It wasn't my intention. This wasn't my plan. I didn't come looking for God. He came after me like an apex predator, and it's like I didn't even have a choice, all right?

Never in my wildest dreams that I think, I mean, just this overeducated redneck from Dillon, South Carolina, that I would be stepping into the baptismal waters as the lead pastor of church baptizing people.

Because I am totally unqualified to get in these

waters and proclaim anything about Jesus, just like you're unqualified to get in, but it's by his grace

and his mercy that he calls us into that. And my hope and prayer over this entire series is that God

would wreck your life in the best possible way.

And so we're going to look at the next three or four weeks of these particular men and their stories

and how their life was totally interrupted by the gospel.

So we're going to pick it up in Acts chapter 8, verse 4.

It starts out with, now those who were scattered went about preaching the word.

If you'll remember, if you've been here in the past couple of weeks, there was persecution in the first church.

And so the early Christians didn't just decide, you know, we're kind of tired of living in Jerusalem.

You know, there's all this beach and no ocean.

So let's go move somewhere else.

And so that's not how it went, but they were being persecuted, that religious terrorists

were trying to kill them because they believed in Jesus. And so when Saul and these other Pharisees

and Sadducees began to persecute a church, they began to spread out all over the place. And one of the

reasons that Christianity spread so fast and so far in the first century

is because every Christian preached the gospel everywhere,

which was unique among Christianity.

You see, in most religions, the proclamation of whatever they teach

is really just relegated to the priest or the religious people.

...