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. You started your sermon with a great illustration, about this amazing muffin that you've had at your supermarket coffee shop, and you told us the name of the coffee shop. I did not tell you the name of the coffee shop because I wanted to count how many people came up and asked, like, but where is this coffee shop? Because I figured when we got to cut for time, we can talk about that and how that's actually kind of an illustration of what I was trying to get across in the sermon of evangelism or word-of-mouth marketing or whatever you wanna call it. It's like, tell people about something great that you've experienced.

Share your experience, and the people with whom it resonates are gonna come ask you, like, where do I get that to? How do I get to have that experience also? So that's why I did not say the name of the coffee shop. And I'm not gonna say it now. I'm gonna wait till the end.

Woah. I'll wait till the end of Cut For Time before saying it. So you have to get through the boring stuff if you wanna find out where to get this amazing French toast muffin. Okay. Well, Anna before I move on, let me just say that I've also had this muffin, and I knew the moment you, like, even brought it up.

I'm like, I know where is this going. And I will tell you that I searched the web so much to try and find a recipe that could somehow recreate this muffin because I think about it. And it drives me crazy that I think about this muffin, and I'm like, certainly, I don't have to go to this coffee shop for this moment. I could make it at home. Tried and tried and tried.

Couldn't find any recipe like it. Really? Must not be maybe searching the right thing, but I tried a lot of combos of words and found one recipe I tried. And Nathan and my kids would be happy to tell you that it failed. I'm not maybe happy to tell you, but they would They wouldn't hesitate to say, like, nah.

Didn't didn't nail it yet. No. Not at all. And I was disappointed because I was really hoping that I wouldn't have to I would, like, figure it out. You know?

So, anyways, I'm just saying code. This muffin haunts me. It's amazing. It's delicious. People are will also enjoy trying it.

So you're not You know, somebody did poke their head in my office this morning and say, I found a recipe for the French toast muffin. No. So I'll have her send it to you. I can't believe that. Alright.

Maybe it's the same one you found, though. Well, we'll see. I'm happy to try. And then everyone can keep listening to our time, and I'll tell you how the recipe iterations work out. That's right.

We'll do updates on the quest. We every week. I just support small business and just be like Yeah. There you go. Support yeah.

That that's pretty good. Yeah. Alright. Let's jump into sermon stuff. Let's do it.

Okay. Up from the hall. You had 3 little baby verses. Three tiny verses. I know it's fascinating because it's the shortest explanation of the longest period of Paul's ministry career.

Yeah. It's like well, because nothing I I almost said nothing really happened. Well, it's not that nothing really happened. It's just that the there there weren't any big controversies or, like, plot movements other than the church grew, which is awesome. So we were looking at Acts 19 8 through 10.

Yeah, 3 short verses, and it's it's one of Luke's kinda characteristic summaries of, and here's what happened. So we have Paul in the synagogue. He gets about 3 months, worth of preaching, and the the sense of the Greek there is that it's like continuously getting worse and worse, the opposition. The the people who refuse to believe are willfully obstinate. They are, publicly denigrating the way.

They're, speaking maliciously about Jesus as the Messiah, about people who choose to follow him. Paul's like, I'm done. I'm out. He doesn't do what he did previously when he said, I'm going to the Gentiles from now on. He just goes to the Hall of Tyrannus, rents a room in this lecture hall, and uses that as the base of his kind of weekday ministry of teaching and lecturing and preaching.

And then, we get a report from Luke that this arrangement lasted for 2 years and was so effective that all Asia, everyone in Asia heard, the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks. So, yeah, it's Paul's last longest, most stable, least eventful ministry as a free man before he eventually finds himself in chains for basically the rest of his career. Mhmm. Yeah. It's like normal is good, and it's like this was normal.

Right? It was good. Yeah. Yeah. And what's great is that it gives us a picture of kinda what the church looks like in just a normal context during a normal period of growth.

And it's basically, two things are happening. 1 is the church is gathering in churches and smaller groups. They're they're doing what church does, which is at its core, the church is about gathering people together in worship where the where the scriptures, where the word of God is you know, we're invited to worship him. We're reminded of who we are, who God is, what he's done for us in Jesus. We sing, we pray, we hear the words of scripture, we respond, and we obey.

I mean, that's that's the bare minimum of what church is. So that's happening on a regular basis. People are learning to live in community, learning to live out their new life in Jesus, and there's an educational component happening where Paul is working out different theological perspectives. He's in, like, trying to think through how does this fit and how does that fit and how does this fit. And he's got other coworkers that are going to different places, but the majority is like, hey.

Let's let's help people figure out how do you talk about new life in Jesus that you've experienced, and how do you share that with others. And then you just unleash people to tell people about it, and that's how the church grows. We've been saying, at SAIF, we've been trying to say God reaches people through his people. Yeah. Absolutely.

Very rarely even in scripture do we see God just kinda show up bolt out of the blue. Like, I am who I said I am. Now follow me. No. I mean, you could probably name the people, right, on one hand.

You're you're like Moses, Abraham, all. Yeah. Okay. Everybody else, God reached people through his people. Yep.

And that's the way he's still working today. Yeah. Well, you have a few little nuggets that you have to cut from your sermon on Sunday. So, let's start with, the word for hall, the title of your sermon, the hall. Did you think about dinosaurs every time you had to say it?

The the hall yes. The hall of the tyrant lizard. Yes. The my, my computer, every time I typed tyrannis, it tried to change it to tyrannis with an apostrophe s. It was like, Apple does not do well with ancient Greek names.

Yeah. Tyranus, the tyrant, or king, if you wanna, translate it as without the connotation, you know, the negative connotation. But, yeah, like tyrannosaurus rex, the the king of the lizards or the tyrant lizard. I made the joke. Well, I didn't make it.

It wasn't a joke. It was an observation that Tyranus is probably not the guy's given name. It was his student's nickname for him. You know, he's the tyrant lecturer. So, we we gotta go to we gotta go to school, to the, tyrant school.

So you brought it up. The word hall in Greek is skole. It's where we get the word school from. You were a teacher. Did they call you the tyrant?

No. But I did I was told by many people, including our principal, that I ran probably the tightest ship. So So the school of Taranis is probably referring to your classroom. Maybe. I'd like Yeah.

That it was not like that. Not tyrannical? Just well ordered? Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. No. It's funny. You know, nobody translates it, the School of Taranis, because then we would have the idea of, like, middle school and classrooms and hallway and and line basics and all of that. Yeah.

But that's not what it's about. It actually, skole in Greek is the word for for relaxation or leisure or leisure time. It's like if you had the, the capacity to relax, you would relax by going and listening to a a lecturer or a speaker, a dynamic, you know, guy talking about something interesting. So, so it's really the relaxation center of the tyrant lecturer is, where Paul was set up in in preaching and teaching. Kind of that's like an oxymoron, but A little bit.

Little bit. Yeah. Is that if it's, like, something to do with your leisure times at drawing a specific crowd of people who have leisure times? Yep. Yeah.

Because it's drawing the crowd who does not have to go to work during the day in order to survive or make a living. So it's talk it's drawing the top of the top, you know, the 1% of the 1% who are able to say, like, yeah. I spend all my time, you know, going to shows and listening to lectures and going to community events or whatever, which is not the average person, which is why Paul was working there, you know, after hours, after the workday was over. Mhmm. Because he doesn't have that leisure.

Right. And the people who are responding to his message don't have that leisure time either. So yeah. No. What what's actually interesting is that the Roman workday, is not a 9 to 5 like we think of it.

The Roman workday is from 6 AM to 11 AM. There's 5 hours and then an afternoon break, you know, a siesta or whatever. So tradition tells us that Paul taught here from 11 AM to 4 PM. What we would think of as, like, that's right in the middle of the workday. But no, everybody's taking a break, everyone's gone home and are taking a nap.

There's, like, an old Greek proverb that that there's more people awake at 1 AM than 1 PM because everyone's out and asleep. And then at 4 or 5, everybody gets up, they go back and put in a couple more hours work, they have a late dinner, dinner goes till 1 o'clock in the morning or whatever, and then you crash for 4 hours before you get up and start, the workday again. So it's like the, you know, the 8 hours of sleep is you is done in 2, 4 hour chunks in this particular culture. But like you said, the group that could have been been present for his teachings were also the people like himself who were working. Yeah.

So the working, and then, basically, this is night school. It's just from 11 AM to 4 PM, and they're giving up sleep and, time off in order to, in order to learn and hear what Paul has to teach. Yeah. Alright. Anything else that you had to cut for time this weekend?

Oh, man. Let me think of it. Well, you know, it was kinda nice having 3 short verses, when we had a shorter Sunday because it was communion Sunday. So, you know, the only other thing that I really didn't take the time to point out is that in in verse verse 8 or 9, when it says that Paul withdrew from the synagogue and took the disciples with him to the Hall of Tyrannus, it's the only time we've seen it's the only time we will see in Acts. So this is the first time we've seen, distinctively saying, like, the Christians, the followers of Jesus left the synagogue and began worshiping somewhere else.

Because, you know, keep in mind, for the average 1st century Jewish follower of Jesus, they're not seeing Christianity as something over and against Judaism. Like, these two things are opposed. Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism. It's the fulfillment, you know, of the expectation of the Jewish messiah. And so for them, the the center of their worshiping life was still the synagogue Mhmm.

For most of the time until the synagogue became a place that was antagonistic to their messianic faith, their faith in Jesus as the Messiah. And then they had to kinda gather with people who believe Jesus was the Messiah outside of the context of synagogue worship. It's one of the main reasons why, like, you go to synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday. It's the resurrection of Jesus, but, also, it's like, well, that's that day's free. You know?

The Saturday's taken, as the sort of two cultural movements kinda ran into each other and and things had to shift. So it's just in interesting here. You know? Nowhere else does Lou tell us, or make explicit this kinda clear delineation between the Christians and, the non messianic Jews. Mhmm.

And partly I I assume in this location, partly, that's because of really how antagonistic, the synagogue, atmosphere had become to thinking of Jesus as the Jewish messiah. This is the first time, only time we see, Luke using words like speaking maliciously evil of the way of Jesus or really obstinately digging in and refusing to believe. Some yeah. Something here made Paul say, hey, it's really not this isn't a good environment for, Messianic Jews to continue worshiping. We need to set up an alternative opportunity for the groups to gather together.

And that's when we see the the healthy and the small, like, churches starting Mhmm. Really starting to grow in houses. Yeah. And in other places, of course, little house churches are kinda popping up and be and slowly becoming the center of, you know, the a a Jewish follower of Jesus' life, their worshiping life. But here, there was such antagonism that there was, like, a a break and a real fast kind of breaking away and forming a new group instead of instead of that kind of slow, like, oh, yeah.

Well, I guess over here, we're in the synagogue. We're we're still waiting for Jesus to come, but or the messiah to come. But here, it's like, no. We know he's come. So it's it get it gets harder and harder to square those things.

And, eventually, you would have been fully committed into the church life. So, Joey, the last name before we sign off. The name. Mhmm. It's an amazing copy of that one, it's an amazing copy of that one.

I know it's an amazing copy of that one, and I even hinted at another one, after community at the very end. I don't know, if anybody noticed, like, but the place is called Illumine. It's at Rangeline and 86, southeast of 86. It's great. Yeah.

So Westfield. I think that Or Westfield. Yeah. You're right. It's Rangeline when it's in Carmel.

Yeah. Yeah. There you go. So 86 and Westfield, southeast side. You have to go down half a block to the strip mall next to the yeah.

There's the dry cleaner and the global gifts and all that. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. But don't don't go because it's already getting too busy and hard to find a table to work at all morning.

So They did just open up a downtown location. People come Oh, that's true. They're in. Yeah. So get get the muffin to go.

Alright. Thanks, Joey. Thanks for your time. Yeah. No problem.

We'll be back next week looking at a crazy story of Jewish exorcists who don't believe in Jesus trying to use Jesus as a way to get better at exorcism in Ephesus. It's it's whack. It'll be fun. And I don't get to be part of it. So it's Yeah.

You guys are gonna be on vacation. Yeah. So you and Jeff will, get to work all that out forever. Yeah. We'll figure it out.

Maybe it takes 2 pastors, really, to figure out that passage. Oh, man. I think I'm gonna call in sick and let let Jeff handle it. He'd he'll be he'll be fine. He'll you know what?

He'll do great. Thanks, Joey. 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 at faith, live it out.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.