25th Nov 2010

Acts 24:1-27 – Paul’s Trial before Felix

• “Faith is in the Waiting”
• I hate being in limbo. I wonder how Paul felt about it?
• Eventually the High Priest and a lawyer turn up to accuser him.
• His judge is Felix who has about three reasonable good marks as a leader [putting down rebellion, bands of robbers and some assassins] but many poor ones. Later he was returned to Rome because of misrule.
• Tertullas the lawyer presents his case using the popular form of rhetoric debate and Paul systematically diffuses each clam with confidence. The jews fail to get him executed [3^rd time]
• Then he has to wait… for two whole years.
• Faith is not in the stepping out, faith is in the waiting.
• When we step out in faith we are usually motivated, energized, pumped. Paul would have been when Jesus appeared to him and spoke to him in dreams. But now here he is in a negative environment with only a few friends to look after him.
• What a waste of time!
• Or was it?
• Faith may be in the waiting but it does not mean we have to wait for faith.
• Paul did not wait to get pumped again or for the promise [to speak in Jerusalem] to come true.
• Firstly he witnessed to Felix and his family who ultimately rejected his message due to Paul’s forthrightness and description of judgment. Felix’s wife was a Jew and their child eventually died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
• It seems Paul learnt the value of still doing Gods’ work whilst in the waiting and Paul wrote the Books of Colossians, Philemon, Ephesians, and Philippians during his later imprisonment in Rome.
• That makes me think… some of the work he did whilst in waiting was not something that just kept him busy but it affected the entire world.
• When I am in the waiting period I can still do a lot of good if only I understand that Faith may be in the waiting but it does not mean I have to wait for faith.
• Praying for the kind of faith that does not wait.