Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: CS Lewis, who we all know wrote
[00:00:03] Speaker B: the Chronicles of Narnia and a wonderful apologetic for the Christian faith, Mere Christianity and many other books that influence still influence Christianity.
[00:00:15] Speaker A: C.S.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: lewis once wrote this to a friend.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: I believe in no religion.
There is absolutely no proof of any of them.
And from a philosophical standpoint, Christianity is not even the best.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: This is CS Lewis writing these words to a friend.
And then 15 years later, he wrote
[00:00:43] Speaker A: to this friend, Christianity is God expressing himself through what we call real things,
[00:00:51] Speaker B: namely the actual Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.
What a transformation.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: I believe in no religion, and Christianity
[00:01:03] Speaker B: is not even the best two.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: Christianity is really real, as real as the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection.
You see Lewis as a teenager committed
[00:01:19] Speaker B: to disprove the existence of God.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: And yet, as he is trying to disprove God through reading and thinking and arguments, he would say during that time, often as he stopped to reflect on the arguments and kind of move back from his study, in moments of reflection, he would say he felt the unrelenting approach of him who I did not want to meet.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: During this time, he could not deny the existence of God.
He often called God the Hound of Hell or Heaven. Sorry, that was bad. That was a bad mistake.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: In one of his books, he refers
[00:02:04] Speaker B: to the Hound of Hell, but God is the Hound of Heaven.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: Who was pursuing him this whole time
[00:02:10] Speaker B: as he is trying to. Please edit that out of the sermon this week.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: Who was pursuing him the whole time as he is trying to disprove God.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: And eventually, in 1929, when he says he prayed his first real prayer to God, admitting God does exist. He says, I prayed as the most dejected and reluctant convert. It was not even something I wanted to do, but I denied God existed and had to, after arguing against his
[00:02:45] Speaker A: existence, admit that he does exist. But I had lost this battle.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: And yet he still wasn't a Christian because he had not trusted in Christ yet.
But then two years later, as he is still trying to ward off the hound of Heaven, he was headed to the zoo on a bus.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: He has all of these arguments in
[00:03:10] Speaker B: his head against God and now is being wooed to God specifically through Christ.
He's seeing the truth of Christianity.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: And he says, when I got on
[00:03:22] Speaker B: this bus to the zoo, I don't
[00:03:24] Speaker A: know how I made the decision.
All I know is when I set
[00:03:28] Speaker B: out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. And when I reached the zoo, I did.
God saved this man who has influenced our faith, a man who was set out to disprove Christianity became one of the most influential proponents of Christianity.
And he would say when he came to faith in Christ, and this is my favorite quote in his autobiography, Surprised by joy. When he finally believed the Gospel, he said, the great angler fisherman played his fish.
And I have never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue.
As I was arguing against Christianity, God led him to Christianity. What a powerful testimony of grace.
And it's actually the truth in all of our lives, those of us who are rejecting Christ. And so often, even in our rejection, there's grace and there's moves of God that are wooing us to himself through Christ.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: And the same is with the Apostle Paul. The Judaizers here in Galatians are attacking
[00:04:45] Speaker B: Paul's credibility as an apostle.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: And if they can say Paul's not a real apostle, he has no credibility and authority to be teaching these things.
If they can prove he's not an apostle, they can disprove the gospel of grace, that Jesus alone is sufficient for salvation, that we need to add nothing else to Christ, not even the law. If they can prove he is a false apostle, they prove his gospel false.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: They're saying things like, Paul was convinced of this by men. You know, the apostles in Jerusalem, Peter, James, John, those guys, they just convinced him through arguments that this was the truth of the gospel.
And Paul sets out in this narrative that begins here in verse 11. And we'll run through much of chapter two to say, no, this was something only God could do.
And when God saved me, I didn't go to men for credibility.
It was the Lord Jesus Christ who gave me credibility as an apostle.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: And one of the things we see in the Apostle Paul is one of the proofs that this gospel of grace is true is the way in which he was saved.
You want to know if grace is real and grace is true and this gospel is a fact.
[00:06:09] Speaker B: Look at my life.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: I was the most insolent opponent against all of this. I hated it.
There's no man that's going to convince me of this gospel. It had to be God and God alone, which he begins to argue in verse 11. Look at verse 11.
For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel was preached to me, that was preached by me is not man's gospel. That phrase, man's gospel means man doesn't own this God. This gospel, it's not man's to give.
It's God's gospel. It didn't originate with any man. Notice verse 12. For I did not receive it from any man or was taught it.
No man came to me and tried to convince me of this and teach me this. As we see, as we'll see in the text, men were teaching Paul something directly in contrast to the Gospel.
But he says, but I received it
[00:07:09] Speaker B: through a revelation of Jesus Christ. And as we know, this happened on the Damascus road in Acts chapter 9, where he is miraculously converted to Christ and sent out to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: He says, this is the way this
[00:07:23] Speaker B: came about in my life.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: You want to know if the Gospel is true? Think about who I was before Christ and now. Think about who I am now in Christ as an apostle of Christ. This is a testimony that all of this is real, that all I am preaching is true. And he begins to recount his life before Christ.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Here we see. First of all, for Paul, religion was rebellion.
Notice verse 13.
For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the Church of God violently and tried to destroy it.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Now we have to make a distinction
[00:08:04] Speaker B: between the Judaizers, who are false teachers, who have affected the churches in Galatia that Paul planted.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: They were those who were saying, we accept Christ.
We accept that you should believe in Christ and trust in Christ. But that's not it. You have to add circumcision ceremonies of the law. You have to add traditions to Christ. So it's not Christ alone. It is Christ plus becoming a Jew, acting like a Jew. They want to Judaize the church, and Paul says, I want it to destroy the church. That's the version of Judaism that Paul was a part of.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: You see, Paul hated the church because
[00:08:50] Speaker A: he would say he loved the law.
He hated Jesus because he was so committed to the law. This was the version of Judaism that Paul knew.
He was an ethnic Jew, and he was extremely zealous for his heritage and his people. But he was also a Pharisee.
Pharisees were influenced by rabbis that interpret the law, and then they would apply the law and their interpretations of the law and their applications of the law became rule. And so they looked to their rabbis, their traditions, for what was right and wrong and how they should live.
The rabbis would come up with rules in light of their interpretation of the law, that you could only walk a
[00:09:40] Speaker B: certain distance on a Sabbath, and they
[00:09:43] Speaker A: would calculate the steps and the miles.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: Their rabbis would come up with things
[00:09:50] Speaker A: like, you can't help your neighbor get
[00:09:52] Speaker B: his ox out of a ditch on
[00:09:54] Speaker A: the Sabbath, because that would be breaking the Sabbath, but what about loving your neighbor? And so the rabbis would rule on these Things and their rulings became law. And Paul says, that's the kind of Jew I was.
I was a Pharisee of Pharisees. And he will say in Acts, according to the strict manner of the law. The rules I adhered by were the most strictest rules.
They were harsh, they were disciplined.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: But according to our interpretation of the law, Paul would say it meant we had to hate Jesus because Jesus was a blasphemer.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, and in light of the law, he deserved to die.
This is the group Paul was a part of, those who killed Jesus. And we see in the Book of Acts he's working for the same court that tried Jesus. He goes to the Sanhedrin and he gets papers. He's a hitman.
To go out and arrest Christians who are meeting and have many of them killed.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: At the stoning of Stephen. Paul is there.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: They're throwing coats at his feet. He's holding the coats of men who are tossing rocks on the head of Stephen as he is crying out, forgive them. They know not what they do. He is there at the martyrdom of Stephen because he's so influential.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: He's working his way up this version of Judaism. He is a Pharisee of the Pharisees who hates the church and wants to stamp it out. He says, that's who I was in verse 14. He says, I was advancing in this Judaism. Look at verse 14. Beyond many of my own age, many of my contemporaries among my people, he was a rising star.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: You want to know the future of Phariseeism or this sect of Judaism? You look at the Apostle Paul.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: He's the logo.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: He's the guy who's going to lead it all one day. He is right. Notice I was extremely zealous for all these traditions of my father or of my father's. He was also. He studied under one of the best teachers, teachers of the law. It was as though he went to the Harvard of Old Testament studies. And he had the best mentors. And this is who he was. And it all led him to hate Jesus, to look back and say, this kook who claimed to be the Messiah, he deserved to die. And now all of his followers who are chasing after him and saying he rose from the dead and they're empowered by the spirit of God. That is foolishness, and it deserves to be wiped off of the planet. That's who Paul was.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: He was religious, but his religion was rebellion.
And it reminds us that we can be sincere about things like religion and be sincerely wrong.
Sincerity does not determine if it's right.
Only Christ does.
But Paul unpacks his religious resume here. And you have to understand he's doing this not to say this is why I got saved.
[00:13:25] Speaker A: He's doing this to say this is
[00:13:27] Speaker B: why I should have never been saved.
I was opposing Christ with everything within me.
My intellect, my influence, my goals and plans were to oppose Christ and his church.
And if you're here today and you say God saved me because and you insert there anything other than the grace of God, you don't know the grace of God.
God doesn't save us because of our goodness.
No, he saves us in spite of our goodness.
And so often our religion is rebellion.
You see, you don't have to be running wild, just some vile hedonist pursuing pleasure to be wicked.
No, you can be like myself.
I grew up a Southern Baptist brat.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: Like I was at the church every
[00:14:31] Speaker B: single time the doors were open and they were open a lot.
Sunday morning Sunday school worship.
Probably some meeting in the middle of the day, Bible drills and then something called discipleship training at night and then another worship service and then Wednesday, growing up mission friends, Ras Ga's.
I know what WMU is. I know what the foreign mission board is acting.
And all of that.
So many times in my life kept me from Christ.
Those are good things.
But I used them to cover up a rebellious heart that was just kind of going through the motions.
My religion was rebellion because I was thinking this is what makes God happy with me.
I took my Sunday school quarterlies and stored them in my closet and would not ever throw.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: I never read them, but I would not throw them away.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: I wouldn't allow my mom to throw them away.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: Why? I thought that was bad.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: I slept with a Bible under my pillow every single night. Night.
That's who I was.
Because I was trying to make God happy.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Trying to use religion to cover up a wickedness in my own heart. And so many times it is those of us who are religious that need.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: You can't quantify grace, but sometimes we need more grace than the most wicked because it has to penetrate through such self righteousness.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: And that's who Paul is. Hey, I was very religious. And all my religion was being used to destroy the things of God.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: This is our plans, but God often has different plans. Notice as we continue verse 15, we see our plans and God's plan of grace.
Notice this is who I was. I was a rebellious religious tyrant.
But when, But when?
When the time was right.
He says, if you're a Christian here today, you. You know what that. But when means in your own life as you think about who you were at the right time. He who set me apart. This phrase means to ordain for use
[00:17:29] Speaker A: and it's used of Old Testament instruments that were in the temple that were
[00:17:34] Speaker B: set apart to God.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: He says at the right time.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: When God, who had set me apart
[00:17:40] Speaker A: for his use and notice when he
[00:17:42] Speaker B: did this, before I was born.
[00:17:47] Speaker A: He set me apart before I was born.
Now, before Paul was born, what had he done to be set apart?
[00:17:56] Speaker B: Nothing.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: And then after Paul is born, what has he done to be set apart?
[00:18:06] Speaker B: Nothing. Only rebellion.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: He deserved to be left in his sin and to die and go to hell.
Before
[00:18:16] Speaker B: he had done nothing, God had set him apart. God had a plan.
And this one who had a plan. Notice the text continues.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: Who called me?
[00:18:25] Speaker B: The word means summoned by his grace.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: This is the unmerited favor of God. Despite what we deserve. We deserve hell. We deserve judgment for our sin. But God gives us grace and he gives us mercy.
Despite what we deserve, despite what we've earned. Paul deserved to be left as this religious terrorist who opposed Christ his whole life and went to hell. But he says, no, God had a different plan. That was my plan.
God had a different plan and it was a plan of grace. Unmerited favor. Notice when he was pleased. This means good pleasure. Or when he decided, when his will came to an existence, to reveal his son to me. You see, Paul had a plan to destroy the church. God had a plan in eternity past to make him the biggest proponent of the church that we've ever known.
We see Paul's plans, but here we see God's plans. And God's plan notice was to reveal his son to me. This is how grace shows up in our lives.
It's not generic do goodism or just kind of going through the motions. It's not even knowing the Scriptures.
Paul knew the Old Testament and he knew it well. He knew the Old Testament enough that he would probably get you to doubt your faith today if you allowed him to teach the Old Testament law, he would convince you that Jesus was a coke, that Jesus deserved to die. That's who he was.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: But on this day, by the grace of God, as he is headed to Damascus to kill Christians, God knocks him off his horse and Acts, Chapter nine says he was blinded and he heard the voice of Christ saying, why are you, Saul, persecuting me?
Jesus revealed himself personally to Paul and he was blinded.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: And from that moment on, he talks about seeing the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ on this day. This was God's plan all along for Paul and nothing on this day could stop it. And you've got to understand, Paul was trying to stop it.
That morning when Paul got up and
[00:20:55] Speaker B: ate a bagel and drank coffee sitting around the table, he didn't do that. But you get the point, right? He ate breakfast.
He wasn't imagining, you know, what these Christians might be, right?
[00:21:10] Speaker A: I think today will be the day
[00:21:12] Speaker B: that I try a church out.
That's not what he was doing that morning when he woke up.
No. He was making plans in his head to go and have Christians imprisoned to
[00:21:28] Speaker A: stamp out the church.
He didn't say, you know, today I think I'll throw it all away.
All of my achievement, who I am, all of the recognition that I've earned. I think I'll just today throw that all away for this Christianity stuff.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: No.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: In Acts chapter nine, when he sets out on the day that God saves him, it is said he is breathing
[00:21:51] Speaker B: fire against the church.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: He is like a wild beast, snorting and pawing to go out and destroy the church. And as he is headed to arrest Christians, Jesus personally shows up and stops him in his tracks, literally stops him in his tracks and blinds him. He cannot see until Anias baptizes him.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: God had plans for Paul and God had plans for you and I. When we came to faith in Christ, Paul becomes the one who is the greatest enemy of the church. Makes the greatest impact we've ever seen. He wrote most of, we might even say most of the Bible, most of the New Testament.
The greatest missionary the church has ever known.
Many have said no other event besides the cross, resurrection and Pentecost has had as much effect on Christianity as the conversion of Paul. That was God's plan.
And the day you got saved, you had plans, too.
God had different plans.
Thank God he had different plans.
You may have been like C.S. lewis.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: You're going to meet with a friend
[00:23:09] Speaker B: over coffee and debate them. That Christianity isn't true, it's wrong. You had all your arguments planned out. If they say this, I'll say this.
You may have planned, I'm going to go to church to appease my parents.
That was your plan for the day.
And you had a list of excuses of why you would never follow Jesus.
Just sort of cramped your life.
Can't give in to that Christianity thing. I got too many things I really want to do with my life.
I'll never forget sitting on a metal chair in my dad's welding shop and I was Sitting there thinking about my life. It was a break, wasn't being lazy. But I was sitting there reflecting on my life, and I remember thinking, what am I going to do?
And I wanted to make a lot of money.
I wanted to eventually take over my dad's business. And that's what I wanted to do.
And I'll never.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: I could take you back to the
[00:24:10] Speaker B: place and show you exactly what I was looking at on the floor when I thought, this gospel is true.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: And if this gospel is true, what
[00:24:22] Speaker B: else matters in this world?
[00:24:25] Speaker A: And in that moment, I said, I
[00:24:26] Speaker B: will give myself over to preaching this gospel. I'll never forget it. That day I woke up, headed in one direction, and God stopped me in my tracks and sent me in a totally different direction.
And if you went back to my high school teachers and said, this guy's a pastor now and he's preaching to
[00:24:46] Speaker A: a few hundred people every week, they
[00:24:49] Speaker B: would say, you're lying.
There's no way that's happening.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: I've told the story before.
[00:24:56] Speaker B: I tried my best Ms. Daugherty, to fail her English lit class because I would not recite a poem.
She said, you have to recite this poem or you will fail. I said, no, I have enough good
[00:25:11] Speaker A: grades to get me by.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: I can still fail.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: She said, I will decide to fail
[00:25:15] Speaker B: you if you do not get up there and recite this poem.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: And if you told her I was
[00:25:20] Speaker B: doing this right now, she would say, what in the world?
[00:25:22] Speaker A: The first time I read scripture in
[00:25:25] Speaker B: church, I was shaking to death.
I had plans, praise God. He had different plans.
And you got to think about that the way. Same way in your life when you became a Christian, when you got saved.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: You see, you might be sitting here today and saying, I never had this Damascus Road experience.
Yes, you did. It was just on another street.
God radically saved you.
You didn't want to be saved.
And that's the grace of God. That's the mercy of God, that we don't hold anything up to him and say, this is who I want to be. This is what I want to do. Unless he puts that in our hearts. And then we say, yes, this is all that matters, the glory of Christ. And that's what happens to Paul. And he says, when this happened, notice verse 16 continues. I didn't consult anyone. You want to say that this was all about men.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: And the apostles in Jerusalem.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: I had nothing to do with them. And we'll see next chapter. He didn't really like them very much. Verse 17.
Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me. But I went away to Arabia and I returned again to Damascus. Now think about this. He goes to the places where he was trying to stamp out the church and they would know who he was.
And he shows up and he's all of a sudden preaching the gospel.
He shows up and he's going into the synagogue declaring the good news of Jesus Christ. And if you're a Christian, you're scared to death.
This man has been killing Christians and now he's in a pew next to me.
What in the world is going on? This is a trick, right? He's a spy.
[00:27:12] Speaker B: Notice verse 18. Then after three years, finally, after doing
[00:27:16] Speaker A: that, think about that time.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: He's preaching the gospel.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: He's going. He's associating with the church there. He's making disciples. He himself is being discipled.
[00:27:25] Speaker B: Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas. Now, this is the apostle Peter.
And I remained with him for 15 days. Now, there is a sense in which maybe his gospel is being confirmed. Here Peter said, I hear about your ministry. Let's hang out. Verse 19.
But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: It's not as though I got in a room with all the apostles and they convinced me of things to believe.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: No, I was with Peter for 15 days. And then in verse 20, in what I am writing to you before God, I do not lie. He makes a vow here before the Lord.
I'm not lying before the Lord.
And remember, the Holy Spirit is pinning these words. This is also the Spirit's testimony. This is true. Verse 21.
Then I went into the regions of Syria and Sicilia and I was still unknown in person.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: So there wasn't Facebook, there wasn't Twitter,
[00:28:30] Speaker B: there's no Instagram, there's no TikTok.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: Paul's just out preaching the Gospel in
[00:28:36] Speaker B: these churches, in the churches in Judea, Jerusalem, the home base of operation.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: All they're doing is hearing this apostle who used to try to kill us. He's preaching the gospel.
That's all they knew of me. I had no interaction with them. I was still unknown in person.
Notice verse 23. 0 in they only were hearing it
[00:29:04] Speaker B: said, he who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy. That was all they knew about me,
[00:29:13] Speaker A: is that the one who once tried
[00:29:15] Speaker B: to destroy this is now preaching it.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: He's declaring it with boldness. And we even see in Acts, he's. He's being chased out of cities he now is suffering for the gospel he's preaching. And notice what they do. Verse 24. And they glorified God because of me.
We go back to Acts, chapter nine.
[00:29:37] Speaker B: We see everyone's confused. The word confounded is used.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: They were confounded that the Apostle Paul is now preaching the gospel. And now Paul is leveraging that testimony to subtly rebuke the Galatians. He says, I want you to know what you're doing when you call into question my testimony.
You are questioning the grace of God.
You are minimizing God's glory in my conversion.
God is glorified through grace and mercy. And now you're questioning that. You're questioning what God has done by
[00:30:16] Speaker B: his grace and mercy.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: I mean, this would be the equivalent of a high ranking Muslim terrorist member of Al Qaeda, all of a sudden
[00:30:27] Speaker B: becoming an American patriot.
Make America great again.
That would be insane. We would say that's a trick.
That's a trick.
Same thing going on with Paul. But they step back and they say that's what God does. By his grace.
God takes the worst of us and saves us by his grace through the gospel, through the blood of Christ, through the righteousness of Christ, through the resurrection
[00:30:54] Speaker A: of Christ, which Paul would give himself
[00:30:56] Speaker B: over to preach to his dying day
[00:30:58] Speaker A: and even suffer much for.
He says, you're robbing God of his glory by questioning what he has done in my life. It took God to do this, not a man.
[00:31:11] Speaker B: And we have to understand that our lives are to give credibility to the gospel.
And so often we get in the church and we think we deserve to be here.
And Paul's combating that in Galatians. He's saying, no, no, it's not as
[00:31:31] Speaker A: though Jesus got you to the door of the house.
[00:31:35] Speaker B: And before he turned around to us and said, now before we go into my Father's house, y' all gotta act right.
And when we get in there, if you don't act right, we'll kick you out.
That's not the grace of the gospel.
Grace of God gets you to the house and keeps you in the house.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: But Paul says to add things to the gospel once you get in the house is to minimize God's glory.
If God saves us by his grace and then we get in the church and we say, and now you got to do all these things to keep yourself saved. You got to do all these things to stay here. You got to do all these things to make God happy. We are minim. We're pushing down his glory. No, we are a people who always Maximize God's grace, and in doing so, notice they glorified God because of me. Don't you want others to glorify God because of you? How do you do that?
You don't all of a sudden say, I know how to act because I'm
[00:32:35] Speaker B: a part of this.
I got the right brand of politics, whether it's right or left.
I got the right brand of theology.
[00:32:46] Speaker A: I'm a good mom, I'm a good dad. I read all the right books.
[00:32:50] Speaker B: I post all the right inspirational quotes.
I know all the good podcasts.
[00:32:56] Speaker A: And you begin to create this Persona
[00:32:59] Speaker B: to the world around you.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: Those people that you interact with on a daily basis who need Christ, you begin to communicate to them. You got to take on this brand to be a part of what God is doing.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: It's a form of legalism.
No, Paul could.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Paul, let's just. Let's just admit Paul was a better
[00:33:20] Speaker B: Christian than any of us here.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: And he was a man who often said, what I want to do, I don't do, and what I don't do, I should be doing.
[00:33:35] Speaker B: Who's going to deliver me from this?
Jesus Christ? There's no condemnation in him.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: He would always go back to Christ. It was not about himself.
Even when he's defending himself, he doesn't defend himself.
No, Paul would say this.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: In First Timothy, chapter one, I was an insolent opponent of the gospel. I was a persecutor of the church. And he would say these words, I am the chief of sinners.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: Paul says, in the hall of fame
[00:34:11] Speaker B: of sinners, I'm at the top of the list. I'm on the front page.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: I'm the COVID of that book.
I am the worst of sinners. I know.
And how do you live in the grace of God? You do it this way.
You remember you yourself, the worst sinner that you know you are.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: You say, well, I'm not Paul.
But you know in your heart what you're capable of, right?
You see God's common grace, it holds down our sin so often, and we express it differently in different ways, to different extents, but we're all capable of what Paul was capable of. Here we are.
And you know that about yourself.
[00:34:59] Speaker A: You feel that. And if you're a Christian, you'd still feel it. You're struggling with your sin, and you know what you're capable of. You are the worst sinner that you know.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: And you know what that's to lead us to?
Not wallowing in sin, but saying, jesus is the only Savior I know.
That's where you live.
That's how we live, in grace.
We don't look around at others and say, I'm better than them. I've done it better than them.
[00:35:29] Speaker A: I know more than no, I'm the worst sinner.
[00:35:31] Speaker B: And if it weren't by the grace of God, I would have gone as far away from Christ as I possibly could. He just was gracious to keep me from doing that.
John Newton, who wrote the song Amazing Grace, was once the captain of a slave ship and then, because of the grace of God, became an abolitionist and worked in that realm. We've seen the movies, we read the books.
We sing the song of Amazing Grace.
And toward the end of his life, it's believed that his memory began to fade.
[00:36:19] Speaker A: And he would say, as my memory
[00:36:21] Speaker B: fades, I still know two things, two of the most important things that anybody could know.
And it's this.
I am a great sinner and Christ is a great savior. That's where we live.
It's not, I'm a sinner. Christ saved me, and now I got it together.
No, we remember who we were in our hearts. We could have been the worst of the worst, but God's grace saved us.
And we live there, but we also pray there.
I want you to consider, as we come to a close today, who you would say is the furthest from God's grace in your life, what friend, what family member have you maybe just given up on?
You stop sharing the gospel with them. You're not praying for them anymore.
You just say, they're too far gone.
I imagine when Stephen is being stoned and he cries out, forgive them, just like Jesus, they know not what they do.
There were persecutors standing around, and maybe Paul heard that.
Maybe Paul looks back on that and says, I was saved by Christ. But also the prayers of the church.
Can you imagine the believers huddled together
[00:37:44] Speaker A: and thinking, the only way we can get out of this persecution, the only way we can get out of the fury of this tyrant Paul, who's trying to kill us, is if he gets saved.
[00:37:59] Speaker B: And they began to pray that Paul would get saved, and he did.
And I wonder if there's someone in your life who's the same way and you're on the verge of stopping to pray for them because you haven't seen God work.
Maybe today's the day.
Maybe that leftist couple with the flags out in their yard as you drive by, maybe that.
Let's go the other way, Republican, who you say, well, they've traded politics for Christianity.
Maybe today's the day they believe the gospel because you're here praying for them.
Maybe that single guy who will show up at work Tuesday this week, still a little hungover from the weekend, and you're thinking, oh, why live your life that way? What if today you prayed that he would get saved and Tuesday he'll have a plan on the way to work, and yet God will have another plan, and he'll use you to share the gospel with Him.
Who would you pray for today?
Those who might even be in this moment rejecting Christ, C.S. lewis, the apostle Paul and the Hound of Heaven, the Great Angler would see fit to glorify his name by saving even the worst.
