October 4th, 2026

Hallelujah! Turn to somebody and say Hallelujah! Turn to your second choice and say you two.

And then sit down.

Good morning once again, Pastor Michael.

Those of you watching online, thanks for dialing in online.

And now I have to address the elephants in the room.

As you all are aware, I am wearing purple.

We have switched to moral victory mode.

That's right.

We're in moral victory mode for TCU.

That's right.

We're not going to win another game, but we got close.

That's all that matters.

No, I I know many of you were here last week.

It was a big Sunday, a huge Sunday.

The Holy Smokers and Miss Natalie and her team did such a great job of the picnic and getting all the third grade Bibles out here.

So awesome and wonderful.

It is, you know, it is a great Sunday, but to be quite honest, I hate third graders.

So I didn't want to be here.

I was totally fine.

I was just like, I hate third graders.

I'm leaving.

No, just got to I love third graders.

Uh they're my favorite right after second and fourth.

Uh but uh yeah, I had an issue last week during the first service.

I almost passed out, almost big big man almost fell hard.

You know what I'm saying?

Like right into the altar there, and uh it was not pretty.

Um somebody in the front row gave me her water, like she literally spit it back in her cup and was like, here you go, like that.

And I was like, I'll take it, um, whatever you have.

And and Debbie got up and she sat with me as I finished my sermon.

So the 9:30 got the real sermon, y'all apparently got a comedy show uh at 11 o'clock, from what I understand.

I was like, How'd it go, Debbie?

She goes, I made him laugh.

Okay, well, that's pretty much what I go for every week, too.

Uh, and so uh and many of you have reached out this week, and and Jenna has done an amazing job going into pastor's wife mode of uh getting some people really spiritual warfare that exists, all the things going on in St.

Andrews and the amazing stuff that's happening here because of our congregation and what God's doing here, and um, and just having some prayer teams walk our campus from now until we walk into that new place, and really we should continue beyond that.

But uh I just want to say thank you.

One, uh I don't like the spotlight, um, which yeah, thank you.

Uh I got it when I got a much bigger laugh at the 9:30.

Like somebody literally he's almost spit his coffee out.

Steve, one of our choir members, we have blah like that.

Um, but I don't.

Uh I I I uh I like to get up and talk, uh, but I don't like people thinking about me and and and and stuff like that.

I I just that's not my not in my makeup.

And um, but I was I was humbled uh this week at uh at so many of you who who called or texted or emailed to to check on me.

Thank you.

Um I am fine.

Uh I I went to the doctor, uh Magoon was here in between services, and he made me go uh to his clinic.

I'm like, you just want to bill me, whatever.

Um but we we went to his clinic and they ran a bunch of tests and continued to do so uh this week.

And one doctor said, You you're healthier than I thought you would be.

I don't know how to take that.

Um I'm gonna take it as a win.

I'm just gonna go, that's a dub in my uh arena.

Um so I I I'm good, I I'm I'm back, uh, and and we're rolling rolling on.

So thank you for your your prayers and and and concern.

Um and I'm sorry, that doesn't need plus.

That doesn't need plus.

Um you can applaud yourself.

Um way not to die, Pastor.

Um, there you go.

Um so uh and I'm sorry, third graders, I love you guys, and and I hate that I missed it.

Um and then one other thing before I get going is can everybody stare at Lisa real quick?

Just stare at her.

Everybody stare at Lisa.

It's her birthday.

Go, Lisa, it's your birthday.

Um so I think she's 29.

That's what she told me anyway.

Um and so happy birthday, Lisa.

We love you.

Uh so today we begin.

How many of you have been following along?

This is day four of our DOYBC.

How many of you follow along with Dust Off Your Bible Challenge?

Okay, see, this is why I have heart problems.

It's because I create these things and you all don't follow along.

Like I just pour it all out there for you, and you're like, whatever.

Um, that's not true.

But it is day four, and I would love, love, love for you to join me and those of us who are doing it in the dust off your Bible challenge.

We have these wonderful dust off your Bible challenge journals that are at the doors, both sides of the deal.

You can grab a little journal.

If you're not a journaler, that's fine.

We have the scriptures online.

You can follow along.

There's a different scripture.

We're following the life of Paul throughout the 31 days of October.

Remember, we started this last year in October to kind of delve into the Bible.

We did a 30,000-foot view of Genesis to Revelation, all those things, but this year I just kind of wanted to zero in on something a little differently.

And so we're going to look through the book of the life of the Apostle Paul.

But what's really cool about this, and why I think why I really want you to grab hold of this, is imagine what it would be like.

Like, how many of you read a little bit of scripture, even just like a verse of scripture every day?

Okay, yeah, a whole lot of us do.

What would it be like if we all read the same one?

Right?

How cool would that be?

Like, because the scripture's big.

From Genesis to Revelation, there's a lot of places you can go.

But what if every day we're all like today, day four, Acts 13, verses 4 to 52.

Acts 13:4–52

We're all reading it.

How cool is that when the body comes together and gets into God's word as a body.

So I just want to encourage you.

There's videos that we post every morning at 6 a.m.

that I'm doing, just putting out these videos, little short devotional thoughts about the scripture reading for the day.

I would love to encourage you to join us in the dust off your Bible challenge.

But even if you don't, and break my heart too soon, um, we're gonna talk about Paul for the next four weeks.

Because I because Paul is a significant individual in the life of the church.

In fact, you get you can make an argument.

I hate sports radio talk shows and everything, like who's the greatest quarterback ever?

And you can make an argument for like blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Um, you can make an argument that outside of Jesus, the most influential person in the early church as recorded in the New Testament is Paul.

And that's a pretty strong argument.

Like you'd be hard-pressed to throw out another name.

Yes, there were some dudes and some women that did some amazing stuff, but not to the level of what he did.

Most scholars would agree 48% of the New Testament was written by Paul or attributed to him.

I don't know if you're good at math, but that's almost half.

Almost half of the New Testament is because of his ministry, his words, his teaching, the way that he carried out the God, the call that God had on his life.

That's enormous.

That's huge.

He traveled almost 7,000 miles in his missionary journeys.

Right?

If you read through the book of Acts, there's three different missionary journeys that Paul goes on, and he also goes eventually to Rome.

And covering that amount of distance, if you take into all the places that it says that he goes, you get 6,900 miles.

That's a lot of mileage.

And let's he wasn't jumping on a PJ, you know?

He was going by foot.

At best, he was getting on some sort of beast of burden and traveling these great, great distances.

Sometimes he would travel by ship as he's crossing seas, right?

But he's traveling so far.

Like he the disciples didn't do this.

The guys who had been with Jesus, most of them stayed right around that same little area.

Didn't travel very far.

They stayed in the 09.

You know what I'm saying?

They didn't leave.

You want me to go outside 410?

I'm good.

That's what Paul's for, right?

They just stayed right here.

And they didn't do anything.

But Paul didn't.

Paul went out.

And Paul changed the world because of who God created him to be.

And so he he deserves a little bit of attention.

He deserves a little bit of focused time on the Apostle Paul.

He's also one of my favorite characters in the Bible, and because I get to choose what we talk about, we're gonna talk about Paul.

And as there's a, you know, Miss Natalie did her little thing today, and she she talked about it.

And I heard I heard that there was a lot of commotion coming from over here, the kids over here, that you all already knew.

Like, who's this?

Saul.

And who's this?

Paul, right?

Because Saul is bad, right?

But Paul is good, right?

I told Miss Natalie this week she was wrong.

Yeah, I don't get to get to tell her that often, right?

Her parents know what I'm talking about.

Um, but but there is that I I said, well, I said, I don't know about that.

She mentioned it in her video, she learned some things about that this week.

But that's what we think about all the time, right?

Is we think that Saul bad, Paul good.

Saul bad, Paul good.

But here's the thing, it was the same guy.

Right?

Because if you if you look at the scripture, and in one of the videos, I can't remember which day it is, I talk about it.

There is a moment when Luke, who is talking through, he's saying the story of the book of Acts, he stops talking about Saul and he starts talking about Paul.

And this is how he does it.

He goes, also known as Paul.

And in that little short verse, he never calls him Saul again.

There's there's no big moment in the life of Saul Paul that makes this transition, at least that Luke tells us about.

There isn't something like when Jesus comes to Peter and he goes, From now on, you're gonna be known as Peter, the rock, right?

Do you smell what the rock is cooking?

There's no moment like that for Paul.

It's just a one-off line from Luke who says, he's also known as Paul, and that's what I'm gonna call him from here on out.

So he does.

I think that's significant.

I think it's significant in understanding who he was, but it's also significant in understanding the difference in thinking that Saul was bad and Paul was good.

Because I don't believe that Saul was bad.

I think Saul was exactly who God created him to be.

And because he was, when he took on the label apostle, he was able to change the world.

See, he'd always had the same names, right?

He was always known as both Saul and Paul because one was a Hebrew name, one was a Greek name.

Paul was both a Jewish citizen, he was a Pharisee of Pharisees, but he was also a Roman citizen.

And he lived a life that was way different than the disciples.

He lived in a world that they could never understand, that they could never touch.

He was both Saul and Paul.

He was the apostle who Jesus met and said, Oh, you.

Now, if you know the story, we go through the story, right?

It's the road to Damascus where Jesus meets Saul and has this big conversation with him.

But Saul goes on, Paul goes on, and he's preaching the gospel message, right?

He's going around, and his MO would typically be to go into the synagogues.

And whatever the scripture was of the day, he would show the Jews this is why it points to Jesus.

We're gonna read this scripture from the Old Testament.

Guess what?

Jesus fulfilled all this stuff, and that really made some of the Jews upset, right?

So Paul was causing some commotions.

He was going to these places, people didn't like him.

If you're if you have your Bibles, open up to Acts chapter 23, we're gonna do a summary of 23, 4, and 5, and we're gonna get into chapter 26.

Acts 23 · chapter mention

But we have this stuff where Paul's going in and he's he's preaching this message, and the Jews, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, which are the two big religious leaders, groups of the days, they don't like it.

And they want to shut them down.

And so they come at him hard with like riotous stuff.

They want to kill him.

And they they pull out some stuff to whip him, and Paul goes, uh, excuse me, some Roman soldiers come in to kind of calm things down.

And Paul goes, Are you going to let them whip a Roman citizen like this?

And the Roman soldier's like, uh, I'm sorry, what?

You're a Roman citizen?

It's like, uh-huh.

And then they're like, uh-oh.

So they shut everything down and they call the commander, and the commander comes out, and Paul goes, Hey, I'm a Roman citizen.

And the commander goes, yeah, me too.

It cost me a lot of money.

Paul goes, didn't cost me a thing.

I was born a Roman citizen.

And the commander's like, uh-oh.

Because born a Roman citizen, man, you had a whole lot more rights than the Jews did.

Yes, he was a Jew, but he was a Roman citizen.

That took him into another area altogether.

And so that commander got a little freaked out.

He's like, Well, ah, hey, every you Jewish religious leaders, you settle down there.

I I need to figure out how to handle this.

And he pulls him back and they discuss it, and they end up deciding to send him to the Roman governor of the area.

His name was Felix, and he lived in Caesarea.

So they send Paul up to Caesarea, which is on the coast.

It's a beautiful place.

Um, and and they send him to Caesarea, and he encounters Felix there.

And Felix is like, okay, what's going on?

And the Jews follow him and they're like, this guy's blaspheming God, and he's saying all these things that this dude, Jesus, died, and then he lived again, and all this stuff, and he needs to be executed.

Felix is like, ah, I don't understand what's happening.

So he throws him in prison.

And he has Paul come out and defend himself.

Paul goes, no problem.

And he lays out his whole case.

And Felix is like, ah, I just don't see any reason why we need to execute this guy.

I want to keep the Jews happy, but I also don't want to kill a Roman citizen, because then that's gonna reflect bad on me.

So I'm just gonna keep you in prison.

Felix's wife was a Jewish woman, and periodically she'd go, hey, let's call Paul up and talk to him.

And so they would call Paul into their little palace area, they would have this conversation with him.

Paul would explain everything.

This is who Jesus is.

Felix would go, Okay, yeah, go back to prison.

But for two years, for two years, Paul is in prison in Caesarea, and Felix would call him out, they'd have these conversations.

The Jews wanted him dead, but Felix was like, I don't see any reason why.

And look, if I execute a Roman citizen and it goes south, my head's the next one on the block.

So he stalls.

Eventually he is called off to go serve somewhere else, and in order to keep the Jews going up, Felix was a good guy.

He kept Paul in prison.

After Felix came come a guy named Festus.

Come on, wagon train friends.

Uh wagon train or gunsmoke friends.

Thank you.

Gunsmoke friends.

Um, yeah, Festus comes in.

Festus is the new Roman governor and he hears about Paul and he's like, What's this Roman citizen doing here?

How long?

He's been in here for years?

What?

He calls him out.

He goes, All right, you people have told me why you want him dead.

You tell me why you should live.

Paul delivers the whole thing.

Festus is like, this is above my pay grade.

I don't know how to handle this.

So he goes into the same modality as Felix did until King Agrippa comes.

Now, King Agrippa is the appointed king of the Jewish people by Rome, right?

He's the grandson of Herod the Great.

Right?

So we've been through a few different generations of leadership over the Jewish nation, and a new king, Agrippa, comes to town, and his wife Priscilla with him.

And they come in, and Felix, or Festus is like, hey man, you're a Jew.

Figure this out.

So Agrippa goes, Okay, bring Paul to me.

And this is where I am, chapter 26.

Then Agrippa said to Paul, You may speak in your defense.

So Paul, gesturing with his hand, started his defense.

I am fortunate, King Agrippa, that you are the one hearing my defense today against all these accusations made by the Jewish leaders, for I know you are an expert on all Jewish customs and controversies.

Now please listen to me patiently.

As the Jewish leaders are well aware, I was given a thorough Jewish training from my earliest childhood among my own people and in Jerusalem.

If they would admit it, they know that I have been a member of the Pharisees, the strictest sect of our religion.

Now I'm on trial because of my hope and the fulfillment of God's promise made to our ancestors.

In fact, that is why the twelve tribes of Israel zealously worship God night and day, and they share the same hope I have.

Yet, your majesty, they accuse me for having this hope.

Why does it seem incredible to any of you that God can raise the dead?

I used to believe that I had to do everything I could to oppose the very name of Jesus and Nazarene.

Indeed, I did just that in Jerusalem.

Authorized by the leading priests, I caused many believers there to be sent to prison.

And I cast my vote against them when they were condemned to death.

Many times I had them punished in the synagogues to get them to curse Jesus.

I was so violently opposed to them that I even chased them down in foreign cities.

One day I was on such a mission to Damascus, armed with the authority and commission of the leading priests.

About noon, Your Majesty, as I was on the road, a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shone down on me and my companions.

We all fell down, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

It is useless for you to fight against my will.

Who are you, Lord?

I asked.

And the Lord replied, I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting.

Now get to your feet, for I have appeared to you to appoint you as my servant and witness.

Tell the people that you have seen me, and tell them what I will show you in the future.

This isn't going to be up there, but listen.

And I will rescue you from both your own people and the Gentiles.

Yes, I am sending you to the Gentiles to open their eyes, so they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God.

Then they will receive forgiveness for their sins and be given a place among God's people who are set apart by faith in me.

And so, King Agrippa, I obeyed that vision from heaven.

Right?

So, what's Paul doing here?

Paul's doing a couple of things.

One, he is putting the two religious groups against one another, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, these two groups that are riling all this violence up.

And he's coming in, and what he's doing is he's saying, because here's the deal the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead, the Sadducees didn't.

Paul was a Pharisee, and the majority of Jews at this time believed in the resurrection of the dead.

In fact, that is what they believed God would do when he brought restoration to all things.

This hope for the reunification of the people of Israel and God the Father was about resurrection.

And Paul plays into it.

It's like, what have we been hoping for?

This is the very thing we've been hoping for for our very the twelve tribes zealously day and night are worshiping and praying to God that He would send the Messiah.

Guess what?

He did.

And the man Jesus Christ.

And resurrection isn't something that's going to happen sometime far off.

Resurrection is something that has happened.

And because it has happened, the kingdom of God has entered in.

Everything we've been waiting for has been fulfilled.

And yet these leaders just can't see it.

That's why they want me dead.

What I love about Paul, and what I love what Paul's doing here.

He tells of his experience, and this isn't the only time that Paul's going to talk about this Damascus Road experience.

He's going to talk about it at different times.

But I love this.

When he has this, I'm totally blinded, and then Jesus is like, dude, watch your beef with me.

That's how I translate the Aramaic right there.

What's your deal, Paul?

All of a sudden, Paul didn't change who he was.

Paul changed how he saw Jesus.

Who he was as Saul was still who he was, if we want to call him Paul, he just saw through the lens of Jesus Christ.

Because God didn't make a mistake that led him to that road at Damascus and said, you know what?

Everything that's happened before, we need to blow up and throw away because it was a nightmare.

But now that you know me, we can start.

No.

God goes, everything that led you to this moment has prepared you for what's coming next.

I just need you to see through the lens of Jesus Christ.

See, that's what conversion story is.

It doesn't matter what happened before.

When you see through the lens of Jesus Christ, everything is new.

You don't throw out what was because that's what God's going to use.

Paul didn't stop being who he was.

He was extremely zealous for the kingdom of God.

Before he saw Jesus, he was trying to kill people who said Jesus was the Messiah.

Once he knew Jesus, he didn't care if he was killed as long as people knew Jesus.

That's zealousness.

That's the same personality.

That's the same person.

See, what I love about Paul that the other disciples didn't have is Paul had the ability, he was, and he says this, I was a Pharisee.

In one of his other letters, he'll say, I was the Pharisee of Pharisees.

He drops the name of the rabbi that he studied under.

Everybody's like, dude, you know your stuff.

He's like, Yes.

You know what, Peter?

You're a fisherman.

You're awesome.

You're gonna do great things right around Galilee.

You have no ability to go into the places that I'm going because God created me for the This, not you.

I created you for something different.

But he was able to go into places because Jesus didn't erase who he was at that moment when he called him.

It wasn't that Saul was bad and that Paul was good, it was his perspective changed.

Saul was good, he just didn't see clearly.

Because God didn't make a mistake.

You're calling too.

My calling.

When I knew Jesus, it's a long time.

I don't know, I don't remember.

I don't remember when I said, Yes, I accept Jesus into my heart and all those things.

But I remember the moment I said, I'm for you now forever.

I remember the moment when I began to see things through the lens of Jesus Christ in a new and different way.

He met me on a on a path in the country of Guyana.

It was about 27 years ago.

28 years ago.

It was right before Jenna had the greatest moment of her life when she saw me for the first time.

I was on a mission trip with our church, and we had been at Lake Essequipo, and it was, we're like, we're in the middle of nowhere in Guyana.

And it just, we hear this thunder, like everything.

And me and this other guy were like, we know that we have to get on this little bitty boat to cross Lake Essequipo, and then we have to traverse through these jungle little paths to get to the road because the truck can't get down to where we are because the roads are too bad.

We had to hike out to get to the road, to get to the truck, to get to the city, to get to the plane, to get home, all these things.

And we hear this thunder, and we're like, uh, we feel like it's gonna rain.

We should leave right now.

And they're like, ha ha ha, you're fine, you're fine.

This is just clear, the skies are clearing.

You know how the sky's clear in Guyana?

By raining a lot, all of a sudden, just who just downpour.

And we're we're on this little boat, and literally the guy, the guy who's driving, he taps me on the shoulder and he hands me um, what is it?

Thank goodness it's not butter.

What was that old thing?

It's one of those little butter margarine containers, and he goes, bail.

Like, bail, like we're taking water on in this little thing, and we're bailing water.

I'm like, there's piranhas in this water.

I know it.

And we're bailing all this stuff, and we we finally get to the other side, and he's like, bye, and he turns around and he takes off.

We're just standing there.

We're like, he goes, go that way.

So we start walking.

And there wasn't this, there wasn't a place on me that was dry, there wasn't a place on me that wasn't caked in mud.

And every so often as we're walking, people would walk out of the jungle holding machetes.

And I remember this one time this dude walks out and he's holding a machete, and they're just they're in there doing work, right?

That this is what this is what they do.

He walks out, he goes, White people! Just like that.

Right, yes, we are.

Do you know where the van is?

And he just disappears back into the jungle.

It was on that walk.

I remember so vividly that I knew everything had changed.

Nothing about me changed except the lens through which I was seeing everything.

In fact, I came home and I told the guy who I was with, who was a pastor, is a pastor.

I said, I'm ready to pick up my cross and follow him.

Thank goodness that happened first because Jenna probably wouldn't have said yes to me a couple months later.

But everything changed.

I was still the same Michael.

Everything that had got down when I went to AM, and AM said it was it was them, not me, or however they termed it, I don't remember.

Whenever we broke up.

Everything that went down when I went to the school formerly known as Southwest Texas State University, and I lived my life to see if I could destroy my life.

All those things didn't change about me.

It's just how I perceived everything.

It's just who I knew God was calling me to be because I was seeing through a different lens.

That's conversion.

That's what Saul Paul goes through.

It wasn't that Saul was bad and that Paul was good.

It was the perspective had changed.

And I think that's true for all of us.

That we need to allow ourselves the moment when we see through his lens and say everything up until this point has prepared me for what's to come.

That's why I love Paul.

I love him so much.

Because God gave him so many gifts and abilities to reach the world for Jesus.

And guess what?

He did.

He didn't change who he was, he used who he created.

I don't know what's happened previous to accepting Jesus or what's happened since.

But when God has called you and he calls you by name, he longs for you to see through that lens, that perspective that says Jesus is, which is all that Paul was trying to tell Agrippa.

The hope we've been waiting for.

This is it.

And when you realize that, you get to step into the life that He has for you.

I'm gonna invite the folks who are assisting with community to come forward right now.

And I'd ask if you would join me in an attitude of prayer.

Father, we thank you and praise you for the way that you created each one of us so uniquely in your image beautifully.

And God, you called each one of us.

You've converted each one of us in our own way, in our own time.

And maybe there's somebody sitting on a road today that just needs to hear you call their name.

May today be that day.

And they hear you say, hey, hey, hey, hey.

Look at me.

See the world through my lens and see the life that comes with it.

Father, we thank you for the way that you so readily gave yourself for us.

The night that you were to be betrayed, you sat around the table with your disciples, you took the bread, you broke it, you said, Take this, it's my body which is given for you.

After supper was over, you took the cup.

You blessed God, you said, This is the blood of the new covenant which is poured out for the forgiveness of sins.

As often as you do drink this, do so in remembrance of me.

And so we come in remembrance of this mighty act of salvation.

We proclaim that this is the body and blood of Christ, and that by the power of the Holy Spirit, as we consume this, we become living and holy sacrifices, proclaiming the glory, your glory, to the world who needs to hear it.

We thank you and praise you in the name of Jesus.

Amen.