Acts: The Kingdom on Mission Caleb Nelson

It's been eighty weeks of joy to study this book together with you. What a treasure trove of the wisdom and knowledge of God are here in these too-short pages as they summarize the early spread of God's kingdom from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria and the uttermost parts of the earth! So what do we take away from these final two verses of the book? This is Luke's summary, wrapping up everything he wants us to know from his two-volume work. So we will review his main point: The Kingdom is certain. We will also review his two subpoints: The Kingdom is greater than any particular servant of the Kingdom, no matter how important, and the Kingdom keeps spreading through the proclamation of Jesus and His reign.

In this final quarter of Acts, Luke is adopting the Genesis-style narrative of promise and fulfillment, where God's promise meets with threat after threat, but vanquishes them all in succession. The story of Paul's journey to Rome is just such a Genesis-style narrative. Paul decided to go to Rome back in chapter 19, and then for ten chapters met with obstacle after obstacle to the fulfillment of God's promise. One such major obstacle, of course, is the shipwreck on the island of Malta that Luke recounted at length in the previous chapter. Now, at the beginning of this final chapter, Luke records how the apostle was received in Malta. Many commentators have noticed that Luke doesn't say that Paul preached, that people were converted, that Paul started a church on the island, etc. One even goes so far as to say that the text is all about how Christians can cooperate with non-Christians to make the world a better place. But I much prefer the comments of Luke Timothy Johnson, who points at that by this point in the story, Luke doesn't need to tell us that Paul preached and planted a church. Instead, Luke shows us the symbols that he has used time after time in his two-volume work. If you look, the marks are there. The natives received Paul; they showed hospitality; and they ruled money, showing generosity with their possessions toward the mighty apostle and his companions. Taken together, these three symbols leave no doubt: The Maltese show major evidence of conversion. The Son and Spirit of God were at work on this island, converting the Maltese and bringing them into the Kingdom.

Why is this here? One reason, of course, is that it happened. As Ajith Fernando comments in his commentary, he had to take a seven-hour boat ride in the Indian Ocean to get to a place in Sri Lanka where he was speaking. The ride home involved fierce winds and was pretty harrowing, to the point that Fernando says it is indelibly imprinted on his memory. Luke was there, and this story stuck out to him so much that he had to share it. More than that, though, he also is tapping into an ancient Biblical theme of promise and fulfillment. Jesus had promised that Paul would reach Rome; that promise is jeopardized time and again by the trip across the Mediterranean in which Paul engaged. Yet though the promise is jeopardized, it wins through, and not only Paul but all 275 others affiliated with him in this trip come safely to land in the end. God keeps His promises. He rules His Kingdom, and He even rules over the chaotic waters of the sea.

My other job is to be an English teacher. One of the things we talk about in English class is the plot climax, where everything comes to a head; after that point, we have the falling action, the wrap-up of all the loose ends from the plot. What, I ask you, is the climax of the book of Acts? The answer, as you have already surmised, is that it's right here in front of you. If you were to pick a moment in which the issues crystallize, in which our hero confronts and vanquishes the biggest challenge in front of him, the moment after which all the rest is just tying up loose ends, I'd say that it's this moment. Paul's biggest challenge is to faithfully proclaim Jesus in the face of strong opposition. That is exactly what he does here in Acts 23 — indeed, he does it very well, such that I'd say this verse stands as the moment where we can see the clearest possible gospel proclamation in front of a governor and a king. So let's dive into this verse and see what Paul says about the gospel to Festus and Agrippa.

I got this entire sermon from evangelist Jim Wilson's book Taking Men Alive. But the content is just so good, so life-changing, that I want to proclaim it to you tonight. You see, most of us have no idea how to do evangelism because we are looking at the whole enchilada and thinking "That is a big enchilada." Perhaps you think back to your own conversion, and the years of preparation and the baby steps that led up to it, and then the years of follow-up work as you continue to pursue Jesus, and you think "How on earth am I going to communicate all of that in a three-minute conversation, or even a thirty-minute conversation?" The answer, of course, is that you're not. And therefore, we tend to want to give up before we've even started because we have such an exalted concept of what the Christian life is. That concept is correct; getting saved really is something the size of your whole life, something that takes a lifetime to understand, internalize, and live out. But my point today is that, armed with this playbook from Jesus, you will be able to focus on a manageable-size step of the process. You will be able to evaluate where the person you're talking to is at, and by the grace of God say something that represents progress in the right direction. Don't think that you have to complete all the steps in one conversation. Working on a piece of the process, taking even a portion of one step, is the goal. Jesus, in this verse, tells us how to evangelize.

Why does Paul take a defense speech and turn it into a time of evangelism before king and governor? The best answer to that question is that Luke is showing us that proclamation of the gospel is the church's best defense. Our behavior is unjustifiable unless Jesus is alive — but if He is, and the New Testament is true, then the rest of it follows from that. We ought to be evangelizing; we ought to be living for God; we ought to be found at the center of riots caused by people who can't stand the good news that Jesus does indeed live. In short, brothers and sisters, Paul's defense is simply "Christianity is true." That is all the church has to say for itself. We don't claim to do good on the world's terms; we are not a social relief organization that even an atheist could endorse. Our activities are only good, only make sense, if Jesus is really alive. We stand or fall on the certainty of His resurrection and reign.