We shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders at political correctness
By Julian Mann, VOL:
How seriously do we take evangelism? How much does evangelism, the communication of the saving good news of the Lord Jesus and people coming to believe in him, matter to us?
Paul the Apostle took evangelism with the utmost seriousness and so he took the threats against evangelism very seriously as well.
After being converted to saving faith in Christ and commissioned as Christ’s Apostle to the Gentiles, Saul, this terrible one-time persecutor of Christians, this former violent religious fanatic, joined the Christian Church in Antioch in Roman Syria.
Then, as we heard in Acts 13, whilst the church family in Antioch together with its prophets and teachers were worshipping the Lord and fasting, they received a message from the Holy Spirit. Saul and Barnabas were to be set apart for a work of the Lord to which they had been called by the Lord’s Holy Spirit. This work was their first missionary journey, probably undertaken in around 48 AD.
Accompanied by John Mark, Saul and Barnabas sailed from the Antiochene port of Seleucia to Cyprus, Barnabas’s home island. On arriving in Salamis, Saul and Barnabas proclaimed the word of God, the gospel of the Lord Jesus, in the Jewish synagogues. There were Jewish synagogues in the main population centres around the eastern Roman Empire and these were the result of the Diaspora, the scattering of the Jewish people after the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in the 6th Century BC.
Saul and Barnabas followed the principle of going to the Jewish synagogue first because the Lord Jesus was and is the Jewish Messiah. Thereafter they spread the message further afield and went around the whole island of Cyprus until they got to its administrative capital, Paphos, where the Roman proconsul, the governor of the island, was based.
We see in Paphos the confrontation between Saul, now in Gentile territory using his Greco-Roman name Paul, and the Jewish sorcerer and false prophet, Bar-Jesus, also called Elymas, meaning sorcerer. Elymas was trying to keep the Roman pro-consul Sergius Paulus, who was an intelligent man and wanted to hear the word of God, from becoming a Christian.
Paul gives Elymas a real tongue-lashing: ‘You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right. You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord?’ (Acts 13v10 – NIV).
Paul back to Saul, his former nasty self, do we think? What he says sounds rather unchristian if we are inclined to think that being a Christian is about being nice all the time.
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