It has been nearly eleven years since I last preached this passage in the early days of planting this church. While the last eleven years of ministry hold some miraculous memories – people being saved powerfully from the clutches of Satan, Sin, and Death, broken lives being restored, marriages being strengthened, sin being overcome, etc. – even amidst all that miraculous beauty, the last eleven years has also felt like I literally walked through hell and back sometimes.

Our passage today, is a summary of the suffering that the Apostle Paul endured at the hands of his lying accusers and his wicked political captors. The people who should have been his friends were nothing more than slanderous back stabbers and the Roman officials who should have protected him from false accusations and freed him from any further harm, chose instead, to leave him in chains to win political favors.²

At some point, the repetition of the last few chapters of the book of Acts begins to feel well… repetitive! The apostle Paul is in the custody of his Roman captors and his enemies – the Law-Loving-Jews – keep following him around, leveling their accusations against him.

The passage in front of us today describes some of the events surrounding the apostle Paul’s journey towards Rome with the testimony of the gospel ready and waiting on his lips at every turn. Paul was a man who was called to testify.

When I read this passage, I am struck with the power of love. I am not talking about love in the biblical sense of love as an action – in the sense that we are called to love God and love people in the same way we have been loved by Christ at the cross of Calvary – I am talking about love in the sense of what we deeply love, desire, want, obsess over, or long for.

I have always admired the Apostle Paul. The more I study the Bible – specifically the parts that record portions of Paul’s life and ministry or his letters to the churches he planted – I am consistently taken back by the unwavering determination he possessed for the calling of God on his life as a minister of the gospel. Paul literally possessed a deathwish; he literally desired to die for the One who had died for him.

At first glance, this passage of Scripture can seem a little disorienting. It feels like a weird story about a long-winded preacher who literally preaches someone to death, sandwiched in between two really boring GPS maps.

This passage is centered around the battle between idolatry and the gospel. The gospel had slowly but surely been taking ground in the city of Ephesus for quite some time and now the idolatry that lurked in the shadows of that dark culture was rearing its ugly head.