Sermon Tone Analysis

INTRO:

IL: Have you ever had a bad day?

How about a bad week?

Shannon and I went to a missions Conference in Texarkana.

We checked in and went out to eat.

I promptly got food poisoning and missed the whole thing!

Shannon even had to drive my stick shift home.

That must have been how Paul felt in our text we will read today in .

acts 21:27-36

I only have two points this morning, so let’s look at them:

I. FIRST, LOOK AT WHEN EVERYTHING WENT WRONG FOR PAUL

Let’s pick up the story now at verses

–

The attack which began this series of unfortunate events began with a total misunderstanding.

That is sadly all too common.

People make assumptions and/or have feelings and take them as truth.

Have you ever been misunderstood?

It’s a terrible feeling when someone takes what you have said or done and misunderstands or misrepresents it.

Illus.

– I remember hearing of an assistant pastor telling a man that his family “came before the church in my priorities, not my time, but my priorities”

The church secretary completely misrepresented what he’d said to the pastor, saying I was not putting in my hours of work and visitation.

He was sable to clarify what he’d meant, and tendered my visitation records, proving he had more visitation hours than any anyone else on the church staff.

When words are twisted it hurts!

We’ve all experienced that, so we understand how Paul must have felt.

He had gone to all this expense and trouble to placate Jewish believers,

He probably expected peace

Yet some people recognized Paul coming out of the Temple with these four men who agreed to participate with Paul.

They had seen Paul with some Gentiles earlier that day and immediately jumped to the conclusion that the four men who came OUT with Paul were the same Gentiles they had seen before, and that he had taken them into the inner courts of the temple, something strictly forbidden for any non-Jew upon pain of death.

I can just picture Paul as a mob quickly forms.

He thinks to himself: This just isn’t my week!

Unfortunately, the worst was still to come!

Acts 21:30-32

The mob is beating him to a pulp and a local Roman captain, hearing about the disturbance, immediately sends a detachment of soldiers to see what’s going on.

As the soldiers arrive, those beating Paul make a run for it.

Instead of arresting the perpetrators of the beating, THEY ARREST THE VICTIM! –

Acts 21:

Could it get any worse?

It could and it did, for not only was Paul arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, but he suddenly discovered that he was the victim of a mistaken identity!

–

What a TERRIBLE week!

Now, everything in the Scriptures are written for our learning, so what can we learn from Paul’s bad week when everything went wrong?

II.

LESSONS FROM PAUL’S BAD WEEK

I see three main lessons from Paul’s bad week:

1.

The first is: Do not let the actions of others hinder your spiritual growth.

How was Paul able to be unaffected by the failure of other Christians?

What was his secret?—Two

things…

a. First, Paul was not preoccupied with people but with the promotion of the gospel.

All he cared about was the Gospel going forth.

Wow!—I’ve seen it time and again that when a person or a church becomes focused on self and their personal feelings instead of evangelism, then strife, disagreements and relationship problems ensue.

The best weapon against discord is an emphasis on evangelism.

Paul was so absorbed with reaching people with the Gospel that he simply didn’t have time to be trivialized with hurt feelings or disappointments with the actions of others.

b.

Second, Paul focused on CHRIST –

He said in

Illus.

– Have you ever used a 35mm camera?

– If you look in the lens, it can only focus on either the foreground or the background, unless you set it to a special setting or lenses.

If you focus, say, on the FIELD IN THE BACKGROUND, the FLOWER immediately before you becomes unfocused.

But if you focus on the FLOWER, the FIELD IN THE BACKGROUND gets slightly out of focus.

The same is true in your Christian life.…

If you focus on people and their faults and failures, JESUS will get out of focus in your life.

But if you focus in on Jesus, and really live just to please Him, and let Him become the source of your joy and peace and fulfillment in life, then people and their foibles and sins and inconsistencies just fade into the background.

So, lesson 1 from Paul’s bad week: Don’t let the failures of others hinder you.

2. Lesson 2 is that God has a larger purpose in things that go wrong in our lives.

As Paul sat in a Jerusalem prison reviewing his bad week, he didn’t know what God was up to.

Up to that time Paul’s ministry had been in the Greek provinces.

But the center of power was Rome!

There was a saying that “All roads lead to Rome” and if all roads led TO Rome, that also meant that all roads OUT OF Rome led to other places.

What an opportunity if a great soul-winning station could be organized in the CENTER of the civilized world—ROME ITSELF!

From there the Gospel could go out to the far reaches of the Roman empire.

Well, Paul didn’t know it, but God was working things out for Him to receive a free, all-expense paid trip to Rome, complements of the Roman government!

But he wouldn’t get there the way HE would have planned it.

God had a bigger idea.

Paul had long wanted to go and preach to the church already established in Rome.

He said in

& 15

That may seem to as bad, but actually it was GOOD, and here’s why: Turn with me in your bibles to Philippians, written from Paul’s jail cell.

But guess where in Rome that jail cell was?—Note

Paul said that his bondage was well-known in all the PALACE.

Scholars believe that Paul’s case was so special, and his position so important, that he was imprisoned in the Caesar’s own palace.

From this vantage point Paul began to witness and pretty soon he had a band of believers right there IN CAESAR’S PALACE!

And they were becoming bold—speaking the Word without fear— right in the palace itself.

Scholars debate whether Paul died in Rome or went from Rome to Gaul and ministered.

One thing’s for sure—a beachhead was established in the heart of Roman paganism, a fact that had repercussions through the centuries—and it all began with a bad week in Paul’s life.

Oh listen, if we only knew what God is trying to do through troubles and trials in our lives, we wouldn’t complain when we go through them!

3. The third lesson is this: God often uses bad people to accomplish His larger purposes.

Here God used judgmental Jewish Christians, rabble-rousing lost Jews and pagan Roman soldiers to carry out His plans.

Later in Acts we’ll see how God used wicked governors and kings and various other rulers to get Paul to Rome.

All of God’s purposes were accomplished by bad Christians, lost Jews or outright pagans!

I wonder—is there someone who has done or is doing bad things to you?

That person may indeed be evil and ungodly, or just plain stupid.

But be assured that God will use their bad to accomplish good for you, for Paul says in that “All things work together for good to them who love God, to them who are called according to His purpose.”

CONCLUSION

Do you see what I’m trying to show you?

When you have a bad week, or a bad experience, or a bad relationship—don’t give up!

Hold your head up and don’t get discouraged!

All you see is one little piece of a very big puzzle, but God sees the BIG picture!

Paul could’ve been discouraged in his cell that day in Jerusalem.

I don’t know if he was, but you could hardly blame him if he was.

But two years later he was in a different cell in a different city doing more from that little cell in Rome than he ever did traveling through all the Greek cities.

So when you have a bad week or a bad experience, remember these three things: