Zealous
Read Acts 22:1-21.
Acts 22 is the second time in the book of Acts the story of Paul's conversion is told (the first is in Acts 9). This time, as the story goes, Paul tells his own story as a part of his defense before a crowd that has been stirred up against him (see Acts 21). He's in Jerusalem. He's in a place of religion. And he does something brilliant (Luke tells us twice that he did this): he speaks to them not in the language of commerce and government (Greek). He speaks to them in the language of their faith (Aramaic). Luke says they all become very quiet so that they can hear him (most likely because they didn't know Aramaic as well as Greek). He has their attention. He's sharing his story. How else will he help them listen?
There is that one word he uses early on to describe himself: zealous. Full of zeal. Passionate. Absolutely 100% devoted to the cause. Paul was sold out to God in a way only a few of them (and us) can imagine. Though they are, at this moment, passionate about doing away with Paul (and some of them may not even know why, they just got swept up in the crowd), Paul knows very few of them really approach the level of zeal he had for doing away with false believers. He was "just as zealous" (and probably moreso) than any of them were on that particular day. His point is this: when he turned his life over to Jesus, he turned that zeal toward Jesus, which is why he is in the trouble he's in.
Zeal is a good thing, but it can also be a dangerous thing. Misplaced zeal can lead to all sorts of wrong. You can passionately believe something and be passionately wrong. That's where, Paul says, he was in the days when he persecuted Christians. Just because we believe something passionately doesn't automatically make us right—which is among the struggles we have in our world today. Blowing yourself up for your "cause" doesn't make you right. Paul would say we need to be sure our zeal is aimed in the right direction.
There are those, of course, who say that those who believe in Jesus are passionately wrong. I challenge those folks to seriously investigate the evidence and see where it leads. C. S. Lewis, a brilliant Oxford scholar who was determined not to believe, who preferred to remain an agnostic, investigated the evidence and was forced to come to the conclusion that it was true, it had to be true. More recently, similar things have happened to men like Josh McDowell, Lee Stroebel and J. Warner Wallace. The key is to not just place your zeal where your feelings lead you. Become zealous for what is true. That type of zeal will lead to life.
Acts 22 is the second time in the book of Acts the story of Paul's conversion is told (the first is in Acts 9). This time, as the story goes, Paul tells his own story as a part of his defense before a crowd that has been stirred up against him (see Acts 21). He's in Jerusalem. He's in a place of religion. And he does something brilliant (Luke tells us twice that he did this): he speaks to them not in the language of commerce and government (Greek). He speaks to them in the language of their faith (Aramaic). Luke says they all become very quiet so that they can hear him (most likely because they didn't know Aramaic as well as Greek). He has their attention. He's sharing his story. How else will he help them listen?
There is that one word he uses early on to describe himself: zealous. Full of zeal. Passionate. Absolutely 100% devoted to the cause. Paul was sold out to God in a way only a few of them (and us) can imagine. Though they are, at this moment, passionate about doing away with Paul (and some of them may not even know why, they just got swept up in the crowd), Paul knows very few of them really approach the level of zeal he had for doing away with false believers. He was "just as zealous" (and probably moreso) than any of them were on that particular day. His point is this: when he turned his life over to Jesus, he turned that zeal toward Jesus, which is why he is in the trouble he's in.
Zeal is a good thing, but it can also be a dangerous thing. Misplaced zeal can lead to all sorts of wrong. You can passionately believe something and be passionately wrong. That's where, Paul says, he was in the days when he persecuted Christians. Just because we believe something passionately doesn't automatically make us right—which is among the struggles we have in our world today. Blowing yourself up for your "cause" doesn't make you right. Paul would say we need to be sure our zeal is aimed in the right direction.
There are those, of course, who say that those who believe in Jesus are passionately wrong. I challenge those folks to seriously investigate the evidence and see where it leads. C. S. Lewis, a brilliant Oxford scholar who was determined not to believe, who preferred to remain an agnostic, investigated the evidence and was forced to come to the conclusion that it was true, it had to be true. More recently, similar things have happened to men like Josh McDowell, Lee Stroebel and J. Warner Wallace. The key is to not just place your zeal where your feelings lead you. Become zealous for what is true. That type of zeal will lead to life.
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