The 260 Journey

Day 117

Today’s Reading: Acts 28

In today’s reading, we look at the last chapter of Acts, chapter 28. We are going to discover real friends today—forty-three-mile friends.

When talking about friendship, John Churton Collins said, “In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends.” In Acts 28, Paul is in adversity. He is in Rome where he will meet death. However, something happens that can be overlooked. Acts 28:15 shows an extraordinary act of friendship: “The brethren, when they heard about us, came from there as far as the Market of Appius and Three Inns to meet us; and when Paul saw them, he thanked God and took courage.”

Let me give you some timelines. Acts 21–23 took place in AD 59 and Acts 24–28 took place in AD 62. We are dealing with a very tough three years of prison for the apostle Paul, who has been defending himself against the angry mobs and has faced an unexpected amount of tragedies and also miracles before he lands in Rome, the final place he will live.

Let me take you through his journey and show you how important Acts 28:15 is in Paul’s life. It all starts getting crazy in Acts 21. Paul will never again be free from chains after verse 30. He ends up on an island from a shipwreck. While building a fire, a snake bites him, but God protects him. When God heals him from the bite, everyone thinks Paul is a god. He ends up staying on the island for three months until he finally gets to Rome in Acts 28:15. People who love and care about Paul go to see him. They take an important journey to get there. Let me explain.

Apii or Appius is forty-three Roman miles (roughly thirty-nine-and-a-half contemporary miles) from Rome. That means Christians walked forty-three miles to be with Paul, forty-three miles to encourage the apostle.

I love that Luke, the writer of Acts, uses the Greek word that translates "to meet us." It specifically describes people going to meet a general, king, or conqueror. They go to meet Paul as one of God’s generals.

This is so important to Paul. He thanks God and takes courage. It lifts his heart and spirit because he realizes he isn’t alone. The body of Christ is there to encourage him.

Christians are never alone. You have a family called the Church. Every time someone makes a sacrifice to call you and you are encouraged, you have forty-three-mile friends. Every time you are visited in the hospital, you have forty-three-mile friends. When someone sends you a Bible verse or prays for you, you have a forty-three-mile friend. If you ever have someone give you a hug when you are down in the dumps, you have a forty-three-mile friend.

To be a forty-three-mile friend—like these no-name-people who encourage Paul—costs time. If they walked a quick pace and made a mile every 20 minutes, that means they traveled 14-15 hours just to encourage Paul. It was sacrificial. It took time out of their schedules and lives.

"Appius to Rome” is such a quick part of the Scripture that it’s easy to glance over without ever giving it a thought. However, this phrase is an important detail about those Christians. They were forty-three-mile friends.

I have forty-three-mile friends in my life who have made journeys to encourage me when I did not know if I had the strength to keep going. Think about your friends—your real friends, not your “friends” on social media. A court in Florida recently made a decision on the legal definition of “friendship.” It was based on the question, “Are your friends on Facebook actually your friends?” According to an appeals court, legally, Facebook friends aren’t necessarily your friends. The court looked into this because of a judge who may have been required to recuse herself from a case—because an attorney involved was friends with her on Facebook. However, the court ruled that recusal was not necessary, because they said Facebook friends are not really friends.

Thank God someone is getting it right. Just because you "follow," "like," or "friend" someone doesn’t mean you have a friend.

Real friends go forty-three miles, they don't just press a "follow" or "friend" button.

Day 116

Today’s Reading: Acts 27

Today, we'll take a boat ride on some rough waters in Acts 27. This boat has 276 on board, most of them prisoners. The apostle Paul is below deck in shackles and on his way to Rome. At one point the most famous prisoner on the boat tells the professional seafarers, “I wouldn’t go that direction.” And his advice is rejected vehemently:

Paul began to admonish them, and said to them, “Men, I perceive that the voyage will certainly be with damage and great loss, not only of the cargo and the ship, but also of our lives.” But the centurion was more persuaded by the pilot and the captain of the ship than by what was being said by Paul. (Acts 27:9-11)

Paul warned that if they continued on the journey, they would experience damage and great loss. The other passengers were probably thinking, “What does a religious man know about sailing?”

They do not listen to the Christian and this is what happens:

Before very long there rushed down from the land a violent wind, called Euraquilo; and when the ship was caught in it and could not face the wind, we gave way to it and let ourselves be driven along. . . . The next day as we were being violently storm-tossed, they began to jettison the cargo; and on the third day they threw the ship’s tackle overboard with their own hands. Since neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small storm was assailing us, from then on all hope of our being saved was gradually abandoned. When they had gone a long time without food, then Paul stood up in their midst. (Acts 27:14-21)

At some point, some "Einstein" on the crew said, “Where is the guy who told us not to go on this journey? Maybe we should listen to him?”

They pull the prisoner up on deck. They wanted to hear from Paul; they had an awakening.

That story is an example of what at an awakening looks like in our country. It’s when people want to hear from God again—not the professionals: not the politicians, not the news reporters, not Hollywood celebrities, or athletes. It's when people declare, “Let’s hear what God has to say.”

The sailors are at that place of desperation when they want to hear from Paul. This is what he tells them:

Men, you ought to have followed my advice and not to have set sail from Crete and incurred this damage and loss. Yet now I urge you to keep up your courage, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship. For this very night an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I serve stood before me, saying, “Do not be afraid, Paul; you must stand before Caesar; and behold, God has granted you all those who are sailing with you.” Therefore, keep up your courage, men, for I believe God that it will turn out exactly as I have been told. But we must run aground on a certain island. (Acts 27:21-26)

When Paul says, “An angel of . . . God . . . stood before me,” that means God gave Paul a word for the ship. The captive is now the captain! The sailors listened to the one they had in the bowel of the ship. Wait until you hear Paul teach them how to survive! In verse 44, Paul tells them that when the ship breaks up, they are to grab hold of a plank and float to shore.

Holding on to a piece of wood is going to get you through your storm. I have a sneaky suspicion you may have caught where I’m going with this. The only chance for America and the impending storm we will face is still a piece of wood—a two-thousand-year-old piece of wood on which the Son of God died—the cross.

There’s enough wood for everybody. Paul is speaking to his enemies. He is helping the sailors survive who made him a prisoner. All 276 make it to shore during a terrible storm. The storm allows the captive to become captain. Paul guides the ship and those on board to safety. How?

It is like two men who are on a beach gazing out at sea. One man says, “I see a ship.” The friend replies that he doesn’t see anything. The first man persists in saying he sees a ship. The friend says, “Well, I have 20/20 vision and I don’t see anything.” To which the first man says, “Yes, but I have binoculars. And there is a ship.”

The godly have binoculars. They know what is coming.

Many times the world won’t listen to the church until the storm comes and until hope is lost. And then we listen as we stand up with the Word from God. The world won’t listen to us sitting in our church seats. They did listen to Paul, however, when they were drenched on the deck of a boat being battered by a storm.

God has a way of using storms to bring us to places in our lives and in our hearts that we would not have gotten to on our own. It’s called providence. God uses circumstances and directs our steps. When hope is lost in our society, there is wood that can get us to safety. Grab a plank. It is the cross of Jesus.

Day 115

Today’s Reading: Acts 26

In today’s reading, the apostle Paul is about to make his defense before king Agrippa before leaving for Rome. It is so powerful that at the end of his speech, the king says to Paul, “In a short time you will persuade me to become a Christian.”

What was so powerful about this speech Paul made? He told his conversion experience (this is the third time he tells it in Acts). Always remember that something may be old to you, but it may be new for someone else. D. L. Moody, the great American evangelist in the nineteenth century, was never afraid to tell people about Jesus wherever he was. He had a reputation for it. One day Moody intercepted a man who was hurrying toward a train and asked the stranger, “Are you saved?” The man told him, “That is none of your business.” Moody replied, “That is just my business,” to which the stranger said, “Then you must be Moody.” He was an amazing storyteller who could make the gospel more understandable to his listeners. After one meeting in which he preached, a woman approached him and said, “Moody, I’ve heard those stories you told, they were repeats.” To which Moody replied, “The people need to hear those stories, and I must tell them.” And that is what Paul did before the king. He retold his story.

But this time we get something we have never heard before. It is as if Paul’s memory was jarred the more he told his conversion story:

While so engaged as I was journeying to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, at midday, O King, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining all around me and those who were journeying with me. And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew dialect, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.” (Acts 26:12-14)

Did you hear it? Every time he told his story, it always had Saul. “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” But this time he added the second part, “It is hard for you to kick against the goads.”

These are red-letter words, which means Jesus was talking. That is why we have to take note of the addition to Paul’s story. The risen Christ told Paul that it was hard for him to kick against the spikes or goads. When a young ox was first yoked, it tried to kick its way out of the yoke. If it was yoked to a onehanded plough, the ploughman held in his hand a long stick with a sharpened end, which he held close to the ox’s heels so that every time it kicked, it was caught by the spike. The sharp end would urge the ox in the right direction, but if it wanted to do its own thing, the small pain of being guided was traded for the big pain of being stabbed in the heel for not listening. It was the pain of disobedience.

It seems that Paul was making an important point. He was saying that God was pricking his conscience, and every time he refused and fought against it, it just got harder for him. Many believe that when Paul witnessed Stephen’s stoning in Acts 8, that act started the pricking of his conscience. He saw Stephen’s face look like an angel. He saw Stephen forgive the men who were stoning him. He saw Stephen commit himself into the arms of Jesus. To see all this and not turn to Jesus was nothing but kicking against the goads.

When God is trying to get our attention and we keep on going our own way, we join the goad-kicking club. The pain of disobedience is way more costly than the pain of obeying. Every time God asks us to draw closer to Him in obedience, it is our chance either to say yes and all Him to guide us to our destination or to say no and have Jesus discipline us to our intended destination.

This is really important. With God, He is going to get you to your intended destination. So you can do it the easy way or the hard way.

What was Paul’s destination? “I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:17-18, NIV).

God said you chose the sharp goads but we still got there.

It’s nice to get where God wants us to be. It’s better to do it without getting the sharp end of a goad. It’s so much easier to listen to the voice of God than to be stubborn.

Day 114

Today’s Reading: Acts 25

There are two ways to view yourself—from a photo or in a mirror. Photos are how we wished we looked. Mirrors are how we really look. One is fantasy, the other reality. We can fix our hair and our make-up for a photograph. But when we look into a mirror, that is the real us staring back. Until we see and acknowledge our real selves, we never understand our need for God. In other words, if our lives are constantly about over-inflating ourselves, we undervalue our need for a Savior.

In today’s reading, we find a very overrated moment. It’s men seeing their photo and not looking into the mirror.

Paul was on trial and about to go to Rome, but not without some overrated people showing up to see the “little man” who was changing the region with the message of Jesus. Look at this one verse in particular. The contrast of people is amazing: “On the next day when Agrippa came together with Bernice amid great pomp, and entered the auditorium accompanied by the commanders and the prominent men of the city, at the command of Festus, Paul was brought in” (Acts 25:23).

In this scene, we have the king of Judea, Agrippa, his wife, Bernice, and Festus, the procurator of Judea. There were the commanders and the prominent men of the city all in this one verse. But there was one other person there also.

In the midst of all this pomp, there was also one man in chains who was changing the world—the apostle Paul. All of those other people looked at their photos and decided how great they were. Paul looked into a mirror and realized what a great sinner he was. And the latter man changed a planet.

It says they came “amid great pomp.” An interesting tidbit: Pomp is the Greek word phantasia, from which we get fantasy. The photo was fantasy.

In the Daily Study Bible, William Barclay described the fantasy like this:

There is no more dramatic scene in all the New Testament. It was with splendour that Agrippa and Bernice had come. They would have worn their purple robes of royalty and the gold circlet of the crown on their brows. Doubtless Festus had donned the scarlet robe which a governor wore on state occasions. Close at hand there must have stood Agrippa’s court, and also in attendance were the most influential figures of the Jews. Close by Festus there would stand the captains in command of the five cohorts which were stationed at Caesarea; and in the background there would be a solid formation of the tall Roman legionaries on ceremonial guard. Into such a scene came Paul, the little Jewish tent-maker, with his hands in chains; and yet, from the moment he speaks, it is Paul who holds the stage.

Think of the contrast of having a tentmaker in chains and a king in purple, and people forgetting that the man in chains was really the man in authority in that room.

This story made me think about Mother Teresa’s speech at the Washington, D.C. prayer breakfast on February 3, 1994. Three thousand people attended the event, mostly DC officials. The president and first lady, Bill and Hillary Clinton, were there, along with the vice president and second lady, Al and Tipper Gore.

Mother Teresa stood to speak, and the room’s atmosphere became intensely uncomfortable when she started by saying, “I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because Jesus said, ‘If you receive a little child, you receive me.’ So every abortion is the denial of receiving Jesus, the neglect of receiving Jesus.”

Journalist Peggy Noonan recounted the scene:

Silence. Cool deep silence in the cool round cavern for just about 1.3 seconds. And then applause started on the right hand side of the room, and spread, and deepened, and now the room was swept with people applauding, and they would not stop for what I believe was for five or six minutes.

But not everyone applauded. The president and the first lady, seated within a few feet of Mother Teresa on the dais, were not applauding. Nor were the vice president and Mrs. Gore. They looked like seated statues at Madame Tussaud’s. They glistened in the lights and moved not a muscle, looking at the speaker in a determinedly semi-pleasant way.

Mother Teresa was not part of the Washington elite, but she had a message. She didn’t talk about airy, politically correct issues that everyone could get behind. Instead, she dug in and spoke of God-honoring ways to combat abortion. “It was all so unhappily unadorned, explicit, impolitic,” Noonan continues. “Mother Teresa seemed neither to notice nor to care. She finished her speech to a standing ovation and left as she had entered, silently, through a parted curtain, in a flash of blue and white. . . . She could do this, of course, because she had a natural and unknown authority.”

I love that story and the images it evokes. It looks like Acts 25 between three thousand Agrippas and a little apostle named Paul. Imagine it, a tiny slightly slumped-over woman standing on a box to allow her to be seen over the lectern and addressing some of the most powerful men and women in the world. And packed into that aging frame was enough authority to lay low anyone who dared raise a finger in opposition. You tell me who was the most powerful person in that banquet hall that day? And you tell me who was overrated?

Such is the power of truth when spoken with authority. It silences all the critics.

Day 113

Today’s Reading: Acts 24

Recently I read a quote about being good stewards of our time and made me sit back and really think about what I do with the time God has given me:

Each new day brings us 24 hours, 1440 minutes, 86,400 seconds, each moment a precious gift from God . . . each calling for us to be good stewards, mindful that one day we must give an account for how we spent the time God loaned us, how effectively we “bought up” the opportunities He provided.

William Penn once said, “Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst.”

Acts 24 is about a man who did not use time effectively. The man, Felix, was a king, and he heard a three-point sermon preached by one of the best, the apostle Paul. It was a sermon that made a king tell the preacher to stop:

Some days later Felix arrived with Drusilla, his wife who was a Jewess, and sent for Paul and heard him speak about faith in Christ Jesus. But as he was discussing righteousness, self-control and the judgment to come, Felix became frightened and said, “Go away for the present, and when I find time I will summon you.” At the same time too, he was hoping that money would be given him by Paul; therefore he also used to send for him quite often and converse with him. But after two years had passed, Felix was succeeded by Porcius Festus. (Acts 24:24-27)

Listen to an old Methodist preacher, Halford Luccock, and what he makes of Felix’s mistake:

There is a unique characteristic about time which we overlook: We can lose time, but we can never find it. We have to make it. Felix found lots of moments for what he wanted to do—to satisfy his curiosity about Paul and open the way for a bribe. We read that he would send for him “pretty frequently” (Acts 24:26), but he found no moments to face the big issue squarely and render a judgment. Such moments are never found. They must be made.”

And what we conclude from the passage is that Felix never found time to deal with the most important issue of his life—eternity. Here is how it reads in The Message, and it’s raw:

As Paul continued to insist on right relations with God and his people, about a life of moral discipline and the coming Judgment, Felix felt things getting a little too close for comfort and dismissed him. “That’s enough for today. I’ll call you back when it’s convenient.” (Acts 24:25)

To say, “I don’t have time,” is like saying, “I don’t want to” or “I’m not interested.” I read something that is only too true: “Time is a strange commodity. You can’t save it, borrow it, loan it, leave it, or take it. You can only do two things with it—use it or lose it.”

Felix lost it.

A. W. Tozer said it like this: “When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.”

Felix heard a sermon that keyed in on righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come. And he got frightened. I know that feeling. It happened to me. I was twelve years old and picked up a comic book at a youth camp, called The Late Great Planet Earth. It was the kid version of the book by the same name by Hal Lindsey, that dealt with the end times and the judgment to come. I was struck with such conviction and fear that I was not ready for the rapture that I sought out my counselor to get things right with God.

What I learned was this, when you don’t do something about the conviction of the soul, the intensity does not get stronger. The opposite happens and it lessens. The more we ignore the voice of God toward obedience, the more difficult it is to act.

When God speaks, respond. When you feel convicted about something, do something. Felix got convicted and all he did for two years was listen to Paul but would not respond. It seems he never felt that way again, and by verse 27 he was out and another king came in.

Make use of time wisely, especially if it is dealing with your soul and eternity. As Mother Teresa allegedly said, “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” Amen.