Why Do We Trust the Apostle Paul? Acts 15 SHOWDOWN

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Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Bob and Ear Live. Today we are getting into a sermon that I had the privilege of giving at Agape Kingdom Fellowship in our series. This was the part two of a sermon titled, Why Do We Trust the Apostle Paul? Why do we trust Paul? So much of what Paul teaches is seemingly contrary to the rest of the bible it seems almost to contradict the rest of the bible and so why do we trust paul why does he have a place in our bibles it’s eerie you see the similarity between the apostle paul and the founder of mormonism joseph smith the con man They both say they loved God, they were ignorant, and then Jesus, when they were in the wilderness, Jesus appeared to them in a ray of light and gave them a new message for a new people group. And it’s kind of eerie how similar these two groups are. In fact, Jews have a saying, they say that God gave Christianity Mormonism so that Christians could know how Jews feel about Christianity. And so the similarities, they are a bit eerie. So why do we trust the Apostle Paul with his message of grace, whereas we reject, and rightfully so, we reject Joseph Smith? Joseph Smith, he inserted himself into the Bible. If you look at at his Joseph Smith translation. In your Bibles, if you look at Genesis chapter 50, you’ll have 26 verses, whereas in the Joseph Smith translation, there’s an additional, I want to say like 10, 15 verses or so, where he inserts prophecies about himself into the Old Testament, into Genesis chapter 50. Joseph Smith was a con man Whereas Paul, Paul, on the other hand, he had a new message for a new people group. And it was the apostle Peter who confirmed Paul’s message. And it was Luke, the great historian who wrote the gospel of Luke. who recorded Peter’s confirmation of Paul’s message. And so a lot of fun. We got into Acts chapter 10 last week. This week we will be recapping some of that, and then we will be going backwards into Acts chapter 9. Should be a ton of fun. Hey, let’s jump right into it. We want to go ahead and is my volume coming through there? Testing one, two, three. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Testing one, two, three. All right. There we go. Well, good morning, Agape Kingdom Fellowship. It’s great to see you all here today. Last week, we began to answer the question, why do we trust Paul? Why do we trust the apostle Paul? After all, the message that he gave was different from the other apostles. And the message of Paul was even different from what Jesus taught himself. So how can we trust him? How do we know he wasn’t just another con man like Joseph Smith? Joseph Smith, he claimed he had a new message for a new people. Paul, he claimed that he had the gospel of grace for the Gentiles, a new message for a new people, very similar to Joseph Smith. And so how can we trust him? How can we trust when he was teaching grace, whereas Jesus and the other apostles were teaching the law? And a lot of Christians miss that. They miss that Jesus taught the law. In Jesus’ most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, he said, “…do not think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I did not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jaw or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.” Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. And then after that, what was his formula in the Sermon on the Mount? He would say, you have heard about this teaching in the law, but I double down on it, and I triple down, and I encourage you to go further than the law. So for example, Matthew 5.21, you have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgments. But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. Jesus takes the law, he affirms it, and he takes it further. You have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. He reminds them of the law, and then he takes it further. Again, you have heard it said to those of old, you shall not swear falsely, but shall perform your oaths to the Lord. But I say to you, do not swear at all, neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne, nor by the earth, for it is his footstool, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king, nor shall you swear by your head, because you cannot make one hair white or black, but let your yes be yes and your no be no, for whatever is more than these is from the evil one.” Or, you know, Jesus, he doubles down on the law, if you see in Matthew 22. But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. Then one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, testing him and saying, “‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’ And Jesus said, “‘No, we’re not under the law. We’re under grace.'” Wait, no, he didn’t say that. What did he say? Well, in verse 37, Jesus said to him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. In the next chapter, Jesus, he rebukes the Pharisees. And what does he rebuke them for? Well, he rebukes them because they keep the lesser matters of the law, but they don’t teach the greater matters of the law. They don’t keep those. In Matthew 23 and verses 23 and 24, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you pay tithe of mint and… and come in and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith, these you ought to have done without leaving the others undone, blind guides who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.” Notice he says, “…the weightier matters of the law, these you ought to have done.” Jesus taught obedience to the law. And we won’t read all the verses we read two weeks ago where Jesus teaches you must follow the law to enter into eternal life, but we will read this example from Matthew 19. If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments. People, Christians, will often say that Jesus taught grace. And you have to be careful with something I’m going to do here. But if you take a Bible and you use Bible software and you do a word search and you try to find Jesus saying the word grace in the Gospels, you will not find a single example. Jesus does not use the word grace not one time in the entire Gospels, in all four of them, not once. Paul, on the other hand, he preaches against the law, and he preaches that we are saved by grace. Whereas Jesus used the word grace in the Gospels zero times, Paul, according to a word search I ran this morning, uses the word grace 84 times in his epistles. It’s different depending on what translation you use, but when I ran mine, 84 times in the different epistles. Actually, I did find one example of Jesus using the word grace, but it was not in the Gospels. It was with Paul, and we mentioned this verse this morning in Bible study. Paul, he quotes Christ as saying, my grace is sufficient for you, but you don’t see Jesus using that at any point in the Gospels. Which, a slight problem with this for today’s question, this verse of Jesus mentioning grace is recorded by Paul. So Jesus, on one hand, he’s teaching law, law, law, whereas Paul, he’s teaching grace, grace, grace, right? Jesus says, if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments. Paul says, therefore, we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from deeds of the law. Paul, he teaches the exact opposite. Jesus said, and I’ll read this from Matthew 15, but he answered and said, “‘I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.'” Paul says in Romans 11, for I speak to you Gentiles inasmuch as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry. Paul says in Ephesians that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs of the same body and partakers of his promise in Christ through the gospel. Jesus consistently preaches law, law, law, do good works, do good deeds if you want to enter life and be blessed. keep the law. Paul teaches the opposite. Grace, grace, grace. If you want to be justified, if you want to be blessed, have faith and do not commit yourself to deeds of the law. Some teach that you can mix law and grace and you can put them together and you can mold them together and they’re compatible with one another, but they’re not. Paul teaches in Galatians 5.4, you have become estranged from Christ. You who attempt to be justified by the law, you have fallen from grace. Paul teaches his followers that they are not under the law. And so this presents a massive problem, which we began talking about last week. Why do we trust Paul? How can we trust him? If he came preaching a new message for a new group of people in the Bible, why do we allow his epistles to be in the Bible? Why is he in there? Joseph Smith, he came preaching a new message to a new people, and we rightfully reject him, and so what’s the difference? We might say, you know, well, hey, in Paul’s letters, like, you know, in his letter to the Corinthians, we see that Jesus, that he gave Paul grace, and Paul’s letter to the Galatians, we see that the church blessed Paul’s ministry, but the problem is, Those were written by Paul. Just like how Joseph Smith’s teaching, he says, oh yeah, Jesus is totally blessing my ministry, yet we reject Joseph Smith, but we don’t reject Paul. Why is that? We rightly reject Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, if you’re not aware, as a con man. Why not be consistent and reject Paul? In fact, a lot of people who claim to worship Christ, and it seems they do worship Christ, very often you’ll run into people who do reject Paul. They say Paul was a heretic. So why is he in our Bibles? Well, last week we asked this question and we started answering it. And you guys remember Peter, of course. And Peter in the book of Acts, we saw in chapter 10, Peter got this vision and it was this vision of all these unclean foods. And within this vision, God tells him to to eat these unclean foods. And Peter, he’s very upset by this. And he essentially says, you know, well, you know, I’ve never eaten anything unclean. I follow the law. And the Lord tells him, what God has cleansed, you must not call common. And people, often Christians, when we read this, we assume it’s about food. We assume this means, oh, Peter can now eat unclean foods. But as we saw last week, that’s not how Peter took this message. He didn’t take it as a change to his diet. He kept these same dietary restrictions before and after this vision. Yet immediately after this vision, God takes Peter to a Gentile’s home and commands him to preach the gospel to these Gentiles. And how bizarre is this? It’s so bizarre. We read earlier Jesus say, do not go into the way of the Gentiles. Yet here he’s saying, go into the way of the Gentiles and preach to them. How bizarre. And Peter, very reluctantly, he agrees. And if you recall, he said when he was preaching to them, it’s unlawful for me to be here. I shouldn’t be here, but God, what he said should be clean. I’m not going to call it common. And so Peter, he thinks back to this vision, and he understands, rightfully so, that this vision, it wasn’t about food, but it was about Gentiles, right? The unclean world, the unclean Gentiles, they have been made clean. Gentiles who did not keep the law were now clean and could receive the Holy Spirit for the first time ever. And at the end of Acts chapter 10, we read, while Peter was still speaking these words that is preaching, The Holy Spirit fell upon all those who heard the word, and those of the circumcision who believed were astonished, as many as came with Peter, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles also. So those who were of the circumcision, that is, those who were of the law, they were astonished because the people who did not keep the law could be saved because they received the Holy Spirit. But why? Why would they be astonished that God saved some people? We saw last week that Peter, he was preaching very effectively in all Judea. And he did very mighty miracles there, even raised a woman from the dead, and that caused people to believe. So why here would they be astonished that the Holy Spirit saved these people? Well, because for thousands of years, God’s people were a people of the law. For the entirety of Jesus’ earthly ministry, he taught, if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments. Yet here you have those who did not keep the law entering into eternal life, receiving the Holy Spirit. So they were astonished because the Gentiles received salvation. This was brand new to them. They had not seen this before. And immediately after this, Peter, he recounts this story, and he recounts it verbatim to other Jewish believers who were under the law, and we read that. That’s at the start of Acts 11. I’ll read a few of these verses, verses 2 and 3. And when Peter came up to Jerusalem, those of the circumcision contended with him, saying, you went in to the uncircumcised men and ate with them. So just like how Peter, he was hesitant to go speak to these Gentiles, these other men under the law, believing Christians who were under the law, they looked at Peter and they said, you’re not supposed to do that. They had that same, they were upset by that, similar to how Peter was upset by that. Verse 4 says, but Peter explained it to them, and then he recounts the story. In verse 18, when they heard these things, they became silent, and they glorified God, saying, then God has also granted to the Gentiles repentance to life. Amen to that, right? We’re all Gentile, so we say amen to that. God has granted us repentance to life. And from this point onward, a massive dispute started in the early church. A massive dispute among Christians. They debated this very question, can you be saved if you do not keep the law? Can you be saved? And we’re not going to go into much detail on their debate here today, other than to mention Peter’s involvement in this debate. If we jump forward to Acts chapter 15, we read in verse 1, “…and certain men came down from Judea and taught the brethren, unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” And of course, circumcision, that is representative of the law, and Moses is the lawgiver. So they’re saying, unless you be circumcised according to Moses, unless you keep the law, you cannot be saved. In verse 5, but some of the sect of the Pharisees who believed, so these are Christians who believed, they rose up saying it is necessary to circumcise them and to command them to keep the law of Moses. These Christians are saying you can’t be saved if you’re not keeping the law. So there’s this big dispute over this. And so even those who believed in Jesus were claiming you needed to keep the law. So what did they do? Well, now the apostles and the elders came together to consider the matter. In verse 7, we see Peter’s involvement in this story. And when there had been much dispute, right, that is, can believers be saved if they do not keep the law? There had been much dispute over this. Peter rose up and said to them, “‘Men and brethren, you know that a good while ago God chose among us that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe.'” So God, who knows the heart, acknowledged them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us, and made no distinction between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith. Now therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke on the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?” But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we shall be saved in the same manner as they. So the Apostle Paul, he came preaching this new message of grace to these Gentiles, to this new people group. Why do we trust Paul when he says this? Well, Peter is extremely influential in this matter. Peter, a pillar of the church, one who was close to Jesus, one who Jesus clearly put in a position of authority over believers, that Peter, that very same Peter claimed, hey, salvation has come to the Gentiles and I’ve seen it. I’ve witnessed it. And this verifies Paul’s message. It would not be good enough for Paul and Paul alone to say that salvation has come to the Gentiles. No, because Paul was an outsider. Paul was an outsider. He was an outsider who came with a new message, and that simply is not enough for us to trust him. Many outsiders came with new messages. Joseph Smith, he came adding stuff to the Bible, and he said, God is blessing me in this ministry. So an outsider coming with a new message isn’t enough to trust him. They’re not trustworthy. But here we see the thrust of Paul’s message to the Gentiles being confirmed by Peter. That salvation has come to the Gentiles. The thrust of his message is confirmed by a pillar in the church. And it’s crucial that it was Peter to get this message across. It needs to be someone who’s in authority, someone who is close to Jesus, someone who can be trusted to be both honest, yeah, to be honest, that’s one part of the equation, but to also to be wise, someone who’s not naive. It can’t be some gullible fool with a good heart. And so Peter was the perfect option. And so when God, when he gave Paul the message of grace for the Gentiles, he knew that there would be strife. He knew that, of course. He knew that people would have difficulty being convinced that these plans have changed and that, you know, everything is different now. And so in God’s wisdom, God directed Peter, who he previously told, Only go to the Jews. He directed Peter to go and be a credible witness that salvation has come to those who did not keep the law. If Peter had not gone to Cornelius and Cornelius’ Gentile family members, the entire church would have rejected Paul’s ministry. The entire church, they would have rejected Paul. In fact, there was another problem that Paul faced in his ministry, not just that he was bringing this new message, but that he was formerly a persecutor of the church. Paul came persecuting the church immensely, and he did so more than any other. And because he persecuted the church so severely, the believing Jews, the Christians, they, at first, they didn’t trust him. In fact, Paul says in Galatians chapter 1, he says, For you have heard of my former conduct in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it. If you notice in your Bible, the words tried to, they are in italics. right? And if you don’t know what that means, that means that translators, when they were translating the section, they will add words in italics because they think it helps make the sentence structure fit better. And so these two words, tried to, are not in the original text. They’re not. The King James Version, it says, beyond measure, I persecuted the church of God and wasted it. If you kind of take this literally, it almost seems like Paul succeeded in destroying the church. But that’s a conversation perhaps for next week. And so it makes sense that no Christians, no worshipers of Christ would accept Paul’s message, right? He’s out here persecuting the church, killing Christians, murdering them, throwing them into prison. What’s that? You know, oh, now he’s actually become a Christian and he’s teaching a We’ve been teaching this for thousands of years and he’s teaching something else. It’s different from what Christ himself taught, yet he’s a worshiper of Christ. Yeah, right. Yeah, sure. We totally believe that, right? That’s about their attitude and it’s fairly understandable. He had been murdering their friends. But that is exactly the struggle that Paul faced. In fact, I’d like you to join me in reading the account of Paul’s conversion in Acts chapter 9. And we’ll have this up on the screen, I believe. But we’ll go ahead and we’ll just start in verse 1. Acts chapter 9 verse 1. Then Saul, and Saul was another name for Paul. Then Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked letters from him to the synagogues of Damascus, so that if he found anyone who were of the way, whether men or women, he he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. And followers of the way, that’s what Christians called themselves before they came up with this name Christians. So followers of the way, that is Christians. So Paul, he’s persecuting the church, more specifically persecuting Christ, verse three. As he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. Then he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, who are you, Lord? Then the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. It is hard for you to kick against the goats. So he trembled and astonished, said, Lord, what do you want me to do? Notice that Paul instantly, when he’s confronted with the truth of this, with undeniable truth, he was afraid and he was instantly submissive to Christ. It’s fascinating that that’s relevant for other discussions, so remember to keep that in mind. Verse 7, and the men who journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice but seeing no one. Then Saul arose from the ground, and when his eyes were opened, he saw no one. But they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank. Now, consider Paul. He was a Pharisee who understood the Old Testament very well. He understood the Old Testament extremely well. And one of my favorite topics in the Bible is Old Testament prophecies that prophesy the forecoming Christ. It’s so fascinating, the hundreds of prophecies, how deeply layered they are into the text that prophesy Jesus specifically. And I can imagine Paul, who knows these scriptures, for three days being blind, he can’t see. He’s got to be deep in thought, right? What else are you going to do when you’re blind? You’re deep in thought. And he’s got to be running through these stories, right, in the Old Testament. And they’re just hitting him. Oh, with Abraham and Isaac on the mountain, with the law, this foreshadow. I’m assuming he’s realizing these things as he’s blind. and I can’t imagine that this wouldn’t hit him at that time. But verse 10, now there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias, and to him the Lord said in a vision, Ananias, and he said, here I am, Lord. So the Lord said to him, arise and go to the street called Straight and inquire at the house of Judas for one called Saul of Tarsus, for behold, he is praying. And in a vision, he has seen a man named Ananias coming in and putting his hand on him so that he might receive sight. Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. And so notice briefly, Ananias, he recognizes, hey, I’m kind of afraid of this guy. His reputation precedes him of being someone who murders us. And here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on your name. And so he’s saying, yeah, God, I love you, but it’s kind of scary. Verse 15, but the Lord said to him, go, for he is a chosen vessel of mine to bear my name before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel. For I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name’s sake. And here we see directly Jesus calling on Paul to be a vessel to the Gentiles. But what is so important about this is who recorded this? If you know the name, you can just shout it out. Who recorded this? Any brave? Brave folks. Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, if you want the rest of this message, head to kgov.com, K-G-O-V.com, kgov.com.