In the sermon 'Preaching to the Outward Christians,' Peter Allison examines Paul's defense before King Agrippa in Acts chapter 26. Paul is granted permission by Agrippa to speak for himself, and he recounts his life story, emphasizing his transformation from a Pharisee who persecuted Christians to a devoted apostle of Jesus Christ. The sermon discusses the importance of repetition in the Book of Acts, highlighting that Paul's four sermons are recorded multiple times to reinforce the gospel message across different contexts and audiences. Allison notes that Paul's approach to different audiences varies significantly, illustrating the necessity of understanding one's audience for effective communication of the gospel. Paul's message to Agrippa, an 'outward Jew,' is crafted with humility and respect, acknowledging Agrippa's knowledge of Jewish customs while emphasizing the spiritual transformation that comes through Christ. The sermon further explores the concept of 'outward Christians,' who may appear religious externally but lack true inward faith. Through Paul's example, Allison encourages believers to adopt a posture of vulnerability, humility, and transparency in their witness to others.

Alright, Acts chapter 26. We'll read the first 23 verses, though we won't be able to cover all of that today, but it's the entirety of Paul's defense. Then Agrippa said to Paul, You are permitted to speak for yourself. So Paul stretched out his hand and answered for himself, I thank myself happy King Agrippa because today I shall answer for myself before you concerning all the things of which I am accused by the Jews. Especially because you are an expert in all customs and questions which have to do with the Jews, therefore I beg you to hear me patiently.

My manner of life from my youth, which was spent from the beginning among my own nation at Jerusalem, all the Jews know. They know me from the first if they were willing to testify that according to the strictest sect of our religion, I lived a Pharisee, and now I stand and am judged for the hope of the promise made by God to our fathers. To this promise our twelve tribes, earnestly serving God night and day, hope to obtain. For this hopesake King Agrippa, I am accused by the Jews. Why should it be thought incredible by you that God raises the dead?

Indeed, I myself thought I must do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. This I also did in Jerusalem, and many of the saints I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests. And when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. And I punished them often in every synagogue and compelled them to blaspheme. And being exceedingly enraged against them, I persecuted them even to foreign cities.

And while thus occupied as I journeyed to Damascus with authority and commission from the chief priests at midday, O King, along the road. I saw a light from heaven brighter than the sun shining around me and those who journeyed with me. And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice speaking to me and saying in the Hebrew language, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads. So I said, Who are you, Lord?

And He said, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But rise and stand on your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to make you a minister and a witness both of the things which you have seen and of the things which I will yet reveal to you. I will Deliver you from the Jewish people as well as from the Gentiles to whom I now send you, to open their eyes in order to turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in Me. Therefore, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but declared first to those in Damascus and in Jerusalem and throughout all the region of Judea, and then to the Gentiles that they should repent, turn to God, and do works fitting for repentance. For these reasons, the Jews seized me in the temple and tried to kill me.

Therefore, having obtained help from God to this day, I stand witnessing both to small and great, saying no other things than those which the prophets and Moses said would come, that Christ would suffer, that He would be the first to rise from the dead and would proclaim light to the Jewish people and to the Gentiles. This word of God is very pure. May we, His servants, love it. Heavenly Father, May you seal to our hearts this morning the truth of your Word. May you impress it upon us and give to us a zeal for your kingdom and a greater zeal for Your Word.

We ask, Lord, that You might speak to us this morning. That we might hear Your voice as You come through your word. And I ask that you would sanctify my lips this morning, that from a vessel of clay and a sinful vessel, the riches of your grace may be proclaimed. In Jesus' name, Amen. Well, the book of Acts records four sermons by Paul in some detail.

And there is a bit of repetition in those messages because He's preaching the same gospel. And it's tempting to breeze through them as repeats of prior passages. But we can't do that. God's Word is not arbitrarily or unnecessarily repetitive. According to the Psalms, God's Word is refined seven times.

Purified, that's the sense of distilled. Seven times. Distillation one time gets most stuff out. When you do it seven times, it's saying it's perfect. There's no contamination in it.

The words of the Lord, Psalm 12, are pure words like silver tried in a furnace of earth purified seven times. And so there are no extra words in God's Word. Which prompts us to ask, Why does Acts repeat these four sermons of Paul? Four sermons that have the same message. Well there's a couple reasons.

One certainly is that we need to hear things more than once. We are forgetful, and especially of things that we hear, and we can be slow to understand. So we need that repetition. And marketers tell us that people need to hear something, you know, seven times in order to actually hear it. But more importantly, the Scriptures teach us the necessity of repetition for effective learning and for effective communication.

Deuteronomy 6, for example, talks of God's, says we speak of God's commandments as we lie down, as we rise up, as we walk by the way. So this is not identical or mindless repetition of just saying the same thing over and over again, but this is representing the information in different contexts and in different ways, but it's still again a repetition of the message. It tells us to write these things on our doorposts where we will see them and be continually reminded of them as we walk around our homes. Or in Romans 8.38 where Paul repeats a laundry list of things that cannot separate us from the love of God to simply drive home this message that nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of God. And so you probably have that passage memorized, for I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

You see that type of repetition drives that point home far more powerfully than just saying well nothing can separate us from the love of God. The Apostle Peter even says in 2 Peter 1, Therefore I shall always be ready to remind you of these things, even though you already know them, and have been established in the truth which is present in you. Yes, he says, goes on, I think it is right as long as I am in this tent, as long as I am in this physical earthly body, I think it is right to stir you up by reminding you. So we need this repetition. The Lord knows we need the repetition of the gospel message We are every group of people is always changing people are growing up getting older and what you have said once needs to be said again and again.

But I think there's something else here as well that is maybe even more relevant to why there are four sermons in Acts, spelled out in some detail. Because in each of the four cases, there is a different audience. And so Acts gives us an example of how to apologetically approach each of these different classes of people. And while there are overlaps, certainly, because he's preaching the same message, there are also some significant differences in each of these messages. And that's what we want to focus on this morning in looking at this passage as an overview of Paul and the audience, particular audience that he is addressing and how he does that.

See, in Paul's first message sermon in Acts 13, verses 16 to 41, Paul is speaking in the synagogue at Antioch to Jews who have not rejected Christ yet. Okay, these are people who are members of the church. They are in the synagogue on the Sabbath. Some of whom may be believers who have simply not yet heard about Christ. Others are not yet believers.

So this might be analogous to teaching in churches with significant doctrinal errors in some area, but still through churches. See, as long as these Jews believed what Paul was teaching them, because he was teaching them out of their own Scriptures, he was teaching them from the law and the prophets and the writings of the Old Testament. As long as they believed what Paul was teaching them from God's Word, he would stay in the synagogue and continue to teach them. If They rejected his teaching, then he moved out and took the believers with him and planted another church. And so in this sermon, in this context, preaching to these Jews that have not rejected Christ who are in the church, there's no mention of His own testimony or His past persecution of Christians, because that wouldn't be directly helpful for His purpose there, which was showing how Christ was promised in the Old Testament.

So rather, in that sermon, we find a lengthy doctrinal teaching from the Scriptures showing that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament types and shadows. That Jesus is introduced into His message as someone, as the Messiah that was promised long ages ago. And then He closes that sermon with the same warnings that are also given in the New Old Testament, not to reject the truth, as some Old Testament saints did. It's a warning. After hearing Paul's sermon, some believe, become Christians, and some don't.

The ones who don't believe become unbelieving Jews who have now rejected Christ and they are the ones who become very antagonistic to Paul and begin persecuting him and seeking to put him to death. The second group that Paul preaches to in Acts where we have a lengthy detailed recording of his sermon are zealous Jews who have rejected Christ. And this sermon is recorded in Acts 22, 1-22, which is Paul's message to the Jewish mob in the Jerusalem temple. The mob that had just tried to kill him. And this mob was stirred up, led by Jews from Asia who had already heard Paul and rejected Christ.

See, these were Jews who paid a lot of outward attention. Outwardly, they paid a lot of attention to the external details of the law. These are the Jews that Jesus described that self-righteous Pharisee who described himself as fasting several times a week, tithing everything he got, and so on. But see, inwardly they had a proud and hardened heart that didn't love the Lord Jesus. And Jesus described these people like whitewashed tombs.

They came to church, they looked pretty, they smelled nice. They looked nice on the outside, they said nice sounding words. They smiled and greeted people like They were close brothers and friends. So on the outside, He said they were like whitewashed tombs. But on the inside, they were putrid, stinking, rotten corpses.

Jesus went so far as to call them children of Satan. Now I doubt probably any of us have had to deal with stinking, rotten, putrid corpses, but there's nothing more revolting. But there's nothing more revolting. I just happened to be listening to some military people who had done a raid back in the first Gulf War to rescue a prisoner of war. And they also ended up digging up the bodies of other people in that unit that had been killed when that prisoner of war was taken.

And they talked about having to dig up these rotten corpses that were buried in shallow graves and had been buried, of course, without embalming or anything, about three or four weeks ago. And they describe it as one of the most horrific, soul-wrenching, life-altering experiences they've ever had to just dig into these rotten corpses. But that's how Jesus says these kinds of people are. Those who go to church outwardly look nice, but inwardly are lost. Today these people might be like the religious but lost people like Zionists or Muslims who in their rejection of Christ think that they are serving God by killing Christians.

See, Paul approaches this group very differently. This group of Jews very differently than that first group of Jews. Paul shows them Jesus. And if you listen to Daniel Sheyestes' testimony, He's a former Mujajidin fighter, freedom fighter from Iran, who personally knew the Ayatollah. He follows a very similar approach when he gives his testimony.

Paul begins by identifying himself as a Pharisee who thought he believed the Scriptures and persecuted the Christians who believed in Jesus. See, with a group like this, he needs to earn the right to speak to them. He has to win enough of their respect that they will bother to pay attention to what he's saying. You know, the first group of believers is willing to listen based on his credentials and his standing as a rabbi, but these people are not. And so he approaches them very differently.

He doesn't spend a lot of time in his post-conversion dialogue with Christ or in the substance of His commission. He shows them Jesus. And He does that by using His own conversion experience, where He met Jesus for the first time and how that changed His life. And if you listen to Daniel Scheyesthe, he does very much the same thing. It's his testimony of how he was converted from a Christian-hating Muslim who could recite the Koran in its entirety from memory as a preteen child, who he and his wife carried rifles to through a believer.

He simply presents how he met Jesus. In his case, he met Jesus through the ministry of Christians, who showed kindness to Him. And it didn't fit in His mind. It created some cognitive dissonance between what he had heard about believers and what he was seeing. Now the third group then that Paul, for which we have a sermon in Acts, are what I'll call non-Jews.

Pagans are unbelieving people. These are people that have never heard of Christ or the Gospel. No, nothing of it. They haven't grown up in any context that they would hear the Gospel. In Acts 17, 22-31, Paul's address on Mars Hill is an example of this kind of message.

Paul begins in a very different place with them. He begins with the Creator God in the visible world that He made. And only after he is taught about God and who He is, The sovereign, the one who has made them in the heaven and earth, the one in whom we live and move and have our being. Only after he has given a more lengthy discourse about God does he briefly mention, in closing, the coming judgment. One verse out of nine.

He doesn't explicitly mention Jesus by name. They don't have the background or knowledge to understand that. He simply calls Christ the man whom God has ordained to judge the world. That there will be a judgment. And that's as far as he gets in his gospel presentation with these people.

You see, a very different message, a very different approach. They didn't have the Old Testament foundation to begin with Jesus and the Messiah. But then the fourth group that Paul preaches to in Acts where we have a detailed record of the sermon are what I'll call outward Jews. And Paul defines outward Jews in Romans 2, 28. He says, for he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, referring to people that have been circumcised, Nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh.

But He is a Jew who is one inwardly. And circumcision is that of the heart in the Spirit, not the letter, whose praise is not from men, but from God." Outward Jews are people who look like Jews on the outside. They have been circumcised, they might partake of the Passover, they may go to prayer occasionally and have some semblance of an outward religion, but there's no inward faith. There's no true repentance in their lives. Many national leaders today are just like Agrippa.

Outward Jews, outward Christians, outward whatever they profess. Recently, President Putin attended an Orthodox church service at the Church of Smolensk with Lukashenko, the president of Belarus. And the video shows him standing there by the priests and the other officials conducting the service. He's holding a candle. He crosses himself at the appropriate time as he listens to this service.

But here's a man who served in the KGB and the Soviet Russian. While we don't know the state of his heart, we certainly don't see the fruits of a new birth from above. But we can be thankful that under his leadership, the church has returned to prominence as the state religion and that there's instruction in the Orthodox faith in the schools and so on. All because of his leadership. Or to quote an American example, we have President Carter, who taught a Sunday School class at his church well into his late 90s.

At 95, he's still teaching a Sunday school class. He was very religious. But he advocated and believed a number of very wrong and unbiblical ideas. These are like the people in Matthew 7, who do all sorts of outward works in Christ's name, but don't know Christ. And Jesus says of them, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven.

Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name, cast out demons in your name, and performed wonders in your name? And Then I will say to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness. Lawlessness. That would describe Agrippa.

It's lawless. Outwardly a Jew, but lawless. Living an immoral life. These kinds of people are sometimes called carnal Christians or worldly Christians based on Paul's first letter to the Corinthians in which he calls them carnal Christians because they live more like the world than they live like Christians. He says in 1 Corinthians 3, 1, And I, brethren, could not speak to you as spiritual people, but as to carnal, as babes in Christ.

I fed you with milk and not salted food, for until now you weren't able to receive it. And even now you are still not able, for you are still carnal, for fleshly, for where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, for where there are these things, you are not carnal. Are you not carnal? And behaving like mere men. So some people are carnal or worldly Christians because they haven't been taught the law of God.

They haven't been instructed in how to live in order to be more and more like Christ and more and more conformed to His image and less conformed to this world. So you can say they're ignorant. They need instructed. But other times, it's because people have never been converted. And they don't want to give up their sinful ways, their sinful dress, their sinful speech, their sinful music, their sinful entertainment.

They're not interested in giving these things up. They've never repented and humbled themselves under Christ's dominion. And since true saving faith never exists apart from true repentance, such people that are unwilling to give up their sins aren't saved. They won't inherit the kingdom of heaven. Now some of these people can have extensive knowledge of the scriptures.

They can know the scriptures better than we do. But they don't know Christ. They know nothing of His transforming power in His life, changing their wills and their desires and their affections. Changing their hearts. Their prayers, if they do them at all, are formalistic.

Repetitions of words that they almost mindlessly repeat. Words that sound right, words that are maybe orthodox and correct, but Words that have no life in them. Because they aren't coming from a heart that's been born from above and filled with the Spirit. It's a life that doesn't know the power of the resurrection. And so in this message, Paul spends most of his time talking about Christ.

That's what they're missing. But he does so through the context of his conversion. And like the Jews who have rejected Christ, Paul identifies himself with these. So here's Agrippa. Agrippa is the person to whom Paul is speaking, almost personally.

Yes, there is a lot of pomp and state regalia. There are many prominent people, all citizens of Caesarea, Romans, leaders of the army, and other prominent officials that have been gathered for this occasion. Because Agrippa and Bernice have come in with great pomp. But Paul is talking to Agrippa. That's his primary audience.

And Agrippa is a Jew. He considers himself a Jew. He's knowledgeable about the Jewish faith. He is, after all, in charge of the temple and the appointment of the high priests. Of course, he doesn't live like a Jew.

He's not a Jew inwardly. He's living in an incestuous relationship with his sister. But he wants to hear Paul. There is something in Paul's life that he senses something different about Paul. Because Paul has been transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

His mind and thinking are different. He's a new creature. He's foreign to Agrippa. Agrippa is long familiar with these. It was his father that killed James.

And so he wants to hear Paul. And he says to Paul, you are permitted to speak for yourself. And so Paul begins his message. The first thing we see about Paul in this message is that he is very polite. He treats Agrippa with respect.

He extends a gesture of greeting. A friendly gesture. He stretches out His hand. I think that's an interesting detail because we communicate with more than our words. We communicate with our bodies as well.

In fact, some people would say that we communicate more with our body than we do with our words. And that if the message of our bodies is contrary to the message of our words, What do you suppose is received? The message of the body. The tone of voice. The expression on our face.

The posture of our bodies communicates either supporting our words or contradicting them. And if it contradicts them, then we are not believed. And so Paul's very bodily communication here is supporting a message of respect to Agrippa. And we see that coming out in his language, you know, I am happy, King Agrippa. That would have been expressed through his facial expressions and through his hand gestures.

He speaks humbly. He doesn't try to come as superior in knowledge or a better Jew, although he clearly is. There are many things that he could have poked a grip before. But this posture with which we approach people reflects how we think and speak of these people all the other times in our life when we're not in front of them. It's not an act that we put on in front of these people.

It's the way that we view them all the time, whether they're there or not. And so Paul wasn't one to be cursing the darkness or always condemning the church. Paul certainly could, but his criticisms, for example, of the Corinthians, which was a church very much in need of correction, it was in the context of a much fuller relationship where He brought praise and commendation where they had done well. So Paul doesn't bring here a message of condemnation. There are too many people who have been hardened against gospel witnessing by well-meaning but deceptive or offensively aggressive messengers.

We all can think of examples of either deceptive or offensively aggressive presentations of the Gospel that are not often helpful. Here Paul also graciously acknowledges Agrippa's expertise in Jewish matters. See, Paul's not looking down on him. He's not speaking to somebody who is his intellectual inferior, who doesn't know the law, and he's there to instruct him. He recognizes that Agrippa does know a few things and respects him for it.

Paul, secondly, he speaks graciously to Agrippa, humbly, but he's also happy to be there and give a defense and apologia. He says, I think myself happy. And that's the same word, blessed, that Jesus uses in the Beatitudes when he says blessed are the meek. It implies a privilege of receiving favor from God. Paul is saying he is blessed.

In fact, most other places in the New Testament where this adjective is used, It is translated blessed. It's usually used of a blessing in a spiritual sense, favor from God. Paul considered it a blessing from God, a privilege to testify to the Gospel before Agrippa, and he tells Agrippa that. And he means it. Paul doesn't argue that Agrippa has no jurisdiction or that since he has appealed to Caesar, he can't be compelled to testify.

Sometimes there is a place for those arguments, but not here. Here Paul sees an opportunity to carry out his commission of preaching and testifying before kings. That's what God told him he would do. And Paul is faithful to that commission. Paul is standing in chains, we learn later.

But he can truthfully proclaim to Agrippa, I think myself blessed to be able to give a defense before you." We get our word apology from the noun form of the Greek verb that's used here for defense. When Paul says, I am happy because I shall answer." That's answer or defense. That's the word there. And ironically, in Greek it means the exact opposite of what we mean by the word apology. We use it to mean an expression of regret or repentance, a change of heart, a change of mind after doing something we should not have done.

That's how we use the word apology. But the Greek word means the exact opposite. It means to give an answer or explain why we did what we did was right. It means to defend our view, our actions, not express remorse or regret for them. Think about that when you talk about an apology.

You're giving a defense. You're defending yourself. A lot of apologies are actually defenses of themselves. Or are you repenting and expressing remorse and a change of heart and acknowledging that what was done was wrong? So Paul here is giving a defense, an apology, not an admission that what he did was wrong, but a justification why what he did is right.

He defends his views as being the true understanding of the Scriptures. The very Scriptures that the Jews themselves claimed to believe and to follow. Another example of his graciousness in addressing Agrippa is that he asks him for an opportunity to speak. He doesn't presume upon it. He says, therefore I beg you, he asks him, to hear me patiently.

Fourthly, in this message, Paul identifies with his hearers. He identifies himself as a zealous Jew, a Pharisee. He lived according to the strictest sect of his religion. That means he was a scholar, a man of letters. He's not ignorant or illiterate.

As a strict Pharisee, He was well versed in the law and the traditional expositions and meaning of it. To live as a Pharisee means that he was moral and virtuous. He wasn't a loose or debauched young man. He wasn't a drunkard or a fornicator. But concerning the law, He was blameless.

He couldn't be charged with any vice. And being a Pharisee as opposed to a Sadducee meant that he received all of the Old Testament, all the books of the Bible, which the Sadducees did not. They rejected. It means that as a Pharisee, he believed in the spiritual world, in the immortality of the soul, in the resurrection of the body, and in the future reward of punishment after death. The Sadducees denied all of these things.

So he's establishing here that he is like any other Pharisee and that he believed, just like any other Pharisee. And in identifying himself as a Pharisee, he's setting the stage to make two points. First, he's setting the stage to be able to tell the Jews who are in a similar situation that their outward religion was useless. By putting himself in the same position as they are, One who practiced a useless outward religion. People will be more willing, and Agrippa will hopefully be more willing when he says all that's useless, more willing to listen to him.

Because transparency about our own weaknesses helps to break down defensiveness in somebody that we're seeking to minister to. People are more willing to listen to us when we are honest about our own weaknesses. People are more willing to listen when they know that we've wrestled with the same things, same sins, the same weaknesses that they are wrestling with. But secondly, he's setting the stage to show that it is not unreasonable to believe God raises the dead. Because that's what all Pharisees believe.

And so why should it be unreasonable that he would believe God raised Jesus? You see, in this matter, in this point of doctrine, Paul is concurring with all of Jews. His faith is according to the scriptures and it is also according to the church. He talks about the twelve tribes. He said to this promise, this hope of the promise that God made to the fathers, to this promise, our twelve tribes, which he was a part.

In fact, he was a tribe, he himself was of the tribe of Benjamin. And he says, Our twelve tribes, earnestly serving God, night and day hope to obtain. And for this hopesake king Agrippa, I am accused by the Jews. The people of Israel are called the 12 tribes because they were 12 tribes that came out of Egypt. That came out of Egypt and even though we don't have them returning in mass, scriptures do seem to indicate that many of these tribes individually, in various ways, made their way back, such that Paul is of the tribe of Benjamin.

Christ speaks of the twelve tribes. He says, To you assuredly I say to you that in the regeneration, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Anna was of the tribe of Asher. And James directs his epistle to the 12 tribes which are scattered abroad. So there still is some identification of the 12 tribes of Israel.

And then Paul, the last thing we want to look at this morning, Paul paints an accurate, even unflattering picture of his past life. There are a lot of things that Paul could have chosen to speak to Agrippa about if he wanted to evangelize him. He could have spoken about the immorality of Roman culture. He could have spoken about Agrippa's immorality as John the Baptist did. He could have spoken about all the injustices of the Jews toward him, but he doesn't.

He brings something more personal, something more warm, and something more vulnerable. He doesn't talk down to Agrippa. He talks to him as a fellow sinner. Agrippa knows all about the zealous persecution of Christians by the Sadducees and Pharisees. His own father was a part of it.

I think what's fascinating to Agrippa is that this leader of the persecution, Saul of Tarsus, has been turned upside down by the very Jesus that he was persecuting. And I think that's what leads Agrippa to be curious. There's a supernatural element here that he can't explain. But see, Paul is making it clear in his discussion of himself that zeal, enthusiasm, defending the cause, sacrificing, fanaticism, these are not necessarily coming from saving faith. Paul had done all these things in the name of Christ, thinking he was doing God a favor, thinking he was pleasing God when he wasn't.

Paul also is willing to answer objections. He's willing to answer questions. He's not irritated by them, even when the questions are a little bit denigrating to him. Vesta says there at the end he interrupts with a loud voice, Paul you are beside yourself, much learning is driving you mad. I mean that's an insult to tell somebody that they're mad or that they're learning is driving them mad.

But Paul is not offended. He says, I'm not mad, most noble festus. He speaks to him with respect. I'm not mad, most noble Festus. I speak the words of truth and reason.

For the king before whom I also speak, freely knows these things, for I am convinced that None of these things escapes his attention, since this thing was not done in a corner." So he's willing to answer objections. He's willing to deal with put-downs without becoming aggressive or responding in kind. And it's here that Paul then gets to what the essence of the Gospel is. And we'll look at that, Lord willing, next week. But it is about opening blind eyes.

It's about turning people from darkness to light. It's about rescuing us from the power of Satan. It's about receiving forgiveness. It's about sanctification by grace and not by work. It is a work of grace.

It's not a work that we do. And it's about walking by faith. And it's about fellowship. And we'll look at each of those in more detail next week, Lord willing. May Paul's message here and his sermon and his very approach of humility, of vulnerability, and of transparency, may that characterize our witness to Jesus Christ, to those outward Christians around us.

Almighty Heavenly Father, We thank You for the examples of Your Word. We pray that we would profit by them, that we would learn through them, that we would be able to imitate them and follow them as You have given them to us for our edification. Father, we ask that we might not be strangers to these things of which Paul speaks. We ask in Jesus' name, Amen.