“And he entered the synagogue and continued speaking out boldly for three months, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God. But when some were becoming hardened and disobedient, speaking evil of the Way before the people, he withdrew from them and took away the disciples, reasoning daily in the school of Tyrannus. This took place for two years, so that all who lived in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks.”
Looking back at chapter 18 for a moment, if you read from verse 19 you will be reminded that Paul has already spent some time in the synagogue at Ephesus and they asked him to stay and tell them more. He was unwilling to at the time, but promised to return if he could.
So, keeping his promise, he has now returned to Ephesus, and apparently almost immediately upon his arrival he runs across these 12 men who are worshippers of God but have not become Christians. MacArthur calls them Old Testament saints. They seem to be in much the same condition Apollos was before he was approached by Aquila and Priscilla, except that perhaps he may have been more knowledgeable of information about Jesus than they. Again, we don’t know and won’t speculate here. It is enough to know that God in His providence brought the right people together at the right time so that these various men could be brought to completion.
Now Paul goes to the synagogue, and this is why I said he apparently found those twelve incomplete disciples very early after his arrival; because the scripture record seems to indicate that when he arrived in any community he went to the local synagogue before even stopping at McDonald’s.
His time in the synagogue appears to have been much more successful than in other cities, since it says he stayed there three months. And this was not three months of glad-handing and patting each other on the back and keeping the conversation shallow for the purpose of keeping the peace.
Luke says he was ‘speaking out boldly…reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God’.
A closer look at these words, ‘reasoning’ and ‘persuading’ indicates that this was not a one way lecture from Paul. He was dialoging with them. It was confrontational. It was at times argumentative.
Here is where I’d like our focus to remain today; on the persuasive power of God’s Word, and the consequences that result from the manner in which it is received.
WE SPEAK OF WHAT WE KNOW
People of God, there has never been a time in the history of the church, and especially, I think, in our nation, when the need has been more urgent than today, for Christians to diligently study and internalize their Bibles.
The day I began this sermon and, in fact, at the point of typing the statement I just made about studying and internalizing the Bible, my wife was reading the latest issue of the Rocky Mountain Baptist news magazine that comes out of the Colorado Baptist General Convention offices in Denver.
She began reading aloud to me, and I knew I had to include this article in my sermon.
“The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that a lower court was correct in overturning a death sentence for a man who raped and murdered a woman because the jury in his trial read excerpts from the Bible during deliberations.
In 1994, a 29 year-old telephone operator named Robert Harlan kidnapped a casino waitress on her way home from work, according to the Denver Post. He shot and permanently paralyzed a woman who tried to save the waitress, and after raping the waitress at gunpoint for two hours, he shot her in the head.
Jurors in Harlan’s 1995 trial sentenced him to death, but defense lawyers discovered they had consulted the Bible, specifically a passage from Leviticus that commands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, The Post recounted.
After years of appeals, the state Supreme Court ruled 3-2 March 28 that the citation of a Bible passage unduly influenced deliberations.
Governor Bill Owens called the ruling ‘demeaning to people of faith’.
“Even the justices who voted to overturn the penalty agreed that moral values and religious beliefs are important and can be part of the debate among jurors,” Owens said in a statement. “I’m disappointed to see that the Court would supersede the will of the jury and the people of Colorado … on such a technicality.”
Tom Minnery, vice president for government and public policy for Focus on the Family, said it is not wrong to use biblical principles to determine whether the death penalty should be imposed.
“Today’s ruling further confirms that the judicial branch of our government is bereft of any moral foundation,” he said in a statement, according to The Post. “It is a sad day when the Bible is banned from a jury room.”
Pastor Paul Brewster of Barlow Vista Baptist Church in Hampstead, NC submitted an editorial to the RMB in response to this, and he ended his comments with this:
“The ongoing process of marginalizing Christians in America has taken a giant leap forward with this court ruling. At the same time, justice has taken a beating.”
Now I’m not waving this one instance of abuse in the air and shouting ‘the sky is falling, the sky is falling’. It’s just an example of the way the tide is turning in our society. As Christians, we need to open our eyes, be cognizant of the way things are going, and prepare ourselves now for the strong possibility that the day may come in our nation, and very soon, when we won’t be able to use our Bibles in any public forum without being openly persecuted.
Christians, if you lost your right to carry a Bible today how much of it would you already have stored away in your mind and heart to help you in the days ahead? How much of it would you have there now for helping or persuading anyone else?
It’s time for true Christians everywhere to drop the attitude that preaching and persuading is the job of pastors and church leaders, and come awake to the fact that it is the duty of every born again believer in Jesus Christ to be a dedicated student of God’s Word, and to know their subject well enough to be able to stop the mouths of objectors and be able to give an account for the hope that is in them to those who are seeking.
Jesus challenged the belief process of Nicodemus with these words, “…we speak that which we know, and bear witness to that which we have seen; and you do not receive our witness.” John 3:11
Brothers and Sisters in Christ, if we have spoken sound scriptural truth to those with whom God puts us in contact, they will have no excuse and they will have no legitimate charge against us when called into account.
But we must be able to say with conviction, ‘we speak that which we know’; and the only way to know it is to study it. And I submit to you that your Bible is the most important subject you will ever learn in this life simply because it is the information that you will take with you into the next, and it is the information that will empower you to persuade others to go with you.
THE PERIL OF PERSISTENT PROCRASTINATION
Well, Paul was in the synagogue in Ephesus for three months, speaking out boldly, reasoning and persuading about the kingdom of God. He was speaking that which he knew.
Let’s not miss something being revealed here about Paul. He was among men whose lives had focused on knowing their scriptures, and spending their days ruminating and debating that which they knew.
They were learned rabbis, who searched the scriptures with a magnifying glass, considering every point of punctuation, the nuances of every word, raising nitpicking questions and answering them with long and loud oration.
But Paul, eloquent Pharisee and now courageous Apostle of Jesus Christ, held his ground with this group for three months; reasoning and persuading about the kingdom of God.
What an education we might have gotten if we were able to sit at the sidelines and observe!
What would he have been saying to them? Well, they only had what we call the Old Testament; what they referred to as the Law and the Prophets.
We recall passages like John 5:39, where Jesus told the Pharisees, “You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that bear witness of Me…” and Luke 24:27 where on the road to Emmaus, Jesus approached two grieving disciples and Luke writes, “And beginning with Moses” (that’s the Law) “and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.”
So for three months, Paul would have been using the Scriptures, and from Moses and with all the prophets he would have been showing them Christ, on every page, in every ordinance for worship, in every story of the patriarchs, in every utterance of the prophets.
So we think, ‘how could they have not been convinced?’ Here was the perfect setting for understanding.
Paul was using their own text books, by his own declaration with no empty boasting he excelled them all in his learning and understanding of the Jewish religion, so they had the best of teachers, there was no rush, no shortage of time; he was there for three months, free to speak, no threats from the Romans or any other outside influence.
But in the end some became hardened and disobedient, speaking evil of the Way publicly.
Christians as a sect were referred to as the Way at this point. You may remember that the term ‘Christian’ started in Antioch but of course it would take some time to become the common reference to believers in Christ.
So here we have this certain group, who for three months have listened and deliberated with Paul, and with every passing day, every passing hour, they’ve hardened their hearts against his message and his Messiah, until they could stand no more of it.
What a strong reaction when they finally burst. They begin publicly speaking evil against the good news that Paul preached and against believers in that good news.
It just makes me wonder; what took them so long to get mad?
Let’s not miss this word, ‘disobedient’. It speaks of deliberateness. A choice.
Listen to me. They were hearing truth, they were understanding what they were hearing, their every argument and objection was being answered successfully, and they were consciously suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, as Paul says in Romans 1, and hardening their hearts against what they knew to be the oracles of God, and therefore their subsequent rejection was viewed as disobedience.
There is urgent warning here for the one who attends church or otherwise puts himself or herself in the company of Christians, who hears the gospel over and over yet never chooses to respond in faith. They are in a dangerous place, because every time they hear and go away having suppressed the truth, they are hardening themselves against it; and the harder they get the less likely it will become that the Spirit will ever break through and find fertile soil.
There is also a solemn and urgent warning for us, believers. The Spirit speaks to us when we hear the Word preached or read it in our study. Every time we are confronted with God’s truth in reference to our lives and our walk and our witness and give it the Scarlet O’Hara ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow’ response, we harden ourselves against Him, and that is disobedience.
Listen to Andrew Murray:
“There is nothing so hardening as delay. When God speaks to us, He asks for a tender heart, open to the whispers of His voice of love. The believer who answers the ‘today’ of the Holy Ghost with the ‘tomorrow’ of some more convenient season, knows not how he is hardening his heart; the delay, instead of making the surrender and obedience and faith easy, makes it more difficult. It closes the heart for ‘today’ against the Comforter, and cuts off all hope and power of growth.” “The Holiest of All” – Andrew Murray, Revell, NJ
Christians, when we know of someone, some brother or sister, who is living in disobedience, away from the fellowship and neglecting their spiritual exercise for the lures of the world, we mustn’t excuse them with false assurances that ‘they’ll come around’; ‘give them time’; ‘don’t pressure them or we might push them away’. They are, day by day, hardening themselves, and the time will come when the warnings in their heart will cease, there will be no strength to be found for obedience, the feeling will be gone.
Remember the Eagle’s song, ‘Desperado’?
“Don’t your feet get cold in the winter time?
The sky won’t snow and the sun won’t shine,
It’s hard to tell the nighttime from the day.
You’re losin’ all your highs and lows;
Ain’t it funny how the feeling goes away?”
You tell them! You challenge them! If you love them, you point out to them how everything is turning into shades of gray and they are slowly sinking into the bog of deception, thinking they are alright but gradually and dangerously losing their ability to pull themselves out.
Just like the Eagle’s song, they have to be warned to stop straddling their fence before it’s too late. Because, believer, they, (you? me?) when God’s voice is ignored again and again, do not become softer, but only harder. And none of us knows when what God calls ‘today’ will be over.
The peril of persistent procrastination.
Well, let’s talk about:
THE BLESSING OF BOLD BELIEVING
Class gets kind of rowdy, so Paul takes his serious students, the ones who aren’t afraid to admit they’ve been wrong and are teachable and willing to be used by God, and removes them to a place more conducive to learning.
In fact, it’s a school. Now we don’t know anything at all about this guy, Tyrannus. His name means ‘the tyrant’, so quite possibly he was the teacher and overseer of this school and earned the nickname from his students.
If not, he just drew a very unfortunate name from his parents.
In any case, commentators say that it was the custom of the culture to take a break from work and studies from about 11 am to mid afternoon because of the heat of the day. So the common speculation is that Paul used those hours when this facility was not in use to meet there with his students and continue to teach.
And this went on for two years, and he apparently did no traveling during this time but spent his mornings making tents and his mid day teaching and probably his evenings telling the people of Ephesus about Jesus also, yet from this hub of teaching, of reasoning and persuading, the word of the Lord spread to ‘all who lived in Asia, both Jews and Greeks’.
Folks, this is what church and church growth could and should look like in our society today. There’s an emphasis on planting churches. Let’s take a look at local diagnostics, find pockets of unchurched people, try to start a Bible study in their midst and get a church going.
What if every church leader boldly reasoned and persuaded about the kingdom of God in his own congregation, and then every believer boldly believed, studied diligently to internalize the Word of Gold, then spoke it boldly, reasoning and persuading in his own circle of acquaintances?
Do you think that as time went by the word of the Lord would be spread to the whole region, to people of every rank and file?
Would there be new churches? Yes! Because every home that became turned to Jesus would be a church. Isn’t yours? Is your house a church of sorts? I mean, to my understanding, a church is where two or more are gathered in Jesus’ name. If a family is a family of believers, then their house should be a church where Jesus is the head.
That’s the blessing of bold believing. If you’re bold in your belief, you’re going to speak boldly that which you know. You’re going to use the word of the Lord in your reasoning, and the word of the Lord is going to persuade others to believe.
The ones who harden themselves will be disobedient, sure, but that won’t stop the spread of the word to people all over the region.
Would you like to be a blessing through bold believing?
Christian. Study diligently to internalize the Bible. Get the Word of God deeply rooted in your mind and heart, because if you are a believer in Christ it is your duty to be prepared to reason and persuade people about the kingdom of God.
When God speaks to your heart, whether through preaching or your own study and prayer time, obey today. Do not harden your heart. Be tender and receptive and obedient; and when necessary, warn others to be also.
Be bold. You have the truth that leads to eternal life, and the blessing of your boldness to speak is that churches will be started in homes all over the region, because those who are obedient to what they hear will take the word of the Lord home and to their neighbors, and the kingdom will grow.
Hurry. They’re trying to marginalize us and minimize our Bibles. We have to be diligent now, while it is still called ‘Today’!
