when we're talking to people about Christ, it's very easy to see when people are behaving less than their potential as an image bearer of God.
SPEAKER_00: And instead of pointing it out, sometimes we can tell the story in our own personal life to say, this is true of me.
SPEAKER_00: And without having to point it out in their life, it echoes, it resounds.
SPEAKER_00: Like, man, that's that sounds familiar.
SPEAKER_00: But then he says, King, I'm walking on this road and I'm experiencing this kind of subhuman life, but then suddenly a light that was brighter than the sun appeared.
SPEAKER_00: But this light was unlike any other light because it spoke, which meant it wasn't just a light, it was a man who was bright.
SPEAKER_00: And he said, My name.
SPEAKER_00: He knew my name.
SPEAKER_00: He had personality.
SPEAKER_00: He said, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?
SPEAKER_00: It's hard for you to kick against the goats.
SPEAKER_00: This is an amazing goat, it was a stick that a shepherd used to move an animal around.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, I mean it's all this picture.
SPEAKER_00: It's like I was acting like an animal, and so God treated me like one.
SPEAKER_00: Not in every way, but it says that he used the illustration of he used a goat by his spirit.
SPEAKER_00: He was convicting him, he was showing he was causing a restlessness within his heart.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul says, now I could see the source of my restlessness.
SPEAKER_00: I was sinning and he loved me so much that so he he prodded me with conviction, but I kept kicking against his prod, and so he had to prod all the harder.
SPEAKER_00: I thought I knew him.
SPEAKER_00: That is, I thought I knew God.
SPEAKER_00: I prodded myself.
SPEAKER_00: Myself on knowing God.
SPEAKER_00: And yet this was clearly God, and I did not know who he was, so I had to ask him, and who are you, Lord?
SPEAKER_00: And he said, I'm Jesus, who you are persecuting.
SPEAKER_00: See, friends, we're in the Bible it says we're all sinners.
SPEAKER_00: We've all fallen short of the glory of God.
SPEAKER_00: And in our chase for a freedom, every one of us in our sin, we're chasing a kind of freedom.
SPEAKER_00: And in our sin, what we're doing is the freedom we're chasing is to remove the yoke of God from us, to be unrestrained, because it feels so free.
SPEAKER_00: I won't be restrained from old words in an old book.
SPEAKER_00: I won't be restrained by the things of God.
SPEAKER_00: I won't be won't be restrained by what my mom and dad have taught me about the ways of God.
SPEAKER_00: Every single one of us do this, but this is what happens.
SPEAKER_00: Anytime you become unrestrained with the ways of God, you grow to become more like an animal.
SPEAKER_00: Not physically or in your being, but in terms of your thoughts, you begin to live subhuman.
SPEAKER_00: You begin to be insatiable for pleasure, insatiable for violence.
SPEAKER_00: You become a person who's contentious in your mind.
SPEAKER_00: You're always arguing with people in your mind.
SPEAKER_00: There's not a peace.
SPEAKER_00: All the possibilities of being truly human, what it means to be in a relationship with God, to love Him with all of our heart and to love people as ourselves, it erodes and we become like a wild animal that tears up precious and valuable things.
SPEAKER_00: Every one of us are created by God to thrive and to feel free and to be human, fully human, so long as we live in our desired environment.
SPEAKER_00: So a fish, for example, is free so long as it lives in water and stays in water, and so are we.
SPEAKER_00: What's our environment?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus said, Come to me, take my yoke upon you, and you will find rest for your souls.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, only when we live under Jesus' rule can we be fully human.
SPEAKER_00: Can we be free?
SPEAKER_00: And so Jesus gives us this freedom.
SPEAKER_00: He also gives us the forgiveness, a forgiveness that restores identity.
SPEAKER_00: For Paul, he was a Pharisee, and as a Pharisee, his identity, his identity became being a moral man, an upstanding citizen.
SPEAKER_00: People looked at him and applauded him.
SPEAKER_00: Look at the discipline and the zeal and the education and the theology.
SPEAKER_00: So his identity was rooted in him being righteous, moral.
SPEAKER_00: But he had a problem.
SPEAKER_00: Say, what was his problem?
SPEAKER_00: He was a sinner like you and me.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you base your identity on being moral, when you sin, what happens?
SPEAKER_00: It shatters your identity.
SPEAKER_00: You become so confused because you're like, this is what everyone knows me to be, and yet this is what I really am.
SPEAKER_00: He tells a time when God led him to see this in Romans chapter 7, one of the times when God used a goat, a stick, in order to jar his mind into thinking about reality.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, You shall not covet.
SPEAKER_00: I was once alive apart from the law when the commandment came, sin came alive, and I died.
SPEAKER_00: What's he saying there?
SPEAKER_00: He's saying, There was a time that I was thinking about the Ten Commandments, and the first nine commandments, you're not supposed to, but you can think of the first nine as entirely behavioral.
SPEAKER_00: No idols.
SPEAKER_00: Be careful how you use the name of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Honoring the Sabbath, keeping it, and remembering it, honoring your parents.
SPEAKER_00: And then there's a string of these are things you shouldn't do.
SPEAKER_00: Don't kill people, don't steal from people, no adultery, false witness.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul looked at the verse and he said, Man, I'm crushing this.
SPEAKER_00: I feel so alive.
SPEAKER_00: Look at my life.
SPEAKER_00: Because he's simply looking at his behavior and he's like, you know what?
SPEAKER_00: I keep the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: I haven't killed anybody, I haven't cheated on anybody.
SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm I'm just I'm just I'm just winning in life.
SPEAKER_00: I'm just crushing it.
SPEAKER_00: This is amazing how I'm living.
SPEAKER_00: He goes, and then I got to the tenth commandment, and the tenth commandment cannot be read and evaluated by our behavior.
SPEAKER_00: It's thou shalt not covet.
SPEAKER_00: It's something that's only an evaluation of the heart.
SPEAKER_00: It's saying that I love God so much that I don't want what I don't have.
SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, coveting is the source of all the breaking of the other commandments.
SPEAKER_00: When you commit adultery, it's because you want what you don't have.
SPEAKER_00: When you steal, it's because you want what you don't have.
SPEAKER_00: And he looked at it and he says, Oh my goodness, now I'm a dead man.
SPEAKER_00: I thought I was alive.
SPEAKER_00: But now that I know that I'm a sinner, I've died.
SPEAKER_00: I imagine he looked around the room and he says, and you guys know that we've all sinned and we all try to hide it, but let me tell you where you can't hide.
SPEAKER_00: You can't hide from a man who's brighter than the sun.
SPEAKER_00: And when he said to me, Saul, why are you persecuting me?
SPEAKER_00: And he said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
SPEAKER_00: Paul could say, I saw for the first time that when I sinned, I wasn't simply violating an impersonal law, I was violating a person who was brighter than the sun.
SPEAKER_00: But in love, this person did the unthinkable.
SPEAKER_00: He came to the earth.
SPEAKER_00: And he tells in a story exactly what he did.
SPEAKER_00: It was promised in the Old Testament that he would suffer.
SPEAKER_00: And then he rose from the dead after living without any sin in order to pay for our sin problem.
SPEAKER_00: He loves us, he cares for us, and he sent me to tell you the impact of putting your trust in him.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus said to me, is what he's saying.
SPEAKER_00: I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins in a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.
SPEAKER_00: You see what we receive?
SPEAKER_00: We receive forgiveness.
SPEAKER_00: And we receive a place.
SPEAKER_00: A place is a home of love and acceptance.
SPEAKER_00: And these things are not achieved, they're received.
SPEAKER_00: But don't you see that when you understand and believe that being forgiven and having a place with God is the truest thing about you, is it gives you a new identity.
SPEAKER_00: And this is an identity that can't be shattered when you sin because you know you're a forgiven person, which means you already acknowledge that you're a sinful person.
SPEAKER_00: If you base your identity on your own self-righteousness and your own morality, then every time you mess up, it shatters your very identity.
SPEAKER_00: But if you know and believe that the truest thing about you is that you have a place in God and you are forgiven, then when you stumble, you can know I am forgiven.
SPEAKER_00: And it's not because of me, it's because of Him.
SPEAKER_00: And so He gives us a freedom and a forgiveness.
SPEAKER_00: And last, He gives us this future, a future that gives us hope.
SPEAKER_00: Everyone in that room and everyone in this room is gonna die.
SPEAKER_00: And none of us like that.
SPEAKER_00: That's why we spend collectively with all other people in the world$46 billion every year on anti-aging products.
SPEAKER_00: And friends, like you look great.
SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you something, those products are failing.
SPEAKER_00: We're getting older.
SPEAKER_00: I'll say it personally so it doesn't hurt so much.
SPEAKER_00: I have never been closer to the day of my death.
SPEAKER_00: And for a lot of people in the world, that takes away all hope, but not for the Christian.
SPEAKER_00: That's what he says.
SPEAKER_00: What does Jesus give us?
SPEAKER_00: He gives us a hope.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse six.
SPEAKER_00: He says, I stand here on trial because of my hope in the promise made by God to our fathers.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, Why is it incredible that any of you that God raises the dead?
SPEAKER_00: In other words, Jesus rose from the dead, and he's the first fruits of those who rise from the dead.
SPEAKER_00: He's the guarantee that everyone who puts their faith in Christ will also rise to newness of life, and therefore he could stand in this trial and say, King, I know you're a really important person, but let me tell you something.
SPEAKER_00: There's not a thing that you can do or decide that's going to take away my hope.
SPEAKER_00: If we receive and make it part of our true identity and life, that we are forgiven and free, and we have a future that gives us hope, it begins to transform our life in such a way that we become persuasive.
SPEAKER_00: So let me encourage us two applications here.
SPEAKER_00: First is let's yield our lives to the Lordship of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: I'm really speaking directly to Christians.
SPEAKER_00: If our lives do not bear witness to the transformation that we proclaim, people will be persuaded otherwise.
SPEAKER_00: Fact is, he had to persuade us in spite of people.
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that true of all of us?
SPEAKER_00: Every single one of us who have put our faith in Christ, we had to believe in Christ in spite of professing believers and their confusing life.
SPEAKER_00: Because Jesus can do that, he can overcome.
SPEAKER_00: But that shouldn't be our excuse as believers to say, well, he can overcome in spite of me.
SPEAKER_00: We should want to be part of the evidence that people can look at and say, if that's what it looks like to trust Christ, then that's a good thing.
SPEAKER_00: I want that.
SPEAKER_00: We say frequently that people in Raleigh and in your lives, they're reading you far more often than they're reading a Bible.
SPEAKER_00: And so let's yield to the Lordship of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And second, is let's be ready to tell our story that leads to his story.
SPEAKER_00: You see, nobody in this day in this courtroom was led to think that Paul was the hero of his story.
SPEAKER_00: You should ask yourself, when you tell your story, who's the hero?
SPEAKER_00: When people come up to you and say, hey, I'm so-and-so, what's your name?
SPEAKER_00: Tell me your story.
SPEAKER_00: It's story time now.
SPEAKER_00: You gotta tell them something.
SPEAKER_00: What's the truest thing about you?
SPEAKER_00: Tell them that.
SPEAKER_00: You see, our story, we're never intended to tell people think that we're the destination.
SPEAKER_00: We're just the bridge.
SPEAKER_00: So let me encourage you in that.
SPEAKER_00: Second is this is the spirit leads us to appeal to the rational evidence.
SPEAKER_00: When Festus, you're you see here, a man who didn't understand Christ, didn't understand Paul, didn't understand the Jewish religion, he didn't understand.
SPEAKER_00: He was new to this area.
SPEAKER_00: We're told that when he heard Paul's story, he said, Paul, I think you've lost your mind.
SPEAKER_00: I can see you're educated, but all that education has literally caused you to lose your mind.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul says to him, I am not out of my mind, most excellent Festus, but I'm speaking true and rational words.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't say, I really believe this, and I'm emotional about this, so I know it's true.
SPEAKER_00: He says, There is publicly available information that proves the credibility that what I'm saying is not only rational, but it's reasonable.
SPEAKER_00: And then amazingly, he looks right at the king.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, the king knows about these things, and to him I speak boldly, and I'm persuaded that none of these things has escaped his notice.
SPEAKER_00: But this has not been done in a corner.
SPEAKER_00: Agrippa was roughly eight years old when Jesus died on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: So the next 20 some years, he's lived his entire life.
SPEAKER_00: He's lived his entire life, a family dynasty.
SPEAKER_00: They lived in Judea.
SPEAKER_00: As a child, there's rumors going around, this guy was going around healing people.
SPEAKER_00: Eight years old, Jesus dies.
SPEAKER_00: And ever since this time, there's people who've been talking as eyewitnesses that this man rose from the dead.
SPEAKER_00: He's very familiar with all of this evidence.
SPEAKER_00: And what Paul says to him in front of everybody is this Agrippa, you know, as someone who's lived here for 20 years, the last 20 years, you cannot laugh this off.
SPEAKER_00: You can't.
SPEAKER_00: And therefore, I'm asking you to account for the evidence.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we need to do.
SPEAKER_00: And we encourage you to account for the evidence.
SPEAKER_00: What I'm about to do, hopefully, we'll do two things.
SPEAKER_00: For some of you who are not persuaded, maybe you will be persuaded.
SPEAKER_00: And for those of us who are persuaded, maybe some of this evidence, just a reminder of the evidence, will help you to be more persuasive as you're talking to people who don't know the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: What is the evidence?
SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, the greatest peace you always have to start with is the empty tomb.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because 1 Corinthians tells us that if Jesus is still dead in the grave, that we are all wasting our time, that there is no forgiveness of sin, and that we as Christians, if he actually says this, are to be the most pitied people on the face of the earth because we have bought a lie.
SPEAKER_00: And so the resurrection of Christ is not just a little thing, it's everything.
SPEAKER_00: Well, the resurrection of Christ assumes he's not in a grave, right?
SPEAKER_00: They put him in there dead, and he's not there.
SPEAKER_00: Now he is not there for one of two reasons.
SPEAKER_00: Either he walked out of that grave, which means he's the Lord because he rose from the dead, or someone took him out of that grave as a dead body.
SPEAKER_00: If someone took him out of that grave, it had to be one of two kinds of people, either his enemies or his disciples or friends.
SPEAKER_00: If it was his enemies who took his body out of the grave, then when the disciples started proclaiming the gospel that Jesus rose from the dead, beginning a new religion, all you have to do is expose the body, and that religion immediately dies.
SPEAKER_00: And if it was his followers, his friends who took the body, and they began to go and spread a lie that Jesus rose from the dead and they knew better.
SPEAKER_00: Well, when they all, 10 out of the next 11 of them, had to give their life refusing to recant.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what you don't do.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe one of them is just sort of crazy, but the fact is, is you're not gonna get this many people who die for what they know is a lie.
SPEAKER_00: They got the body literally in someone's basement.
SPEAKER_00: Someone's gonna break down and go, okay, well, enough of this.
SPEAKER_00: Here he is, let's rebury him.
SPEAKER_00: He rose from the dead, friend.
SPEAKER_00: Then there's eyewitnesses to it.
SPEAKER_00: Just three to five years before Acts 24 happened, not when it was written, but when it happened.
SPEAKER_00: Paul wrote 1 Corinthians.
SPEAKER_00: And in 1 Corinthians, this is what we find.
SPEAKER_00: He, Christ, appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is what's happening.
SPEAKER_00: Paul, 20 years after Jesus rose from the dead, he's writing a church in Corinth, and this is what he's saying.
SPEAKER_00: 20 years ago, after he rose from the dead, before he ascended to heaven, he appeared to a lot of different people, including at one time 500 people all at the same time.
SPEAKER_00: You can have hallucinations, but people don't group hallucinate the same thing.
SPEAKER_00: 500 people.
SPEAKER_00: And then he says this.
SPEAKER_00: Now he's back to their time, and he says, and most of them are still alive.
SPEAKER_00: This was three years before this moment.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, he's saying, Agrippa, you know that there's still hundreds of people still alive who saw Jesus resurrected from the dead.
SPEAKER_00: And not only that, there's people walking all over Judea right now who saw the miracles.
SPEAKER_00: Not just that miracle, but tons of miracles.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus did so many different miracles.
SPEAKER_00: He's walking around and he's healing people, he's making miracle food, he's raising people from the dead, and there were witnesses to all of these things.
SPEAKER_00: The Gospels only give us so many of them.
SPEAKER_00: In the Gospel of John, he actually says this.
SPEAKER_00: He goes, Look, Jesus did so many of them, there's just too many of them to write down.
SPEAKER_00: And all of them had eyewitnesses.
SPEAKER_00: And so there had to be all kinds of conversations all over Judea for all of these decades where two people are talking and they're like, Hey, have you heard about this whole Christianity thing?
SPEAKER_00: It's like, yeah, I have.
SPEAKER_00: And he goes, Man, I just think it's just bogus.
SPEAKER_00: I just don't get it.
SPEAKER_00: Someone else says, you know, I don't really understand it either.
SPEAKER_00: But let me tell you something.
SPEAKER_00: I was at the tomb of Lazarus, and man, he stunk so bad.
SPEAKER_00: He was dead.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he was a dead man and he walked out.
SPEAKER_00: I saw it.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what it means, but I saw it.
SPEAKER_00: There are people still alive who ate Jesus' miracle food, who saw him like open the eyes of the blind.
SPEAKER_00: All of these miracles, there were eyewitnesses that at the time of these events, when they're being written, they're still walking around and they can give credible evidence.
SPEAKER_00: The only reason to point skeptics to these eyewitnesses is if these eyewitnesses were still walking with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: There was a transformed life.
SPEAKER_00: And so my encouragement is this either find a historical, viable, alternate explanation for these things or believe.
SPEAKER_00: And the last thing, application-wise, is this let's consider our universal offense.
SPEAKER_00: I know this is a weird thing to say.
SPEAKER_00: But there is something about the gospel that everyone dislikes.
SPEAKER_00: But it's not always the same thing.
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever disliked something that was objectively true?
SPEAKER_00: Let me give you an example.
SPEAKER_00: Like, what does that even mean?
SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you.
SPEAKER_00: So I like the sun.
SPEAKER_00: Like it does its job, it's doing a great job.
SPEAKER_00: And uh the sun is fantastic.
SPEAKER_00: But there are times in the year that I just don't like how hot it is.
SPEAKER_00: I just say I just don't like it.
SPEAKER_00: I don't like you right now.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: But it's objectively true.
SPEAKER_00: It's there, it's not subjective, it's not just like, you know what?
SPEAKER_00: I don't like it, so I'm just not gonna believe it's there.
SPEAKER_00: It's there, and if I don't account for it, I get burned by it.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus is objectively true.
SPEAKER_00: People will say, hey, if he fulfills you, then believe.
SPEAKER_00: The apostle Paul would say, fulfill.
SPEAKER_00: It was anything but fulfilling initially to me.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, he eventually turned my whole life around.
SPEAKER_00: I totally see how valuable he was.
SPEAKER_00: But initially, he was, he ruined everything.
SPEAKER_00: He wrecked my whole worldview.
SPEAKER_00: But here's the problem: he's objectively true so much, he's brighter than the sun.
SPEAKER_00: I have to deal with him, I have to account for him.
SPEAKER_00: Because he's objectively true.
SPEAKER_00: See, friends, I urge you today, don't reject the gospel because you don't like part of it.
SPEAKER_00: It offends everybody.
SPEAKER_00: Some people do not like, you go to parts of the world, and some people do not like Jesus' teaching about sexuality.
SPEAKER_00: Some people are fine with that, but they do not like Jesus' teaching on forgiveness.
SPEAKER_00: Some people are fine with that, but they do not like the idea that God could become a man and die.
SPEAKER_00: There is something in the gospel, at least initially, that offends you.
SPEAKER_00: That you don't naturally go, I just love that.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the reasons this is so important is because that's proof that a man didn't write it.
SPEAKER_00: He wasn't the ultimate author of it.
SPEAKER_00: If you were creating your own religion, you would like, you would write what everything you liked.
SPEAKER_00: God Almighty sent it to us as sinners, and sinners look at it collectively, and we all don't disagree, we all don't agree on all the parts that we don't like, but there's something about it that all of us don't like.
SPEAKER_00: But it's objectively true.
SPEAKER_00: So, my friends, is even if it offends you, you have to account for it.
SPEAKER_00: And I urge you to believe because the Bible tells us that we've all sinned against God.
SPEAKER_00: And this is not trivial because the seriousness of an insult rises in proportion to the dignity of the one that we insult.
SPEAKER_00: We insulted Jesus, the Son of God.
SPEAKER_00: And all of our sin.
SPEAKER_00: And he is just and the wage of sin is death, but he is loving.
SPEAKER_00: He came to die for us.
SPEAKER_00: And I urge you, as he appeals to Agrippa, he says, just read your Bible.
SPEAKER_00: I know you believe the prophets.
SPEAKER_00: Read it and see if it doesn't point to a transformation of life and to credible evidence.
SPEAKER_00: So let's pray.
SPEAKER_00: Father in heaven, we thank you so much for your grace in our life, and we're thankful for your grace to Paul, a man who is so opposed to you and everything about you, and how he became not only an advocate for us, but an example of how to persuade people.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, you are the most persuasive, though.
SPEAKER_00: And we acknowledge that.
SPEAKER_00: When we set our eyes upon you, you do things in our life.
SPEAKER_00: You change us, you melt us, you make us whole.
SPEAKER_00: And so, Lord, as we sing now, I pray for those who are considering putting their faith in Christ that you would incline their hearts to do so.
SPEAKER_00: And Lord, for those of us who have, would you help us now to sing as people who believe?
SPEAKER_00: We pray in Christ's name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.