'EXACTLY like the Apostle Paul lived in'

"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." -- Hebrews 13:3

Through my church, Shorewood Bible Church, there are men around the country whose ministries take them inside nearby prisons.

At a Bible conference the other weekend in North Carolina, my pastor, Richard Jordan, spoke of a young man around 30 who was in a federal penitentiary out West. He had been saved about four years and graduated from my church's Grace School of the Bible.

Jordan recalled, "I got a letter from him recently telling me its the third time he's been beaten up and literally put into the prison infirmary by Muslims who want to stop him from preaching the gospel. They corner him and say, 'You need to recant, deny Jesus and confess Allah or we're going to beat you up.' He keeps saying, 'I won't do it,' and they keep beating him up.

"I asked him, 'Has the thought entered your mind, oh maybe the fourth time they're going to beat you up, that you could just say to yourself, I'm not going to lose my salvation if I say I'll deny Jesus?' He answered, 'How can I do that?' I said, 'Well, that's the right answer, but we've all got flesh, weaknesses where those thoughts come into the mind.'

"He said, 'You know, when I learned about the grace of God and how to rightly divide God's Word so it wasn't confusing . . . There was a time when it was so confusing that if those guys had approached me, then I would have given up, because it was so confusing I didn't know how to answer it for myself. Now, I have a clear understanding and when they come, I've got an answer.'

"That young man in the penitentiary doesn't really have much of an expectation of ever getting out, and yet in it, he has a ministry. It keeps him going: 'I'm doing it for the Lord Jesus Christ.' It was the same thing with Paul, who said, 'I'm an apostle of Jesus Christ.' That's who he's doing it for; he's not doing it for himself, for religious notoriety.

"How did Paul become the Apostle to the Gentiles? Romans 11:

11] I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy.
[12] Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?
[13] For I speak to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify mine office:
[14] If by any means I may provoke to emulation them which are my flesh, and might save some of them.

"Paul begins Ephesians 3 with, [1] For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles. Notice it says he's a prisoner OF, not FOR Jesus Christ. He realized the reason he was a prisoner in Rome was because he was preaching the message of the gospel of the grace of God.

"He prays in Ephesians 6: [19] And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel, [20] For which I am an ambassador in bonds: that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.

"He knew why he was where he was because of who he was serving. Ephesians 3 continues, [2] If ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me to youward:

[3] How that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery; (as I wrote afore in few words,
[4] Whereby, when ye read, ye may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ)

"How often do people read that passage and not even see what it says? Paul says, 'I just got a revelation from the Lord Jesus Christ, from God the Father to me, and that's how I got to be an apostle. I'm an apostle by the will of God. God is doing something that's different than what He did in time past. It's part of His secret program.'

"You know, [5] Which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit; [6] That the Gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel.

"The thing that strikes me more often than not when I think about this passage, when the Apostle Paul went out and preached Christ, he preached to a pagan world that had never heard of the Lord Jesus Christ. At least at the synagogue in Acts they knew who the Messiah was, because they knew the Scripture, but Paul went out and preached to completely unattached pagans.

"The world that has come upon us right now, and the reason things are happening the way they're happening right now in our culture, is that we're going into a world exactly like the Apostle Paul lived in.

"Our country, you know, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'

"Can you think of a verse that matches each of those? Sure. The social impact of the Protestant Reformation is the source of the underlying philosophy that produced the founding documents and the founding thinking of our country.

"That influence of the Protestant Reformation, that social impact and the social compacts produced because of that in a new world--the things that produced the foundation of all that, they're gone!

"I was watching David McCullough, a well-known American author who writes books on history, give a lecture on C-SPAN. It was in Ohio last year and he was talking about his book on the Wright Brothers. A lady stood up during the Q&A following his lecture and asked, 'Would you just give your opinion about the American education system; where we're at?'

"He answered, 'Let me give you an anecdote to explain what I think. Recently I gave a lecture at the University of Chicago. A lady in graduate school approached me and said, 'I just want you to know how much I appreciate your lecture. It was so fascinating to learn that the original 13 colonies were on the East Coast.'

"He said, 'You tell me how much that lady knows about what they thought if she didn't even know where they were?! And she's in graduate school. That means all of the education she'd had up to that point didn't even tell her how to locate on a map, much less understand the principles of thinking . . . Her schooling told her how to think; they taught her principles of economics but not the principles that come out of the founding of our country.' "

(new article tomorrow)