1a.unBELIEVABLE Trans.SERMON

Sermon || lead pastor || Joe Brantley

Introduction

We will be camping out in Acts chapter 9 again today. So go ahead and get there it’s in the NT and you can find it in the (wpbb pg.535).

Last week we met a student of the Apostles teaching, a member of the local church, who Jesus spoke to, and told him to go and pray over a man who he fears tremendously. He told him this man who he was to pray over, a man who hated and assaulted the people of Jesus’ church was going to be His [Jesus’] chosen instrument to make Himself know to the Gentiles, and to the kings and children of Israel. And that he would show Saul how much he must suffer for the name of Jesus.

We’ve been talking about Saul of Tarsus for some weeks now and he was a high ranking Pharisee, who knew the law of Moses well, loved God, but hated Jesus and all those that followed Him.

Saul had great intentions in following the past traditions of the Jewish fathers that came before him, but when God made a sharp right (a turn that He for-warned was coming through the prophets), he [Saul] missed the turn.

Instead of following God, he chose to follow tradition and found himself in violent opposition against the very God he loved. Thinking he was serving God by murdering, jailing, and persecuting the followers of Jesus he was wrongly pursuing a path where he had left God and wandered into a place of pride and religion that lead to a blind wandering of rage, against God, all the while, claiming this brutality in the name of God. Unknowingly, He was hurting the very God he loved. Saul, spiritually speaking, had no vision.

He was persecuting and rejecting God by rejecting His Son, Jesus, and Jesus’, bride the local church. And we learned if you are not serving the church you are hurting the church, just as Saul was.

Then he had and encounter with Jesus. This. Changed. Everything. His error had been made known to him. And now, he became as physically blind as he was spiritually. Jesus awoke a new vision in his heart.

Jesus awakened a new vision in his heart.It’s through Saul’s suffering and through Annanias (the student of the Apostle’s teachings; a member of the church at Damascus—the church Saul was on his way to tear a part) it through these two individuals and God’s grace through active faith in Jesus, in last week’s teaching that we see how God calls you to suffer now so He can restore your future.Saul past mistakes made the followers of Jesus skeptical of his transformation in Christ. That’s something that each of us can relate to on some level.So as we enter into today’s teaching be encouraged no matter if you are a believer struggling with sin or if you are a skeptic who pushes away from this idea of forgiveness, because of the cruel world you live in. Because the good news that we learn today is this...People will judge you for your past mistakes, but God rescues your future for His glory!Let’s jump in…

It’s through Saul’s suffering and through Ananias (the student of the Apostle’s teachings; a member of the church at Damascus—the church Saul was on his way to tear a part) it through these two individuals and God’s grace through active faith in Jesus, in last week’s teaching that we see how God calls you to suffer now so He can restore your future.

Saul past mistakes made the followers of Jesus skeptical of his transformation in Christ. That’s something that each of us can relate to on some level.

So as we enter into today’s teaching be encouraged no matter if you are a believer struggling with sin or if you are a skeptic who pushes away from this idea of forgiveness, because of the cruel world you live in.

Because the good news that we learn today is this...

People will judge you for your past mistakes, but God rescues your future for His glory!

Let’s jump in…

Exposition

We pick up where Annanias had been obedient to what the Lord called him to do where he prayed over Saul and in verse 18 (the verse before our kick of point today) we read that once he did...

Acts 9:18 ESV

18 And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized;

so let’s pick it up...

​ ESV19 and taking food, he was strengthened. For some days he was with the disciples at Damascus. 20 And immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.”

Acts 9:19–20 ESV

19 and taking food, he was strengthened. For some days he was with the disciples at Damascus. 20 And immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.”

Acts 9

Notice here the paradox that exists within these two verses. What I mean is that there are two statements that we can miss, or believe to be contradicting and confusing, yet are both profoundly true.

In v.19, it says, that Saul stayed with the disciple “for some time” in Damascus. So this give the impression of an extended time, a process of learning, and gaining trust as we will see in a moment.Yet in v.20, it says that Saul “immediately…proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, [Jesus] is the Son of God.”

Which is it? Because if he was being discipled (learning; pupil) by the Apostles, learning about what Jesus taught from the very men He did life with, “for some time,” how could he immediately proclaim something he was learning about?

You see it was both.

Look if you will at as Saul now known as Paul, talks to one of the kings Jesus said he would, and understand this after he had spent his time in Damascus...

Acts 26:19–23 ESV

19 “Therefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, 20 but declared first to those in Damascus, then in Jerusalem and throughout all the region of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance. 21 For this reason the Jews seized me in the temple and tried to kill me. 22 To this day I have had the help that comes from God, and so I stand here testifying both to small and great, saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass: 23 that the Christ must suffer and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles.”

Acts 25​

We are to be students of Apostles’ teachings of Jesus as we are proclaiming the truth and the reality of Jesus.

Even when the people who you are spending time with are concerned about your past and how it might catch you and revert you back to your old ways. You must do both.

Learn how be like Christ while you are a mess, yet tell people how Christ is working in you through His message.

You must understand...People will judge you for your past mistakes, but God rescues your future for His glory!

Acts 9

Acts 9:21 ESV

21 And all who heard him were amazed and said, “Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem of those who called upon this name? And has he not come here for this purpose, to bring them bound before the chief priests?”

But it takes time, it’s a process. But even in the mess of that process as you press in learning and walking with Jesus and the people of His local church you still proclaim Him and tell people how He has transformed you. How He meet you in your mess and He’s hasn’t left you there. He’s still working on you. That’s good news for those looking for hope. That God would meet them in there mess; He will meet you in your mess, but you have to lean in to HIM!

People will judge you for your past mistakes, but God rescues your future for His glory!

But praise God he knows your past, he knows your present and he knows your future. And He loves you anyway, because you have responded to His call. And by His grace and the faith in Him you’ve recieved you have been saved. are being saved. and will be saved. To His eternal Kingdom and for His glory.

Acts 9:22 ESV

But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ.

Acts 9:22

Conclusion

Even though People will judge you for your past mistakes, you must realize God rescues your future for His glory!

Be encouraged whether you consider yourself a faithful Christian or a unbelieving skeptic, God wants to reach you, speak life in you either to awaken to truth or to keep pressing on despite those who doubt you.

The good news of Jesus is that even in our mess as we press into who He is, and the two most important things He’s given us to reveal Himself to us: the Word and His Church (His bride; His people). He has given us the Bible to help us grow deeper in relationship with Him, in community with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He has given us His bride, the church, to grow deeper in relationship with Him and His messy, jacked up, “once blind-now I see” people. We experience deep community as we dig deeper into the Scriptures and as we walk further into our struggles and successes with others.

We can’t just know more about Jesus and then once we have it figured out, then tell people about Jesus. What’s the difference in that and having to get your life cleaned up before coming to church? Isn’t that the Pharisaical and “Country Club” model of church? That’s not the church of the Bible.

​ ESVbut God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

You see we must seek both simultaneously. Telling people about the Jesus we’ve encountered even before we truly understand all that we could possibly know this side of heaven. And we fuel our evangelism (sharing Jesus; telling people about Him) with our learning (discipleship), our growing to understand Him (theology). So as you are telling people about this marvelous Savior, you are in process of learning more…that process never stops. Because Disciples are to make more disciples (students, learners, pupils) of Jesus.

But we mess it up as a church. We make it completely focused on one or the other when it requires both!

Check out this quote from author/pastor/professor/and theologian, John Kossler as he quotes other people who he has learned from…this is cool it’s a literary and theological “INCEPTION,” a quote inside of a quote, being quoted by me. How awesome is that! Kossler refers to something…,

Thomas F. Torrance notes, “In the language of the New Testament, preaching Christ involves [being]...both evangelical and theological.” The church’s mistake, according to Torrance, has been to separate these two. One way this has been done is by separating the Christ of theology from the Christ of history. Torrance labels the Christ of history shorn of theological truth “an abstraction invented by pseudo-scientific method” and warns, “The historical Jesus and the theological Christ cannot be separated from one another without grave misunderstanding of the gospel and serious detriment to the faith of the church.” Separating the theological Christ from the Christ of history severs the church’s theology from its mooring in the incarnation and removes any hope of knowing God as he intended us to know him. There is, as Torrance puts it, “no unknown God behind the back of Jesus for us to fear; to see the Lord Jesus is to see the very face of God.”

Another way the church has separated kerygma and didache is by detaching the application of our Christian faith from the gospel. It is easy to understand why some might want to relegate the gospel to the beginning of the Christian life. Coming to faith is one thing. Living out the reality of that faith is something else. Our listeners’ disappointment when they hear a sermon that is “only the gospel” usually springs from the false assumption that the gospel has a single application. It unites us to Christ but has nothing to say about how we live for Christ. If, as Torrance says, it is damaging to the faith of the church to separate kerygma and didache evangelism, it is equally damaging to the preaching of the church for sermon applications to be detached from the theology of the cross.

The vital connection between the cross and Christian practice is expressed by Paul in : “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul understood the Christian’s daily life to be a cruciformed life, one in which the reality of our union with Christ in his death is reflected in ordinary practice. The Christian’s daily life is also a resurrected life. This too is implicit in the message of the cross: “If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection” ().

The message of the cross is incomplete without a corresponding proclamation of resurrection that spells out its implications for Christian practice. This is the apostolic pattern according to Richard Lischer: “The proclamation of Christ’s death and resurrection is always followed by an authoritative ‘Therefore’ (as in ), which connects the salvation event with the stories of our lives.”

Look right at me…you want to know what makes people doubt the power of our God?The very people who He has called to use to make Him known. Let me help the Christian and the skeptic here. WE ARE ALL MESSED UP! People will judge you for your past mistakes, you must realize God rescues your future for His glory!The only difference between the mess of someone who has awoken to the saving grace of Christ and responded by faith; no matter how weak, tired, or non-existent in can appear, and the skeptic whose mess and struggle looks just the same…is that the Christians mess has been paid for, I’m talking debt free! Bought a price through the precious blood of Jesus on a cruel cross at Calvary 2000 years ago. And the skeptic well you’re just still wallowing in your debt. All the while the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news to the saved and to the sinner.Listen to what Kossler says as we go into “INCEPTION” mode again...

This means that the gospel is for the believer as much as it is for the unbeliever. To marginalize the gospel by relegating it to the entry point of our faith and to ignore its application to the believer’s daily experience is spiritually deadly. Torrance marvels that evangelicals often link the substitution of Christ with his death but not with his incarnate person and life. He believes that this undermines the radical nature of Christ’s substitutionary work: “Substitution understood in this radical way means that Christ takes our place in all our human life and activity before God even in our believing, praying, and worshipping of God, for he has yoked himself to us in such a profound way that he stands in for us and upholds us at every point in our human relations before God.”

The gospel offers hope for the present life as well as for the future. It is about living as much as it is about dying. It is true that the gospel promises a kingdom in the future, a time when those who know Christ “will also reign with him” ().

Like Christ’s apostles, we too are waiting for the day to come when Jesus will “restore the kingdom to Israel” ().

But we do not have to wait to be placed under new authority. We do not yet see everything subject to Jesus, but we do see the one who has “tasted death” on our behalf ().

Through Christ’s death and resurrection, the Father “has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves” ().

As a result, the old dominion that sin once exercised over us has been shattered.

Sin is our lord no longer (). The hope of the gospel is the hope of forgiveness, but it is also the expectation of “being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might” ().

Living the Christian life is more than a matter of willpower and information. The Christian life is Spirit driven and grace enabled. It is a life that is lived not only in response to the gospel but through the power of the gospel.

The difference between preaching the gospel to those who do not believe and to those who do is the difference between announcement and implication. Both involve obedience, but of a different sort. Martin Luther warned, “The chief article and foundation of the gospel is that before you take Christ as an example, you accept and recognize him as a gift, as a present that God has given you and that is your own.” When we announce the gospel to those who do not believe, we invite them to receive Christ as a gift. This is a call to the obedience of faith (). When we proclaim the gospel to the saints, we call them to take Christ as their example. But in doing so, we do not lose sight of the gift.

When we preach to saints, we focus on the “therefore” that proceeds from the gift. This too is the obedience of faith. It is the obedience which “comes from faith.” When the gospel is preached to those who do not believe, it is faith itself which is the primary response which is called for. This faith is a response to God’s gift and is itself a gift (). When we preach to those who have believed, we are calling for an obedience that springs from faith. We proclaim Christ as an example, but without losing sight of the fact that Christ and his righteousness have already been received as gifts. The gospel does not recede into the distance when preaching to the saints. It must remain in the forefront, or our call to take Christ as an example will prove toxic to those who hear. They will become like the Galatians, who after beginning with the Spirit, tried to attain their goal by human effort ().

Being a Christian, Stanley Hauerwas, “involves more than just making certain decisions; it is a way of attending to the world. It is learning ‘to see’ the world under the mode of the divine.”

In making this observation, Hauerwas provides us with the primary rationale for preaching the gospel to the church. Yes, we are offering the hope of the gospel to any who may be among us who have not yet believed. But we are also providing those who believe with a view of the reality that will shape their response to our sermon. “A Christian does not simply ‘believe’ certain propositions about God; he learns to attend to reality through them,” Hauerwas explains. “This learning requires training our attention by constantly juxtaposing our experience with our vision.”

Often both groups—the redeemed and those who are not yet believers—are part of the same audience. The same gospel applies to both. When we preach the gospel to those who are lost, we hold out the hope of Christ to them and call them to the obedience of faith. When we preach the gospel to those who already believe, we hold before them the Bible’s vision of reality and call them to act accordingly.

What I want you to hear is this...People will judge you for your past mistakes, you must realize God rescues your future for His glory!

If you are a skeptic you must take hold of that hope in Christ. You must surrender and be obedient to a truth that seems foreign and unbelievable. You are blinded by this world.If you are a believer, you must catch the vision and the reality of what the Word of God has called us to. You must be both a walking talking mess, but a mess that is proclaiming the message of saving grace, that knocked you off your feet, allowed the scales to fall from your eyes, brought you to a family of people who doubted because they knew who you were, or even more so they know who they are.

People will judge you for your past mistakes, you must realize God rescues your future for His glory!

This story of Saul, is the rescuing and transforming story of each of us. But more important than the story of our rescue is the story of the Rescuer.

Our hope. Our only hope, is to respond to, to believe in; trust, walk, learn, seek, teach, and love like Jesus.It doesn’t matter what people know about your past, it matters that they know the One who rescued you from it.

Surrender to Jesus.

Share Jesus.

Seek Jesus.

Because no matter what you’ve done, His Father is the only judge that matters.

Let’s pray.