Empowered by the Spirit: Boldly Proclaiming Truth

So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus. And when they arrived in Salamis, they preached the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews. (And) They also had John as their assistant. Now when they had gone through the island to Paphos, they found a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew whose name was Bar-Jesus, who was with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, an intelligent man. [00:14:14]

Now, the early church used the laying on of hands frequently as a symbol of anointing people with the power and the presence of the Holy Ghost. It was used in ordination. It was used in the benediction at the end of the service. It was used to commission church leaders and workers, again indicating a sense of spiritual consecration, a setting aside and anointing for a sacred task. [00:40:48]

You see, we can commission people, but we have no power. We can license, ordain, and send people for sacred tasks, but unless God the Holy Spirit sends them and anoints them, their labors will be in vain. Now I want us to notice here this morning that what we have in this brief text is the beginning, the onset of the most significant, most important, most vital missionary undertaking in the entire history of the church, indeed in the entire history of the world. [00:47:52]

Paul reminds us later on in his letter to the Romans that his commission was to give the gospel to the Jew first and then to the Gentile. We don’t know how long they stayed in Salamis, but then they went to Paphos on the other end of the island, some 90 miles west of Salamis, and there we read of this encounter with the false prophet. [01:06:24]

Now, we can expect a participation in the occult from oriental religions and mystery religions of the east, but this man who’s known as Bar-Jesus is identified as a Jew, and Jews who cast fortunes, who were soothsayers, fortune-tellers and the like, came under the wrath of God because in the Old Testament in the law of Moses the practice of this kind of sorcery and this kind of magic was an abomination to God and subject to the death penalty. [01:16:00]

As Paul is trying to give the Word of God to the proconsul, he’s interrupted by this false prophet, who’s doing everything that he can to impede the presentation of the gospel and prevent the proconsul from having a favorable response to it. Does that sound strange to you? Those of you who are believers know very well that when you were first converted there were people all around you, friends, family, whatever, who did everything they could to dissuade you from committing your life to Christ. [01:31:20]

And he looked at him and he said, “O full of deceit and all fraud, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, will you ever stop perverting the straight ways of the Lord?” Now again, obviously the apostle had not taken the time to read Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Nor was he bound by the conventions of political correctness of his day. But rather he lashes into this man and gives him what for. [01:52:56]

Now, if you’re familiar with the life of Paul, you know that Paul was a man who over and again manifested a pastor’s heart, a man who admonished us to be gentle, patient, long-suffering, kind and merciful, not combative, not belligerent, not bellicose in our relationships with people – and in that sense, mirroring and reflecting the way in which Jesus dealt with people. [02:03:19]

I thank God that the Apostle Paul loved Sergius Paulus enough to call the enemy of the Gospel out right in front of him, to expose him for what he was, a fraud. He was a deceiver who saw his whole vocation to be to undermine the preaching of the truth. That’s why Paul spent so much time in jail, so many times getting beaten, so many times within a half an inch of his life, and finally paid for it by having his head cut off by Caesar, because he loved the lost and cared about their eternal destiny. [02:24:02]

And then we’re told that this false prophet, who could tell everybody else what was coming next, was groping around for somebody to hold his hand, to lead him in this dark mist that God had put upon him. As for Sergius Paulus, he was astonished. The Apostle Paul comes and tells this fortuneteller, “You son of the devil, you’re going to be blind.” And the proconsul sees that, and we are told he believed. [02:31:52]

It was the Word of God. It was the truth that was proclaimed by Paul and Barnabas and John Mark that overwhelmed Sergius Paulus. And God gave to that man ears to hear and eyes to see, so that when he died, he did not end up in hell. Now every now and then, folks, you have to ask yourself. You have to look in your mirror and you have to look hard, cut away the facade and say, “Where’s my heart? Am I really trusting in Christ and Christ alone for my salvation? [02:41:32]

If I flee to Jesus, He alone is the gateway to Heaven and everlasting life. And every moment that we resist the full commitment of our hearts to Him, the same apostle who spoke to this false prophet says, we are heaping up wrath, piling it up, treasuring it up, making a new deposit every day against the day of wrath. So I say, flee to Jesus if for no other reason than to save your own soul. [02:50:41]