All right, well, it's good to be in church tonight. I am thankful that I will never get over it. I'll never get over being thankful that I'm free. Amen. Well, while they're going downstairs, we're going to be in Acts tonight. You'll turn to Acts chapter number 21. We'll read a few verses here. We're going to hop a little bit over in Romans here in a little bit as well. But, Brother Johnny preached a couple weeks ago about doing the right thing at the wrong time. And I kind of want to give something kind of in line with that about making the wrong decision at the right time. at the time when you're maybe supposed to do something but you are faced with a decision you don't know which direction to go. And I want to look at something the Apostle Paul had to deal with. And if the Apostle Paul wasn't immune to making bad decisions, then we definitely aren't either. So we'll go ahead and get started here in Acts 21 and verse 3. They write, Now when we had discovered Cyprus, we left it on the left hand and sailed into Syria and landed at Tyre, for there the ship was to unlaid her burden. and finding disciples, we tarried there seven days, who said to Paul through the Spirit that he should not go up to Jerusalem. And when we had accomplished those days, we departed and went our way, and they all brought us on our way with wives and children till we were out of the city. We kneeled down on the shore and prayed. And when we had taken our leave one of another, we took ship, and they returned home again. And when we had finished our course from Tyre, we came to Ptolemaeus and saluted the brethren and abode with them one day. And the next day we that were of Paul's company departed and came into Caesarea, and we entered into the house of Philip the evangelist, which was one of the seven, and abode with him. And the same man had four daughters, ten virgins, or correction, four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy. And as we tarried there many days, there came down from Judea a certain prophet named Agabus. And when he was come unto us, he took Paul's girdle, and bound his own hands and feet, and said, Thus saith the Holy Ghost, So shall the Jews of Jerusalem bind the man that owneth this girdle, and shall deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles. And when we heard these things, both we and they of that place besought Him not to go up to Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, What mean ye to weep and to break mine heart? For I am ready not to be bound only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus. And when he would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, The will of the Lord be done." Brother Drew, if you would open us up in a word of prayer, please. truth. Thank you. Amen. Amen. Well, so we know a couple things about Paul just kind of off the get-go here. We know that Paul being our apostle to the Gentiles of the Church Age is the greatest example we have on how to live the Christian life. He's the greatest example on how to be a Christian without actually being Christ Himself. Paul was at a pivotal time in his ministry here. So if you go back in Acts chapter 20, you find that Paul's done a little bit of traveling. But for the most part, for the previous three years at that point, he had spent that previous three years in Ephesus with that church. He was teaching, he was preaching, he was sleeping in their houses. They were feeding him and he was feeding them with the Word and of the Spirit. And he finally came to a point where he knew it was time to do something. And if you look here in Acts 20, 25, he says, and now he's talking to the elders at Ephesus here. He says, And now, behold, I know that ye all among whom I have gone preaching the kingdom of God shall see my face no more. And then at the end of the chapter, in verse 37, he says, And they all wept sore and fell up on Paul's neck and kissed him, sorry most of all for the words which he spake, that they would not see his face no more, or that they should see his face no more. And they accompanied him unto the ship. So Paul's at a pivotal point. He's at an emotional point right here in his ministry and he needs to go somewhere. And he has a plan on what he needs to do, but he also knows what he feels like he's supposed to do. So I want to look at a couple things here starting out. The first point that I want to make before we get into dissecting this is Paul had a couple different callings on his life that were pretty certain, pretty obvious things. If you hop over to Acts chapter 9, we get over here and we're reading about the conversion of Saul into Paul when God called him and saved him and called him. So God blinds him on the road to Damascus and God speaks to him and tells him to go into Damascus and he says, I'll tell you what to do there. And then he calls on Ananias, he says, hey, you need to go get this sucker, he's blinded, you need to tell him what to do. And here's what you need to tell him. And Ananias is kind of like, well, ain't this the guy that's been signing our death warrants? Isn't this the guy who's been persecuting us and killing us? And Lord says, yeah, it ain't none of your business, but he says here in verse 15, But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way, for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel." So we know that Paul had a calling on his life. In Romans 1 and verse 7, when he's talking to the Romans, he mentions that they are called to be saints. That's the first calling on the apostle Paul. He's called to be a saint. That's the same base calling that every Christian has. If you're saved, you are called to be a saint. All right? I want to look at another thing. He was called to be an apostle. He starts out most of his epistles in the New Testament saying Paul called to be an apostle or he says an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God or some kind of form of those words. It was very obvious to Paul that he was called to be an apostle. The third thing, moving quickly so we can get to the rest of this, is he was called specifically to the Gentiles. Now he was called to be a saint. That's your salvation. That's what you are supposed to do as a Christian. That is everybody. He's called to be an apostle. That's his calling as a preacher. He is called to preach and teach the Word to whoever will listen. But God took it a step further and called him specifically to the Gentiles. In Romans 11, 13, he says, For I speak to you Gentiles inasmuch as I am the apostle of the Gentiles. Galatians 2, he says, For he that wrought effectually in Peter to the apostleship of the circumcision, the same was mighty in me toward the Gentiles. And then here in Acts 22, which we're going to get to here in a little bit, in verse 21 when he's giving his testimony, he says, The Lord told him previously about going to Jerusalem and about being in Jerusalem, Depart, for I will send thee far hence unto the Gentiles. So Paul had a very obvious calling upon his life. He already had marching orders. He knew what to do. Everybody here knows I spent about five years in the Marine Corps. I did a couple different things. I had a couple different callings placed upon my life. At the base level, I was a basically trained Marine. It was my job to be able to pick up a rifle and seat close with and destroy the enemy. That was something every Marine needs to be able to do. You go and qualify every year. You go through courses every year to make sure that you keep your memory fresh. In addition to that, I also worked on aircraft. So I had to learn how to turn wrenches on these aircraft. I had to learn how to launch and retrieve them. I had to learn how to inspect work on them. But I also was a shift supervisor, a work center supervisor. I had a calling there where I had to lead a crew of maintenance personnel and accomplish the maintenance workload that had to be done every day. And at the end of the day, if that workload wasn't accomplished, it was because I didn't task my Marines correctly and prioritize their work correctly. It wasn't because of them, it was because of me as the supervisor that the job didn't get done. So your calling is a very important thing in your Christian life, whatever it may be. It doesn't have to be a calling to preach or to be a missionary. It might be a calling to sit right here in a God-fearing church under a God-fearing preacher like we have, you know, that sits here and puts a big spread out every time he preaches and feeds us very well. It might be that you have a calling to go have some kind of ministry out in town, to minister to some of the folks that we have around here. Whatever it is, you should take that calling seriously. Paul writes, he says, for the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. I might be paraphrasing that just a little bit there. But it's a calling that doesn't go away. So you should always keep that in mind when you're going about some certain things in your life. So I want to look specifically and kind of the meat of what we're looking at here is in Acts 21 in verse four here. Grab a bottle of water. So in verse four is the first time that we read about him being warned about what was going on. They had just gotten to Tyre. And he says in verse 4, the Lord puts down in verse 4, he says, In finding disciples, we tarried there seven days, who said to Paul through the Spirit, that's with a capital S, the Spirit, that he should not go up to Jerusalem. Now the first thing we want to look at is that Paul had a warning from the brethren that he wasn't supposed to go to Jerusalem. We get those warnings a lot and the first line of defense that you're probably going to have if you don't realize the Lord is telling you to do or not do something is going to be our pastor. He's got a special spiritual discernment about things that God gives him as your pastor to be able to tell you, Quit whatever you're doing. Quit that mess. You may not bring it up here publicly. It may not be something that's known, but standing behind this pulpit is the pastor of the church. He can see certain things. He can tell certain things that nobody else can see. The Lord gives him a special kind of understanding. When he's sitting here preaching, the Lord might direct him in a certain direction based on something that's happening in somebody's life. I know it's happened to me before sitting back there in the sound booth. So you have to be careful to listen to these old men of God that came before you. They have some knowledge about some things and they have some wisdom about some things that you don't have. That's something that I had to grasp just using my Marine Corps experiences. That's something I had to grasp as a Marine was there were a ton of Marines that went before I did. A ton of guys that went and did a lot of hard things before I did and I had to sit down and I had to learn how to be a learner and be a follower before I could be a leader. I had to learn how to work on aircraft. I had to learn how to sign off work and inspect work and stuff like that. But more importantly, I had to learn how to lead people before I could actually be a leader. The best way to learn to be a leader is to be a follower. Now you have a really good example of a leader in our church. Our pastor is a... I don't understand how we have preachers in Lincoln County that can put ramen out on the table on Sunday mornings for their congregations, but our pastor does what he does with still having a full-time job and everything. The Lord uses him, and he's put a good leader before you, but you can also learn from bad leadership at work. You learn how not to be a leader. You can take all the experiences that you have in your Christian life with people that you know, with things that you hear, and whatever the Lord teaches you from His Word, you can take all of that and apply it in one way or another to your Christian life. That's why Brother Johnny hits hard about using your entire Bible. There's some Baptists out there that like to say you should only teach and preach out of Paul's epistles because he's the apostle to the Gentiles. That is completely wrong. The Lord's written a lot of things in here. He's got a lot of types in the Old Testament that you can apply to your Christian life. They may not apply to you doctrinally, but there are a lot of good lessons and a lot of things, a lot of devotional applications that the Lord has written down for your admonition and your learning. So you shouldn't forsake that stuff. But the Lord will use a man of God or a preacher or somebody in your church to warn you about some things sometimes. Usually if He does that, it's because you ain't picked up on it first. Now, the next thing we look at over here in verse 10, he says, And when we had tarried there many days, there came down from Judea a certain prophet named Agabus. And when he was come unto us, he took Paul's girl, and bound his own hands and feet, and said, Thus saith the Holy Ghost, Again, the Holy Ghost, that's the capital S, Spirit right there. So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man that owneth this girdle and shall deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles. So not only did God send the brethren to tell Him, God sent somebody outside the brethren to tell Him. Sometimes the Lord will use things outside of your control. Sometimes the Lord will use things happening outside of your home and outside of your life. People that have no clue what in the world that they're showing you. He will use them to show you that you should or shouldn't do something or you shouldn't have a certain view of something or in general just to talk to you because you won't listen to anything else. I've been there. Not only did he use his peers, but he also sent a Jewish prophet who showed Paul in a very Jewish manner by physically taking Paul's girdle and saying, the guy who owns this is going to get arrested. Do you understand? You own this, right? The Jews seek after signs. So Paul being the apostle to the Gentiles, you would figure he should have a pretty good relationship with the Lord and with the Holy Spirit. He should see exactly what's going on here. but he ain't listening, so the Lord's like, okay, next in line, go get him. So he shows him in the manner of his own people that he's not supposed to go to Jerusalem. It's not just that somebody from outside his own little circle of brethren and his own belief showed him. Somebody from the people that are going to arrest him, somebody of that same lineage came and prophesied and came and told him, hey stupid, here's what's gonna happen. So these first two things that we note here, his warning from the brethren and from the Jews directed, both of them directed by the Lord, both of these are things that you can see when you need some warnings about some things, but you also have to be kind of careful because both of these things are things that can be, both of these oppositions are things that can also indicate that you are supposed to do something. We've heard, our pastor says a lot, if you ain't making the devil mad, then you probably ain't doing something right, or if you're making the devil mad, then you're probably doing something right, or something along those lines. Those two things can mean one of two things. It's either, it's kind of, it's binary, it's one or zero, white or black, you should or shouldn't do this a lot of the time. So I want to look at the third thing here. The key that kind of unlocks exactly what these things meant. And of course we have, with the benefit of hindsight, and with the benefit of the word that we have here that says capital S Spirit and Holy Ghost in those specific verses, we know what was happening. But as far as Paul is concerned, if you flip over to the next chapter in chapter 22, when he's been arrested, when it actually happened and he, you know, when it actually happened, We find Paul giving his testimony. Listen, one of the greatest tools that the devil has in his arsenal about hindering or to hinder your Christian life is opposition and discouragement. That is one of the top tools that he is going to use to hinder you in your walk with the Lord. So you have to be careful about discerning some things. But Paul, he shows the key to kind of unlocking exactly what was happening here. And he just comes out and says it to everybody in Jerusalem. In verse 17 and chapter 22, we pick up here when he's giving his testimony here, he says, And it came to pass that when I was come again to Jerusalem, even while I prayed in the temple, I was in a trance. Now this was one of his previous times that he was in Jerusalem before he had gone off and he had preached and teached among a lot of the different churches and things. But he said, I was in a trance and saw him saying unto me, make haste, get thee quickly out of Jerusalem for they will not receive thy testimony concerning me. And I said, Lord, they know that I imprisoned and beat in every synagogue them that believed on me. And when the blood of thy martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by and consenting unto his death and kept the raiment of them that slew him." So Paul's argument here is the Lord obviously tells him whenever this happened one of his previous times in Jerusalem, him being a Jew and that being where he was from, He says, "...make haste and get thee quickly out of Jerusalem, for they will not receive thy testimony concerning Me." So He had already told him in the past, don't go. It wasn't just these two previous times from the brethren and from the Jews directed by the Lord. It was also the first time he had heard about it was from the Holy Spirit Himself. And then he comes through and he says in verse 19 and I said, or correction, in verse 21, and he said unto me, depart for I will send thee far hence unto the Gentiles. So Paul already had his three strikes. Three strikes, you're out, bound, you don't know what's going to happen next. Back here in Acts 20, in verse 22, when he's talking to the elders at Ephesus, he says, And now behold, I go bound in the Spirit unto Jerusalem, not knowing the things that shall befall me there. Now if you notice, if you notice something interesting here, he says, not knowing the things that shall befall me there. In chapter 21, the prophet says in verse 11, so shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man that owneth this girdle and shall deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles. That was a direct answer to Paul not knowing what shall befall him there. But back in chapter 20, the next verse, in verse 23, He says, not knowing the things that shall befall me there, save that the Holy Ghost witnesseth in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions abide in me. I don't know what's going to happen in Jerusalem, except the Holy Spirit says I'm going to get arrested. But I don't know what else is going to happen. I might go to jail. That seems like a pretty big deal to me. I think that would be a pretty big hindrance on your ability to minister as a preacher. So he already knew what was going to happen. And he says here, "...say that the Holy Ghost witnesseth in every city." Every place he's gone that he's talked about this, the Holy Spirit's tried to tell him, wake up, stupid! And he's ignored him. So he sends a couple more warnings and a couple more signals to him that he shouldn't go do this thing. Now you might be asking, You might be thinking to yourself, why on earth would Paul want to go to Jerusalem? He says up here in Acts 20, if you look in verse 16, when he's talking about going to Ephesus for the last time, it says, "...for Paul had determined to sail by Ephesus, because he would not spend the time in Asia, for he hasted, if it were possible for him to be at Jerusalem, the day of Pentecost." Pentecost is a Jewish holiday. Now Paul knows there is nothing, there is no power left in whatever the Jews are doing over there. The entire first half of Romans is talking literally about salvation for both Gentiles and Jews. There's a theme of every chapter in the book of Romans and the first couple ones he's dealing with the Jews are in a mess, and then he's saying the Gentiles are in a mess, and everybody's in a mess, so how do we fix it? And then you come up on Romans 6, Romans 8, all those good chapters about your salvation, your doctrine for salvation, where it comes from. And Paul had already written that at this point. So why on earth would he want to make it to Jerusalem for Pentecost? Well, Paul, he had a specific burden. If you look, if you go over here to Romans chapter 9. Romans chapter 9, we'll pick up here in verse 1. I say..." He's speaking to the Romans here. "...I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost..." Now this is before he had gone to Jerusalem. "...that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." who are Israelites, to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises, whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is overall God-blessed forever, amen." So why in the world would Paul want to go to Jerusalem, knowing that the Lord doesn't want him to go, the brethren don't want him to go, he knows what's going to happen when he gets there. Why on earth would he want to go? Well, he does mention in his testimony here in 22, he says, And I said, Lord, they know that I imprisoned and beat in every synagogue them that believed on thee. And when the blood of thy martyr Stephen was shed, I was standing by and consenting unto his death and kept the raiment of them that slew him. So in his mind, his first justification for this is, Lord, You suffered a lot, you know, dying on the cross and paying for sins and everything. You went down to hell. You were in the heart of the earth for three days. You went and got the Old Testament saints and everything. He says, I killed your believers, so I probably deserve to suffer a good bit for what I've done. And if you get a little bit of glory out of me going, then praise the Lord. But that still wasn't what the Lord had for him to do. Paul's burden here that he has is a very important burden and that is a burden that everybody should have for their own people. Now we looked earlier that Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles, so he had been called to the mission field more or less. But he was pretty much the first missionary in the New Testament church. Paul had a burden for his own people. Now if you go back there and you look at a lot of the missionaries we support, I guess about a third, maybe close to half of them, are domestic missionaries in the United States. We support evangelists. We support BNL. We support deaf ministries and things happening in the United States and Canada and North America in general because we have a burden for foreign missions and we should send out foreign missionaries to go and preach the gospel to people that don't have it. But the first place you should be looking, especially as somebody who isn't called to be a missionary, your first place you should be ministering is right here. And our church has been doing not to puff everybody up or anything, but I'm thankful that our church has been doing a good job of that over the past couple of years. We're thankful for the stouts going out and prepping everything and organizing everything that we do on the square up there. Do you see any other churches out there trying to do anything for this county anymore or for the city or anything? You don't because there is no burden anymore. There is no burden to preach the word to the people around here anymore and you see that everywhere. Every, I'm convinced, every single person in Lincoln County is saved. They've got to be because that's what they all say, right? And something Brother Andrew mentioned down at his church a couple weeks ago when we were down there is he mentioned they have the same problem when they go pass out tracts and stuff. So he said, drill down on what their salvation's about. He's like, well, okay, you say you're saved, but how are you saved? Drill down on it and you get to the base of that thing and you'll find out most of them aren't saved. And that kind of opens the door for you to be a witness and a minister to those people. and to spread the gospel and everything. But Paul had a burden for his own people, and that's an important burden that we should have right here. It's not a bad thing. The reason that Paul wanted to go to Jerusalem was not a bad reason in and of itself. The problem is that Paul had a different calling on his life. Paul had a different burden on his life. So if you go back to Acts 20 over here, We look at verse 22. We've already read this verse, but I want to point something else out. He says, And now behold, I go bound in the Spirit unto Jerusalem. Now in 21.4, that word Spirit there has a capital S, right? So the precedent is set that when the Bible is speaking of the Holy Spirit and it uses the single word Spirit, it's going to use a capital S when it's talking about the Holy Ghost. So what about the Spirit He talks about in 20 verse 22? There is no capital S on that one. He is bound in the Spirit but it ain't the Holy Spirit. He was constrained to go to Jerusalem by His own Spirit and by His own burdens. Now we talk a lot about laying your burdens at the foot of the cross and everything and you should do that. You know, but it's a good thing to have some burdens and have some convictions of your own. But at the point where they conflict with what the Lord is telling you to do, and a lot of your burdens as a physical carnal being, a lot of the things that you worry about from a day-to-day basis, you need to give those over to the Lord. And if you have a spiritual burden, that might be something you think might be a calling, if it conflicts with something that the Lord is trying to tell you otherwise, then you need to hand that up to the Lord. If He wants you to do it, He will give you a sure calling on that later in life, or whatever His plan for you is, He'll make sure you know. He'll also make sure that if you're doing something you ain't supposed to be doing, you're gonna know. He'll tell you. He'll tell you by brethren. If you ain't going to listen the first time, if you ain't going to listen in every city you go to, He's going to send your own people, and then He's going to send people outside of your own people. And finally, barring everything else, He's going to let it happen. And that's what in 21, in verse 14, they write, And when He would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, The will of the Lord be done. And it's like, well, Guess that's... obviously you have already changed your mind. You have purposed to be in Jerusalem at the Day of Pentecost to be with your people. So, yeah, exactly. He's got a free will. The Lord gave him a free will. And he exercised it. And exactly what the Lord told him was going to happen, happened. There's an important thing for this. Now if you ever faced with this kind of decision and everything, obviously it would have been a whole lot better for Paul to just do what he was supposed to do and not go to Jerusalem. You say, what was he supposed to do? You go over here to Romans 1. Romans 1, let's take a look here in verse 9. For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit, my spirit, lowercase s again, in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers, making a request if by any means now at length I might have a prosperous journey by the will of God to come unto you, speaking to the Romans. For I long to see you that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift to keep the end, or correction, to the end you may be established. That is, that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith, both of you and me. Now I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, that oft times I purposed to come unto you, but was let hitherto that I might have some fruit among you also, even as among other Gentiles." Not only did Paul want to go to Jerusalem, he also wanted to go see the Romans. He mentions this again over here in Romans 15 and verse 20. You don't have to turn there, but I'll read it for you. He says, "'Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon any other man's foundation. But as it is written, to whom he was not spoken of, they shall see, and they that have not heard shall understand, for which cause also I have been much hindered from coming unto you, or coming to you. But now, having no more place in these parts, and having a great desire these many years to come to you, Whensoever I take my journey into Spain, I will come to you, for I trust to see you in my journey, and to be brought on my way thitherward by you, if I first be somewhat filled with your company. But now I go unto Jerusalem to minister unto the saints." So he wants to make it to Rome. And he says over there in Romans 1, he specifically mentions by the will of God. He believes. He's like, if I'm going to get to Rome, it's by the will of God. And I firmly believe that he thought that's what he was supposed to do at some point. Maybe not right now, but he was supposed to get there. Well, if we go over here to Acts 23. Paul has come before the Sanhedrin and then he's appealed to the... he's talked to the Pharisees. And if you come over here in verse 10, the Bible says, And when there arose a great dissension, the chief captain, fearing lest Paul should have been pulled in pieces of them, commanded the soldiers to go down, to take him by force among them, and to bring him into the castle. And the night following the Lord stood by him and said, Be of good cheer, Paul, for as thou hast testified of me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome." So Paul's kind of, he knows, he asked for this, you know. He's mentioned specifically about suffering for the Lord and everything and he writes a lot about glorying and his infirmities and everything. And he seems like he's pretty cheerful and stuff, but in all honesty, I don't think Paul at this point was really used to being imprisoned. And this is his first or second night in prison. The Lord comes over there and he's like, well... Where you at, Paul? He says, if only somebody had told you. No, he doesn't say that. He doesn't come over there and rag on him and say, I told you, you should have listened. No, he starts out with, be of good cheer. You know? For as thou hast testified of me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome. He went and did what he wasn't supposed to do. what happened or what was said was going to happen, happened. But thankfully, Paul didn't go for completely the wrong reasons. Now it was his own personal burden and his own personal things he was dealing with as to why he went. But He testified of Christ the right way. He held up to his word about his persecution, everything he was going to go through. And he would have a lot more opportunities to do that coming later on. But the fourth thing and the last thing I see here is that despite Paul's disobedience, the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance. So must thou bear witness also at Rome. And then you come over here and you come through the next five chapters. Paul spends two or three years in captivity getting kicked around from place to place, in bonds, in a shipwreck, bit by a snake, you know, everything that's happened to him, he does make it to Rome. And he does do exactly what he was supposed to do in Rome. He was allowed to minister to the saints everywhere that he went. the Lord was able to use the testimony that he had and the way that he went about his captivity and everything, the Lord was still able to use him as an apostle, an apostle to the Gentiles. The calling did not change. Over in Ephesians 3, in verse 1, he says, Paul writes, speaking of the things to the Ephesians, and this is after the fact, this is one of those prison epistles, he says, for this cause I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles. So you can see there in Ephesians when he's writing back to the Ephesian elders and they're like, they told us. Didn't somebody say something about him? After he left here, he went somewhere and they told us that he was going to do something stupid or something, I can't remember, but now he talks about being a prisoner. I wonder what that's about. Yeah, Paul had submitted to the consequences of his actions as he became a prisoner. It's evident that Paul hasn't let go of the calling that God placed on him either. The calling didn't change. He was still called to be a saint, called to be an apostle, and called to the Gentiles. But the important flip side of that coin is that you also have to keep that calling. It's not that the calling is going to go away if you don't answer it and you don't keep picking up the phone when it rings. It's still going to ring and it's still going to annoy you and it's going to bug you for the rest of your life if you don't. But Paul was willing to pick up the phone and he was willing to do his job. He was willing to do his job regardless of the circumstances around him. Paul was supposed to go to Jerusalem or he was supposed to go to Rome as a free man. He was supposed to make it over there and not be hindered at all. Paul made it, but the consequences of his actions meant he got there in bonds. And pretty much the rest of his life that we know about, at least physically and temporally, it was all downhill. He was imprisoned. He talks about his infirmities with his body. A lot of people have drawn the conclusion that he had bad eyesight and different things happening. And he wrote a lot of these epistles from prisons and different places and stuff in his bonds. but he did make it to where he was supposed to go. So, kind of in closing and everything, it's important tonight that if the Lord's trying to warn you about some things, that you listen, and I've been there before, and I have not listened before, and I went through a couple years that I couldn't get out of at that point, because I wouldn't listen. Now, the difference was I wasn't doing it with the right burden at all, and not to glorify what I did and everything, I'm very thankful that the Lord brought me out of that, but there was no guarantee that He would, and there was no guarantee to Paul going into the thing that the Lord was gonna bring him out of Jerusalem. The Lord didn't come to him and talk to him until after he had testified that first time about him. He said, all right, you've done what you're going to do. Here are the consequences. How are you going to handle it? And when Paul handled it the correct way, in the correct manner, that's when the Lord came to him and said, all right, we can work with this. So it's important that if you're faced with a decision and you're not sure the right way to go, that you soak that thing in prayer. The first thing you should do, you should take the opposition that you're facing, whether it's from people around you, because the devil will let that happen as well, whether it's from the world outside, that's going to happen as well. The important thing that you do is, first off, you soak that thing in prayer and you pray about it. If the Lord ain't talking to you spiritually, like you're not getting indications anywhere, look at the precedence that He set in His Word. for the first part, and then try to look at the things you're facing in that light and in that aspect. And the flip side is, if you haven't gotten a warning from the brethren, or you haven't gotten a knock on the head, why don't you go check with somebody? Go get somebody who knows what they're doing, who's been around this thing for a bit. We got a pastor that's willing to sit down with you and would love to sit down with you and talk to you about some things if you'll just do it, you know? You can, for Drew and my dad and a lot of these men around here, been around this stuff for a while. And at the very least, and especially Papa, been around a while, some of the earliest memories I have in church are of these two right here, and I love them to death. But at the very least, if some of these men can't direct you what to do, they'll help you pray about it. At the very absolute least, you can't overemphasize the importance of prayer. And prayer in and of itself is, there is nothing special about the actual prayer itself. You have to Don't put too much emphasis on the actual prayer as much as you put the emphasis on believing in a God that hears the prayer and will answer that prayer if he so wishes to. There's a lot of people all over the place, not just in Lincoln County, but everywhere we go. You hear preachers being invited to pray at NASCAR races and NFL games and different places, and you know them prayers don't get through the hair on their head. You have to make sure that you're praying with the right spirit and you're praying for the right reasons. Brother Terrence preached a good message about that back a couple months ago when he was here. The thing you have to grasp is that you're praying to a God that can hear what you're saying. And you should be careful of the things you say in your prayers, because there's a God that is listening. But the other side is if you have already made a decision, or if you come at a point later in life or whenever it might happen, Paul wasn't immune to it, so we aren't either. You come upon a point where you have made a decision and you realize and you're like, then you should go about that with the right spirit. That's the important thing. The Lord can use anything if you go about it with the right heart. And that's exactly what happened here. But yeah, that's a pretty simple thought tonight. I hope that was a blessing to you.