An overview for Sunday School teachers and Bible study leaders, of Lifeway’s “Explore the Bible” lesson of Acts 22:6-21, with the title of “Witness” for Sunday, Nov. 10, 2024. A video version of this overview is available on YouTube at:

INTRO: ??? Has anyone in our class ever been called to testify as a witness in a trial???
Then you could say: today in Acts 22 we are going to see how the Apostle Paul testified to his faith before the Jews …

OR: ??? Has the Lord given anyone an opportunity to share a witness with someone recently???
You/your group can share your experiences, then you can say, this morning in Acts 22 we see how Paul took advantage of an opportunity to share the gospel, in the midst of a very difficult situation.
(Or even if none of you can share a recent opportunity, you could say: We probably DID have some opportunities, but missed them! But here in our passage in Acts 22 this week, we see how the Apostle Paul did take an opportunity to share, even in a difficult situation.)

CONTEXT
Last time in our study through the Book of Acts, in Chapter 20, the Apostle Paul was giving his farewell message to the pastors of the church at Ephesus, on his way back from his 3rd Missionary Journey. Since that time, in Chapter 21 he went back to Jerusalem, where he was falsely accused by the Jews of preaching against the Law, and of bringing Gentiles into the Temple (21:28). In all the confusion, the Roman soldiers were called out, and the commander took custody of Paul, and ordered him taken the the barracks. In his Illustrated guide to the Apostle Paul, Dr. Alan Bandy tells us this “barracks” was the Roman Antonia Fortress, built on the northwest corner of the Temple Mount. He writes “This was a citadel with four high towers that served as the barracks for Roman soldiers assigned t keep the peace in Jerusalem.”

PICTURE:

While he was being taken into the Antonia Fortress, Paul asked him for permission to speak to the people. This brings us to Chapter 22, our focus passage for today, where Paul addresses the Jewish people from the stairs of the Fortress, and shares a witness of his testimony.

OUTLINE
I. Taking the Opportunity to witness (21:39-22:2)
II. The Content of his witness (22:6-21)
III. Sharing our own witness (22:15)

TEXT:

I. Taking the Opportunity to Witness (21:39-22:2)
The first thing I would point out from this passage is just not to overlook the fact that Paul specifically TOOK THE OPPORTUNITY to share his faith. Think about it: he has been accosted by the Jews, who were in a frenzy because they had heard that he had brought Gentiles into the Temple, which was absolute heresy to them, so they were furious. He had undoubtedly been beaten and bloodied. He was finally being whisked away by the Romans — and what does he do? He stops and asks if he can share a word with the Jews who had been beating him, from the steps of the fortress where they were taking him to be imprisoned! He purposefully took the opportunity to share his faith in this situation. Don’t miss that! This is what we are to do too:

Col. 4:2-6 is one of the best witnessing passages in the New Testament: “Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving; 3 praying at the same time for us as well, that God will open up to us a door for the word, so that we may speak forth the mystery of Christ, for which I have also been imprisoned; 4 that I may make it clear in the way I ought to speak. 5 Conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the opportunity. 6 Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how you should respond to each person.”

You could share this passage and/or ask your group: ??? “What all instructions does this passage give us regarding evangelism/being a witness?”???
(Several things:
— :3 shows the importance of PRAYER in evangelism: PRAY that GOD will open up a door. Only God opens doors for witnessing. So pray for those doors to open.
— :3-4 we should also pray for OURSELVES that we would speak a clear witness
— :5 addresses our LIFESTYLE: “conduct yourselves with wisdom towards outsiders” — our lifestyle is the backdrop for our witness and everything we say. Our lifestyle either validates or discredits our witness!
— Then :5-6 both address TAKING THE OPPORTUNITY just like Paul did in Acts 22: “make the most of the opportunity.” See the opportunities like Paul did, and share. Like :6 says “Let your speech be … seasoned with salt” as your “respond to each person.”)

Every Christian should WATCH for the daily opportunities we get to share the gospel.

If you didn’t do it for the introduction, you might ask your group at this point to share some opportunity they had to share the gospel with someone, that just arose from a situation.
(If you have had a personal opportunity, you might be ready to share that.
Cheryl & I had numerous chances to share a witness when we were at the rehab for three weeks; I was so proud of her as she took several opportunities to actually quote Bible verses to several of the therapists, nurses, and others there. She’d quote a Proverb that applied to our situation, or quote Isaiah 58:11 or Joshua 1:9 and how God was using His word to help her — she was a strong witness for the Lord there. She took the opportunity.
Cheryl later said that our time in rehab was the most difficult time in her life — more difficult than childbirth, she said! But like the Apostle Paul, even in her own distress, she took the opportunity to be a witness for the Lord.

You might choose to use an illustration here from Don Sunshine, who does a fantastic witness training seminar for churches. This is from his Facebook page (10/29/24)
“Testimony I just received: Thank you! Many of us are sharing the gospel as often as we can, thanks to your seminar. Here’s one of my recent stories…
‘I was cleaning off my kayak on the banks of a local river a few Fridays ago. It was Yom Kipper. No one else was around and a car pulled up beside me. The driver had a beard, no boat and no fishing pole. Hmmmm, I thought. I kept a discreet eye on him and quietly asked the Lord for protection. I focused on my kayak and tried to ignore him.
After about 10 minutes of silence, he popped out of his car wearing a yarmulke and a robe. He told me he was going in the water and not to watch because he wouldn’t have any clothes on.
Oiyyy! … was all I could think. But the Lord quickened my spirit and I said, “Are you doing a mikvah? The water is kind of dirty.”
He replied, “Yes, but it will clean my soul.”
I turned around so I couldn’t watch and I heard lots of splashing. He came out of the water, put his robe back on and said, “So, what are you doing for Yom Kipper?”
Again, the Lord put together my answer and I shared the gospel. I said, “Every day is Yom Kippur for me because I follow Messiah Jesus. I don’t have to wait an entire year. I can ask him for forgiveness anytime I want and he forgives me immediately. All this is because He shed His blood on the cross for our sins.”
“That’s nice,” he said. “How do you know what a mikvah is?”
“Messiah Jesus was a Jew and Judaism is the foundation of my faith.”
“That’s nice,” he said again and drove off.
One of the strangest encounters I’ve ever had. But Jesus was glorified. Hallelujah!’”

This man took advantage of the specific opportunity God gave him that day at the river. One of the great applications of this passage is for all of us to LOOK FOR THE SPECIFIC OPPORTUNITIES that God will give us this week. Like Colossians 4 says, PRAY that God will “open the door” and give you opportunities — and then WATCH for them. Psalm 5:3 says “in the morning O Lord, You will hear my voice; in the morning I will order my prayer to You — and WATCH!” So this week let’s PRAY for opportunities to share — and then WATCH for the specific opportunities God gives us.

Like Paul, our opportunity might come out of some difficult circumstance in our life: it may arise out of a trip to the ER, or some trouble with your car, or some other difficult thing. But WATCH for the opportunity God gives you to share, and then TAKE that opportunity, just like Paul did here. Jesus said, “You shall be My witnesses” — challenge your group to be His witnesses this week. (You might end the class with a prayer that God would open up specific doors for you to witness this week.)

II. The Content of His Witness (:6-21)
So what did Paul share from the steps of the Antonia Fortress?

— A. First, he shared his personal testimony: just what happened to him.
:6 “But it happened that as I was on my way, approaching Damascus about noontime, a very bright light suddenly flashed from heaven all around me, 7 and I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?’
This is what he saw and experienced. He just shared what happened to him.

We can ALL do this same thing. If you are a Christian, then you have a personal testimony. Sharing a testimony is just sharing the story of what happened to you: specifically how you came to know Jesus as your Savior. It may or may not be “dramatic” like Paul’s was, but you have a story you can share.

— B. the gospel
But he not only shared his own “personal experience,” he also made sure to convey the facts of the Gospel. We see several elements of the Gospel in this passage:

— In :16, Ananias tells Paul: “wash away your sins, calling on His name.” This is the heart of the Gospel: that in Jesus’ name, our sins can be forgiven, “washed away,” as Ananias said.

There’s an illustration of this great truth that came out of our stay at the rehab after Cheryl’s stroke:
Our daughter Libby had sent us a vase of flowers. I was trying to hook up a ROKU up to the tv in the room so Cheryl could watch the OU game, and as I pulled a cord, it knocked the vase over, and water went everywhere. It was just a big mess.
But it just so happened that a cleaning lady was right there at the door, and she said, “No worry mister! No worry mister!” She jumped right in and cleaned it all up in a flash, with the best attitude, and when she’d finished cleaning it all up, she said: “Nothing happen here Mister. Now look like nothing happen here.” I said, I like that expression, “Nothing happened here.” She told me that her father used to use that expression when she was growing up; he said if you clean a mess up good enough, it will look like “nothing happened here” — and that became one of their “family sayings” that they used all the time growing up: “Nothing happened here.”
Later I thought about that: This is what the Lord does for us: we’ve all sinned; we’ve all made a huge mess out of our lives, and our hearts are all stained with sin. And on our own, we have no way to clean it all up. But when we put our faith in Jesus’ death on the cross, like Ananias says here, our sins can be “washed away” through faith in him. So that now, from God’s perspective, it looks like “nothing happened here!” As the old expression goes, it’s “just as if I’d never sinned,” That’s the beauty of the gospel. And that truth is all through scripture:
— Psalm 51:7 “Purify me with hyssop and I shall be clean; wash me and I shall be whiter than snow”
— Psalm 103:12 “as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.”
— Isaiah 1:18 “Come now, and let us reason together,” says the Lord, “Though your sins are as scarlet,They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool.”
— In Acts 15:9 Peter said God makes no distinction between Jews & Gentiles, that for anyone He is “cleansing their hearts by faith.”
— I John 1:9 “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness”

Just like that woman’s father’s expression, “Nothing happened here,” so OUR Heavenly Father can look at our lives that were stained with sin and say: “Nothing happened here!” Our sins are washed away in Jesus’ name.
That’s the heart of the gospel, and that’s what Paul shared here.

Then notice something else: two important questions that he asked:
— :8 And I answered, ‘Who are You, Lord?’ And He said to me, ‘I am Jesus the Nazarene, whom you are persecuting.’
— :10 And I said, ‘What shall I do, Lord?’ And the Lord said to me, ‘Get up and go on into Damascus, and there you will be told of all that has been appointed for you to do.’

These are two vital questions:
— “Who are You?”
— “What shall I do?”
First is “Who are You?” Saul had previously thought that Jesus was a deceiver, and His followers a cult. But now he saw Him face to face, and He knew that He was real. Twice here he calls Him, “Lord.” This word means “master, boss.” It is a position of authority. Which leads directly to the second question:
“What shall I do?” If He is Lord and God, then we need to ask Him what shall we do.

This reminds me of the old C.S. Lewis quote, in Mere Christianity, where he writes:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else He would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” (Mere Christianity, Chapter 3, p. 56)

Because Jesus IS who He is, we need to fall at His feet and call Him Lord & God — and like Paul here, ask Him, “What shall I do?” If Jesus is who He says He is, then we owe Him our total obedience.

Notice the kind of total obedience that He requires: the “blank check” of a command that the Lord gave Saul here in the second part of :10: “Get up and go on into Damascus, and there you will be told of all that has been appointed for you to do.” Just what did He want him to do? Just get up and go, and I’ll TELL you what you’ll have to do! The Lord didn’t “bargain” with Saul, or say “If you’ll just do this or that,” or anything like that. He told him to get up and go and He’d tell him what he needed to do — with the obvious expectation that he would be required to do whatever he was asked.
That is what Lordship IS; that is the kind of commitment that each of us as Christians is to have: Jesus is our LORD, and we are responsible to do whatever He tells us to do. We accept Jesus as our “Lord & Savior;” as “Savior” He washes away our sins, like we just saw. But the other side of that is that He is also our “Lord,” the One to whom we are to give total obedience.

III. Sharing Our Own Witness
A couple of times in this passage, the Lord told Saul that he wanted him to be a witness for Him:
:15 “For you will be a witness for Him to all men of what you have seen and heard.”
:21 And He said to me, ‘Go! For I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’”

So when Saul got to Damascus, what did the Lord tell Saul that He wanted him to do? Through Ananias He told him to be a witness of all that HE had seen and heard:
— Share your testimony (the things you’ve seen and heard.)
— Share the Gospel: how Jesus is “Lord & Savior,” how He will wash away your sins, and also be Lord of your life.

We need to understand that He wants US to do the same thing today. Verse 15 here is not only for Saul, but for each of us:
“For you will be a witness for Him to all men of what you have seen and heard.”

As Christians, we should all be prepared to share:
— our own personal testimonies of what Jesus has done in our lives
— we should also be ready to share the facts of the Gospel, how Jesus died to wash away our sins and be our Savior, and how He rose from the dead to be our Living Lord.

You might help your group to prepare to do this:

— Review the facts of the Gospel in a basic Gospel presentation,
like
God’s Plan, for us to be in glory with Him (John 17:3)
Man’s Need, because we have sinned (Romans 3:23)
God’s Provision, that He made to forgive our sins through Jesus’ death on the cross (I Peter 2:24)
Man’s Response, that we must repent of our sins and put our faith in Jesus as our Lord & Savior (Acts 20:21)

Emphasize how every Christian should be prepared to share the gospel in a brief way like this.

— Then encourage them to be prepared to share their testimony.
I’ve mentioned before how once I heard a business professional teach that every business person should have what they called a “30-second elevator speech” — a brief presentation of their business that they could share with anyone in an elevator, or any brief conversation, that might help someone they’d just met to know about their business, and if they might like to invest/work/join in some way.
When I heard that I thought, every Christian should likewise have a “30-second elevator speech,” that we have ready to share with anyone we come in contact with, of our own personal testimony and what the Lord has done in our lives.

If you haven’t shared this with your group before, you might tell them that a good outline for a testimony is:
— My life before Christ
— How I met Christ
— My life after I met Christ.
If you look at it, this is the outline Paul used, isn’t it?
— His life before Christ (:3-5)
— How he met Christ (:6-16)
— His life since he met Christ (:17-21)
(You might even choose to teach this whole lesson using this kind of outline, then challenge your class to prepare their own testimony following this outline.)

Either way, I would re-emphasize to your class that :15 is not only for Paul, but for ALL of God’s people: “For you will be a witness for Him to all men of what you have seen and heard.”

The Lord also told Saul that He was sending him in a particular direction to witness. He said in :21 ‘Go! For I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’” This was emphatic! If you read the context there, Saul was kind of arguing with him, but the Lord said “GO!” We need to know that is His word for US today too! “GO!” We are already among “the Gentiles” — we ARE the Gentiles. And the Lord has specifically placed us where we are, to be witnesses for Him.

AS YOU CLOSE the lesson, you might remember the Colossians 4 passage, and pray specifically that God would give you and your class members opportunities to be witnesses to someone of our own testimonies, and of the basic facts of the Gospel, this week.

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— And if you write something in the Comments below, I’ll be sure to pray for your and your group by name this week. (Thank you for your continued prayers and words of encouragement for me and my wife Cheryl as she recuperates from her stroke. We are grateful that virtually every day some new muscle wakes up and she is able to do something new again! Feel free to follow me on Facebook, or read updates here on my blog.)

Per my licensing agreement with Lifeway:

— These weekly lessons are based on content from Explore the Bible Adult Resources. The presentation is my own and has not been reviewed by Lifeway.

— Lifeway resources are available at: goExploretheBible.com and: goexplorethebible.com/adults-training

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