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175: Paul's Mission
30 Plays16 days ago
If you've ever doubted that Jesus can change the heart, just look to the example of Paul (aka, Saul). Once renowned for his violent persecution of early Christians, Paul has a conversion experience that knocks him to the ground (literally!). Days later, he sees the light (literally!) and emerges as one of the church's great leaders. Take a listen to this week’s episode as Vicar Ryan Pfendler walks us through the heart change Paul experienced and how we can change our own hearts.
If you’d like to dig deeper, check out these discussion questions. You can complete them on your own, with your Community Group, or with family and friends.
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Transcript
Introduction and Listener Engagement
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the following podcast is a Jill dev Divine Media production.
00:00:19
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We really appreciate you coming to Normal Goes a Long Way and hitting play on this week's episode. So let's go ahead and get
Erich Honecker's Fall and Struggles
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to it. The sermon series that Messiah is doing based on the book, The Story.
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In October 1989, Eric was a man in desperate need. He had just been charged by the government with a number of high-level crimes.
00:00:43
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He had been kicked out, he and his wife had been kicked out of their own home. He'd been forced out of the hospital he was staying in onto the street, and he believed that the world wanted him dead.
Honecker's Persecution of Christians
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For those of you that don't know who this man is, Erich Honecker was the communist dictator of East Germany, and he kind of looks the part, I hate to say it. Like I tried to find, that's the nicest looking picture I could find of the guy.
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But he was a man, By the way, as the dictator of East Germany, he's the man responsible for the construction of the Berlin Wall. He's the man who enforced the shoot to kill order along that wall, that wall that divided not just communities, but families and friends and and loved ones.
Seeking Refuge and Redemption
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And he enforced the shoot to kill along that wall that anyone who tried to go from his side to the other side would be killed, making him responsible for the deaths of 300 people.
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And I don't know if you know your 20th century history, but the 20th century Communist Party was not known for its generosity and its kindness, especially not towards Christians.
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Communism was known as being one of the greatest persecutors of the church in history, and that is no different, that was no different in East Germany. But in 1989, everything changed.
00:02:15
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The communist government of East Germany collapsed, the Berlin Wall was torn down, and the people wanted Erich Honecker gone.
Parallels Between Honecker and Paul
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A writer for Christianity Today actually wrote an article about this period of history. And in it, they write that Honecker was charged with treason, embezzlement, and abuse of power.
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He was placed under house arrest. And when the government started seizing Communist Party property, Honecker was suddenly homeless. After a short hospital stay, he was forced out onto the street.
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And here's where gets interesting. With nowhere else to go and fearing that he might be killed by a mob, he turned to the Lutheran church, our church, for help.
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the persecutor, now needed help from the very people he persecuted. And wouldn't you know, but a Lutheran pastor by the name of U.A. Homer invited his former persecutor, his former enemy, into his own home to care for him and protect him and his wife.
Paul's Transformation and Mission
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How would you respond? If your greatest enemy, the one who persecuted you, showed up to your home needing your help.
00:03:49
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Today we're talking about the story of Paul, and Paul's story begins as a persecutor of the church.
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He was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of many early church Christians, the arrests of many early church Christians. He was there on the scene giving approval to and overseeing the stoning of Stephen after he preached a sermon outside of Jerusalem.
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And the authorities really liked what Paul was doing. And so they said, hey, why don't you franchise this persecution? Take it from Jerusalem and move on to to Damascus with it. And so he does. he He gets on the road and gets ready to arrest and kill more Christians in a city, in the city of Damascus.
00:04:35
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But it's on that road that that Jesus himself appears to Paul and says to Paul, why are you persecuting me?
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Paul is literally blinded by this experience. And yet in this moment, Jesus does not strike this persecutor down. He does not destroy him. Instead, he gives Paul a second chance.
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And he even says, hey, keep on going to Damascus. Keep on going to that city. You were going to persecute my people in and see what happens to you there.
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And it's here that we pick up the story in God's word.
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In Damascus, there was a disciple named Ananias. The Lord called to him in a vision. Ananias, yes, Lord, he answered. The Lord told him, go to the house of Judas on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying In a vision, he has seen a man named Ananias come and place his hands on him to restore his sight.
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Lord, Ananias said, I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your holy people in Jerusalem. And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name.
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But the Lord said to Ananias, go. This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel.
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I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. Then Ananias went to the house and entered it. Placing his hands on Paul, he said, Brother Saul.
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By the way, that was Paul's name before he started following Jesus. He went by Saul. Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here, has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.
00:06:44
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Immediately something like scales fell from Saul's eyes, and he could see again. He got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength.
00:06:59
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You cannot understand Paul's mission without understanding how the mission started.
00:07:08
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Paul was a persecutor of the church, and yet he was loved and received by the very Lord that he persecuted. Loved and received by Ananias, the very Christian he had gone to Damascus to persecute.
Lessons from Paul's Humility
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Through this experience, Paul is transformed, not just by meeting a loving and forgiving Jesus, but also by meeting a loving and forgiving Christian in the form of Ananias.
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And from this point on, Paul's life is changed. He is a man on fire for Jesus. And he takes the gospel. Oh, this guy who once was a condemner and a persecutor of the church is then commissioned by that same church to take the gospel across borders and across the sea.
00:08:08
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Talking about Paul, for me, the struggle is where do I go? Because this guy is talked about so much in the New Testament. The guy wrote most of the New Testament. So what do i focus on? I didn't know where to start with this sermon.
00:08:24
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But for me, there is one story in Paul's life that stands out above the rest.
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It happens in Acts chapter 16. And what happens is Paul and his ministry partner Silas are spreading the gospel in this area around the city of Philippi.
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And something happens that happens a lot in Paul's life. He makes a crowd of people angry with his message. And the crowd doesn't like what Paul and Silas have to say. And so they go to the government authorities and ask them to do something about these pesky Christians that had shown up in their area.
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Here we pick it up in God's word. The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas. And the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods.
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After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison And the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
00:09:29
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About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken.
00:09:43
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At once all the prison doors flew open and everyone's chains came loose. The jailer woke up and when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself because he thought the prisoners had escaped.
00:09:57
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But Paul shouted, don't harm yourself. We are all here. The jailer called for lights, rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas.
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Paul's enemy just laid down in front of him on his knees
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The persecutor now needed help from the very people he persecuted. The enemy of Jesus now needed help and mercy from a follower of Jesus.
00:10:38
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How would we respond in a situation like this?
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have you ever found yourself at night after a frustrating day ah thinking and dreaming about how you would get back at the people who frustrated you? Just me? I'll admit it. I have been in that place myself, right? Those late nights where you dream of the perfect comeback, right? If I ever cross paths with this person again, that's what I'm going to say to them and defeat them.
00:11:10
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Yeah, in that moment, In those moments, our mission for our enemy, it's not mercy. Our mission is to defeat them, to embarrass them, to turn others against them.
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And it's only by the grace of God that our enemy is not right there in front of us in that very moment, isn't it? We dream of how we would get back at those who oppose us and frustrate us. We dream of the one-liners that would embarrass them or the perfect arguments that would defeat them and turn others against them.
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Well, in this moment, Paul's enemy is before him, on his knees. And Paul has the power to defeat him, to embarrass him,
00:12:04
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to turn others, to turn the authorities, to turn his boss against him. Paul has the power to do all these things to this man. And how Paul responds in this moment will reveal Paul's mission.
00:12:20
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Back to the word. He, meaning the jailer, the jailer brought Paul and Silas out and asked, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?
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They replied, Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household. Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house.
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At that hour of the night, the jailer took them and washed their wounds. Then immediately he and all his household were baptized.
00:12:59
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Paul's mission was not to defeat his enemies or to embarrass them or to turn the world against them. No, Paul's mission was to turn enemies into friends, more specifically to turn the enemies of Jesus into followers of Jesus.
Invitation to Personal Transformation
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And why does Paul love his enemies this way? Why does he love his own jailer, his own persecutor this way? Because not that long ago in the story, Paul was the jailer.
00:13:35
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Paul was the persecutor who needed grace from the church he persecuted. Paul was the sinner in need of mercy. in fact, all throughout his life, Paul always saw himself as a sinner in need of God's mercy.
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One time he wrote a letter to his young protege, this young pastor, Timothy, And in this letter, Paul said, i thank Christ Jesus, our Lord, who has given me strength, that he considered me trustworthy, appointing me to his service.
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Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, i was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.
00:14:27
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The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.
00:14:36
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Here's a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst.
00:14:48
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Look at the humility in Paul's tone.
00:14:54
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i don't think we're used to leaders speaking this way, are we? We're used to leaders who fight for power and tell us that they deserve it and spend all their time trying to convince us that they are the best, they are the greatest, and they are worthy of their position over us.
00:15:14
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They are worthy of us following them.
00:15:19
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But Paul didn't see himself as the best or the greatest. No, Paul saw himself as the lowest.
00:15:26
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And he didn't fight for or push for or say that he was deserving of a place in church leadership. No, instead, he lived in humble disbelief that God would ever use someone like him and humble gratitude that God chose to do so.
00:15:50
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Everyone in ministry should feel that way.
00:15:54
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In Paul's mind, sin had warped him even more than it had warped his enemy. And in Paul's mind, if Jesus had grace on him, how could he not show the same grace and mercy even to his enemy? Amen.
00:16:14
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He went all over the Roman world telling people about Jesus. And you know what he got for it? He got a lot of money and a lot of praise and a lot of people liking him. Oh, no, that's not what happened, is it?
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No, what Paul got for serving Jesus was arrest, beatings, abuse, shipwrecks. And he went through those things for the very people who were abusing him and jailing him and beating him. Why would he love them like that? Because Paul never forgot the grace that Jesus had shown him.
00:16:51
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He did it because he never forgot the transformation that Christ had done in his own heart. He had passion to see broken people changed by the gospel because he remembered how the gospel had first changed him.
00:17:10
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So you've got the story and you've got the why behind the story. Paul dedicated his life to sharing the good news of Jesus with others because he never forgot what Jesus had done for him.
00:17:27
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When he compared himself to others, Paul saw himself as the worst sinner. He saw himself as the one in need of grace.
Reflecting on Christian Mission
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And it was Paul's understanding of his own ignorance and unbelief that empowered him to reach others in their ignorance and unbelief.
00:17:49
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So you know the story, and you know the why, The question is, what does Paul's story mean for you?
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I see in Paul's story an invitation and a challenge.
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God's word invites us first to see ourselves in this story. If Paul were here today preaching in this room, he would tell you that there is nothing in your past that and nothing in your present that is too big for the grace of Jesus.
00:18:31
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Maybe people have always been this way, but I think we live in a time where a lot of us are our own worst critics, aren't we? We are the ones who constantly bring up our past to ourselves. We are the ones that constantly hold our sin over our heads.
00:18:49
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We are the ones who constantly feel we are unworthy and undeserving, the ones who are are constantly haunted by what we've done.
00:19:01
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And if that is you, Paul's words in today's passage are an invitation. That Christ Jesus came to this world to save sinners, even the worst sinners.
00:19:17
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And his grace is poured out abundantly on you. Even for your worst sins. Even your worst memories.
00:19:29
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Paul would tell you that if Jesus has forgiven it, you can let go of it.
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You can let go of the sin that once chained you and walk forward in freedom and in confidence that the blood of Christ has set you free from what you could not set yourself free from.
00:19:55
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The blood of Christ has restored you and made you new when you could not do those things yourself.
00:20:03
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Paul's story is an invitation that if this guy can be transformed by Jesus, so can you.
00:20:14
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Paul's story is also a challenge.
00:20:18
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It's a challenge to see our enemies far differently from the way we've been trained to see our enemies. We've been trained to see our enemies and treat them with hate and with anger. We've been told that our enemies should be bombed rather than baptized, shot rather than saved, trampled on rather than transformed.
00:20:42
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That if you ever find your enemy in front of you on his knees, he's there for you to rub his nose in the dirt in defeat. But when Paul's enemy was in front of him, Paul showed him mercy.
00:20:58
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And he gave him the gospel.
00:21:03
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I believe that when Paul saw that jailer before him, he saw himself.
00:21:10
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A persecutor who needed help from the very people he was persecuting.
00:21:17
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A sinner in need of the gospel.
00:21:21
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And just as Ananias showed grace toward Paul and Damascus, Paul showed grace and mercy to his jailer, to his persecutor.
00:21:35
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Here's the question that Paul's story challenges us with. Will you love the enemies of God the way that you were loved? Or will you pretend that you were not once an enemy of God yourself?
00:21:51
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Will you show grace, love, and mercy to your enemies? Or will you pretend that Jesus was not gracious and loving and merciful to you?
00:22:07
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how we respond to those questions will show the world what our mission is.
00:22:15
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If we ever forget what Jesus has done for us, that's when our mission starts looking like defeating and embarrassing and turning people against our enemies.
00:22:27
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But when we recognize the depths of our own sin and the depths of our own brokenness, when we recognize how much grace Jesus has shown to us, that is when we show grace, mercy, and love to our neighbors, to our enemies, to those that don't know Jesus.
Historical and Modern Spiritual Awakenings
00:22:50
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Our mission is to show our enemies the same gospel that changed us, the same Jesus that changed us.
00:23:01
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Paul in prison. Ananias in anias and Damascus, UA Homer in East Germany. These are men who show us what the mission is.
00:23:14
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The mission looks like love, grace, and mercy, and giving the gospel to our enemies. It looks like found people who find people. You've been to a church before that talks like that?
00:23:27
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That's what the mission is. Because we are the church of the prodigal son. You remember that story? The son who who turns his back on his own father, takes his money and makes himself an enemy and runs off and goes something does something stupid in another country.
00:23:49
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And when his luck runs out and his money is gone, he comes home back to his dad and you can almost picture him ready to to place himself on his knees at the mercy of his own father who he had turned against and embarrassed and hurt.
00:24:05
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And yet the father doesn't embarrass his son. He embraces him.
00:24:13
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He throws him a party. He welcomes him back into the family.
00:24:22
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That is how the enemies of God are turned into the friends of God.
00:24:29
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I wanna speak now into our time and our place. I see two futures on the horizon for our country and our culture.
00:24:41
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I don't know if you've seen the statistics, but there's some exciting data out there that's saying that people are starting to come back to the church in this country. Gen Z and millennials are now the biggest generation in the church. They are coming back, and that is exciting news as a millennial myself. That is exciting news to see of movement of the kingdom of God.
00:25:04
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Why do you think we're growing in Messiah kids? We're watching as people come back to Jesus. And I can't wait to see what might happen. Maybe we're on the verge of a revival. Maybe we're on the verge of our own 1989 East Germany moment where overnight the culture shifts, things change, and maybe followers of Jesus and the church find themselves back in a place of power again.
00:25:35
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If that's our future, then let us be the church of Paul and Ananias and U.A. Homer. A church where when those who don't know Jesus place themselves at our mercy, when we when the unbelieving neighbor comes before us and we are in a position of power, may we show them the grace, love, and mercy that Jesus first showed to us.
00:26:05
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Our mission, our mission is not to defeat or embarrass. Our mission is to turn hearts to Jesus Christ.
00:26:19
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And hearts, and let us remember that hearts are not turned towards Jesus in the courtroom. They are turned towards Jesus in the church and in the home.
00:26:30
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Having Christian judges and Christian courts, awesome. And if you are a judge, that's your calling. But if you're not, that's not your calling. No, your calling is to be yourself, the loving, gracious, merciful witness to your neighbor. And yes, even to your enemy. That calling is for you to live out just as Paul and Ananias and you, a Homer did.
00:26:55
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And it is my prayer that we remember that Jesus Christ still changes hearts today the way he changed hearts back then.
Continuing Paul's Legacy of Grace
00:27:06
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Jesus Christ today still turns enemies of God into friends of God through pesky Christians like you and me.
00:27:16
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Maybe we're seeing a national revival.
00:27:21
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Or maybe this is just a blip in the statistics. Maybe the the entropy of secularism is just too strong and we're gonna find ourselves back to where we were a few years ago.
00:27:34
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And if that's our future, then all that means is that we find ourselves in the same world that Paul and Silas and Ananias found themselves in.
00:27:48
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A world where the emperor and the government and the courts were far from Jesus Christ. Did that slow down the movement of God? No way. And yet even in that time, the powerful and the persecutor still found themselves in the presence of those pesky Christians.
00:28:10
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Pesky Christians like you.
00:28:13
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As followers of Jesus, those moments will come in your life, no matter what the culture looks like. And they might just come one time.
00:28:25
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And my hope is that when that person shows up in your life, they show up at your door, at your office door,
00:28:37
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at a school event, wherever that person shows up, my hope is that we would show them the same grace, mercy, and love that Jesus Christ showed to us.
00:28:50
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The grace, mercy, and love that he has shown to us every day of our lives. as he. Amen. As we enter into these final chapters of the story, I encourage you to head to normalgoesalongway.com and check out some resources that we have for you, including some questions to help you go a little bit deeper.
00:29:13
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And then I invite you back on Thursday, Ms. Hannah and Ms. April will present to you this week's episode in kids form in Normal Goes a Long Way for Kids.