Preaching the Gospel from Acts (Part 1 of 2)

The Apostle Paul during his many years of imprisonment spoke before many high-ranking authorities, but he never used those opportunities to seek his own release.

Why was that? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg answers that question by teaching us about the serious undertaking that's involved in being appointed to preach the gospel. There are three factors among many factors that inhibit persuasive gospel preaching, and they are these. Confusion regarding the message itself, fear of the consequences of preaching that message, and complacency regarding the condition of those who are listening to the message.

Paul could never be charged with any of those conditions. And as we look at his approach this morning, he's really clear, he's very straightforward and authoritative, and he is urgent in the way in which he deals with the matters. Let me just say as well as we go into this that there is a distinct difference between preaching from, for example, a gospel or preaching from historical narrative. And the narrative in this instance should frame our approach.

Let me then do what I'm suggesting to you and first of all say that it is imperative if we come to terms with this to sketch in a little bit of background. This would presumably come, it would be unlikely for you to just arbitrarily choose Acts chapter 26 for a one-off sermon. It would probably come in a series of expositions in Acts, but nevertheless you would need to make sure that your people had an understanding of the background. And in order to really set this in context, you have to go back to chapter 24 and verse 5, and there you discover that Paul has been accused of being a troublemaker.

The Holman Bible that I read this morning, put it somewhere along these lines, we have found this man to be a plague, an agitator of the Jews, a ringleader of a sect, and a desecrator of temple property. Those are the underlying notions which have put Paul in custody and in front of a series of folks who are seeking to hear his case. The trial had gone in chapter 24 before Felix, he had heard the case without issuing a verdict.

He and his adulterous companion, Drusilla, had on a number of occasions invited Paul to give a talk, and Paul hadn't missed the opportunity to give the talk, and had given quite a talk to somebody who was sitting there in adultery as he discourses verse 25 of chapter 24 on righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come. He obviously wasn't trying to get himself released from jail, was he? He obviously wasn't trying to get himself onto good terms with the ruling authorities so that he would be invited to the garden parties, so that he would be able to come in and out the back door of the equivalent of the White House.

If he had been seeking to do that, then he certainly would not have challenged them concerning these things. He was very clear, he was very authoritative, he was very urgent, and Felix had no time for it at all, and in a King James Version, of course, we recall that Felix trembled and said, I'll get back to you when it's a better time for listening to this kind of thing. Chapter 24 ends with the fact that he has left for two years in custody before Felix is succeeded by this fellow, Portius Festus.

And here we go again. Festus makes a stab at it, but he's quickly out of his depth. Paul, in the course of the dialogue, decides to appeal to Caesar. And when the Jewish king and his wife arrive to pay their respects to this fellow, Festus, there is an opportunity for Festus to get a little bit of help in the matter. And that's what he says when Agrippa arrives.

I was hoping, perhaps, that now that you're here, you would be able to give me some kind of insight. And you can read that in chapter 25. He says it, I think, in verse 14, and then again in verse 19.

And he outlines the situation for the visiting king. There are some points of dispute, verse 19 of 25. They're disputing about matters of their own religion, about a dead man named Jesus, whom Paul claimed was alive.

A wonderfully dismissive way. It's some kind of intramural discussion, King. Paul is on about Jesus of Nazareth. He's clearly dead. He actually thinks he's alive. And as a result of this, the king says, oh, this is quite fascinating.

I'd like to hear him myself. And so a large door of opportunity in the providence of God is now swinging open. A door of opportunity for Festus to hear, for Agrippa and Bernice to hear, and a big door of opportunity swinging open for the Apostle Paul to make clear, not simply the nature of his predicament, but the nature of the gospel itself.

And in verse 23 of chapter 25, which was where we began, the scene is set for us. If you want to know how I've outlined this for myself, my first heading for my own notes was, sketch in the background. My second heading is, consider the scene.

Consider the scene. It's important as you're studying the Bible that you stand far enough back from it. That you don't immediately assume that you know this, because you read it seven times. That you are prepared as a teacher of the Bible to be surprised by the text. That you're prepared to come to it as an agnostic, not as a believer. Not in the sense of you don't believe the truth of it, but you just don't know everything about it.

If you come to it saying, oh, I know this, I learned this many, many times, then you will not discover the things that you will discover if you're prepared to come to it. As it were, on your knees saying, I wonder why it's written in this way. I wonder how this unfolds.

So I put in my notes, consider the scene. Agrippa and Burnus came with great pomp. In other words, the circumstances would be a bit like a miserable high school graduation, where they play Elgar again and again and again and again, till you're just about going insane.

By the time it gets to the 47th time, it's like scratching your nails on a blackboard. In fact, it's anticlimactic when everybody finally shows up, because they've been played so many times. The high-ranking officers, the leading men of the city, all arrive. The Herod's are here. The Herod's are here.

Wow. Is this the Herod whose great-grandfather was responsible for the slaughter of the boys under the age of two in Bethlehem? Yes. Is this the Herod whose grandfather was responsible for the beheading of John the Baptist? Yes. Is this the Herod whose father killed the apostle James and died a miserable death? Yes. Quite a group, wouldn't you say?

Not the nicest of people. And the scene is straightforward. The humble apostle stands before this representative of the morally corrupt house of Herod.

And the language as it is given to us makes the distinction very clearly. Agrippa and Burnus came with great pomp, the high-ranking officers and the leading men of the city. Okay? They came. At the command of Festus, Paul was brought. There's a distinction here. They arrived. And as you look at this scene, you say to yourself, where does power lie in this scene? Any onlooker looks at this circumstance and says, where is there authority and where is there a might in all of this? And people would inevitably conclude that the authority in this scene lay with those who had arrived with this great display of standing with the indication of their status.

Certainly, whoever this little Jew is, whatever he's about to say, he's in a position of abject weakness. Now, we might pause at this in our preaching and say, you know, this is actually a classic picture of the church in the world. This is a classic picture of the average Baptist church somewhere in rural Alabama, with a pastor and 110 people, and a little Sunday school, and the world going by, and the town council executing its judgments, and the significance and authority of status, intellectually and commercially and socially, all appearing to be on the side of this. As a reminder to us that we need to allow our Bibles to frame our thinking, and some of you who are old enough like me to remember Chariots of Fire when it wasn't something that your grandfather watched, you may actually have that scene in your mind where Eric Liddell stands in the pulpit, and he says he brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing. I wish I could get invited just once to the prayer breakfast in Washington, because this is my text. Give me one shot.

This is what I want to preach. Oh, you'll never be invited back. It doesn't matter.

You only need invited once. Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, nor is weary. There is no searching of his understanding. He gives power to the weak and to those who have no might. He increases strength. Surely young men will stumble and fall, but they that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength.

He is the God who brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of the world to nothing. It is quite pathetic to see the extent to which evangelical Christianity continues to hang on to the coattails of politicians in this country, as if somehow or another they actually control very much. Agrippa has declared that he would like to hear, and so here he will. And verse 1 of 26, you say, we're here for a long time this morning.

Don't worry, we will move ahead quickly. He gives permission to Paul to speak, and notice the little eyewitness observation. So Paul motioned with his hand and began his defense. It's interesting, isn't it? I always like to look for what's surprising. It's quite surprising that you have a detail like that. He motioned with his hand and began his defense. That's eyewitness.

Somebody reported it. It either was a characteristic of Paul that he always started in the same way, or it was characteristic of a time that when you began an oration, you began in that way a kind of Shakespearean look to it, if you like. A kind of Polonius, my liege, and madam, to expostulate what majesty should be, what duty is, why day, day, night, night, and time is time, were nothing but to waste both night, day, and time. And since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. That's the kind of thing. And you remember the queen replies to Polonius, more matter and less art. In other words, we don't need a lot of folderol, Polonius.

What is it that you're on about? Some of us are masterful at getting to it and never reaching the place. Paul motions with his hand and began his defense. And you will notice, number one, he says, I was a religious prodigy.

He's got to get quickly to the issue. I was a religious prodigy. I was the LeBron James of Pharisaism. That's what he says. The people know this.

They can verify it. I was brought up in the strictest of backgrounds, and my life has been characterized by the hope of Israel. My whole life has been driven by the hope of Israel. And if you want, in your reading out loud, then you can go and look for the times that he mentions hope, the certainty of a reality not yet fulfilled, the conviction that God was going to come again, as he had done before in the deliverance of his people from Egypt, and he was going to raise up a banner of salvation in the house of David. That's what we were looking forward to, says Paul.

That's what I grew up with. That is the context of Zechariah's song in the temple, where he says of Jesus, you have raised up a horn for us, a horn of salvation in the house of David. And it was this hope which gave life, which gave meaning, which gave purpose to the synagogue gatherings, to the morning sessions, to the evening sessions, to the sacrificial system.

And that is what Paul is pointing out. In verse 7, he says, this is the promise, our 12 tribes, which is simply the nation in its totality. This is the promise that our 12 tribes are hoping to see fulfilled as the earnestly served God night and day, O king. And it's because of this hope that the Jews are accusing me.

And then he says, isn't this crazy? Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead? It was the Sadducees that didn't believe in the resurrection, but the Pharisees were clear. There is a resurrection to life, and there is a judgment that will follow it.

Paul knew exactly what he was saying, because the issue wasn't resurrection per se, the issue was the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. And just in passing, the issue is not resurrection today either. When I was a teenager in the 60s, you used to get in these huge arguments about the resurrection, and rationalism, scientific rationalism fought vociferously against any of us who were seeking to argue for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I don't find the same arguments in the present generation. I find people are quite happy that they just give up on the notion of resurrection or reincarnation or coming around again or whatever you might like to call it. It's a different day. But what we're talking about, what the New Testament is talking about, in both the incarnation and the resurrection, is a unique, unrepeatable event.

Why would anybody consider it strange that there is a resurrection? No, the real issue is this Jesus thing. It always is.

It always is. Now, he says, I was the LeBron James, and then he goes on to say that actually he was engaged in opposition and in persecution. That's verses 9 to 11, and he outlines his animosity. Then in verses 12 to 18, he tells the king that there has been a divine intervention.

12 to 18 recount his conversion experience, at least one of the records that we have of it from Paul himself. And if your gaze is in the text, you will see that he is telling the king that he realized that Jesus is alive, and that he is so closely connected with his people that to persecute them was to persecute him. And when this dawning realization came to him, as he picked himself up from the ground, he discovered that he had been rescued from his people and from among the Gentiles, and he was being dispatched, verse 18. So just so you know, if it's helpful to you, the way that I tried to move through this is I simply identified that in verse 4 and following, he distinguishes himself as a religious prodigy. He then says, but to be fair, and there's a little transition in verses 8 and 9, there's a transition there, but to be fair, he says, I was actually opposed to Jesus, and I persecuted those who love Jesus.

That's opposition and persecution. Then in 12 to 18, there is divine intervention. God has divinely intervened. And then in verse 18, he's going on to tell that he has been commissioned. And so I would pause there as I pause now with you, reiterate again, I am sending you to them, verse 18, to open their eyes, to turn them from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.

Verse 19, so then King Agrippa, I wasn't disobedient to the vision from heaven, and I set out to do what I had been asked to do. Now, it is at this point that the monologue is going to break beyond the bounds of propriety, and it's going to issue in a dialogue. And so what we need to do is summarize the balance of the material. If in preaching through narrative, we are unprepared to allow things to just lie and leave them, then frankly, it'll take you a hundred years of your life to preach through the Acts of the Apostles.

In other words, if you try and go through the narrative of Acts in the way that you would go through, let's say, the Epistle of James, and you use the same methodology, and you hold yourself to the same sort of intricate word studies and syntax and all these different things, I suggest to you that you will bore your people to death, and that you run the risk of failing to let them see that in this great dramatic historical sweep, there are overarching themes and implications that can only be fully grasped when you take them in their entirety. When you start to particularize them as an MO, then you will run adrift. You may want to debate, well, that is fine. I don't mind.

I'm talking now homiletically. So, he gives this explanation. When you have explanation, then you get into the journalist approach, which is the who, what, why, where, when stuff, right? If you do journalism school, you arrive on the scene of the crash, you're supposed to say who, what, why, where, when, and so on. If you get that, then you can begin to put your paragraph together. So, sometimes I come to someone like this, and I just use the same questions.

All right? Explanation. Question number one, why? Why was I doing this, King?

Why did I, all of a sudden, get out and start doing this? Answer, because I was appointed. Because I was appointed. In other words, I'm not a bright ideas guy. I'm not here on my own authority. This isn't something that I dreamt up. This isn't something that I wanted to do. It's not that I was considering going to law school, and I decided to go to seminary instead, and I've just gone to seminary, and so I'm here, and I'm going to talk to you.

You won't last long. The only reason to go is because you are sent. The only authority with which you can speak is the authority of divine commission. I thought everybody was commissioned. Everybody is commissioned to be a witness to Jesus Christ. Not everyone is commissioned to be a pastor and teacher. And the fact that a number of individuals have banged up against a pulpit to the distraction of their own souls and to the detriment of their own people is evident throughout the entire nation.

Better to be a king or a doctor or a farmer or a plumber, to the glory of God, than to end up in this position, uncommissioned, uncalled, unsent. What's the deal here, Paul? Why are you constantly in jail? Why are you the proponent of these things? Answer, King, let me tell you why, because I was appointed.

That's the why. The reason the Apostle Paul preached with such authority is because he was under God's authority. That's from today's message on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. One of the ways that we can gain a perspective on sharing the gospel with others is by looking at how the Apostle Paul spoke to key officials. It's just one of the many lessons we can glean from his faithful ministry.

That's why we're excited to tell you about a book that's available beginning today. It's a book that will help you see how Paul prayed for the Ephesians. The book is titled, Pray Big, Learn to Pray Like an Apostle, and it's written by Alistair Begg. In the book, Pray Big, you'll find an honest assessment about our struggle with prayer.

It points out how easy it is for us to fall into familiar patterns or just repeating things we've memorized. That's why Alistair shows us how we can resuscitate our prayer life. He shares five key qualities we can use to fuel our prayers, all of them based on Paul's bold intercession for fellow believers. Alistair's books tend to go quickly, so be sure to request your copy of Pray Big right away. The book comes with a corresponding study guide, and both of these can be yours when you make a generous one-time donation to Truth for Life. Give online at truthforlife.org slash donate.

I'm Bob Lapine. Hope you enjoy worshiping with your local church this weekend. Join us Monday as Alistair explains why it is so urgent that we preach the gospel. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.