Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the President of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Well it's great to see everybody here for this final in this series of seven messages on the Magnificent seven.
If you have your Bibles now, if you'll take those and turn to the Book of Acts, the 13th chapter of the Book of Acts.
I'm going to read a little lengthier passage than I have in the past.
Tonight's subject obviously is Paul the Apostle, but I want to read one of the turning points in his life.
Chapter 13 now there were at the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers, such as Barnabas and Simeon, that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul.
As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, separate me, or separate unto me, if you will, Barnabas and Saul, for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them away. So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed unto Seleucia, and from thence they sailed to Cyprus. And when they were at Salamis, they preached the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews. And they had also John, by the way, that is John Mark.
They also had John to their minister, or to help them, if you will. And when they were gone through the isle of Paphos, they found a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew, whose name was Bar Jesus, Bar meaning son of Jesus, which was with the deputy of the country, Sergius Paulus Paulus, a prudent man, who called for Barnabas and Saul, and desired to hear the word of God. But Elymas the sorcerer, for so is his name by interpretation, withstood them, seeking then to turn away the deputy from the faith.
Then Saul, who is also called Paul, filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him and said, o full of all subtlety and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord? And now behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thee, and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a season. And immediately there fell on him a mist and A darkness. And he went about seeking someone to lead him by the hand.
Then the deputy, when he saw what was done, believed being astonished at the doctrine of the Lord.
Now, when Paul and his company loosed from Paphos, they came to Perga in Pamphylia and John, John Mark departed from them and returned to Jerusalem. Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, in the next few moments, I pray that you will overwhelm all of our distractions, fatigue, everything that we may hear from you. Lord, speak to us beyond the weakness and inability of the speaker or every distraction of hearer.
May the miracle of divine communication overwhelm us that when we leave here tonight we will say, surely the Lord has spoken unto us in the mighty name Jesus, the strong, Son of God. Amen.
Paul the Apostle, known to us as Paul the Apostle, was probably eight or nine years younger than Jesus of Nazareth.
He There were some things about him that in a sense make him a logical choice for the ministry that God selected him for.
Let me just deal with some of those and then talk about the issue of the selection of God.
So his name in Hebrew is Saul.
He is of the tribe of Benjamin and the most famous person ever born in the tribe of Benjamin, except for Benjamin himself. The most famous person ever born in the tribe of Benjamin was the first king of Israel, Saul, for whom obviously Saul is named.
He was a Roman citizen. Now, we don't grasp what that means because we think of a citizen as just meaning somebody, a citizen of Cartersville or a citizen of the United States. But to be a Roman citizen might have nothing to do with where you were born. You might not be born in the city of Rome.
It meant to have the exalted title of citizen in the Roman Empire. There were all kinds of things that went with it. You were exempt from certain taxes. You might be free of certain kinds of prosecution. There were all kinds of things that went with it.
You could, one could buy Roman citizenship. It was hugely expensive, hugely. One might buy it on credit and then spend the rest of your life paying the Roman government off for your citizenship.
However, there were other ways. If you were born a second generation citizen, that is to say, if your father, by whatever means became a citizen, born from him, you are a citizen of the Roman Empire.
Paul's father was a Roman citizen.
They were from the city of Tarsus, which is in modern day Turkey.
The city of Tarsus is extremely important in that day.
He is one of the only people that is identified by city. He is often called Paul of Tarsus. Saul of Tarsus Why Tarsus? Tarsus was an extremely important city. Geopolitically it was beloved of Julius Caesar. And Julius Caesar granted all kinds of blessings to the people of Tarsus. Not everyone was made a citizen, but many were. It may be that Paul's father or grandfather was made a citizen and by Julius Caesar, who loved the city of Tarsus. When Julius Caesar was assassinated, his successor was Mark Anthony. And Mark Anthony and Cleopatra met in Tarsus.
And therefore Julius Caesar loved Tarsus and granted all kinds of favor and made many people their citizens. So it may be that either through Julius Caesar or Mark Antony that Saul's family, a Jewish family in this Roman city of Tarsus, became citizens. But however that happened, he was born as a citizen.
We tend to think of him as he's referred to as a tent maker or sail maker. But it's not that he was a laborer, he was willing to do it, but he was from a very well off family that that was their industry.
And therefore he was a person of some prosperity from an important city, a Roman citizen. He was wonderfully well educated. You remember on last Wednesday we talked about the fact that Simon Peter was called, was referred to as being ignorant and unlearned, not Paul the Apostle. He attended the rabbinical school of Gamaliel in Jerusalem itself.
Paul the Apostle. Neither Paul the Apostle nor Simon Peter are mentioned in the works of Flavius Josephus, but Gamaliel is.
And Gamaliel was considered one of the great teachers of first century Judaism. And his school, the school of Gamaliel, was celebrated as the elite school to study Torah.
In addition to all that, Paul was entirely fluent in at least four languages, so certainly Hebrew. He could not study or graduate from a rabbinical school like Gamaliel's if he wasn't entirely fluent reading, writing and speaking Hebrew.
The functional language of the day, however, was almost certainly Aramaic. There would have been no way he would not speak Aramaic. But it is revealed to us in the book of Acts that he also spoke Latin and he wrote in Greek and spoke in Greek at a high level of Greek, because when he spoke in Athens, he spoke in Greek to the Areopagus, which are the most educated people in Greece. And Greece was. Athens was the center of world education at that time.
So he impressed Greek speaking intelligentsia with his Greek and with his knowledge of Greek poetry.
Phrases that he used in his sermon at Mars Hill we think of as being distinctly Christian, but they weren't. The phrase, for example, of speaking of God, in whom we live and move and have our being it is a quote from a pagan Greek poet.
So Paul was able to speak off the cuff in high class. Greek to Greeks, in Latin, to Romans, in Hebrew, to the best educated in Jerusalem and in Aramaic in the marketplace.
Now, why did God choose Saul of Tarsus?
I listed some of those practical reasons.
But we dare not impose our practical sense of judgment on God Almighty.
His thoughts are not our thoughts.
So the fact is that God is.
God is like God and all.
He gets to choose. And he can choose somebody like Saul of Tarsus, and those things add into it. But the bottom line is God is sovereign and he can choose somebody who is educated and sophisticated and multilingual.
But God doesn't need that.
He can also choose a big, loud, talking, impetuous fisherman from a small village on the Sea of Galilee and make them the two twin pillars of the primitive church.
Two men more different, except for the fact that they were both Jews. Two men more different, who viewed the world more differently, with different personalities and different educations, could hardly be imagined. But the saints Peter and Paul are the twin pillars of the primitive church.
I've divided the life of Saul of Tarsus into three sections.
The first would be his convert, would center on his conversion experience. But we have to deal with what leads up to it.
The first time Saul is mentioned, and it is a kind of a random mention, is the, the death of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, when he was stoned to death for blasphemy in Jerusalem.
There is just this kind of offhand mention from Luke, who wrote the book of Acts. And he says the people that were stoning him, they had to take their coats off. You can't, you know, you can't get a good fastball going if you got a jacket on. And so they, they had to lay their coats down to be able to throw the rocks hard enough to kill Stephen. And St. Luke says, and they threw their coats and at the feet of a young man named Saul.
That's a, that's a toss off. It's almost like, you know, who cares where they laid their coats?
But that young man became so passionate, so driven. And I would say this, this is characteristic of his personality. He's one of those 100 proof high octane cholerics with, with never given inch stamped in the middle of his forehead. He, if he's going to do it, he's going to do it all the way. Never does anything in halves. He is ferociously dedicated to what he believes.
And he believes that what Stephen was killed for, the blasphemy of the Messianic anointing of Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God.
He believes that to be wrong, blasphemous, and blasphemy should be punished by death.
So he is affirming the death of Stephen, but it's not enough for him.
He becomes basically a trigger man for the Sanhedrin Solitarsus. Paul is also a Pharisee. And you'll remember the that the Pharisees were the toughest group that Jesus had to deal with. And that's the group that he's in. He's a Pharisee of Pharisees, a Hebrew of Hebrews, he calls himself educated at the school of Gamaliel, the tribe of Benjamin. And he believes these so called Christ followers who have lifted up a human being as being the Son of God, are guilty of. Of blasphemy that deserves the greatest punishment. So he begins to persecute the church in Jerusalem and in Judea. Not satisfied with that, he gets arrest warrants from the Sanhedrin, the high court of Israel, from the Pharisaical party of the high court, to go to Syria, to Damascus, and find any Jews there that are believing Jesus is the Messiah and arrest them and bring them back.
As he travels, I know you know the story. He is overshadowed by a bright light, a voice from heaven, and he is struck blind.
The voice from heaven says, saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
The next line. Not. Not everybody thinks things in the Bible are funny, but some of it rips me out of the frame. The next line really tickles me. Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And Saul says, who art thou, Lord?
I'm thinking maybe he had a hint.
Who art thou, Lord? He says, I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest. Now I just want you to. I just want you to think for a moment what that means theologically and what it means to us. It's important.
What is Jesus saying?
First of all, Saul of Tarsus never met Jesus, never saw Jesus, and never persecuted Jesus.
But Jesus says, you're persecuting me. Because Jesus is making it clear if you touch the church of Jesus Christ, it's as though you touched Jesus. Because we are the body of Christ.
So he says, why persecutest thou me? Who art thou, Lord? I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest. And he tells him, go on into Damascus, go there and wait, and someone will come to you.
While he is blind, he fasts. He doesn't eat or drink. No food, no water, nothing for three days. Blind in a House in Straight street in Damascus. And he has a vision that somebody named Ananias is coming to heal him and get him on the right path. I don't want to deal with Ananias because it's a whole nother sermon. And if I get into Ananias, I'll preach it.
So Ananias comes to him, lays hands on him, and he is healed physically.
All at once, he is healed physically.
He is baptized in the Holy Spirit, and it is revealed to him that God has called him to preach this same Jesus whom he has persecuted.
Immediately, this is Paul the Apostle. Immediately there where he is. He starts in Damascus now, preaching Jesus.
He takes this magnificent Old Testament education that he has, and it says, he begins to prove that Jesus is the Messiah.
So the Jesus whom he has hated, despised, considered blasphemous, now immediately, now he's preaching Jesus and doing the teaching based on his education of the Old Testament, which, of course, the only scripture they had. So he's preaching Jesus in Damascus.
From that moment, the persecution begins.
Paul's entire life is saturated in opposition. And it begins that moment.
The people, the people that he that have agreed with everything he said, they're furious.
The people to whom he's preaching, they're confused.
So they actually are saying, you think this is real?
They're kind of afraid he's a spy, a plant, that he's faking it in order to get inside and find out who's really attending the Christian meetings.
So from the very beginning, his ministry is just saturated in confusion, opposition, anger. So they're gonna kill him. The Jewish people are gonna kill him. So some of the believers hide him in a basket and lower him over the walls of Damascus. And he goes to Jerusalem, and he goes. Where would you. Where would you obviously go? To the apostolic community.
And they said, so you're.
You're a believer now?
You're a believer? Oh, yes. He said, the Lord appeared to me. I'm called to preach.
And the apostles kind of say, don't call us, we'll call you.
Until Barnabas puts his arm around Paul and says, I believe him.
His conversion is real.
And he. Barnabas, ushers him in, to the. Into the core of the apostolic community.
And he is there until the heat becomes so much that the apostolic offices there, Peter and James and the others don't want him killed. So they send him home to Tarsus.
And he is there in Tarsus and then spends some time in Saudi Arabia and is there in kind of a remedial school of Christian theology.
Alone in Arabia with one teacher, Jesus.
So he spends three years with Jesus. He learns about communion. Remember, he wasn't at the Last Supper, so Jesus is teaching him about communion. Later on he quotes Jesus, but he wasn't at the Last Supper.
So this is an amazing and quiet season in, in Paul's life.
Now, as I was coming in, somebody asked me and I thought it was a very good question and I want to speak to it. Why do certain people in the Bible have name changes? Why do they have. Why does Abraham become Israel? Why does.
Why does Abraham become Abram become Abraham? Why does Jacob become Israel? Why does God change people's names?
So sometimes God changes their name because he wants to make a point about them or about their character, about their ministry. As the case is Abram to Abraham, or more importantly, Jacob to Israel.
From usurper. Pastor preached on this recently and beautifully. From usurper to the Prince of God.
So God is making a statement to him with Saul of Tarsus. That's not the way it is.
Saul is simply the Hebrew version of the Roman name Paulus. If you remember the deputy Epaphos that we just read about, his name was Sergius Paulus. His name is Paul.
So as Saul of Tarsus, ministry becomes redirected away from the Hebrew community and toward the Gentile community.
He just quits using the Hebrew version of his name and starts using the Roman version of its name.
And that's perfectly legitimate because he is a Roman citizen who is fluent in Latin.
Now that takes care of the first section of Paul's life.
Now the second section begins. We find him alone in Arabia and there is a move of God in Antioch among a kind of a spontaneous revival.
And the church just kind of balloons up. The church, meaning the. The Gentile believers in Antioch, it just kind of balloons up. It's a revival.
But as often happens in revivals, there's no real theological control mechanism.
It's just happening. And so the apostolic community in Jerusalem says we need to send somebody up there to teach them and get this thing right so it doesn't go loony.
And they send Barnabas.
And Barnabas remembers Saul, and Barnabas goes to Tarsus and gets Saul and takes him to Antioch.
The church at Antioch becomes. Dr. M.G. mcLuhan characterized it as being the first real megachurch.
It was huge.
And there were superstars, superstars there. It's the church that we just read about. Lucius of Cyrene, Simeon Barnabas, a guy who was raised with Herod and Saul of Tarsus. They're kind of the pastoral staff of this great church, prophets and leaders.
And God says, I want to send Barnabas and Saul on a mission trip.
So they pray, they lay hands on them and send them out.
And the story that we just read as we began, that happens at the deputy, a Roman civil servant. He's not a Jew, he's a Roman civil servant, like he is on the island of Paphos.
What, what?
Pontius Pilate was in Israel. He's the Roman deputy, the center of civil government at Paphos.
And he has an acquaintance with this bogus Jewish prophet, falsely false prophet, named Elymas.
And Paul and Barnabas come there and this Roman man who's interested in the religion of the Jews obviously summons them and they begin to preach. And this false prophet begins to try to talk him out of believing.
And did you hear the way Paul approaches it? Let me just read it for you one more time. If you want to understand Paul the apostle, this is not a soft spoken brother.
O thou full of subtlety and all mischief, Thou child of the devil, thou enemy of righteousness.
Wow.
He doesn't say, I feel like you're mistaken here.
And he strikes him blind.
So if you, if one should go online and Google up what was Paul's first miracle, this one is never mentioned, but it is miraculous. If somebody is blind and you make them see, that's a miracle of healing.
If somebody can see and you make them blind, that's also a miracle. It's just not one you want to pray for a lot.
But Barnabas, who's the head of the mission trip, doesn't act.
Paul is second in command. He acts, he strikes Elymas blind.
And then the next verse says, Paul and his company left the next day.
So what begins as Barnabas and Saul ends as Paul and his company.
And except for one minor thing later on, that's sort of the end of our connection with Barnabas. But we'll come to that.
Paul then preaches at Darby, and there he is stoned and either stoned to death or stoned until everybody thinks he's dead.
And those who stone him, as Stephen was stoned, those who stone him leave him for dead.
And he digs, he digs out of the rubble and he's alive.
Paul's life is so saturated in hatred and people hating him and in violent opposition and in riot and in confusion and anger, his hide must have been thicker than a hippopotamus.
His life was saturated in controversy.
In fact, he writes about it later on. He says everybody's Turned against me, everybody.
And he is filled with it now. From that moment on, the story of Paul is actually the balance of the Book of Acts.
The first part of the Book of Acts is about the post resurrection apostolic community in Jerusalem, with a couple of exceptions. Peter and John's trip to up to Samaria, Peter's miracles in Jaffa. But mostly it's still the, the post resurrection church in Jerusalem from the 14th chapter of Acts onward. Basically, it's a biography of Paul the Apostle.
And I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but I want to give you a few things to give you a sense of Paul the Apostle in these chapters.
The first is that his ministry was not simply a ministry of preaching. Certainly he was an anointed speaker, but he ministered in the, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Signs, wonders, miracles.
This is an apostolic ministry in the purest definition of the Word. He has had a divine encounter with Jesus.
He has been called into a specific ministry ministry to the Gentiles. And he manifests this ministry in anointed Holy Spirit, miraculous power.
It is filled with constant opposition, hardship. I just want to remind you of one thing I didn't mention a minute ago, so let me just go back to it.
When God speaks to Ananias, remember in Damascus, and he says, go and lay hands on Saul of Tarsus and heal him. Ananias, maybe you're, maybe you're not a person who's ever explained anything to God. Anybody here?
I want you to. God says, I want you to go next door and forgive your brother in law. And you ever explain God, you don't realize that he's nuts.
You don't know him like I do.
That's explaining stuff to God. So God says to Ananias, go lay hands on Saul of Tarsus. And Ananias says, you may not realize he came here to arrest us all and take us back to Jerusalem and in chains.
Isn't it good when people help God to understand things that he wouldn't know? And God says, go, I've chosen him and I must reveal to him. Listen to this. I will reveal to him what things he must suffer for my name.
He doesn't say, I'll reveal to him what great conquests, what great miracles, what great ministry, what great successes. I'm not going to reveal to him all the churches that he'll plant and the letters that he'll write and how his name will be celebrated until the rapture of the church. He says, I'm going to reveal to him what things? He must suffer for my name.
And Paul the Apostle. Yes. All the successes. Yes. The anointing. Yes. The power, the miracles. But his life was filled with suffering, deprivation, difficulty, hardship, shipwreck, snakebite, stonings, beatings. Beatings.
If somebody received 40 lashes, that was considered a death sentence.
So you would consider that you would die. The 40th lash would kill you.
So you couldn't be sentenced to 40 lashes unless you were sentenced to die, but you could be sentenced to 39 and multiple times. Paul received 39 lashes. By the way. That's where you get the phrase, he beat him within an inch of his life.
The 39th lash. Now you have to stop and see if we can heal him up.
So Paul is lashed, beaten, shipwrecked.
Once, three. Three days floating in the ocean, rejected by his family, rejected by his tribe, despised by his own people.
A life of suffering and hardship and difficulty. But a life of incredibly anointed power. Ministry.
Paul becomes so thoroughly identified with the burgeoning Gentile Church that the church in Jerusalem, the. The. The church that is still altogether Jewish in Jerusalem is struggling to grasp what does this mean, all these Gentiles. If you remember last week, I don't know if you were here, but I talked about Simon Peter going to the city of Caesarea, that as a Jew, it was illegal for him to go there. Not the Romans didn't make it illegal, the Jews did. It was an unclean city, an unclean town. If he went there, he was ceremonially unclean, and he went there to Cornelius House.
So if you have been taught from remotest antiquity, we're Jews, they're Gentiles. We have nothing to do with them. We don't go in their house, we don't eat their food, they don't keep kosher. They don't follow the law.
They're unclean. They're unclean.
You've been taught that your whole life. Your parents, grandparents, your entire history, lineage back to Moses.
We're Jews, they're Gentiles.
Now you've accepted Jesus of Nazareth as the Jewish Messiah.
Now all these Gentiles are saying we do too.
Yes, he's the Messiah of the Jews. He's also the Messiah of the Gentiles.
Can we just wrap our minds around how huge that was?
That just. That just made no, no sense. It was beyond that.
The Jewish people have waited for millennia for the coming of Messiah, their Messiah, their Messiah.
Now you've got people that last week are worshiping Aphrodite and Diana and Zeus.
They don't keep kosher.
Their males aren't circumcised.
They've lived in a pagan, blasphemous, violent, wicked society.
And now all of a sudden they're saying, yes, Jesus is the Lord of my life.
So the question of the Jewish Christian believer is what does the coming of Messiah mean to my Judaism?
They were not asking, how then shall we live?
But a Gentile, they don't know what any of it means.
Worship, worship.
Remember there were temple prostitutes in the pagan world.
So if you wanted to worship the goddess Diana, you would go to the temple, pay money, have sex with a prostitute, and you would thereby connect yourself in worship. That's an act of worship, to have paid sex with a temple prostitute so that you can connect. Paul has to deal with this later on. He says, don't you understand?
If you have sex with a prostitute, you connect with the spirit of the prostitute.
And so people, they hear Paul preach and they want to turn away from that and follow the Jewish Messiah. Their question is entirely different from the Jewish believers. Their question is, how then shall we live everything?
What does it mean to be married? What does it mean to be to work? What does it mean to worship? What does it mean to pray?
All of the things that the Jewish community has dealt with for millennia. The Gentile community is starting not from scratch. They're starting from like way back.
And the, the Jewish believers are having a hard time understanding this.
So what, here's the question.
How do they become Christians?
And by the way, the first place Jew, the first place believers were called Christians was at this mega church in Antioch.
So what does it mean?
Do they all have to be circumcised? Do they start to eat kosher?
Do, do they become Jews? If Jesus is the Messiah of the Jews and they're going to, he's going to be the Messiah of these Gentiles, do they now, do they have to become Jews?
And that's, this has to be sorted out in council.
The church has to make a decision on this.
And so Paul goes back to Jerusalem and there's a big council.
And who helps him is Simon Peter.
Simon Peter says, wait a minute, this didn't begin with Paul.
You remember when I went to Cornelius House in Caesarea and, and God said, don't call any thing, any body unclean that I've cleansed.
And so they make the decision that gentile believers don't have to become Jews.
And they kind of commission Paul to become the apostle of the new branch of Christianity, which is gentile. Christianity.
Now, just so you grasp how breathtakingly new this is, there is no clear, articulated theology.
How does a pagan who has been worshiping false gods in blasphemous ways, how does he become what we now call Christians? What became called Christians at Antioch? A believer. How? What happens?
It is Paul the Apostle who formulates and articulates the fundamental Christian doctrine of salvation by faith.
That to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and confess him with your mouth, that you become a believer grafted into the body of Christ, you don't have to become Jewish.
Now there's all this rampaging argumentation over how many books Paul wrote. I believe he wrote 14. And I believe he wrote the Book of Hebrews, because I didn't want to say the wrong thing. I actually called the pastor this afternoon and said, what do you believe? Did Paul write the Book of Hebrews? The pastor said, definitely, I believe he wrote the Book of Hebrews. So I'm safe.
I just didn't like the idea of Travis calling me out on this.
So, yes, I believe Paul wrote the Book of Hebrews.
What is the Book of Hebrews? Say, why would you go back?
Why would you go back? Jesus is better. The whole Book of Hebrews. Jesus is better. He's better than.
Than Moses. He's better than the law. He's a better sacrifice. He's better than the Tabernacle. He's better than angels. The whole Book of Hebrews is based on one word, better. And it's so Pauline.
I believe Paul wrote the Book of Hebrews, but whoever wrote is the theological articulation of salvation by faith expressed to the Hebrew community.
The letters to Ephesus and. And take, for example, the letter to Philemon.
So these are Gentiles. Onesimus and Philemon are both Gentiles, and he's talking to him.
How do.
How do you treat a slave who ran away from you and then got saved by the same Jesus who saved you?
And now I'm sending him back to you.
Who is he now? Is he your slave or is he your brother or.
That's the kind of fundamental questions that the Pauline New Testament is trying to deal with. How do we live? What does it mean? How do I even become a Christian?
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shall be saved and thy house.
So when Paul is arrested in Philippi, or Philippi, if you want to say it that way, in Philippi and thrown into prison, when the earthquake opens for Paul and Silas opens the prison doors and the Philippian jailer is going to Kill himself.
Paul says, do thyself no harm. We're all here.
And the jailer says, what must I do to be saved?
And all of this complicated theological ramifications is distilled into a simple answer.
Paul says, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shall be saved in thy house.
Paul the Apostle is the instrument of God. His brain, his theology, his determination, his faith, his anointing. Is it is really Paul the Apostle who has shaped this body in this place as we are.
I want to bring this to a conclusion and I want to end it differently than we have the other six.
So two things.
The first is this.
Who are we Gentiles? Who are we in Christ?
We are not second rate.
We are not nothing. We are not to be intimidated. You're not.
One is not. One is not a better Christian if you say Yeshua instead of Jesus.
One is not more Christian in some way.
We are.
We are. However, we must take this into account.
We are grafted in.
We are the wild branch and we are Gentiles. We are Gentiles who have been grafted into the body of Christ. This is one of Paul's fundamental messages. In the book of Ephesians he says God has taken of the two Jews and Gentiles and made one new man, one new person.
So we are not to be arrogant.
We are not to look down on Jewish people who have not yet come to faith. We are grafted in. We're the wild branch. We have no real right to eat of the Commonwealth of Israel except that we have right through Jesus Christ, who is our Messiah. No less than he is the Messiah of the Jewish people. He is the Messiah of the world.
And we are the grandchildren of the great fundamental theologian of Christianity.
All, all subsequent theologians, everybody who's ever written anything, all of the church fathers, Irenaeus, all the rest of them, they all bow to Paul the Apostle.
Everything that we believe to be true about Christianity, especially us in this church, in, and I don't mean in at church of Liberty Square, I mean in the Gentile Church.
We are what we are and we know who we are because God used this remarkable instrument to formulate the, the unmistakable immutable secret of salvation.
We don't have to go back to the law. God forbid.
Why would we go back to the law?
We don't have to.
Christianity is not in eating or not eating certain things, God forbid.
Christianity is not in which day we do what or celebration of new moons and all of that. God forbid.
It comes down to one thing.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shall be saved.
How could we be arrogant about that?
We didn't cause it. We don't understand it.
We just get in on it by faith and by faith alone.
Therefore, I'd like for you to bow your heads and close your eyes.
I.
I can say to myself that on a Wednesday night in the middle of the summer, the people here who would be here for this are fully persuaded of everything I've said. But I can't speak on this and not make sure.
With your head bowed and your eyes closed.
I'm going to ask you one simple question. I'm not asking you if you're a church member. God can make church members out of the pews you sit on.
I'm going to ask you one simple question.
Have you been born again by faith alone, as John Wesley put it? Are you trusting fully, wholly in the blood of Christ and no good deed of yours?
Religion can't save you. Good works can't save you.
Only faith in the shed blood of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
If you are not trusting fully, wholly in the shed blood of Jesus Christ for your salvation and for eternal life, I want to pray with you right now.
If you're not certain of that, if you don't have that blessed assurance that if you were to die right now, you'd be in heaven with Jesus, your Messiah.
If you're not sure of that, then I just want you to lift your hand up right where you are and take it right back down.
I just want to make sure. I don't want to worry about you tonight. On my bed.
Everybody settled?
Good. Heavenly Father, I thank you. I praise you for the life and the. The mystery of your work in this fascinating man.
Lord, we thank you that you have gifted the church with Paul the Apostle, that he is a gift of the spirit.
Lord, we thank you for his letters. We thank you for the inbreathed word of God coming through him to us. And we thank you that we can serve you and worship you and live in you and have our being in you through faith alone.
We thank you for it, God. May it manifest itself in works of righteousness. But none of those will save us. They are as filthy rags.
Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone.
For it is in his name that we pray every time in Jesus name.
Amen. Amen and Amen. God bless you, everyone.
[00:49:30] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on X at Dr. Mark Rutland or visit his website drmarkrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
