Paul's Passion and Preaching - Part 2

Anyhow, like a friend of mine said, would you like to go to heaven? He said yes, but it's not urgent. That Christ may be magnified by my body. Paul makes a lot of the body, doesn't he? Remember Romans 12, 1 and 2, he says, present your body a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service, and be not conformed to this world, or as Phillips translates it, don't let this world press you into its mold.

But lots of people are getting pressed into the world's mold by lifestyle and every other thing. You know, I cannot for a moment think about Paul saying that in the Philippians, that Christ may be magnified in my body. Let me relate it to Galatians chapter 6. And there he says in verse 14, but God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.

Verse 17, henceforth let no man tumble. Get out of my way, the whole lot of you, philosophers, Stoics, poets, he meets them all in the 17th chapter of Acts, and he's totally king of the situation. I think he had the greatest brain the world ever knew, except apart from Jesus.

But he says, look, I want to tell you something. I could glory in my pedigree, I'm of the tribe of Benjamin, I'm of the seed of Abraham, I'm a Pharisee of the Pharisees, I've everything going for me. But he says, my richest gain I count but lost.

We sing that, it doesn't mean a hill of beans. But he's put all that stuff to death. But he says, no boasting.

That's how, who translates it that way? Moffat translates it, but it says, God forbid. Moffat says, no boasting for me, not in pedigree, position, intellect, anything. No boasting for me, save in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world is crucified unto me, and I'm crucified to the world.

And then he writes it off, from henceforth let no man tumble. I bear in my body the marks. Now Moffat says, I bear the brands of Jesus Christ in my body.

Heracles is being called the father of history. I don't think he was. But he recites how in the days of the apostle Paul, a man who was a slave could get away from his boss, or whoever had him in captivity, and he would run to the temple of Heracles.

And there were altar fires burning, night and day, 24 hours a day. And there were men sitting with branding irons, like we brand cattle here. And you could choose which God you want to be branded for.

You say, I'll take that one. Okay, so what do they do? They take a branding iron and put it there, and have your flesh sizzled. You lift it up your instep, and they put it in your instep.

You pull down your toga, and they branded the back of your neck, so that your head belonged to your master, your feet belonged to your God, your hands belonged to your God. And Paul says, I bear in my body the brands of the Lord Jesus Christ. There's a lovely hymn we used to sing in England.

Let me see, I want to begin. Oh, I got it, I think. All for Jesus, all for Jesus.

All my being's ransomed powers, all my thoughts, and words, and doings, all my days, and all my hours. Let my hands perform his bidding. They're branded for him.

Let my hands perform his bidding. Let my feet run in his ways. Let my eyes see Jesus only.

Let my lips speak forth his praise. All for Jesus, all for Jesus. Oh, what wonder, how amazing, Jesus, glorious King of Kings.

Yes, I know it, but I can't. Thank you, James. But it fills me up.

He, King of Kings, deigns to call me, poor bankrupt me. He deigns to call me his beloved, and lets me rest beneath his wings. Do you wonder, he said, all for Jesus.

Paul would have enjoyed that so much. You see, Paul had only one thing to live for, one person to live for, Christ. Whether by life, or by death, I don't care, he says.

If it pleases God to crucify me, crucify me. If it pleases him to put me in a stinking prison, let me stay there. Why? They did the most ridiculous thing they could do, putting a fellow in prison.

What did he do? He got out of it. But he got his revenge. He prayed an earthquake, and wrecked the prison.

I thought that was good. Let me find this, the place where I was looking at here. It says in verse 10 of chapter 1 of Philippians here, that you may approve things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense.

Do you know what the Greek there is? Without wax. What does that mean? What does wax mean? It means this, that when they were chiseling, sculpting a marble statue, the man might be looking around, and he chipped a piece of the ear off. And so it was damaged, it wouldn't be bought.

So what he did, he got some, he got a piece of the same stone and crushed it to powder, and then he mixed it with wax, and he filled the ear in. And it was all right until the sun shone. And when the sun shone, the guy's ear dropped off.

And so he says, be sincere without wax, without any duplicity, without any hypocrisy. Now look what he says, and he's writing from prison. I would that ye should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather to the furtherance of the gospel.

No, that's senseless. What's he doing in prison? He can't write an epistle there, or at least not much, even more useful outside. This man has a ministry of healing, erases the and he's stuck in a stinking prison.

What good is he doing for God's glory? Why did he go to some other country and exercise his power, his authority over death, his authority over demons, his authority over doubt and darkness? But there he is in prison, and he writes an epistle which has blessed millions of people since then. But listen to what he says. In verse 13 he says, My bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace and in other places.

Isn't that great? The guy in prison is infecting those in the palace. Look at chapter 4 and verse 22. And this is how effective it is.

You know, we sing, Oh well, it was a lovely deliverance. They were in jail, and they sang praise at midnight, and the jailer let them out. Isn't that nice? They whipped his back.

They tore him like they tore his master. His back was like a ploughed field. And yet as he sings the praise of God, it echoes down the corridors in the prison.

And the result is what? Well, what's it say in chapter 4? In verse 22. Verse 21, he says, Salute every saint in Christ Jesus. The brethren which are with me greet you, and all the saints salute you, chiefly they that are of Caesar's household.

My professor used to say Caesar's household was next door to hell. And this man goes to prison in order to get a testimony into the palace and into Caesar's household. He'd had a miniature revival there.

This week, somebody sent me a notice. I was profoundly moved with it. Somebody had been up in Russia and then over into one of the worst countries in the whole world, Siberia, which is, I mean, when it's 25 degrees there, it's summer.

It's the most frozen, dark, difficult place. Food is almost unobtainable. Places are inaccessible.

And there's an old man there who has one page of the Bible. One page. And that's all he's had all his life.

And yet he's had dozens and dozens. He hasn't had a mass revival. Dear God, you and I have every page in the Bible and ten other versions.

What in God's name do we do?