Hey. You're listening to Cut for Time, a podcast from Faith Church located on the North Side Of Indianapolis. My name is Claire Kingsley. Each week, I'll sit down with one of our preaching pastors to discuss their Sunday sermon. Cut for time is a look behind the scenes of sermon preparation and they'll share with us a few things that we didn't hear from the sermon on Sunday.

Thanks for listening. Hey, Jeff. Welcome back to Cut for Time. Thanks, Claire. Your your voice is sounding like it's getting better.

I know you've been struggling a bit. So I have been. I haven't actually checked our, the back end of our podcasting site to, like, see if our numbers have dwindled because people are like, this this is impossible to listen to. It's just too horrible. No.

I just I can I can imagine it's gotta be really frustrating? But I think, you know, it's I was at Joey and I and Nick Carter and Tom Waltz were at the EFCA Theology Conference this week and great session on the image of God and disability. And, one of the points was about how, one, that we're all actually disabled biblically. Some of us are just more visibly disabled. But then also there's even blessing in recognizing our disability.

There's a blessing of, God, the one being glorified. It makes us rely on him, in his strength more. And to be able to serve and help people who are more visibly disabled is actually a blessing for us. Yeah. It was it was really good.

It's a it's a great session. Yeah. Joey texted me, like, within hours of us recording our cut for time conversation, And he said everything that we brought up in cut for time was like in the following session. And so I asked him, do we need to rerecord? Like, was that accurate?

And he was like, it was more or less fine. And I was like, okay. It just sounds like based on what you said and what he's shared, like, it was like just like a really, it met a great need and just, like, really, yeah, it was really profound in a lot of ways. Like Yeah. It's tangibly, like, something you can actually put into practice.

You know? Alright. So, Jeff, why don't you give us a rundown from your sermon on Sunday? We started a new subseries. Paul is so this is kind of the aftermath where Paul has now been in danger of his life through, like, three violent mobs, had to be rescued by the Roman authorities.

He's in prison. And, you know, he's in house arrest prison in the in the fortress kind of waiting for things to calm down. We're in Acts twenty three twelve to 22. Jesus has promised Paul that Paul is gonna be a witness to him in Rome. But in the meantime, all these things are happening in the background.

A group of guys go to the Jewish leaders and say, like, hey. We've all taken a vow to kill Paul or die in the attempt and, you know, come up with a excuse to bring him back here into the Sanhedrin, and we'll take care of things. Somehow, Paul has a nephew that we didn't even know existed, and he hears about it and goes to tell Paul who has his nephew go tell the tribune who takes this threat seriously. And, we're we're sort of that's kinda where we left was, what is God gonna do, to rescue his witness? And, we, sort of looked at, you know, the big idea of God fulfilling his promises, but often in unexpected ways.

So God has promised Paul that he's gonna be his witness in Rome, that he's given us all kinds of promises in the gospel. And the reality is we don't often like all here, we don't often get to know what's going on behind the scenes, and it can be hard to make sense of what God is doing. And so I think the encouragement is that God is often working through unexpected people like this nephew we didn't know about, a Roman tribune, in unexpected circumstances, and he's producing, unexpected results in an unanticipated timing. All of this is just happening real quickly, at at the same time that in the rest of acts, you know, a couple of years can be summarized in one verse. And and we've been in, like, three days, is this last three chapters of acts.

So, yeah, just an encouragement that God can be at work, in the middle of the craziness as well as the middle of the mundane, and using people and making an impact in people's lives that we might not expect. So it's, it was encouraging. I mean, I had a number of people say, like, oh, wow. That was that was really helpful. That helps, you know, give me some perspective on the unwanted, unexpected things going on in my life.

Well, yeah, which I think is why Luke puts that here for us, to see, like, Paul has been sort of the center of action for a while, and now he's just sort of, in a sense, almost passive. And stuff is happening beyond Paul's control that God is working through to accomplish his purposes. And and that's a good reminder for us and for our lives. Yeah. And something that you said in your sermon that was so relatable to me, I mean, there were so many there are a lot of different things.

But, when you were like, hey. Many of us have had that year where we're like, we have experienced a whole year, and it's only February. Right? Like, so many different big things in a short period of time. Because you were like, and it's only Wednesday.

Like, that listing, what Paul's experienced. Yes. And and so there are those seasons, and there are also those seasons that are the mundane or the tedious just living day after day in habit, and still pursuing goodness, like, in both of them and God being there in both of them. And I'm just like, yeah. Like, I don't know.

Nathan and I looked to each other and just I had this, like, this complete understanding of, like, this makes sense to us. We see God here. Yeah. I know. But yeah.

So okay. I'd love to zoom out, just for a second. We just like I mentioned earlier, we shifted into a new sermon series our sermon subseries. Mhmm. And, I would just like to know if you can give us just, a little bit of a flyover of how is where we're going different from where we've been, like why this break at this point?

We had orchestrating opposition before, and now we are the gospel on trial. So what are we about to see unfold, and what is, like, the cohesive theme that unifies this subseries? Yeah. So it right. This section that we started last week and will continue for a couple more weeks before we get into Lent, then then we'll come back to it after Easter.

The gospel on trial starts a whole section now going towards the end of the book of Acts where it's not just Paul on trial. I mean, that's a lot of what's happening at the surface level is Paul's arrest. And then he's in prison for a while, and then he gets an opportunity to, share the gospel in front of the governor and, you know, and others. And so there's a sense in which Paul is on trial, but God is not only working through Paul's imprisonment and, you know, a series of trials that he's going through, but it's really ultimately about the gospel, being having an opportunity to you know, Paul has in these sections, some of his, clearest opportunities to really explain, more fully the gospel, and and we see him even, you know, calling rulers to believe in Jesus. And, it's it's a reminder that, just as Paul is seeing imprisonment and going through hard times, and we may have hard times as well, the gospel is not hindered.

Right? The the gospel isn't under arrest, and the gospel has just as much power in the difficulty and the limited circumstances that Paul is in, and it actually becomes another opportunity to preach Jesus to people who otherwise wouldn't be here. So Paul is, in a sense, being given an opportunity to give a defense. And and what's interesting is he's not really giving a defense of himself so much. He he's wanting to use this as an opportunity to give a defense to make an argument for faith in Jesus and why what he's doing is, yeah, legal and reasonable because of who Jesus is and the the power and the significance and the truth of the gospel.

So, the gospel on trial is really about that kind of whole theme going through these next several chapters of Acts. Okay. So great. Alright. So we've got a question that was texted in.

Actually, a few questions we could cover today. The first one is, is there any significance in the number 40 for this conspiracy that we saw in this text? Yeah. That's that's an interesting question. I didn't get into that.

And commentators, I think, tend to sort of dismiss that as, yeah. It's just, you know, could have been any number, which is true. But I I kinda tend to think that there is something to it, and I wonder I mean, Luke doesn't tell us. But I I wouldn't be surprised if these guys getting this conspiracy together maybe themselves decided on 40. And maybe intentionally, there's something in, you know, the forty years of wandering the wilderness and Jesus' forty days of temptation in the wilderness.

And maybe they weren't even thinking in those terms, but I wonder if God was. And so was even possibly working behind the scenes, to have it come up to be this number. Not every number in the Bible is significant. You know? There's John tells us, they caught a 53 large fish.

You know? I there's no significance to a 53, I don't think. But 40 does have some significance biblically. It's not a huge issue one way or the other, but I wouldn't be surprised. That's when we can ask Jesus when we see him.

Mhmm. Okay. And somebody asked you a question after service as well. Yeah. So, yeah, I mentioned these these 40 guys who believe, you know, they would call themselves devout, sincere followers of Yahweh.

Like, they really believe we're doing something that God is going to be pleased with in getting rid of this blasphemer and troublemaker Paul. And someone had asked, like, so then is there any hope for them? Like, they they sincerely believe that they're saved and they're they're right with God and they're doing the right thing when they obviously aren't. Like, what does that mean for them, like, in in their standing before God? And it was led to a big conversation, you know.

I I think they are in the same position that Saul, now Paul, was before when he was persecuting Christians and hunting them down and, you know, cheering on the martyrdom of Stephen. He thought that he was on God's side and and doing things that were honorable and pleasing to God. And God was able to get a hold of Saul and, help him see who Jesus really is. And so in that sense, yeah, there's hope for these 40 guys. There's hope for the people in the Sanhedrin.

There's hope for the high priest. But the hope is in seeing who Jesus is. And, like Paul is, you know, being confronted with the reality of the Jesus really is Lord and savior. So I, yeah, I I think it's, one of one of the things that came out to me in that passage was that happens often in the gospels and and in Acts. And then Paul, you know, refers to people like that throughout his letters, like people who think that they're pleasing God with what they're doing.

But, you know, the the common refrain is but look at their fruits. Look at look at what's their what is what is animating them? What is what is the the output of their actions? Is it the fruit of the spirit? Is it the works of the flesh?

Is, you know, we can get so convinced that, you know, there's something that god would really be pleased with, and and we need to make that happen. And that's not necessarily wrong or bad, but the real question is, not just the outcome, but the means that we're using to accomplish it and the kinds of people that we're becoming in the process. Because God cares as much about that as a particular outcome. Right? Like, what matters is is this helping me grow in godly character, and and is the action that I'm looking at something that god would be honored in doing.

Right? Like murder, it is not it's something that god's going to use to advance his purposes. And, of course, it corrupts our souls. And so it's you know, we can look at that objectively in their case and say, well, yeah, obviously. And yet it just makes me reflect on, I wonder if there are things that I say or attitudes that I nurture in my spirit, responses that I give to hurts or offenses or disappointments that I think are appropriate and justifiable.

But maybe if I step back and look at them, I should be able to go like, oh, yeah. That's not honoring to God. It's not growing me in godly character. It's yeah. So, yeah, there there's hope for them.

There's hope for us as as we keep asking God to help us, you know, think about what's going on in our hearts. Not even just I mean, this was action, obviously, but it's also more even just at the level of what's going on inside me, that I mean, that's, prompting this response. Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Actually, this came up in a conversation I had with Joey a few weeks ago when we were talking about the mob doing the same thing, but they were convinced in their mind that this is what was best was to get rid of Paul. And we, deleted it in the editing phase of cut for time. Because it, it just didn't lead us to where we like ultimately needed to go. But it kind of feels like deja vu. And I think what came back, what I came back to the end of it is like, is there hope for us?

Yes. And, we have the holy spirit to like, help us discern when it is God hit like God and God's will. And like, when it's not like when it's our own master plan or whatever. Yeah. And then that helps.

That gives some comfort that I'm like, I can't get so far off base if I'm consulting with this in, like, in prayer and in sol is it like solitude with the Lord? Like, I can't get that far, Of course. So there's that. Yeah. You know, I'm you made me think of James, you know, in his letter saying if any of you lacks wisdom, ask god who gives generously without finding fault.

Right? Like, if I if I'm praying that sincerely, God help me know, you know, what's the right thing or help me discern what's really going on in my heart and if this is the right thing to do. James is saying God will answer that prayer, and and he does that without finding fault. He does it without condemning us for not having wisdom. He wants us to come to him for wisdom.

Yeah. And we also have the community of God's people too who also have the spirit. Right. You know? And some things are just debatable.

I mean, you know, but there are some things where friends can come alongside and go like, I really don't think you wanna send that email or, you know, the way that came across, Jeff, I am not sure it was as loving and kind as as I know you want to be. So, yeah, we have all those resources that we need and are and are really helpful. The word, the spirit, prayer, god's wisdom, community of godly people, who can help us process through those things. Right? Like and and that's where, again, in this story, you're just like and and here's the, you know, the Sanhedrin, the high priest, the elders who are apparently willing to go along with this.

Right? It's just, wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's alright.

So I'm gonna bring us back, to what did you have to cut for the sake of time on Sunday? Yeah. What do you wish you could have maybe lingered on a little bit longer? Oh, well, there there's actually a a good bit in this passage. I mean, in a in a in a really unique passage, it probably doesn't get preached all along.

One one thought that came to mind that I ran across in one commentator was, the these guys who are gonna take matters into their own hands, and think that they're doing God's will, I mean, they don't know about the promise that God has made to Paul, but, you know, they're convinced, like, we not only know the right thing to do, we're definitely gonna be able to make this happen. And the idea of, like, these people who think they're taking matters into their own hands, like, they're in control, don't really have as much control as they think. Because, ultimately, god has a plan and a purpose and a promise that that he's standing behind in the middle of all this. And and I think that's an encouragement for us too. Like, again, you said, yeah, these last couple of months, probably for most of us, in in different ways, it's felt like we've lived, yeah, a year or more just since the beginning of '25.

So many changes and so many things going on and so many things to respond to and process through. And, yeah, obviously, people make plans and and make decisions and fine. You know, but it's it's not it's not out of control. And people who think that, you know, they've got it all locked down and they're gonna make it happen, if it's not part of God's will, then it it it gives us a piece, I think, this this picture of, you know, these guys who come up with this plot, and we're gonna do this thing and make it happen. And I you know, like, Psalm two, the one enthroned in heaven laughs.

You know? Right. The kings of the earth gather together and conspire against the Lord and his anointed one. And, God's just like, yeah. Okay.

Whatever. And that doesn't mean the things that that may be going on in the world. It doesn't mean we don't get involved. It doesn't mean we just sort of, you know, close our eyes and tune it out. But but I think it's meant to give us a a peace and a trust in the Lord, that that he he is at work behind the scenes in ways that people making all kinds of plans, you know, may not be thinking about what God's doing.

But the Lord knows, and he's at work. He's at work through his people though too. Right? Like, God is working through this nephew, Paul. He's working through this Roman tribute.

And Yeah. If they don't step up and do something, then maybe Paul does get taken out. So it's God's plan, but God's plans, a lot of the times in the Bible, get worked out through people who are trying to listen and obey and follow, and that's us. So, I think the the big picture there is, don't get don't get freaked out. It's not overwhelming.

God's in control, but he's also carrying out his plans, through people who are seeking his will like us. Mhmm. That's a good encouragement. And I'm also thankful for the people in my life who God is, working through them to sort me out, you know, and to be alongside me. And, yeah, it's mutual for sure.

Sweet. Yeah. Thank you for your time today, Jeff. Thank you. It's been good.

We'll get back together next week when we look at, God continuing to work behind the scenes again through a Roman military officer and armed armed cohort and transferring Paul to another prison. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Cut for Time. If you wish to submit questions to our pastors following their sermon, you can email them to podcast@faithliveitout.org or text them into our faith church texting number, and we'll do our best to cover it in the week's episode. If this conversation blessed you in any way, we encourage you to share it with others. Thanks for listening.

We'll be back again next week.