The Power of God Unto Salvation

I'll remain standing for just a bit more, and we'll read together from Acts.

We'll be reading Acts 9, verses 1 through 31.

Acts 9:1–31

Listen and give careful attention, because this is God's holy word.

But Paul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,

went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus,

so that if he found anyone belonging to the way, men or women,

he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

So as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from

heaven shone around him.

And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, Saul,

Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, Who are you, Lord?

And he said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city,

and you will be told what you are to do.

The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice, but seeing no one.

Saul rose from the ground, and although his eyes were opened, he saw nothing.

So they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus, and for three days

he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.

Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in

a vision, Ananias, and he said, Here I am, Lord.

And the Lord said to him, Rise and go to the street called Straight,

and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul,

for behold, he is praying.

And he has seen a vision that a man named Ananias will come in,

lay hands on him so that he might regain his sight.

But Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard from many about this man,

how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem.

And there he even has authority from the chief priest to bind all who call on your name.

But the Lord said to him, Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry

my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel.

For I will show him how much he must suffer for my namesake.

So Ananias departed and entered the house, and laying his hands on him,

he said, Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road by which

you came, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Spirit, Holy Spirit.

And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight.

Then he rose and was baptized, and taking food, he was strengthened.

For some days he was with the disciples at Damascus, And immediately he proclaimed

Jesus in the synagogue, saying, He is the Son of God.

And all who heard him were amazed and said, Is this not the man who made havoc

in Jerusalem and on those who called upon this name?

Has he not come here for this purpose, to bring them bound before the chief priest?

But Saul increased in all the more strength and confounded the Jews who were

living in Damascus by proving that Jesus was Christ.

When many days had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him, but their plot became known to Saul.

They were watching the gates at night in order to kill him, but his disciples

took him by night and led him down through an opening in the wall,

lowering him in a basket.

And when he had come to Jerusalem, he attempted to join the disciples,

and they were also all afraid, for they did not believe that he was a disciple.

But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared to them how

on the road he had seen the Lord who spoke to him, and how at Damascus he had

preached boldly in the name of Jesus.

So he went in and out among them in Jerusalem, preaching boldly in the name of the Lord.

And the brothers learned this, that they brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.

So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was

being built up and walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the

Holy Spirit, it multiplied.

This is the word of the Lord. Can you be seated?

And we'll pray. Holy Spirit, come to be with us now through our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Teach us more and more of him that we might know that great power which our

brother Paul experienced on that road to Damascus in our story.

Be with us, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

So I got the title of the sermon in this morning. It's called The Power of God into Salvation.

Honestly, this week, I was going to entitle it Crossroads of the World Part 2.

It just didn't quite have the focus as the power of God into salvation.

And I think the titles, I hope the title will capture where we're going in terms

of what happened to Paul, how that theology or that experience affects his theology,

drives his theology, and then acts as a gift to us in the church of Christ today.

You will recall that from last week that our story has Saul going from Jerusalem

up to Damascus to persecute and destroy the church. He hates the church.

But on that road, we saw last week, he was visited by God with the glory cloud

presence of God, which came down, surrounded him, on which he fell down.

And at that crossroads, and you remember crossroads are literary devices that

kind of rivet our attention that something at this point or juncture in the

story is happening that's going to change the direction of things,

and it certainly changes the direction a lot.

And as what happened to Paul with this glorious experience of being confronted

by the presence of the Lord, the light that would be so powerful surrounding

him that he was literally blinded by it, came to him,

surrounded him, and he immediately responds with,

yes, Lord, who are you?

And then the connection is made in that conversion experience that the Lord

is Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth.

So what I want to do this morning is take that and continue to tease out some

of the theological themes that are happening in our story, that particularly

the way these themes interact,

change, and affect Paul in his work in the book of Acts that we're going to

be ongoingly seeing, as well as in the whole of the New Testament,

and the theological themes that should be so encouraging to us.

Remember last week I said that part of living and being driven by the love of

the glory of God is doctrine,

but not just doctrine as an intellectual matter, like, look at me,

I memorized the Shorter Catechism, but doctrine that is connected to affection

and love for Jesus Christ, and never the two, hopefully, will be separated.

So remember last week we also said, and this is worth continuing to meditate

on, because Paul will, where we said that there's no one too wicked that God can't save.

And when God came to him on the road to Damascus, and Paul reflects on this

in multiple ways in his ministry, he had the power of God to change him.

And don't think, by the way, that God had to, oh man, Paul, I better get ready because he's a big one.

He's really tough. No, God wasn't, he didn't need to work out or exercise when he came.

He just simply, it's really amazing, he just simply manifested his presence.

The overwhelming, powerful, incredible, immeasurable glory of the Lord came

down, and the Lord just came down.

And that overwhelming presence transformed him.

And we know from that, as Paul will say, this is the power of God unto salvation

through Jesus Christ's presence entering into our lives.

And if God can save me, Paul said, the chief of sinners, he can save anyone, anywhere that he wants.

He does, and Paul will, this is also sort of effect that we'll close on with the sovereignty of God.

We see that in Paul's preaching, and there are two things that I want to focus on.

The preaching, the power centrality of preaching and the apostolic work,

and the sovereignty of God.

Those are good Calvinistic themes. But I hope to show you this morning that this isn't Calvinism.

We had one of our licensed or men coming under care was telling his testimony,

and he was explaining at one point where he started to become kind of theologically reformed.

And he said, jokingly, that's when I accepted John Calvin into my heart.

Like, oh, no, not really. We're not talking about Calvinism.

We're talking about biblical theology. It's just what the Bible teaches.

And when you see it, really you can't unsee it.

That's what I want from us. I want us to see the glory and power of the sovereignty

of God in preaching the gospel, particularly the way Paul preached the gospel

with such power that the thing that seemed to drive it was the sovereignty of God.

God is sovereign. God is all-powerful and mighty.

There's no one like him, and we are not that. And particularly in the work of

salvation, this will drive Paul over and over and over so that we realize what

he said, for by grace you have been saved,

and this by faith, not of yourselves, not of works, lest what?

Lest any man shall boast, right? No boasting except in the power of God.

So God's sovereignty to Paul, to the mission of the early church, and to our church today.

We need this. This is not like a popular theme in modern, large evangelical churches.

I never heard, for instance, anybody ever talk about Romans chapter 9 in my little church,

Romans 9 · chapter mention

Trinity Baptist Church, Bloomfield, Ohio, Bloomfield, Indiana.

Nobody ever. In fact, those were problem passages, quote unquote.

Those were passages that didn't make sense, so we sort of skipped them.

Paul doesn't avoid them as problem passages. Paul hits them head on,

and that seems to come directly from our story here, where God's sovereign grace

came down to him and dramatically,

radically, and forever transformed him because he was confronted by the glory of the Lord.

Paul's sense of mission and destiny is intimately connected to this dramatic

conversion experience.

And don't forget, we said last week, this isn't a teaching of conversionism.

We don't expect all of you to have a road to Damascus experience like Paul, but we do.

And I need, as your minister, to preach to you that you do need to be confronted

with the glory of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

And submit to him and say what all the prophets said, such as they said, here I am.

Here I am. So let's look at the story in chapter 9, verse 10.

We see that what I'm going to say is that Paul has basically a resurrection experience.

Remember that I have been hinting at that Luke is structuring his work in Acts

after the pattern of ministry of Jesus,

so that Peter is going to do some of the same things and have the exact same

experiences that Jesus had, except with greater resurrection power.

Now, Paul, as he's called an apostle, will also have something similar.

Please keep in mind that Luke is writing this history of the church,

not as a normal historian might go about it.

Normal historian might say, this is his mom, this is his dad, this is where he grew up.

And at 15, he went to study under Gamaliel and those sorts of points.

When you're reading scripture, you are reading narrative history,

but it's theological narrative.

That means that when we see certain things emphasized, the people's character

and description or events that take place in their life, we should be attuned

and looking for the theological significance of what's going on.

For instance, Paul's story begins after the confrontation with three days of blindness.

So in other words, it looks like he didn't eat, he didn't drink,

he was blind and he was waiting.

It looks like he went through like a death resurrection experience,

similar to Christ as the Lord begins his ministry after the resurrection.

So Paul goes through this three days and three nights. I don't think that's coincidental.

I think that's helpful for us to say, aha, just as Peter, the main spokesman

of the apostles to the Jews, now Paul, the main spokesman of the apostles for

the Gentile world, experiences many of the same things as Jesus did.

It says, now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias.

The Lord said to him in a vision, Ananias, and he said, here I am, Lord.

And the Lord said to him, rise and go to the street called Straight.

Don't forget, remember we said that street was literally the crossroads of the

world. Everything and all the caravans coming through on land,

east, west, north, south, were coming here to this street.

Make no mistake that this is why the ministry of the Apostle Paul,

who's a ministry to the world, to the Gentiles, begins here at the crossroads of the world.

So it says, at the house of Judas, look for a man named Tarsus, named Saul.

For behold, he is praying, and he has seen in a vision that a man named Ananias

come in and lay hands on him so that he might regain his sight. A double confirmation.

When things come in twos and threes, pay attention to them. So we know for sure

that Paul's experience is from God. He has seen God and he's confirmed in it,

both in his vision and now in Ananias' vision.

And you'll notice too, right from the get-go, we see Paul has a sense of sovereign destiny.

Again, woven throughout this book and the whole Bible, I want you to see it

and I want you to never unsee it, is the sovereignty of God.

It points Paul towards his destiny. Almost everything in his life will be driven

by the reality that he knows God is sovereign.

Wherever he goes, if he lives, if he dies, the sovereign Lord of glory has saved

him, sent him on this mission, and nothing will stop the movement forward,

the progress of the kingdom of God in life or in death.

So I think that's what gives him, and I do love Paul, gives him this sort of tenacious character.

Watch him as we go through the book of Acts. He's just relentless and tireless. And what's the word?

Indefatigable. I love that. He just won't be worn down.

He is worn down, we'll see, even to the point of almost despairing of death,

but then he just keeps going.

And what drives him forward and what keeps him going is the power of the sovereignty of God.

He goes forward in that. And he responds like all the prophets responded. I love this theme.

And I want us, as we think about the sovereignty of God to keep together our

responsibility to respond with willingness and excitement and passion.

In Genesis 22, remember when God called Abraham, he said in Genesis 22,

one, he said, Abraham, and Abraham said, here I am.

When God called Samuel, the little boy, and he finally answered in 1 Samuel

1 Samuel 3:4

3, verse 4, Samuel said, here I am.

The prophet Ezekiel, here I am. The prophet Isaiah, here I am.

I even saw an interview about the war in Iran, and a Persian Christian was talking

about Christianity in Iran, and she had a ministry called Here I Am Ministries.

I said, that's a cool, that's a really cool name. It should be a bit of our theme.

Whenever the Lord speaks, whenever we're confronted with his word, we just say, here I am.

I'm telling you that will that will dramatically change your life because you're

going to you're going to experience the grace of God in your life in wonderful

ways So paul says the same thing here. I am here.

I go and it mirrors the the call of the ancient prophets So over and over again

after he's transformed we read that the church was having trouble with this too,

It's always funny to watch the church's response much like our response like

that can't be Remember when Peter got out of jail and he's knocking on the door, they're praying.

They're like, can't be here. We're praying that you'll be released from prison.

But I'm here, I'm here, believe it.

And they have the same sort of reticence. They're like, wait a second,

this is the guy that was trying to kill all of us, arrest all of us,

destroy and wreck the mission of the church. And yet here he is.

And there is another theme that we should, when we confront the power of God

and salvation, we should be amazed at it.

Our salvation, our redemption, the redemption of our children,

from the redemption of those around us, everyone. We should be amazed.

How could that happen? Why did that happen?

Because of God's great power and love for his people. And it sets him on a path,

it says in verse 20, and immediately he began proclaiming Jesus in the synagogues.

You gotta love Paul here. He just goes.

And I'll emphasize it now and hopefully more as we go.

Paul is relentless and powerful in the preaching of the gospel.

He's going. And as he goes, he's provoking everyone everywhere.

Keep in mind, he doesn't just provoke them for the sake of being provoked.

Some of you may be like that. They call it the cage stage.

When you first become reformed, you deliberately want to pick fights with people

about predestination and election.

Paul wasn't just trying to pick fights. He just was on fire for God.

Everywhere he went, everything he did provoked people because he went immediately

and proclaimed Jesus everywhere.

Particularly in the synagogues, he says, he is the son of God.

He couldn't wait. He was almost like he was anxious to get going to tell everyone

he could about the love of God and particularly that Jesus was the son of God.

And all who heard him were amazed. Same thing, it's amazing.

And said, is this not the man who made havoc in Jerusalem and those who called upon his name?

And has he not come here for the purpose to bring them back to the chief priest?

But Saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who lived

in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ. He preached and he preached and he preached.

One of the things we're going to keep cycling through in the book of Acts is

that the fundamental means by which the apostles were growing the church and

the church was filled with power was the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Yes, there were signs, and yes, there were wonders. But when we watched as we

go through here, we'll see that it wasn't the signs and the wonders.

The signs and the wonders accompanied this new message of the apostles breaking

forth, but it was primarily and fundamentally the preaching of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And he preached that Jesus was the Son of God over and over.

He called men in Galatians. He said, he called me through his grace to reveal

his Son that I might preach him among the Gentiles.

Romans 1, verses 1 through 4, Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle,

Romans 1:1–4

separated to the gospel of God, which he promised before through his prophets

and the holy scriptures, concerning his son, Jesus Christ, who was born of the

seed of David, according to the spirit of holiness, excuse me,

and declared to be the son of God.

The son of God would be one of those themes.

It was Jesus wasn't just an ordinary man. He was, through his work of redemption,

exalted to the right hand of God, the father as King and Lord.

And, and Paul here, I want to keep thinking about what's happening.

This will help you by the way, with this whole Iran war and Israel,

is Israel really the chosen people of God and all the things that are going around.

You'll see here that, that Paul is, is preaching the gospel and he's,

he's putting together the promises of God made in the law, the Torah,

the prophets, the Psalms and everything. He's putting together Jesus Christ with all of them.

This means that Jesus Christ's work is more pervasive than just coming to save you.

Don't ever let me get away with belittling that. I'm not.

Yes, he's saving us. But the work of salvation, redemption, the glory of the

Lord through Jesus Christ as the exalted son of God is more than just getting

people to go to heaven when they die.

There's a mission that we're on. There's a kingdom that there is to build.

There are things to do. There's preaching.

There's salvation of souls. There's so much building of our families,

the growing, et cetera. There's a very, very large business that we're...

Paul preached Jesus Christ as the fulfillment.

You'll notice too, all this Old Testament, New Testament together, not separated.

When I was a little boy, I remember I was pretty proud. I had a...

My mom gave me a little green Bible, little tiny green Bible.

It was a Gideon's Bible. Anybody familiar with them? And it was the kind of

Bible you could even put into your pocket.

I carried it to church. I didn't read it. I should have, but I had my Gideon's

Bible and I noticed something only later in life.

The reason it was so small, not just the print, but it only had the New Testament and Psalms.

And I grew up in a church thinking, that's all you need. What else do you,

we don't need the Old Testament. It's kind of nice.

Sunday school, I learned about David and Goliath and the flood and all that,

but they didn't really have anything to do with Jesus. It was just,

that's what happened. It's done.

And now you can go around with your little green Bible with just the New Testament and the Psalms.

But Paul here is deliberately connecting together everything that had been said

in the Old Testament, everything that had been said, which helps us to understand

that when he's preaching Jesus, there's a fullness to his preaching.

From the whole of the Bible.

It's not just a message in the New Testament where God saves people and gets them to go to heaven.

I started reading a book this past week by N.T. Wright.

Everyone's like, what? You read N.T. Wright? No, in the book,

I'm profoundly interested in it. I like to read N.T. Wright.

In this book, by the way, just as a proviso, I think he's actually not even

orthodox about his reasoning in the fall and sin and atonement.

But one of the things about this book. It's called God's Homecoming.

He emphasizes a serious error that's very popular among evangelical Christian

churches, and that is this tendency to see that the gospel is simply about getting

people saved and going to heaven.

That's it. He said most people today imagine the point of Christianity is you

get to go to heaven when you die.

Hallelujah. And that's true, by the way. The scriptures testify,

however, to God's plan to reunite heaven and earth by coming to us and filling

the whole earth with his glory,

resulting in nothing less than the renewal of all of creation. Wow. Wow.

That's more than just, you get to go to heaven when you die.

That's the Pauline mission, I think, to preach the gospel. And as he preaches,

people are transformed and renewed.

Paul himself even says, listen to this from Romans 8, for the creation,

we very rarely make this connection, that what's happening when Jesus and the

glory of God comes and the church begins to grow and move across the earth,

if you think only that people are just getting saved so they can go to heaven,

you're missing something.

Romans 8 says this, for the creation, waits with eager longing for the revealing

of the sons of God, for the creation was subjected.

Think about this. In the fall, many times when you hear the fall story,

it's all about Adam and Eve, which it is, but there's more that happens.

The earth itself is cursed.

And in the coming of Jesus Christ and with his resurrection,

there's a promise that the earth itself will be renewed.

And Paul says this, that the earth is waiting for this.

It says that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption

to obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in pains like

a childbirth until now, until now.

And not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the

spirit grown inwardly as we eagerly wait for the adoption as sons,

the redemption of our bodies, for in this hope we were saved.

There is more than just getting to go to heaven.

You say, well, are you trying to rob me of that or something?

What's going on? No, I'm trying to enhance.

Yes, we go to heaven. That's an intermediate state that's not normal.

The estate that God is going to bring to the preaching and power of the apostolic

church will be the transformation and the renewal of the whole world,

all of creation, it's far more magnificent than just, you go to heaven when you die.

By the way, I can't wait to go to heaven when I die.

I'm not trying to dismiss it. I'm just trying to say what Paul's preaching here

is that Jesus has now come as Lord of glory, and it means something beyond just

individuals going to heaven. It means the transformation of the whole world.

Jesus is Lord. That's certainly one of the things we see. And we know that this

is why Paul is able to speak into this Judaistic culture about Jesus being Lord

and how you'll notice, and I do want you to notice this,

Judaism and Christianity are not really, really close.

A lot of times people, I think I mentioned this in Sunday school,

people will put religions on a continuum of here's atheism and here's Christianity.

And over here, really, really close to Christianity are Islam and Judaism,

because after all, they have one God, and the Jews are even closer because they

have the one, they have shared the same Bible.

But as Paul begins to demonstrate, they don't understand the Bible so much,

so it's not really, really close. It's very far away. In fact,

a completely different religion.

That's what agitates the synagogue so much. They're saying, you're coming in

here to tell us that we're all wrong, that what we hoped for,

what we expected, what we wanted is not what's going to happen.

So he immediately proclaimed Jesus in the synagogue saying, he is the son of

God. Just, I love it, right in there.

And all who heard him were amazed and they were amazed at him.

But then Saul increased and said, all the more in strength and confounded the

Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ.

This is an interesting word in the original language.

It's not so much proving like he had a really good argument.

In Sunday school, someone mentioned, it's not like he had a mic drop.

That's it. I just had the best argument ever.

No, the word is symbibadzo, which means like to hold something together.

It's closely related to the word symbiosis.

It's another Greek word, which means organisms which live and work together,

and they coexist together, and they mutually, in some cases,

one can't live without the other.

Certainly, we would say that about the Old and New Testament.

You can't have the New Testament without the Old, and the Old Testament isn't

completed until the New.

They live together. The word proving there is a good word because this is one

of the things Paul will continue to do throughout his ministry,

and it's something we need to continue to do to flush out of our minds this

idea that all you need is your little green Bible, because we need the whole

of the Bible, and that's exactly what Paul is doing.

Paul is assembling Old Testament texts of the Scripture, putting them together in perfect harmony.

That's what he's doing, and that's what we also need to do, and we'll see this in the book of Acts.

Putting the redemptive work of Jesus Christ as the end purpose and fulfillment

of everything that has been taught.

When you start doing this, it really gets exciting because sometimes I've likened

it to plugging in an appliance or something into the socket.

It's like all of a sudden the electricity begins to flow.

That's what you do when you put the Old Testament together with the New Testament.

It's like all of a sudden things come alive.

It's exactly what Jesus did in Luke 24.

Remember the story on the road to Emmaus. He said, Oh foolish ones and slow

of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.

Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter his

glory? And the beginning with Moses. Think about this.

Even Jesus preached the gospel from the Old Testament. Beginning with Moses.

He says, And all the prophets he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the

things concerning himself.

So they drew near to the village to which they were going. He acted as if he

were going further, but they urged him strongly to say, saying,

stay with us, stay the evening.

So he went in to stay with them. He ate, he drank, and his resurrected real body.

And their eyes were opened when he left, and he vanished.

And then they said something that I have personally found true.

They said, did not our hearts burn within us when he talked to us on the road

while he opened the Scriptures? all of the sudden, the whole of the Bible began

to make sense with Jesus Christ at the center, the whole of the Bible.

And you see that when you read Old Testament stories and read Old Testament

laws and all the things that are there, all the strange, weird things.

Some of you were with me when I went through this book of Ruth years and years ago.

I wrote a little book on Ruth. And as I was going through that,

even me, I was like, what are these weird laws in the Old Testament, like the leveret law?

You know, if your older brother dies without a child, the younger brother has

to take his place and produce a child.

If that child takes the older brother's, what? It's a little bit weird, actually.

And there's that story in Genesis 38 where all the sons are cursed and Judah

and Tamar and all this. And I was like, what?

It just seems so. And then you begin to see, I see, the older brother dies like Adam.

And the younger brother takes his place and produces offspring.

In the story of Ruth, you see it right there. the man who resurrects the line

of Judah and the kingdom of David is Boaz, who's called the kinsman redeemer.

Jesus Christ is in the story. And all of the stories you read like that are just like that.

And the stories begin to come alive with meaning as it's put together with Jesus Christ.

That's exactly what Paul is doing. He's connecting theological dots.

He's putting our minds together and linking the Old and the New Testament.

So it's not just that he makes a really good argument, but he begins to blow

their minds and and blow their world away by saying, you know,

this law and that commandment and this ceremony and that sacrifice,

they're all coming together in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

And Paul is also, I wanna also look at that, he's struck by light and the glory

of God, and that also affects his ability to take that light to the Gentiles.

It's no, it's no, here's just an example of this, by the way,

of the Old Testament speaking into what we're seeing.

In Isaiah 9, it says, the people walking in darkness will see,

have seen a great light on those living in the shadow of the death. A light has dawned.

I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness. I will take hold of your hand.

I will keep you and make you to be a covenant people and a light for the Gentiles.

This was already forecast.

This was already connected to what's happening in our passage and through Christ

and through his apostles.

Nations will come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn. Isaiah chapter 60.

Isaiah 60 · chapter mention

The gospel of Matthew picks up on the same thing. It says, the people living

in darkness have seen a great light.

On those living in the shadow of death, a light has dawned. That's basically a quote from Isaiah.

This is what's happening in the ministry of Jesus and in the ministry of the

apostles and the church and the ongoing ministry of the church of Jesus Christ.

A light of his glory has shined in the darkness through Christ and now to Paul and now even to us.

You'll notice, by the way, and this is another Acts theme that sometimes you

wish you could avoid, but there it is.

Paul's eloquence, his preaching, his power, his persuasion, his passion all provokes hatred.

It just provokes hatred. Remember, Paul's not going into synagogues deliberately

poking people in the eyes to start a fight.

But when he preaches, he centers his attention directly to them and they hate it.

Primarily because of what happened. We saw, remember Stephen?

Stephen was arguing and he was arguing irresistibly. They had no answer.

They couldn't just say, wait a minute, that's wrong. They said they just didn't

have an answer. And what did it do? It enraged to them.

They hated them. And just as they did with Jesus, they hated Christ.

They hate the apostles and they will also hate us.

And Paul then pours himself out in that context as a martyr.

He says, I'm giving my life as a martyr. Remember the word martyr is the same

word for testimony or witness. I'm witnessing to Christ.

There again, you see the power of simply seeing that the gospel is not just

about giving someone a track per se, but laying your life down for Jesus Christ.

Paul gave everything that he had.

And the end result for Paul was he was humiliated as he left Damascus.

That little scene about the basket, Paul talks about it himself.

If you're leaving a city under conflict, you typically, most of us want to leave

like Aragorn did in the one battle when he put on his armor,

got on a horse, charged out.

Like if I die, Gandalf comes down.

That's how most of us see ourselves. I would like that. But instead,

Paul's like humiliated.

He says in Philippians 1, 21, for to you it has been granted on behalf of Christ,

not only to believe in him, but to suffer for his sake.

Paul being lowered down in the basket at the dead of night, trying to avoid and trying to escape.

He speaks about it in 2 Corinthians 11, 30. He said, if I must boast,

I will boast in the things that show my weakness.

The God and father of the Lord Jesus Christ, he who blessed us forever knows that I am not lying.

At Damascus, our story, the governor and King Aretas was guarding the city of

Damascus in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window

in the wall and I escaped his hands. He's running away in a basket.

It's not a glorious exit. it's a reminder that this gospel ministry will bring

to him suffering, persecution, humiliation, and shame.

Persecuted in the same way that Stephen was persecuted and that the early apostles

and the church and likewise.

But the gospel will go out. This is the exciting thing.

In spite of the persecution, in spite of the humiliation, the gospel will go

out and the gospel is proclaimed. Why?

Because Paul was chosen by God. He was sovereignly elected, election, predestination.

It says in verse 915, but the Lord said to him, go, for he is a selected,

a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name.

Paul was God's ordained servant in that sense, a vessel of election.

And Paul preached the sovereignty of God from his own election, from his own choice.

He preached the sovereign grace of God. And he spoke about it a lot.

Jeremiah 1.5 says it. Recall early in Acts, we've already seen Peter preached it as well.

And Peter and Paul will preach them together. It's not like they preach predestination

and then they don't ever talk about responsibility.

They put them together perfectly. Peter said, you murdered Christ,

whom God had foreordained this to happen. Remember that?

It's predestination and election together with the sovereignty of God and the

responsibility of man put together perfectly.

And something that must be preached and understood and reveled in as a church.

Saul was sovereignly selected, and it motivated his ministry.

You'll notice when you become a, quote, Calvinist or whatever you want to call,

a Pauline, believe in Pauline theology, it doesn't demotivate you.

You don't sit back and say, well, and this is, I've heard people say that,

well, if everyone's getting saved, why do I care?

If God has elect, he's chosen it, he's going to do what he's going to do,

why do I have to do anything?

You'll notice that in Paul's life, it inspired him.

Predestination and election, ironically, inspired him.

If there are people that God has foreordained for election, and he has chosen

me as an instrument of his righteousness, I can't wait to get out and get busy.

That was Paul's response.

The sense of predestination, election, and calling, and destiny seemed to be

something of the fuel that would fire Paul's entire ministry.

It was his salvation and his preaching and what was going on was an entirely,

completely the work of Jesus Christ, sovereignly so.

And Paul is constantly bringing this to our attention throughout his letters.

He wrote 27 of the letters. Or, yeah, he wrote more letters than any other apostle.

Luke wrote more in terms of content, but Paul wrote more letters.

And in his letters constantly is woven in this theme of Jacob I have loved and

Esau I have hated, Romans 9.

You'll say to me then, you all know it. I'm looking at people like, yeah, we got this.

Predestination's no big deal. You're tough, I know. But think about this.

As a result of the passion, you have the doctrine.

Do you have the passion that comes with it that we should have?

Because most people read this and say, well, if God is sovereignly ordained, we're just puppets.

You know the drill. Most of you have been through it with family and friends.

And Paul asks and answers the same question.

You will say to me then, why does God still find fault? For who has resisted his will?

And then his answer is, but who are you, oh man? Who do you think you are, God?

Will the thing formed say to the thing who formed it, why have you made me like this?

Does not the potter have the power over the clay from the same lump to make

one vessel for honor and one for dishonor?

And then Paul says something I think quite beautiful, which really continues

to animate his preaching.

He says in Romans chapter nine, what if, and I know you've heard this,

But what if God, wanting to show his wrath and make his power known,

with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction,

and that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy

which he prepared beforehand?

What if, and it's true, what if God did this as at least one reason to show

to all of us sitting here today, I can't believe he loves me.

What an amazing salvation. What an amazing grace it is.

Amazing grace Even that song is partly inspired by

Paul's example I was once blind but now I

can see That whole amazing grace of God

That comes from appreciating the sovereignty

of God in salvation The power of God in salvation

And it is partly what causes Paul's preaching to continue to provoke and provoke

and provoke As he begins to prove and put together all that he does It's a contrast

That's a big contrast to many churches today who wouldn't speak much about the

sovereignty of God, predestination, or election.

And again, I'm not saying it because I don't think you already know it.

I think you do. But the question is, has it provoked.

The zeal in you that it did in Paul. And many, many people, by the way,

some of the most active churches in the history of the church were by saints

who believed in predestination and election.

It sparked a kind of amazing missionary zeal in the history of the church,

characterized by preaching and teaching and going.

People would go. And when they went, like Paul, they would confront the Druid

priests and all the satanic worshipers.

There's one story about a priest who confronted a Druid priest under a sacred tree.

And they were about to kill a woman. They were about to sacrifice her.

And as the knife came down, the priest leaped in front of it,

and the knife stuck in the cross.

And then the minister, like Paul, this kind of reminded me of Paul,

the minister's like, here's your new sacred tree.

It's the cross of Jesus Christ. It inspired so many people to go and to preach

and teach the gospel fearlessly. Why?

Because they trusted in a sovereign God and they trusted in the power of God into salvation.

That would drive Paul's ministry. It says, and on this I'll close.

Romans 1, 4 that we read, I am under obligation both to the Greeks and to the

barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish.

So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation

for everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith,

as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. Let's pray.

Father, we thank you so much, Lord, for your grace in the ministry and life of the Apostle Paul,

for this story of his dramatic conversion, which brings so many different streams

together that we hope, Lord, by your grace will untangle and unfold as we study

through this book of Acts.

Help us, Lord, as a church to be the kind of church that's bold in preaching

and teaching doctrines of the sovereignty of God.

But Lord, most of all, help us to be a church that's passionate and driven by that passion to go,

to speak of Christ, to provoke, to preach, to teach, to live the glory of God

through Jesus Christ. We pray this in his name. Amen.