Acts 26: Almost Persuaded

We follow Paul’s defense in Acts 26 and treat testimony as real proof of God’s faithfulness, not just a personal story. We challenge ourselves to respond to God’s call with repentance that changes daily life and stands up to the charge that Christian belief is irrational. 
• Paul’s testimony as a model for our own story with God 
• Responding to the Great Commission as a daily choice 
• Repentance as immediate change plus ongoing obedience 
• Rejecting cultural Christianity that stops at belief 
• God providing tools to live what He commands 
• Old Testament prophecy connecting Jesus to Scripture 
• Why the resurrection is central to salvation 
• Festus calling Paul crazy and Paul answering with reason 
• Christianity as public, verifiable faith grounded in witnesses 
• The challenge to perform deeds that match repentance 

Transcript

Acts 26 And Why Testimony Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:20

But yeah, we're in Acts chapter 26. Paul is giving his speech slash testimony is what it's what he's been doing. By the way, you have a testimony. No matter what you're going through, no matter how spectacular or unspectacular it is, your journey with God provides you a story, which is a testament. Testimony, there, there's the connection there, that provides people a proof of how faithful God is. But Paul told his testimony, and his testimony portion of this speech ends with Paul essentially telling people he responds basically emphatically to God's call on his life to share the gospel, which is the same choice that we have every day. Every day we wake up with a choice to respond to the call of the Great Commission in our life to share the gospel and then to live out that call in practical ways. We'll see that today. But Acts chapter 26, verses 19 through 32. It's on the paper if you want it. Um I I just I knew I was gonna have um our iPad gentleman, or as Danielle would like me to say, our ad iPad boy, wasn't gonna be here today. So it's on the paper if you want to look at it. But it says this, therefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. Again, this is Paul talking about his call on the Damascus Road, but declared first to those in Damascus, 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. For this reason the Jews seized me in the temple and tried to kill me. To this day I have had the help that comes from God, and so I stand here, testifying both to 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. And as he was saying these things in his defense, Festus said with a loud voice, Everybody I'm about to get a little loud, just because I'm just warning. He says, Paul, are you out of your mind? Your great learning is driving you out of your mind. But Paul said, I'm not out of my mind, most excellent Festus, but I'm speaking true and rational words. 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. King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe. And Agrippa said to Paul, In a short time, would you persuade me to be a Christian? 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. Just a little note, it won't matter this week, but for next week. That translation there seems a little ambiguous, like he like uh like uh Agrippa is maybe saying, Are you what are you trying to do? Convert me. Other translations and other uh ways of saying this gives a little clearer meaning, and basically it comes down to Agrippa saying, You you have almost persuaded me. Like that I understand what you're saying. So that's more of what this sort of means. Verse 30. Then the king rose, and the governor and Bernice and those who are sitting with them. And when they have withdrawn, they said to one another, This man is doing nothing to deserve death or imprisonment. And Agrippa said to Festus, this man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar. All right, that's our scripture for today. I doubt. Matter of fact, I'm I'm a thousand percent certain there's no way we're gonna cover all of that today. We'll get through a good chunk of it. But each I've outlined this, right? And I've got these phrases written down in my notes that act as an outline. Uh, let me share these phrases with you, and if you remember them, it'll serve as an outline. But in this scripture, we see a response. There's a there's a response, right? There's a connection to the past. We once again see the resurrection. We we see that uh Paul is called crazy, and we see that Paul uh reveals that he is actually not crazy, that that what God is doing is hidden, and not hidden, and it is verifiable, and then we end with almost. Almost. Each one of these represents a part of the scripture we just read, and using sort of that loose structure, let's walk through it and see what we can't pull out of it. As a parent, and we've all are or have been parents in here, we understand, and I I know this, at some point in a day, you're gonna call down the hallway, you're gonna call into a room, you're gonna call upstairs, downstairs for your kid. You're gonna scream, Benjamin! You're gonna scream, Ivy. Yeah. But you're gonna call your kid's name at some point in the day. And and it's gonna be loud, it's gonna be quiet. The question is not, are you going to call your child? The question is, is your child going to respond? That's the question. That's the question. Paul has received a calling, and and part of what he is doing here is that he is pointing out his response to that calling. We are called this morning. Yeah. We're called this morning, we're called this morning, and our our our call is different than Paul's call, right? His has some drama to it, and maybe yours has some drama to it. But the the meat of the call, though it looks different for Paul, the meat of it is the same for us. We have the same calling. And in Paul's story, uh we see that he responds thoroughly to the call. Almost at once he responds and he starts, right? He was going to Damascus to uh capture some Christians, cause problems for Christians, but then when he gets to Damascus, he starts talking about the gospel. Right? He's not even trained yet. He doesn't even know what he's talking about yet. He just knows God said you need to go spread the gospel. And so he goes, and he goes from this place and that place, and his entire life becomes this consistent response to this call every day. We also get a glimpse of what the gospel is from Paul here. Like, what does it mean to respond? But also that response means you're telling people about God, and what he tells people is that they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance. Repentance, this word you've heard before, repentance is all at once. When you have your experience with God, when God meets you and everything transforms in your life, repentance happens just like that. Just like that. It is an all-at-on act enabling you to be changed. And you're changed all at once. Your response to God, and I see this a lot in the South. I don't know how it is in California, but growing up around churches, in churches, every corner had a church, everybody went to church, even the people in my school, even the worst of them, probably still went to a church, right? The problem that I saw the most was that sometimes Christianity was just uh basically a ticket punch saying that I'm going to heaven now, and that's where it stopped. That's where it stopped. There was repentance, but there's no lifestyle that basically showed that repentance, like Paul is talking about here. Your response is not a get into heaven like card or ticket. It's an everyday transformation. You repent and then you start walking around living like you have repented repented. This is stands against cultural Christianity, which again, we you see it all over the place in the United States, especially in the South. The gift we've been given should be followed by appropriate actions. Appropriate actions. God has saved us. Now let's act like it. And the good news is he enables us to do what he's called us to do. He's not here here's Jesus doesn't do this thing, which I've worked for people who do this. They will tell you to do something, and that that's it. They give you the the vaguest instructions, hey, this needs to get done. All right, go do it. They don't give you any tools to do the job. They give you no details, no instructions, just the vaguest, hey, you need to go do this, and then you show up, and then you're sort of just all right. Well, I guess I've got to go to Lowe's and Home Depot, and then you go to Lowe's and Home Depot, and then uh the boss asks you, well, why is it taking so long? It's because you didn't give me any tools. He goes, Oh, yeah, that's right. I forgot to tell you. That God doesn't do that to you. When God gives you instructions, he also gives you the tools that you need to get the job done. He does it for Paul, he'll do it for us. Paul responded to the call. And the question is, are we fully responding on a regular basis? In this room, I don't know all of your stories, I don't know your heart or your mind, but I got a sneaking suspicion this is not necessarily a struggle area in your life, but it is something to keep in mind sometimes as a little gut check as we walk through the day. Am I living a fully bought-in life right now? Because I know how easy it is to get distracted and by this and by that, and a week goes by, and you've really not put any effort into your relationship with Christ, um, internally or externally. All right, let's keep going here. For Paul and the early Christians, this call and this response, this gospel message that Paul describes, they are deeply tied to a myriad, countless prophecies in the Old Testament that pointed to Christ, to a Christ, which just means an anointed one, a savior. Christ is not by I used to, I used to think that Jesus Christ was like his last name. Okay. I'm I'm it's not his last name, it's a title. It's Jesus the Christ, Jesus the Savior, Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the anointed one. But the Old Testament pointed to the need for a sacrifice, a lamb, a savior, a messiah in the Jewish people. That was ingrained into their hopes, into their their vision of the future for their lives, and the hard times and the tough times that oftentimes the Jewish people created for themselves. They held on to the fact that from Moses all the way to Zachariah and Micah that there were promises that things would change. Someone would show up one day and change everything. Now they came up with all sorts of different versions of what that was going to look like for their lives. A lot of times it's wrapped up in politics or the military. But who Jesus was had been prophesied about. It was there. There was a connection for thousands of years before Jesus showed up, there in the Old Testament. Let's read very, very, very briefly snippets of some of these things. Exodus chapter 12. Exodus chapter 12. Um the children of Israel are in Egypt. The Pharaoh has essentially not bent to the plagues and refuses to let the people go. And the last plague, of course, is uh the the death angel, right? The the the God's going to kill the firstborn of everything in Egypt unless they partake of what we call Passover, their first Passover. Says this, for I will go through the land of Egypt on that night and will strike down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast, and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment. I am the Lord. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. Well, that's pretty harsh, but what it is, it's a it's a pointing. It's a pointing to the fact that blood would have to be shed for us, for us not to receive the judgment that we deserve. The Egyptians deserved a harsh judgment. And the only thing that saved the Israelites was the blood of an innocent lamb. It's a it's a typology, that's the the word for it. Right? So all the way back right thousands of years, two thousand years before Jesus, God's already pointing out that there's gonna be a sacrifice made for you. Let's go to uh Isaiah 53. Not all of it, but a chunk of it. Where do I even start with this? It's it's I love if you if you ever want to read a beautiful book, I know some of it can be too tough, but Isaiah 53 is a wonderful chapter to reflect on and to meditate on on a regular basis. Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground, he has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to him. He was despised and forsaken of man, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised, and we did not esteem him. Surely our griefs he himself bore, and our sorrows he carried, yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the chastising of our well-being fell upon him, and by his scourging we are healed, and all of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on. Zechariah chapter 12, verse 10. And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and please for mercy, so that when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced. That's very weird grammar right there, because it's a pointing to the future while talking to the present. They shall mourn for him as one who mourns for an only child and weep bitterly over him as one who weeps for a firstborn. Psalms one uh 118, verses 21 through 22. Thank you that you have answered me and have become my salvation. Now, this is an author talking to God. Interesting wording. I thank you that you have answered me and you have become my salvation. I just right this is this is pointing to the incarnate Jesus. This is pointing to the fact that God Himself would become our salvation. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Jesus showed up, he was prophesied about, he showed up, and the very people he showed up for, first and foremost, the Jewish people, they rejected him and killed him and crucified him. He didn't stay dead, he rose again. But Jesus spent time teaching on these scriptures and more. They were ingrained in the hearts and minds of the Jewish people, including Jesus' own disciples, and yet Jesus had to continually explain and expand on them over and over again for it to click in their head. And it wasn't until Jesus' resurrection that it finally clicked wholly and fully that they finally realized, wait a second, I get it now. You are the Messiah, and you're not a political leader, you're not a military leader. You are bringing spiritual, metaphysical transformation over our lives. The Holy Spirit helped many make that connection, Jews and Gentiles alike, but many Jewish people remain hard-headed and hard-hearted towards the simple and obvious reading of the scriptures in light of Jesus' presence and work here on earth. This is what the people were waiting for. And it was grounded in Scripture. It was common sense. They should have been expecting it. These very scriptures pointed to the need for a savior and a sacrifice. And Jesus was the fulfillment of these things in a very obvious and practical and straightforward way. It's the resurrection. We spent a few Sundays on the resurrection, so I'm not going to stay here very long. But the resurrection is the key to the whole salvation experience. You can't overstate how important the resurrection is. You can't overstate how much the resurrection has changed existence, and not just for Jews, but for Gentiles alike, thank God. That was always God's plan. And all of this, these prophecies, these layers of expectation, the cultural stuff involved and what Paul is preaching about, what Jesus was doing, might be a little much for someone who is maybe Greek or Latin like Festus and who was unfamiliar with all of this stuff, all of this prophecy stuff, this raising from the dead stuff. It wouldn't fit very well with a well-ordered Latin mind like Festus. It's all nonsense. And so Festus feels so strongly in the midst of Paul talking about this that he he screams out. He says he screams. And by the way, in scripture, when it says someone screams, it means they scream, right? They don't got a PA system. Right? Jesus' voice probably hurt a whole lot. I just have to under, like I used to, background, side tangent. I'm sorry, I got it, I got to. I'm close to being done anyways. So I grew up Pentecostal. I grew up with a lot of loud preachers. I get loud sometimes, okay? And I had friends who didn't. And so they were always confused when people were loud. Always confused because you know you go to some places and they're quiet and they're well spoken and they're articulate, and that is wonderful. It's fine. And then one day my pastor pointed out that they didn't have PA systems back in the day. And so when Jesus is preaching to 5,000 people, do you think he was talking like this? Probably not. Probably not. Jesus was probably a loud dude. Had to be. Had to be, not because he was trying to put on a show, but because he had to make people hear what he was saying. Anyways, Festus. Festus is yelling, hey, Paul, you are, you've lost your mind, Paul. Your great learning has has led you astray somehow. You've broken. Literally, the the word that he uses there for crazy is actually the word uh that we get maniac for. He basically calls Paul a maniac. You're a maniac, Paul. You're warped by all your learning, you've taken it too far, you've gone astray, you've lost the trail. Reason and logic have left you. You are crazy. And in our well-ordered world, which isn't not really that well-ordered if you look at it, it might seem like we are crazy for what we believe. What many people call fables and legends and magics and fairy tale, and they they lump us in with those things that we believe in some fairy tale.

unknown 20:41

Right?

SPEAKER_00 20:41

They've been taught that. They've been taught to scoff at that. They've been they've been I don't know. It's just ingrained into Western society that those things are outside of reason and logic, and so we are crazy, like Paul is crazy. But Paul tested that. No, no, no, Festus. My my my excellent Festus, he says, I'm not out of my mind. I am speaking true and rational words. And he goes on to say that none of this was done in a hidden way. It was done all out in the open. Christianity and its beliefs are true and rational despite any sort of campaigns that suggest otherwise. Science, reason, and logic can go hand in hand with Christianity. There's not many places where there's actual real issues. I get it. The resurrection miracles are sort of a thing, but so are a lot of other things that we really don't quite understand. We still don't 100% understand human DNA. We can use it, we can look at it, we can use crisp to do crazy things, but we still don't 100% understand it. Right? And yet we still believe it. Okay, so I it fits. It fits. There are many logical and reasonable evidences that support our beliefs. There's no perfect proof, there's no equation, but there are plenty of things that if we pay attention, that sort of point us in the right direction. When it comes to God being who he says he is in a created and ordered world that he created and ordered. But beyond that, Christianity and its beliefs are true because many of the things that we talk about and believe can be verified. Paul, his testimony that his sharing can be verified. It can be verified. At least he's telling a general truth and recounting his history and his story. This is what happened to me. This is who I was. You know who I was. Many of you were with me when I was who I was back then. Many of you were with me on my way to Damascus. You can go find these people who are with me, right? And you know who I was after that. It's verifiable. It is a version of truth. It's not a grand truth, but it is a truth that is verifiable that people can look at that says he's not lying. The seemingly more fluid parts of his story, the resurrection stuff, the call from God, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't seem so out of place to a person like King Agrippa, who would be more familiar with the prophets and with the scriptures, which he brings up in short order in our scripture. We're not going to get there in a second because we're probably going to end right here with this rational and truth part. But certainly, all of the letters that we have in the New Testament, right? All the letters, all the Johns, Corinthians, Ephesians, Rome, all of these epistles we call them, all of them were finished written and were being circulated while people were still alive who had seen Jesus walking and doing miracles. So everything and every claim that's made in these letters, if there is a claim to be made about some historical point about the person of Jesus and about the actions of Paul or Peter or John, it can be verified. Right? If somebody was truly serious about shutting down Christianity, they could have gone and found these witnesses that were purported to have existed, and they could verify it or say, hey, no, no, no, no. That person said that did not happen. Also, the same goes for the at least three of the Gospels for sure, and probably John 2. All of them were probably finished while people were still alive who had seen Jesus, who had seen him crucified, who had walked with him. It's verifiable. You can go, did this really happen? If someone really cared, the Emperor Nero could have sent a representative to Jerusalem to collect evidence, and there would have been plenty of people still alive who could have said, Yeah, I saw miracles happen. Yeah, yeah, I was there whenever he fed the 5,000. Yeah, you know, I saw him being drove through the streets with the cross. Right? I saw him be beat. It was verifiable. It's a truth. It's not a perfect truth, right? But it is a truth. And what's interesting to me is that if someone really wanted to oppose Christianity and people did oppose Christianity, including the Jewish people here who are causing issues for Paul, the easiest thing for them to have done is to point out the fact that everything you're saying can't be true because there's no evidence for it. But there was evidence for it. It's truth. It's truth. It's verifiable because here's a cool thing about Christianity. It was launched and developed in public. In public. Jesus was a public figure. He ministered in public and in private. He worked publicly. He died very publicly. He rose again publicly. There is uh right it says the there was a list, I think it's 700 people who saw the resurrected Savior.

unknown 26:20

Right?

Deeds That Match Repentance And Prayer

SPEAKER_00 26:20

So it's public. Public. The early church was naturally open and public. And we could say that part of the truth of Christianity was that it was opened sourced, that you could dig in to what people were saying, and you could see the bones of what was happening, and you could examine it and say, I know how they got here because this is here. I saw this, someone saw this, I trust them, this is here. You could examine the individual pieces of Christianity for yourself, and that's why it was able, part of the reason, not the only reason, that's part of the reason why it couldn't be killed. Because that had truth undergirding it, openness undergirding it. This is opposed to, say, Mormonism, right? Where this guy from New York goes out into the desert and somehow, secretly, no one's no one saw it, but he claims to have found some brand new proper translation of the scripture out in the middle of nowhere. No one saw it. And this whole thing about angels having to cover them up with special blankets and things like that, so no one could see. Again, it's closed, right? It's not verifiable, it's not grounded in practical truth. Christianity is grounded in practical truth. Your life, your very testimony. We keep talking about testimony because it is incredibly important to the mission of the church, but your testimony, right? Your life lived in community with others is a type of truth claim. You are who you are because of God. You were this before Christianity, you are now this after Christianity. That's a truth claim. The existence of the church itself is a type of truth. The fact that we still exist 2,000 years later, after everything that we've been through, is a truth claim that there is something to what we say. Right? It is fruitful. And it's been fruitful not through violence, like Muslims. Do you understand? Islam was propagated not through logic and reason, but through the fact that Muhammad was basically a warlord, and slowly but surely he was able through violence to take over cities and regions. But not always. Basically, they gave people a choice. Like either you convert or we kill you, enslave you, or if you're rich and wealthy, we'll just simply you have to pay basically a tax. You have to pay a tax. And that's how they converted the world. Did Christianity do that? No. So the the existence of the church. That, by the way, a church that cuts across ethnic divides, a church that cuts across socioeconomic policies, a church that cuts across uh uh regions and geographies, so that we have uh Asians and Africans and Europeans and South Americans all believing in the same Christ. That's a truth statement in itself. It's a truth statement. Other religions don't do that. You get a glimpse of it sometimes, but not like Christianity for 2,000 years. Don't let the world make you think that you're crazy for holding on to something spectacular like the hope of the resurrection because there's too much truth backing us up. There's truth to it. It's open, it's verifiable. And the most, the dumbest people in the world, and many of the smartest people of the world have believed in the simplicity of a resurrected Jesus. It's a truth statement. We're obviously not going to finish the rest of our review of this scripture today, but let me just go back very briefly back to uh Paul's description of the gospel message. It says also to the Gentiles that they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance. As we end today, and we are going to finish right here, right now, I just want to end with a prayer that we check our hearts and minds. There's no doubt in my mind in this room that all of us have repented.

unknown 30:36

Right?

SPEAKER_00 30:36

That all of us are connected to God. But then the challenge is our repented life being propagated appropriately out in the world. That's the challenge. That's the challenge. If you are in church, if you are already saved, that's great news. You're not done. We're not done. Our life has to reflect that. It has to reflect it with the way we deal with our kids. It has to reflect it in the way that we deal with other family members. It's reflected in the way that we do finances, it's reflected in the way that we drive down the road. It's reflected in the way that we go out of our way to pray for people, even whenever we don't want to. It's reflected in our in the way that we find ways to share the gospel with people, even though you might not be called to be an evangelist. We are all slightly called to be evangelists with the way that we live. Are we performing deeds in keeping with our repentance? And that's the challenge I want to leave us with this morning. So I'm going to pray. And again, please don't just listen to me pray. Let's in this moment ask God, ask the Holy Spirit to help us examine our hearts and minds and help us just grow closer to Him. That's the beautiful thing. We want to be closer to God. We need to be closer to God. God wants us to be closer to God and He enables it. There's no pressure on our shoulders. All we have to do is ask for help, and He will help us. So let's pray together. Heavenly Father, you are good and you are great. But right now, I just want to say thank you for repentance. Thank you for grace and for mercy. Thank you for the faith that you have developed inside of us that connects us to you, Lord. Thank you so much for that, God. And Lord, I simply want to just take a moment and ask the Holy Spirit to just help us examine our hearts and our minds and how we do our life and to make sure that we are walking in a way that brings glory and honor to you and that does repentance the right way, Lord. Lord, if we're struggling in a particular area, I pray for your help in that area right now, whatever it is for each person in this room. But each let each and every one of us, and even the people who aren't here today, but right now, Holy Spirit, begin to move and work in our lives and strengthen us. Give us the tools we need, the gifts we need to be a repentant people who act like repentant people. Give us the opportunities to share your gospel. Give us the opportunities to love people. Give us the opportunities to do your will, Lord. And give us the boldness to do it. In Jesus' mighty name I pray. And we all said together Amen.