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The following is excerpted from To Live Is Christ, The Life and Ministry of Paul, by Beth Moore, LifeWay Press, Nashville, Tennessee 1997. This section is from page 57 and is based on Acts 13.
Sometimes we yearn for God to crack open a receptive door to share our faith with a friend, neighbor, or coworker. We scramble to grab an opportunity that never seems to come. Other times, God swings open a door so quickly, we're too stunned to walk through it! In today's reading God swung the door open so quickly He almost blew the beard off the rabbi! Practically by the time Paul and Barnabas found a chair, they were asked to share a message of encouragement.
Paul was not about to miss a golden opportunity. Like any good orator, he chose his style and material to fit his audience. As he stood in the synagogue, he addressed Jews and those who believed in the God of Israel. I am convinced he had a very specific purpose as he introduced Christ to them through their own history.
Remember when Paul went to Arabia after his conversion and spent some solitary time trying to sort things out? You may recall he then returned to Damascus and "baffled the Jews...proving that Jesus is the Christ" (Acts 9:22). On week 2, day 3 we discovered that the word proving means knitting together. In Arabia Paul had been knitting together the old and the new and found the two strands of yarn to be a perfect match. Paul's intention was to give the Jews in Pisidian Antioch a knitting lesson! He urged them to see how perfectly Christ knit the past with the present. They did not have to forsake all the chapters of their history. They just needed to accept the rest of the story!
Paul was such a prodigy of grace, he could not preach a sermon without it. He charged the Jews with having executed their own Messiah with "no proper ground" (v. 28), yet he extended the invitation to any "brothers" (v. 38) or fellow Jews, to receive forgiveness through Christ. What glorious news! If a person who had shared the responsibility for Christ's death could be forgiven, can any person be beyond forgiveness?