33:45 minutes (15.45 MB)
Sermon text: Acts 26:9-18
Our passage this morning is about Paul and particularly what happened to him when he was arrested for preaching about the resurrection of Jesus and that Jesus was the Messiah that the Jewish people had been waiting for.
Paul has really upset the Jewish authorities of his day and they are doing whatever they can do to stop him from talking about Jesus. In Acts 21 a mob of people attempted to lynch Paul. They were responding to suggestions that Paul was attacking the fundamental symbols of Jewish national solidarity, the people, the law and the temple. One follower of Christ, Stephen, has already been stoned to death in Acts 7 . . . and Paul is now being treated the same way.
The mob is particularly upset that Paul may have brought Gentiles (non-Jews) into the temple, thereby making it unclean according to their laws. They were looking for reasons to accuse him because they did not like a lot he was saying. In Acts 21, it says that some Jews had seen had seen Paul hanging out with a guy named Trophimus and assumed that Paul had brought him into the temple. And for the Jews, the temple rules were a big deal and there were certain parts of the temple that only Jews were to have access to.