Where have you expanded your ways of thinking recently? There's been a way something you've realized. It's a lot better than you thought it was. Lately in the last year, I've learned to eat Brussels sprouts.
Okay, I always thought Brussels sprouts were gross. As a kid, like they're green, they're slimy, like you don't want to do those. It might have also been, I'm a child of the 1980s. It might have been the fact that Ernest scared stupid, those weird little trolls that he said, they would like Brussels sprouts when they're coming out of the ground and if you're a kid in the 1980s, you do whatever Ernest B world tells you to do.
But I went over, I was at the end zone about a year ago, and I'm trying to eat healthy and I had fish tacos. And there was like Brussels sprouts like sliced in there. And so I started eating, I've cooked so many Brussels sprouts in the last year and they're healthy. I mean, I could get a positive gain inside of this.
I'd expand my way of thinking that Brussels sprouts are not that bad. Now in some places, when I go to the deer camp, I'm the Brussels sprouts guy. Like you ever cooked Brussels sprouts for 20 people before? Like that's my role now.
I never would have thought of that a year ago. That was the Brussels sprouts guy. No, I was in my early 20s and I was first beginning my life with Jesus. I had to expand my way of thinking.
I did not like to read a lot of the new test mix. I was not a big fan of the Apostle Paul. And sounds kind of weird, but I associated him with people that I've used to be judgmental, to be less than gracious, with people that I'd had a bad experience with, that were one of the reasons why the preacher's kid doesn't follow Jesus until they're 20 years old. But I realized that was, and thankfully, just a couple of years after that, I realized that was wrong.
And I began to grow into love Paul. But over the last couple of years, this fascination has kind of grown even more. I did a deeper devotional reading of Acts a few years ago. And I'm just reading through this story.
And I'm a history nerd, an Axis history. And I'm sitting there and I'm watching this man. You know, Paul changes his way of doing things a lot. This is incredibly interesting.
And so over the last couple of years, I just keep attached to that. And I keep seeing it more and more and more. And then a few weeks ago, when I realized, I always want to talk about Paul, and the word is his missional flexibility. I knew I wanted to talk about that, to finish out this series.
And what does it mean to follow Jesus in the 21st century? But I decided to do a chronological read of all of Paul's ministry. It ended up being like half of the book of Acts, and all of Paul's letters, which are around a third of New Testament. I got a reading plan.
I kind of organized them together as far as the time was concerned. And I powered through, I can a week and a half. See how is he as flexible as I think he might be flexible? Not flexible as in changing what he believes, but flexible in changing the way that he reaches people.
And he is incredibly flexible. He's incredibly flexible though for the sake of the mission. He continually adapted in order to reach people. So we've been talking about following Jesus the 21st century.
What does that mean? And the first week we talked about apathy, and how in our culture and our world now, back when I was a kid, you hear the church will talk about, they talked about the 21st century, and they're like, you know, everybody's gonna be an atheist. They're not even gonna believe in Jesus Christ. And we realized that's not so much the case now.
The issue's not disbelief, the issue is apathy. The issue's not have no problem with the God, but I just don't think he's that important to me. That changes the way that we shape and shift, but apathy is like this disease. So it's running through culture, affecting us at every single level.
And maybe the role of us as the church is to speak beyond apathy for the sake of the whole person, not just this one thing. Last week we talked about mature faith. And what does it mean to have a mature faith? And what role might that play?
And that we realize that our call as Christians is to simply be imitators of Jesus, as Jesus is following the Father. And that what it might mean if we are being people worthy of imitation, and how that could possibly cut through these feelings of apathy that just pervade our culture. Now, we did this by talking about a phrase that visible faith is viable faith. That we don't live out our faith in private, but our faith is a public enterprise.
And a public affair that should be affecting things and people in the world around us. And today we're gonna talk about sharing that. We're gonna talk about, though, what Paul, we learned from Paul was missional decision-making. Why our own story of our personal experience needs to be bigger than just us.
Paul shaped and shifted his ministry and the role that his personal experience played through his entire life. And the first thing that we learned, when we first meet him in the book of Acts, we learned this that Paul knew what he believed. And in verse nine, chapter one through nine, is our first place we find ourselves in scripture today. This is what it says, meanwhile, Saul.
Now, Saul, most Jewish people that lived in both the Roman culture and the Jewish culture had two names. We meet him here with this Jewish name, Saul. His ministry began more and more and more among non-Jewish people, but he started going by his Roman name, Paul. So you see this little confusion point, that's once there.
It's just like, you know, he's not gonna have to nickname him, he has a kid when he goes in other places. But this is what it says. Meanwhile, Saul was uttering threats with every breath and was eager to kill the Lord's followers. So he went to the High Priest, he requested letters, addressed the synagogues and Damascus, asking for their cooperation and the arrests of any followers of the way that he found there.
He wanted to bring them, both men and women back to Jerusalem and chains. As he was approaching Damascus on this mission, a light from heaven suddenly shone down around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? Who are you, Lord Saul, ask the voice reply, I am Jesus, the one you're persecuting.
Now get up and go into the city and you'll be told what you must do. Then he was Saul stood speechless for they heard the sound of someone's voice, but Saul, no one, Saul picked himself up off the ground, but when he opened his eyes, he was blind. So his companions led him by the hand to Damascus and he remained there blind for three days and did not eat or drink. We find out Paul, as part of the Pharisees, that he was a young Jewish religious leader, that he was incredibly educated, his family, Jewish from a town called Tarsus, his family most likely was one of means, because they were able to afford to send their son as he's younger to Jerusalem to study under the leading Pharisees.
Paul is essentially an aristocrat in the Jewish Roman world. On this mission, he becomes passionate about rooting out followers of Jesus, because he saw them as so dangerous. In scripture, it talks about him being angry. One of the words that used to describe his anger, his every breath is the word that the physical, like huffing of like a rampaging bull.
Like he ever seen someone who's so angry, it changes their physicality, like their face turns red, their voice changes, all these sorts of things like Paul is just, is this angry Paul? The word that describes Paul across his entire life is the word zeal. Paul had incredible zeal. But Flannery O'Connor, the great son and writer, said this about Paul.
She said, I reckon the Lord knew the only way he could make a Christian of Paul was to knock him off a horse. Paul was very, very, very focused. Now we look at this story, if this story would happen to you or I or this story would happen to someone in our culture today, we'd be like, hey, we take about this incredible thing that happened, oh, this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened, this is completely a new thing, but we don't have a language to talk about it. Do you have a way to talk about this?
I can see, this is like, on the history channel, ancient aliens kind of stuff. Like we don't have language to describe this, but Paul, remember he was a Jewish religious leader, Paul knew exactly what was going on in this moment. If you read this story of Damascus, you also look back in scripture and you look at the call of Isaiah, you call it, they call it the Zechil, the call of Elijah, the call of these Old Testament prophets, they have this visionary experience with the manifested presence of God. You know, the moment this starts happening, Paul falls off the horse, Paul's not thinking, what's going on, Paul's probably thinking, finally this is happening.
My zeal has gotten me to this place where I've earned this experience with God. Like Paul even knew it, we find it in scripture, all this stuff is going on and Paul cries out, who are you Lord? He knows that he is having an experience with the living God and then he said, I'm Jesus, the one you are persecuted. Speaks directly to Paul.
Paul's face to face with the living God, he's blind for three days and he realizes that things aren't as he expected them to be. We talked a couple weeks ago, one thing was religious and what that word means and there's that phrase that people might say sometimes, I'm spiritual, I'm not religious. We look at our own faith life as a private thing. We don't talk about religion in good company, that whole unspoken rule, don't talk about religion or politics with somebody.
Like we say, we keep our mouth shut to keep the peace sometimes. So this isn't the way that Paul would have thought that anyone in the first century would have thought. In Latin the word we get, our word religion comes from, is religio, it means to bind, to tie together. In the first century, every single person, not just a Jew, not a Gentile, not just Paul, but every single person, they saw their faith system as the thing that bound together, how they explained how the whole world worked.
Their faith, their religio was about economics, it was about civic life, it was about peace and provision and family and life and love and everything in between. It was the stability that held life together. Their religion was the way you saw and understood all the purposes of the world to actually be in truth. So as Paul's having this experience, he's not converting from Judaism to Christianity.
He's not moving from I believe this and then now I believe that. He's not making this hard transition that we might think he's making. But Paul's understanding is he's seeing the narrowness of his way of thinking, that he has had misplaced zeal, that his zeal is now being redirected by God towards a completely different enterprise. We see him, he's behaving the same way he's always behaved, but the focus of that behavior is radically changed.
Paul was hard-headed before, and I hate to tell you, you even have to experience, Paul is still hard-headed. He's kind of always hard-headed. He's a little bit of a jerk, but he's that person that's so passionate about something, he comes off as a jerk. Like Paul was abrasive before this, and Paul was actually kind of abrasive for the rest of his life.
Like him and the Apostle Peter, it's kind of his two guys that just don't put the two of them in a room together, because it doesn't work out well. But Paul realizes the narrowness of his thinking of the presence of the living God and what that does in God, completely redirects this zeal and focuses it on something else. This personal experience was an expansion of Paul's understanding. This personal experience was the invasion of the presence of God into his heart in the full way.
I think back to the store from John chapter four of Jesus and the woman at the well, where he kind of talks to her and kind of confronts her sin, and then she runs back to town and says, come meet this guy who told me everything about myself. The presence of God invades their being. Paul trusted his personal experience, because it was just that, it was personal. It was his that met him at the center of the right where he is.
The second thing we learned about Paul, is that Paul learned he had to adapt, he had to change this personal call that God gave him, made his life different, 920. Just a few verses down, we find out about Paul. So he goes back to Damascus, a man named Anais had a similar vision from God. He says, hey, listen, so your worst enemy is coming to town, but I talked with him on the road.
So you bring him into your house for three days and let him hang out there because he has to do some things with me and his heart, and then you pray for him, and then you're gonna send him off on his way. So Anais says, okay, God, that makes sense. We read this, Paul, the 920. And immediately he began preaching about Jesus in the synagogue saying he is indeed the son of God.
Paul speaking simply to the reality of his experience and what that actually means. He's going to a place where Pharisees do. Pharisees go to the synagogues and Pharisees teach about God. Paul's simply doing what he has always done, but he has a new message.
This new message goes to an old place and it goes to familiar people. And for the next 10 or 15 years, Paul kind of goes dark. He pops up a couple of times, but really and truly he goes dark. He has to be formed into this person.
And so all sorts of folks love to have theories about what this looks like, but for lack of better and first time, he goes dark. During that time, he means a name named Barnabas, he resurfaces and Antioch, Barnabas goes and finds him. Wherever he was hiding out, brings him into Antioch, he becomes a teacher and the church in Antioch. And the church in Antioch identify Paul and Barnabas is a missionary, he's to send out.
And so you can look in the back of your Bible and you have all these little maps and stuff that are there. And when you're a kid in church and you don't want to pay attention to the sermon or you're not going to pay attention to the sermon right now and you're looking at your maps. Like there's maps of those journeys. The first time they go out and it's incredible, it's big.
They come back to Antioch, they report on this. They get called in Jerusalem because they're getting trouble because they're hanging out with Gentiles. They go back out on their second missionary journey. The second journey is what we see Paul's adaptation begin to take forth.
The first place is in chapter 16. He is in the church in Philippi, a book of New Testament, book of Philippians, was a letter to the church that he founded there. But this is this interaction he had with a woman named Lydia, chapter 16 verse 13 through 15. On the Sabbath, we went a little way outside the city to a river bank where we thought people would be meeting for prayer.
And we sat down to speak with some women who had gathered there. One of them was Lydia from Thyretire, a merchant of expensive purple coffee worshiped God. And she listened to us, the word opened her heart and she accepted what Paul was saying. And she was baptized along with other members for household.
And she asked us to be her guests. If you agree that I am a true believer in the Lord, she said, come and stay at my home. And she urged us until we agreed. So what we can find about Philippi is just a couple of detail points here that for them to go to this river to find people means that there were not enough Jewish people in this town to form a synagogue.
And synagogues had to have 10 Jewish men to be convened. And so when there weren't enough Jews to have a synagogue, one of the practices of the Jewish faith that goes back hundreds of years was on the Sabbath. They would go back and go down to the river to pray. That was their thing, that's what they did.
So they Paul and Barnas, they get into this town, they realize, hey, there's not enough Jews here for synagogue. We know where they're going to be. They go down there. They told us what they said, but it doesn't.
We find this woman who responds. And as a merchant, she allows Paul and his crew to come into her home. They start this church in Philippi out of her house. But with Paul, we're gonna send lessons here.
That's the same message he had. But it was in new places. There's information from there, still the Jewish people, but he had to go to new places to find new ways to reach out to them. In the next chapter, we begin to see Paul transition a lot to the show up in Athens, which is the seat of intellectual capacity for the ancient Near East and for the Roman Empire.
It's like, this is where the smartest people in the world are, and Paul shows up. Remember that Paul was an aristocrat. Paul was heavily educated. Paul knew the ways of court.
Roman world, but also in the religious world, in the Jewish world. He's an environment that he's familiar with, but he comes up to this. So verse 18 through 28, this is what we read. And he had a debate there with some of the Epicurean and stoic philosophers.
And when he told them about Jesus and his resurrection, they said, what's this babbler trying to say with these strange ideas he's picked up? Others said he seems to be preaching about some foreign gods. They took him to the high council of the city, come and tell us about this new teaching they said. You're saying some rather strange things, and we want to know what it's about.
They should be explaining the Athenians as well as the foreigners living in Athens, seem to spend all their time discussing the latest ideas. So Paul standing before the council addressing his followers, men of Athens, I noticed that you were very religious in every way. But as I was walking along, I saw your many shrines. And one of your altars had this inscription on it to an unknown god.
This god whom you worship without knowing is the one I'm telling you about. He is the god who made the world and everything in it. And since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn't live in man-made temples. And human hands can't serve his needs, for he has no needs.
He gives himself life and breadth to everything, and he satisfies every need. From one man, he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries. His purpose was for the nations to seek after God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.
For in him, we live and move and exist. And as some of your own poets have said, we are his offspring. Paul goes to these people who have no Jewish framework for who God is. Their binding is extremely different from Paul.
But he goes in and speaks and tells them the story of God, the story of creation, the story of God's people, and the story of Jesus in a way that absolutely makes sense to who they are and where they are. You've probably heard me say before, Jesus always meets us in our context. We see Paul doing that with the Athenians. He's telling them essentially, you've got all of these things on your life, but none of them are actually adequate.
It's the same message that Paul has always had, but he's going to new places. And he's meeting and interacting with new people. So Paul's ministry begins to grow and grow. He goes on a third missionary journey, and while he's out there, he begins to feel these urging in his heart that he needs to go back to Jerusalem.
He begins telling people, I need to go back to Jerusalem. I've got to go back to Jerusalem and all his friends and everyone that he loves and saying, you can't do that, they will kill you there. Like you show your face there, it means death. And Paul couldn't explain it, he even had this prophet named Agabah show up and I take his belt off and wrap his hands with it and say, this is what they will do to you if you go back there.
But Paul keeps on saying, I've got to go, I've got to go. I've got to go. And in the midst of all this, he goes back, he gets arrested, everything that said happens is going to happen. And Paul is sitting there in jail, he goes, okay God, you told me I've got to come here, but I need to know why this happens.
It's 23 verse 11, if you have a paper Bible with red letters in it, this shows up in red letters. Very words of God to Paul. That night the Lord appeared to Paul and said, be encouraged Paul, just as you have been a witness to me here in Jerusalem. You must preach the good news in Rome as well.
Paul has spent years of his career trying to find a way to get to Rome. He wrote the book of Romans, having never been there. It seems like I really want to come, y'all, I just can't find a way, I can't find an excuse, I can't find a manner or a method to get to you. And how Jesus is presenting his here, you're in chains for me, you're in chains so you can get to Rome.
And other translations that usually even more legal language for Paul to understand why he's put in this place, why God's asking to do it, and for everybody to comfort it in this place. Verse 25, 11-12, it's the last thing we'll read today, but it's just the beginning of the story of Paul and his imprisonment and his eventual death. But 25 verse 11-12, if I have done something worthy of death, I don't refuse to die. But if I am innocent, no one has a right to turn me over to these men to kill me.
I appeal to Caesar. Festus conferred with his advisors, he was the Roman governor of Judea. So Festus confirmed his advisors didn't reply very well. You have appealed to Caesar and to Caesar, you will go.
See, Paul had something that was very unique in his day for a Jewish person. Paul was a citizen of his home city, Tarsus, which afforded him a level of luxury and a level of privilege. But Paul was also a Roman citizen by birth, this was an odd thing. Now just because you're born inside the empire, doesn't mean you're a citizen of the empire.
And Paul had this and that meant that people had to treat him in a very unique and certain way. So it says Jewish accusers label like through false accusations, he gets in front of the government and realizes, hey, I have the right to appeal to Caesar. If that's the case, they're going to run me up every single court in order to try me. And what we see in the book of Acts is every single time Paul was brought with a bit before a new court, he just starts preaching and starts telling the story of Jesus.
And almost every one of the situations, you have these people that he's been placed in a level of influence and begin thinking about what Paul was saying and not in a legal way, but in a spiritual way. Paul's saying the exact same message he's always had to new people and even new places. Paul knew that he had to adapt his method for the sake of the people that Jesus put in front of him. He had a deep held belief that Jesus was putting him in specific places for specific reasons.
And the only thing that he had to do was to recognize what that meant and it was to respond and call. See, this is where we can learn about this adaptation. This is what we can learn about what God might be calling us to doing and where God might be calling us to be. Because for Paul, it wasn't about his experience, it was about him inviting other people into their own experience.
Paul's strategy was based off the biggest needs of those he was called to reach. His ministry was to the Gentiles, to the non-jeces. This was a big shift for Paul, this is a big shift for them, this is a big shift for what everybody else was doing. They weren't Jews, they didn't have the same bindings, the same assumptions about how the world worked.
This changed Paul's conversation dramatically with people. He wasn't trying to tell them, okay, to follow Jesus, you need to be this, like hyper-Jewish, a highly educated person like I am. But instead, he followed the example of Jesus by calling them into their own experience, by willfully stepping into the reality of their life and right where they were. I mean, one of Paul's writings has become a catch phrase in the church sometimes, I have become all things to all people.
You heard this before. But this isn't a statement about universality. This isn't a statement about him saying, hey listen, I can be everything at the exact same time. What this is Paul saying is, I will be exactly who you need to be for the sake of you.
I'm willing to do nearly anything to speak to the truth of your life, right where you are, and to bring the presence of Christ into the space that you occupy right now. And for instance, is the church, global church? This is where we've missed it. We've missed the personalization of this mission of Jesus.
Oftentimes, we assume that the things that we like a lot, the things that we respond to God will be the exact same way that other people should or supposed to respond to God. And to kind of put this in work, Jack sometimes told me, hey, Chad, give me the redneck version of this. This is the redneck version of this. I don't want Johnny's Pizza, because I'm not from Monroe.
I'm not from North Louisiana. I'm from Central Louisiana. Johnny's Pizza is nasty. I think it's messy.
It can be good. It's utility, but it's not my favorite. And a lot of people from Monroe are like, that's heresy. You have to like, what kind of savage are you that you don't like Johnny's Pizza?
Here's the thing, I didn't grow up with it though. When you go home and Google this, it'll be a fantastic read. Google the Pizza Cognition Theory. It's a, I'm not joking if I'm not done.
It's a psychological phenomenon. This guy uses to talk about pizza that our first pleasant experience of something as a child will be the way that we define that for the rest of our life. And is anybody else here in North Central Louisiana? Well, I'll put forth pieces concerned.
BJ's will woke up on Johnny's any day of the week. So many times in the church, we can experience God in a powerful way. But then sadly, we spend the rest of our lives expecting everyone else to value the exact same experience that was valuable to us. And by doing that, we don't take on the mission of Jesus Christ and of going into the neighborhood and meeting them right where they are.
Sometimes we all need to get knocked off our horse. Think about that. What does it mean for us to be knocked off of our horse? To get to the point where we have a transform of experience that makes us say, I'm seeing things way too narrow.
Wow. Okay. I have even knocked off your horse. What does that mean for us?
We talk about following Jesus in the 21st century. What does it mean to reach people in the 21st century? It doesn't mean judgment. It doesn't mean narrowness.
It means being people who have been knocked off their horse and simply willing to adapt to others for the sake of them experiencing Jesus in the way that we have experienced Jesus. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for the realities and the truthfulness of your love for God. We thank you for those experiences that we have had in our lives to where we realized that, okay, I'm not thinking big enough here.
God, we realize that saying that doesn't mean that we're changing what we believe God. We understand that the depth of what we believe and what you have done for us and that makes us being willing to get over ourselves to adapt into desire more for people to know what we have that it does for them to do what we do. God following Jesus means having his personal experience with you with that personal experience being the starting point and not our ending. God, we also recognize that you probably have to knock us off our horse multiple times in our life.
And so God, we sit here in presence now. Just we take our feet out of the stars. God, we loosen our grip. We say, God, you can do with the whatever we have.
Thank you, Jesus.