Who Is Your Judge — Acts 21-23

0:00 Good morning. Let's, open in a word of prayer. Dear Lord, I thank you for the say. I pray that you would help the the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth to be pleasing to you, oh Lord. I pray that you would help my words to be directly from you Lord, and that the people who hear them today would be encouraged and find a way to apply them to their lives and that they would be blessed by it, not through what I've done, but through the power of your Holy Spirit.

0:27 And we pray these things in your name. Amen. Alright. This morning, we are going to be continuing in the book of acts. Acts chapter 23 verses one through 11.

0:44 I was really happy to get this passage, kind of for fun, but kind of because I got a chance to practice it. The last time I preached when Steven was standing in front of the counsel giving his defense. So kind of the second time around with Paul giving his defense in front of the console as well. And just to give a little context for what's happening here, because it really does happen like the next day. It's right after right after each other.

1:12 We have to go back to Andy's message with, Paul heading towards Jerusalem where the prophet Agabus came to him and said, hey, Paul. If you go to Jerusalem, you're gonna be imprisoned and bound in bound in James. And Paul's like, still gotta go. And then we see how he goes to Jerusalem, does the purification ritual, and then is falsely accused by the Jews from Asia who say, hey, this guy brought foreigners into the temple. And then this creates a riot.

1:40 Paul's being torn apart by the crowd. Eventually, the authorities, the police have to get involved, the Romans. And they pull Paul out of the crowd. And then, again we see Paul's like, let me let me talk. Give me a chance.

1:57 The Romans give him a chance. Again, speaks to the crowd talking about how he's giving the gospel to the Gentiles. Again, the crowd erupts. Please pull them out. It's a situation, that does not appear to be easily contained.

2:10 And so that is kind of the end of '21 halfway through '22. And then in '22, the Roman officer whose job it is to keep peace in the city is trying to ascertain what's actually going on. So his first thing that he says that really makes it realize that he has no idea is he, believes Paul to be this Egyptian guy that led a couple thousand people out into the desert. And Paul's like, I'm not that guy. Not that guy.

2:35 And then he's like, I'll just beat the truth out of Paul. That will work. Never fails. And so he's about to whip Paul, then Paul's like, hold on. I'm a Roman citizen.

2:44 You can't do this. And, he's like, no, I can't do this. And so he's like, how do I determine the truth here? Like, I... All I had was beating him.

2:53 I got nothing left. And so he's like, alright, we're gonna call the Jewish Council together and see what they have to say. That is where we find ourselves in this passage. It's the commander calling together the council, the Sanhedrin, same thing, different word. And it's composed of the scribes and the elders and the priests.

3:15 So in this group you have the law, you have tradition, and you have religion. A complete summation of a people's history and what binds them and what rules them. And so he's like, this is the group I'm going get together and we're going to determine the truth. We're going to go ahead and read the passage now, and then we're going to go through it a little slower. So starting in chapter 23 verse one, it says, then Paul, looking earnestly at the council, said, men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day.

3:51 And the high priest, Ananias, commanded those who stood by him to strike him on the mouth. Then Paul said to him, God will strike you, you whitewashed wall, for you sit to judge me according to the law, and do you command me to be struck contrary to the law? And those who stood by said, do you revile God's high priest? Then Paul said, I did not know, brethren, that he was the high priest, for it is written, you shall not speak evil of a ruler of your people.' But when Paul perceived that one part were Sadducees and the other Pharisees, he cried out in the council, 'Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee. Concerning the hope and resurrection of the dead, I am being judged.

5:02 The commander, fearing lest Paul might be pulled to pieces by them, commanded the soldiers to go down and take him by force from among them and bring him to the barracks. But the following night, the Lord stood by him and said, be of good cheer, Paul, for you have testified for me in Jerusalem, so you must also bear witness at Rome. Interesting couple verses here, And we're going to kind of go through them verse by verse. And the first thing we need to be aware of here is that Paul is very intentional with his words. In almost every situation he was in, this was something he was very good at.

5:40 He was never one to fire off the cuff too rapidly, and he always picked his words with care to be a good testimony. The first word that I want to look at here is when he looks at the council, he said, men and brethren, or other translations will say it brothers. These were people that Paul knew of very intimately, if not knew some of them personally. We know in other passages he references the fact that he was taught by Gamaliel the Pharisee, and this was twenty three years prior. We don't know how old Paul was necessarily when this happened, but the people that he could have been going to, I guess, Pharisee school with would have been twenty three years older now.

6:20 And they could very well have been on this council. People that he grew up with. This could have been like a twenty third year class reunion. I don't know how high school reunions work. For me it's just a family reunion.

6:32 But we see how Paul is very familiar with this group. He's identifying with them as men and brethren. And he goes, he's still identifying with the Jews. He didn't see them as an enemy that he's combating in this situation. He sees them as people who are in need of a savior.

6:47 And that's his goal here. Now the next phrase he says is, I have lived my life before God. And it's part of the part of the phrase, but the first part is, I've lived my life before God. And this is something that is a really big phrase, but what does it really mean? And what does it look like to live your life before God?

7:06 And are we living our lives before God? I would posit that every single one of us is living our life before God. It says in Psalms 139, one through three, it says, you have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit down and when I rise. You perceive my thoughts from afar.

7:24 You discern my going out and my lying down. You are familiar with all my ways. So based on this passage, how could anybody say that they are not living before God? Even unsaved believers are living before God in the sense that God knows everything about them from before they were born. In his...

7:41 In the womb, he knew them. He knit their parts together. And so all of us are living before God. It's the second half of this phrase where things really start to get tricky, and it's in all good conscience. And so what exactly does that mean?

7:55 To live before God in all good conscience. Paul is not claiming to never have sinned. This would be a ridiculous claim because we know from his earlier life that he was persecuting the Christians. And he also says in first Timothy one fifteen, it says, I am the chief of sinners. What he is saying here is that he has made the foundation of his Christian life a continuous decision to intentionally live by the patterns that God has prescribed.

8:26 And we're going look at that a little bit more in-depth using a secondary passage here that we're going to be analyzing a little bit more. And that's Philippians one:nine-eleven. And so that passage there says, and this I pray that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. And again, we're going to go through this passage here as well, kind of line by line looking at what it actually looks like to live a life with good conscience before God. Living a life with a clear conscience is not just about not doing wrong.

9:45 And when I was a kid, my parents would sometimes take me out to ice cream as a means of showing affection. Specifically in the household where Rockstar Roger is the father. It happened quite frequently, which is awesome. But if you do not have knowledge and discernment and you were to say, I love my child. They love ice cream.

10:03 I'm going to feed them ice cream every meal. What would happen? Your child would soon start to suffer from malnourishment and they would get sick and they would be very ill. So here we see what is the problem when you have love without knowledge and discernment. And this is why knowledge and discernment is so important.

10:20 Because Paul, in the beginning of Acts, was following his conscience to what he thought was the truth. He's killing Christians. But by the end of Acts, we see how Paul is the one being persecuted because his knowledge and discernment of what the truth is has shifted and he realized that what he was doing is wrong and he needed to change his ways. And this is why knowledge and discernment is so important. Verse 10 is also very important because it says that you may approve what is excellent or approve the things that are excellent.

10:50 And the idea of approving here requires examination and recognizing what is genuinely valuable. I think of the Iwana Key verse here where it says, study to show thyself approved to God, a workman that who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. I also think of the verse in Hebrews five, verse 14 where it says, who by reason of use have exercised their senses to discern what is good and evil. It is only once you exercise these senses and you use your knowledge and discernment that you can really see what is valuable to God. And you know what will please God versus pleasing man.

11:30 And this only comes through study, practice, and being sensitive to the spirit. And then the next part in this phrase is that pure and blameless till the day of Christ. And we kind of heard about this, what the day of Christ is in the song I was just saying, come Jesus, come. When the Lord comes back, that is the day of Christ. When he comes back and we all stand before the judgment seat, and are meeting our Lord and savior face to face.

12:01 I'll be honest, I did a pretty poor job opening up the sermon, but I wanna circle back to what is the main idea. And if you were to leave right now, this is what I would ask you to take with you. And that is who is your judge? And that's kinda what Paul is contemplating or what Paul is exemplifying in his passage. Cause everybody around him is trying to judge him.

12:20 The crowd's trying to judge him. The Sanhedrin's trying to judge him. The Romans are trying to judge him. Even his fellow believers said, Paul, don't go. That's not the right way to go even though God had commanded him to go that way.

12:31 And so Paul is looking towards a higher authority or a higher judge, that is the Lord Jesus Christ because he knows that one day that he will face the Lord Jesus Christ on the day of Christ. And that is Paul's motivation, to be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. He was keeping an eternal perspective of his actions because I believe Paul was a very smart guy and that he could have said the right words where the Jewish council would have been appeased and they would have let him go. And they would have said to the Roman officer, he's good. This is our mistake.

13:01 Let him go. But Paul refused to back down and cater to the human authority. He stood for what he believed and he did not waver on his conscience because he was looking forward to the day where he would stand before his Lord, the righteous judge. He was essentially saying to the council, whatever you decide does not matter. The only person that truly determines my outcome is the lord.

13:41 But the Christian life is not, I would say, not measured by input. It's measured by output. And so if you're not seeing the fruit of righteousness, then how hard can you say you're living the Christian life? Because even the Lord Jesus Christ himself said, by their fruits, you will know them. And I wasn't planning on reading this until the breaking of bread, but I would like to read first Corinthians fifteen fifty eight here.

14:05 It's a really good kind of summary of this idea where it says, therefore, my beloved brethren, steadfast, be immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. And then the last phrase is to the glory and praise of God. Because we established that everybody lives a life before God. But the important thing and the important distinction to make and how you do it is to live a life for God. Cause that is what is much harder and that is what as Paul is trying to exemplify here is to living a life for God, to allow love, truth, and discernment to shape our choices so that we can increasingly choose what pleases God.

14:51 It's to produce righteousness and ultimately seek God's glory rather than man's approval. This is what it means to live a life before God in a pure conscience. I wanted to seal a page out of Jeremy's book and spend the most of the message on verse one. So the rest of the message should hopefully go a little faster. They're not all not all the verses are going take that long.

15:14 That was kind of the the it's phenomenal verse. I honestly could have spent the whole message there. But we're going to move on to verse two. Honestly verses two through five. And this is where we have the interchange between Ananias and Paul with the slap and then the rebuke and then the other rebuke and then the secession...

15:32 Like, submission to the second rebuke. Background on Ananias is Ananias was a political appointment. His career as the high priest was known for corruption and scandal and known for being like, hey, if you can give me more power, I will work with you. But otherwise, no bueno. We don't really know exactly why he slapped...

15:54 Ordered Paul to be slapped. Probably a little bit of anger, frustration, maybe asserting dominance. Whatever the reason, it doesn't matter. It's very interesting that I think it's in second Corinthians we hear about all the torture that Paul went through with the shipwrecks and the beatings and this and that and whatnot. We never really see a physical account of that happening in the book of Acts, but we have a physical account of one slap.

16:17 And the reason that Luke concludes this is it creates a picture. It creates contracts, a contrast. Paul has been convicted of absolutely nothing at this point, so punishing him is directly contradictory to the law. At this point in the proceedings, only one person has broken the law, and it is the judge, not the accuser. The worldly judge, I should say.

16:36 Or not the accused. In verse three, Ananias is the one that thinking he's sitting in the judgment seat, but Paul reminds him that there is a higher judge. And he uses a phrase that's very similar to what the Lord Jesus Christ used in Matthew chapter 23 where he called the Pharisees and the teachers of the law hypocrites in whitewashed tombs, Beautiful on the outside, but on the inside full of bones of the dead and everything that is unclean. In the same way on the outside, you appear as righteous, but on the inside, you are full of hypocrisy. And it's just the New Test version of man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart that we see in first Samuel with David.

17:15 When human approval becomes your highest court, appearance becomes more important than reality. And this is what happened with Ananias. His approval of the human... His approval from humans started dictating his life decisions and what was supposed to be the office that was closest to God, the high priest of Israel, eventually just became a sham to try and appease and gain power with his human overlords. The people that were supposed to be defending the law ended up violating it.

18:03 Could have been early in the morning. Have been dark out. Paul's been away for years. Who knows? Maybe he didn't recognize him.

18:09 Ananias could not have been wearing his high priestly garments as it was an informal meeting. We don't know. Some people speculate, again a 100% speculation, that a thorn in the flesh could have been eyesight. So maybe he didn't recognize him through that as well. We'll never know.

18:23 But we see a beautiful example here of even when corrected in the situation where he is a 100% the one at fault, Paul still lives according to his conscience and answers them with scripture and then submits himself to that scripture. So here we see he receives additional knowledge. He uses discernment and then submits himself to God's will through the scripture once he has been reproved. He doesn't get angry or lash out even though he's the one that is being wronged here. Now moving on to verse six, we have Paul bring up the resurrection to the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

18:57 What was his purpose with this? At first glance, it seems like he's just trying to divide the room because if the council can't come to a decision on this, it's probably going be hard for them to come to a decision on him. But this is really... He's really getting at the reason why he's here because this is the crux of the Christian faith. And Jeremy saved me so much time.

19:15 Bless Jeremy. Because I was planning on reading parts of first Corinthians 15 in this this message, but he read it during the breaking of bread. So that's very very very sweet of you. Because without the resurrection of the dead, are... Be most pitied.

19:29 And with the resurrection of the dead, we are made alive through Christ. And what a blessing that this is. The defense that he was giving was the whole reason he was there because he believed so firmly in the Christian faith and the resurrection of the dead and it compelled him to keep ministering around the world. Now moving on to verses seven through 10 is when kind of the pandemonium broke out, but it's an interesting and kind of funny thing because Paul started with everyone against him and ended this passage with half the council on his side. The very Pharisees who came to accuse him started defending him.

20:09 And then they said, and this is really funny, perhaps an angel or spirit spoke to him and gave him these truths, which we know this is exactly what happened. Because the Lord Jesus Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus and gave him that come to Jesus moment and redirected his life completely. And then for the third time in verse 10, we see how the Roman commander just got to pull him out of the situation because he doesn't know what's going on. Things are getting angry, is like a rough two days because this really did all happen within like twenty four hours. Like the third time Paul's getting pulled of here.

20:42 And then the last verse is verse 11. And this is kind of what brings the whole passage together. And in my bible, it breaks it up into sections, and verse 11 is the start of the next session. But I believe it is very important for this one here. Because in verse one, we see how Paul was living his life before God, submitting to that higher authority, submitting to that judge instead of the judge of the Pharisees.

21:05 And in verse 11, we see how God stood by him and how the Lord appeared to him in this dream and said, be of good cheer. Everyone else is making wild accusations against Paul. Like I said earlier, crowd, Ananias, the Sanhedrin, the Romans. But the only thing that mattered to Paul was Christ's verdict. How does Christ determine my actions?

21:26 How does he feel about what I'm doing? And it seems like it would not be encouraging telling Paul, hey Paul, you're a prisoner here. You're going to be a prisoner in Rome. But it was actually a great encouragement and this verse dictates the remainder of the book of Acts because he says, you must testify before me... For me in Rome.

21:44 And at this point, Paul hasn't been to Rome. He said in Acts nineteen twenty one, I wish to go to Rome, but he still hasn't made it. And he says in the beginning of Romans, in Romans one, he says, I long to be with you. Still hadn't made it. But the Lord Jesus Christ made a direct promise to him, you're going to be in Rome and testify for me.

22:01 And this had to have been encouraging to Paul knowing that no matter what happened in the circumstances, because in the last twenty four hours, he's been beaten, arrested, thrown in prison, has no idea what's going to happen. The Lord says, no, will preserve you. I have more for you to come. And that is why this verse is so important because it brings it full circle of what the Lord is using Paul to accomplish through his life. I don't want to steal more from the future preachers, so I'm just going to stop it at that.

22:27 But how can we apply this to our life? How can we make this passage valuable to us practically? Throughout the entire passage, everybody thinks Paul is the one that's on trial before the Sanhedrin. But we are constantly reminded through his actions and his phrases that there is a higher court. He says, I live with God before live before God with a clear conscience.

22:54 He doesn't talk about defending himself before humans. He I live before God. He talks about the resurrection because the resurrection infers that the day of Christ is coming. If want more on that, just read the whole of first Corinthians 15. The whole thing kind of breaks it out beautifully.

23:09 But it does raise the question for us that is what courtroom are we living in and who... What judge are we looking to for approval in our lives? Because it can come in a bunch of different forms. We could be looking at our kids for approval. We could be looking at our parents for approval, our spouse, the world, and most insidiously, our own approval and letting that dictate our life away from what God would have us to do.

23:35 We have to remember that we serve a higher judge and it is our responsibility to live a life before him with good conscience looking forward to that day. And as Christians, we can look forward to that day with true enrapturement knowing that we will be raptured and spend eternity with our savior. But for nonbelievers, that is not as beautiful of a day. And that's why it is so important to realize that it is not the works that we do that bring us to salvation. It is only justification through Christ.

24:01 And we see this in Romans eight thirty three to 34 where it says, who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died and furthermore is also even risen at the right hand of God who makes intercession for us. And it is because Christ is risen and makes intercession for us that we can sing, come Jesus, come.

24:21 Looking forward to that day. And Paul really was looking forward to that day. And we see through this passage, kind of summation of his life and this idea of living his life with a good conscience before God. And we see one of the last books he wrote in second Timothy where he really brings it all for so full circle. In second Timothy four verses five through seven or six through eight, it says, I am already being poured out as a drink offering and the time of my departure is at hand.

24:55 I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give to me on that day, and not to me only, but also to all who have loved his appearing. Paul did not live his life before God.

25:15 He lived his life for God with a clear conscience and finished it that way. May we do the same. Let's close in prayer. Dear Lord, I thank you so much for your your death on the cross and your way of providing intercession for us that we can spend eternity with you and that we can look forward to that day of Christ with such longing, knowing that we have boldness to approach the throne, that we've been washed clean through the blood of your blood of your son. Lord, I pray that you would help us to live our life with good conscience before you, that we would let your word guide our lives, that we would be sensitive to the spirit, that we would be studying and approving, to discern what is right and wrong and how best we can serve you.