Acts 26:19-23 (NIV)
“So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven. First to those in Damascus, then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and to the Gentiles also, I preached that they should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds. That is why the Jews seized me in the temple courts and tried to kill me. But I have had God’s help to this very day, and so I stand here and testify to small and great alike. I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen–that the Christ would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to his own people and to the Gentiles.”
Paul had put his own repentance into immediate action. He immediately began to preach the gospel that he had fought against for so long. He was so passionate about it that the Jews in Damascus laid a plot against his life, and he had to be spirited out of the city, lowered over the wall in a basket after dark (Acts 9:23-25).
He then went to Jerusalem. Again, he preached so passionately that the Grecian Jews there tried to kill him. The disciples then sent him to his hometown of Tarsus far to the north in Cilicia, just to keep him out of harm’s way.
Paul made no secret of the fact that he had spent the last several years spreading the gospel throughout the empire, not just to the Jews, but also to the gentiles. This had inflamed the Jewish sensibilities against him even further and was the real reason why he had been seized and assaulted in the temple two years earlier. It was merely a continuation of the persecution he had endured since his conversion.
Paul’s final point was that the gospel he preached was not heresy or a new theology that should be opposed and persecuted, but was clearly foretold throughout the Jewish Scriptures. This included the promise of the Messiah as far back as Genesis 3:15, that he would suffer and die on behalf of the people, and that his death and resurrection would open a way into God’s presence for both Jews and gentiles.
In these few short paragraphs, Paul communicated the key points of the previous thirty years of his life, the mission that drove him, and the history of the persecution committed against him by the Jewish people, of which his current imprisonment was merely the culmination. He also clearly communicated the core of the gospel message to this small group of unbelievers: the death and resurrection of Jesus and the transformation of his own life by faith, a transformation that they themselves could experience if they would just believe.
Father, the main points of the gospel really are that simple. And the proof of them is not the depth of our theology or the breadth of our understanding of the Bible, but our own transformation and the evidence of the holiness of our lives, the righteousness that comes by grace through faith in Jesus. Help me, like Paul, to keep it simple when I share my own testimony with those who need to hear, and to keep on sharing every day. Amen.
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