Realization of the inexplicable

When you think about the people in your life who have "saved you" in the truest sense of the phrase, you usually can never forget them. You never forget them because you keep on-and-off realizing, sometimes in the most unusual ways, that they have become part of your psyche, and that you might really have not gotten this far without them!

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Here's an old post and new article tomorrow:

Paul writes in Philippians 1: [20] According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death.

[21] For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

"A guy told me once that it sounded like Paul had a suicide complex. He said he thought Paul got it in Acts 14," says Richard Jordan.

"In Acts 14, Paul goes into a town, he preaches, they don't like him, they drag him outside and stone him and leave him for dead. If you stone somebody and you leave them for dead, the probability is you check for a pulse and they're dead.

"The next verse says, 'But he rose up and went back into the same city and preached again and left the next day and went to preach somewhere else.'

"Up until that point in Acts 14, every time Paul had been in a city and they rejected him . . . in Acts 13 he shook the dust off his feet and went to the next city. The next city to reject him, he departed.

"Now the dude dies, he's resurrected and goes right back into the place where they killed him. You say, 'What's that about?' Then, in the next few verses, he goes back to the other places where they tried to kill him. It's like he had a suicide complex: 'I died, it went pretty good, let's go try and do it again.'

"In II Corinthians 12, Paul says, 'I knew a man 14 years ago.' That book was written in Acts 20 and if you backtrack to Acts 14, you find the period is about 14 years.

He said in chapter 12, [2] I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.

[3] And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;)
[4] How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.

"Was he dead? I don't know. Seems like he was; maybe he wasn't. But he said what happened to him is he got caught up into the third heaven and saw things that were so wonderful, so magnificent, so inexplicable that he couldn't 'speak' them. He said, 'I can't tell you about it; I don't have the capacity.'

"It's like he's saying, 'Hey, man, to die is gain. It don't scare me because I get to go back up there and see Christ magnified in a way that I can't explain to you now.'

"Now, I don't think Paul had a suicide complex, but that's not a bad idea, understanding that to die is gain, and why he would think that way.

"What Paul's doing there, it's more than a suicide complex. Look at Philippians 1: 8-9: [8] For God is my record, how greatly I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ.

[9] And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment;