Acts 9:1-20
Please be seated. Turn in your
copy of God’s word to the book of Acts. Chapter nine will be
our reading today. Verses one through 20. This is
one of three places where in the book of Acts, the conversion
of Saul of Tarsus is recounted. This is a, first account where Paul is not
involved except he’s converted and we’re told about it but in
the other two places he is explaining his calling as a missionary of
Christ to the church he’s explaining it to Roman officials and governors
and those who need to hear his defense of the Christian faith
so we will cover aspects of Paul’s conversion three times so if
you leave disappointed today that I didn’t cover it all you
have to come back for chapter 22 and also chapter 26. Also,
something else to keep in mind, we generally identify apostles. The word simply means sent ones. We identify apostles or sent
ones as those who were with Jesus. So that’s why the apostles are
generally limited to the 11 disciples post-resurrection. and one or
two others who, in a special way, met with Jesus. So today’s
Damascus Road experience for Paul gives him street credit,
as we like to say, to be an apostle. He met with the risen Lord. And
so the risen Lord appeared to him and summoned him into gospel
ministry. Before we read, let’s ask for
God’s help and grace. Pray with me. Lord, we’re like the apostle
Paul, scales on our eyes, blind to see our spiritual need. And
so without your help, without your grace, we won’t hear, we
won’t see, we won’t believe, and we won’t live for you. And
so give us your grace today, soften our hearts, give us minds
ready to receive your word, and we pray. One among us today does
not know you that through the reading and preaching of your
word, they would indeed come to know you just as the apostle
did one day, and they might serve you mightily to the end of their
days for your glory. Help us now as we hear your word.
We pray it in Jesus’ name, amen. So verses one through 20 of chapter
nine, it says, but Saul, still breathing threats and murder,
against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest
and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus so
that if he found any belonging to the way, men or women, he
might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now, as he went on his way, he
approached Damascus and suddenly a light from heaven shone around
him and falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him,
Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, who are you
Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom
you are persecuting, but rise and enter the city and you will
be told what you are to do. The men who were traveling with
him stood speechless, hearing the voice, but seeing no one.
Saul rose from the ground, although his eyes were opened, he saw
nothing. So they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. And for three days he was without
sight and neither ate nor drank. Now there was a disciple at Damascus
named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision,
Ananias. And he said, here I am, Lord.
And the Lord said to him, rise and go to the street called straight
and at the house of Judas, look for a man of Tarsus named Saul.
For behold, he is praying and he has seen in a vision, a man
named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might
regain his sight. But Ananias answered, Lord, I
have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done
to your saints at Jerusalem, and here he has authority from
the chief priest to bind all who call on your name. But the
Lord said to him, go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine
to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of
Israel, for I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake
of my name. So Ananias departed and he entered
the house and laying hands on him, he said, brother Saul, the
Lord by which you came has sent me so that you may regain your
sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. And immediately
something like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his
sight. Then he rose and was baptized and taking food, he was strengthened.
For some days he was with the disciples at Damascus. And immediately
he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogue saying, he is the son of God. Amen. Well, you can imagine a
good old pulpit committee. with a stack of resumes at a
conference table in the church building. Stacks of resumes,
or as we call them, MDFs, ministerial data forms. It’s a bit more than
a resume. They’re looking through a man’s
education. They’re reading through his testimony.
They’re looking at his ministry experience. They want to see
a family picture. You know, we don’t get hired
by our own abilities. It’s usually the family that
seals the deal. Uh, they want to know where he did an internship.
Has he been a associate pastor, a senior minister? Is he on the
radio? Does he have a book, a podcast,
a website, all those sorts of things. And they read through
these stacks of resumes, all the flowery language, you know,
we’re never as good on a resume as we make ourselves sound. And,
you know, not just the flowery language, but the purpose words,
you know, I’m intentional. I’m passionate, whatever. All
those words pop up in these resumes. Not just the family picture,
but usually you see in a resume an action picture. I can’t do
this, I hate doing this, but something like this. Self aggrandizing. And the group tosses these resumes
around back and forth. I like this one, no I like that
one. What impresses us the most? Well, Paul’s resume would not
make it. First of all, he has no family
picture. He’s a single man. Second of all, if you were to
look at Paul’s mugshot, he was an ugly man. He was short, he
was stubby. And by the time he ended his
ministry, he, as he says himself, bore in his body the marks of
suffering, beaten, shipwrecked, You can imagine red eyes, not
sleeping, mosquito bitten. You know, he’s been snake bitten.
He’s been lowered out of the sides of walls, escaping cities
by night, running for his life. And not only was he a stubby
man, an ugly man, his ministry was full of controversy. But
even worse, especially in our day and age, he was not a man
of flowery language. He was not a man who had passed
today’s homiletical courses on preaching. He was a man who just
got up and talked about God. And he talked plainly about Jesus.
And he talked purely about the things in the gospel. In fact,
he has to defend his ministry to the Corinthians. He says,
you love these prophets. You love these traveling speakers
who come in and they wow you with what they know, but we just
preach the plain truth. And so our God would indeed pick
up Paul’s resume. In fact, in our passage today,
he has chosen his data form out of the stack. Though he has a
checkered past, yes, he was a violent man, a murderer. He’s done wrong. He’s done quite wrong. He is
God’s chosen instrument to speak to kings and rulers. He is God’s
chosen apostle to the Gentile world, and he is God’s chosen
instrument to proclaim to the people of Israel that Messiah
is indeed the son of God. Um, so many people would say,
no, Paul is unqualified. Uh, so many people would say,
uh, he is not the right man for the job. But as we look back
over the life and the ministry of the apostle Paul, we see that
God and his wisdom used him mightily. 14 new Testament letters are
in our Bibles. Doesn’t include Hebrews, by the
way. He also wrote several other letters that didn’t make it into
God’s word. We know he wrote several additional letters to
the Corinthians and no doubt there were other epistles, which
he wrote to the church. They didn’t make it in the Bible,
but 14, his missionary journey spanning a couple of decades
all around the Mediterranean Sea, as far as the country of
Spain. And so when our risen Lord gathers
his disciples in an upper room in Jerusalem and says to them,
you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends
of the earth. He had in mind the apostle Paul
making his way as a prisoner no less to the far reaches of
the Roman empire, speaking to the Caesar himself of the goodness
of God through Jesus Christ. Today, as we look through this
first account of Paul’s conversion, Saul’s conversion, I want us
to look at some snapshots of his life. We’ll have opportunity
to see other details of Paul’s conversion when we get to chapters
22 and 26. But today I want us to look at Six quick snapshots. The main one we want to look
at is his encounter with Jesus. But the first snapshot, it’s
not really in our passage, but we know it from other places
in Paul’s letters. He bumps into, he’s influenced
by a man named Gamaliel. Now in our American culture,
we would call it prep school. We would send our children, if
we wanted them to be elite, maybe to the Burlington School or to
the Greensboro Day School or to Forsyth Country Day School
over in the Winston area. And I’m sure there’s these prep
schools in the Raleigh-Durham area. We lived in Charlotte for
a decade or so. There was Charlotte Country Day,
Providence Academy. This is where you go, basically,
to get a leg up in life. And parents spend thousands,
if not probably millions today, educating their children to give
them a leg up in life. And Paul was no different. He
sat under a teacher named Gamaliel. Paul was from Tarsus. He was
a Roman citizen by virtue of his father, but he was Jewish
to the core. And Gamaliel would have been
one of the greatest teachers of the law. This would be in
our equivalence of being trained as a minister under John Calvin
or Martin Luther or some to this day can claim to have sat under
John Murray or the Alexander brothers or all the great Princeton
theologians that we love and revere. Paul received an education
par excellence. He was, as he claims later in
his defense of his ministry. a Pharisee of all Pharisees.
He knew the Old Testament backwards and forwards. And so you began
to see, don’t you, as you put together Paul’s life, his Old
Testament background paired with meeting the risen Messiah. And
then there’s some days we don’t know about Paul. He’s gonna spend
some years in Arabia before he goes into full apostolic traveling
ministry, but he is going to be infused with teaching of the
Messiah and couple that with his Old Testament upbringing
in the Gamaliel Prep School. Paul, and as we know from his
14 letters and all the volumes written on his theology, He was
a force to be reckoned with. God went nuclear, we might say,
when he chose the Apostle Paul and paired his Old Testament
prep school upbringing with meeting and being educated by the risen
Christ. You know, we should look back
on our lives and see how God prepares us for the things that
we do. You know, we have a child on the way and we say, oh, I’m
not prepared for a child Maybe we get a school teaching job
or heaven forbid, a preaching job. And we look back on our
lives and we say, you know, God and his wisdom was making today
possible. I look at so many ministers who
have been influential in their scope and depth of their ministry,
many of them, new languages. Maybe one of you is an expert
in languages and you think you’ll maybe go teach and maybe do some
translation work. Well, God uses people with language
gifts to translate the Bible into unknown tongues to get the
word around the world. I’ve seen men who were Excellent
in the field of engineering become great theologians. They have
the ability to systematize and maybe in a sense, mathematize
theology and to distill it and condense it into understanding,
understandable bites and snippets that us common people can understand.
scientists and mathematicians and business people make great
theologians and pastors. And so what I want to say to
you in light of Paul and what we know from church history,
never underestimate what God may be preparing you to do. And
it may not be full-time gospel ministry, apostolic ministry.
You may not be the next theologian of all theologians, but whatever
God has given you, to do in life, whatever he has given your hands
to do, he is preparing you for that now. He’s been preparing
you for it since day one. And in God’s wisdom and in his
providence, you never know what your life experiences will bring
to the table when God lands you in that great position that he
wants you to serve him in. And so Paul meets Gamaliel. We also know from our past studies,
Paul meets Stephen. Remember Stephen was one of the
seven chosen to be a deacon, to serve tables and make sure
that the widows were fed. But Stephen, like Philip, was
also a great preacher. And remember that at Stephen’s
death, when he was stoned outside Jerusalem, there standing with
the cloaks of those who were stoning him, those putting him
to death, was Saul. He was giving approval to the
murder of this man, Stephen. And remember the details of Stephen’s
life and death. He had just given a masterful
defense. In fact, you remember it was
like 60, 70 verses in our chapter of Acts of a masterful explanation
of the whole Old Testament Bible and how it had come to fruition.
in the life and the ministry of Jesus Christ. And so Paul
has a front row seat to that defense of the Christian faith
and a front row seat to the death of this man as he is stoned.
And so not only was this man like an angel as he spoke the
words of God, but he was like an angel as he was being put
to death, seeing into heaven. and seeing Christ himself being
received in his spirit into the heavenly places. And you can’t
help but believe that Paul was deeply affected, not only by
this man’s defense of the faith, because Paul, remember, went
to prep school for Old Testament. He knew exactly what this man
was saying. He knew every word clearly what
this man was saying. And then he sees the experience
of a man sold out for Christ. willing to die for Jesus and
sees Christ himself ministering to him in his death. Stephen
must have been quite an influence on the Apostle Paul. Can you
imagine the eye contact? Can you imagine the inner turmoil
of the soul of Saul as Stephen speaks to the Sanhedrin, the
council, and as Stephen speaks to those who are bringing him
to his death? Paul’s, Saul’s conscience must
have been pricked. And he is a man with many quiet
moments. There’s no cable television.
There were no lights and electricity. And so when it came sundown,
you had time either to sleep or to think and maybe to have
conversation. Paul was a well-educated man,
a smart man. I’m sure he did not play tic-tac-toe
or fiddle sticks or whatever they did to pass the time in
those days. but he was a man thinking about
this encounter with Stephen. And so here’s a man influenced
by Gamaliel. Here’s a man no doubt influenced
by Stephen, the great saint, the first martyr of the church.
But then the center of this passage, we see the apostle bump into
Jesus, the risen Lord, the resurrected Savior. And Saul is on the road
to Damascus. He’s got papers, he’s got authority
from the church at Jerusalem. it’s not the church at Jerusalem,
from the Jewish authorities, to go to Damascus, about 150
mile trip. It’s gonna take him a while to
get there, a while to do his business, a while to return,
but he has papers, arrest warrants, if you will. And he’s traveling
in an entourage, he’s got a group, and they are going to make sure
that this way, the Christian discipleship movement, the Church
of Jesus Christ, is snuffed out. He’s gonna put an end to the
church, an end to the way, an end to the followers of Jesus.
He goes to arrest men and women and to haul them back to Jerusalem
jail where they might stand trial and most likely meet the same
demise as Stephen. We’re told that Paul, angry and
murderous in his heart, he admits this later, I was a bad man. He’s on the way to Damascus and
he meets Jesus. The word of God tells us that
a bright light shone and he was stunned, he could not see, and
the voice of Christ himself spoke, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting
me? Now, a couple of things to think
about this encounter. First of all, you all know that
if you got called by your first and middle name as a child, that
meant you were in hot water. Well, in the scriptures, when
it’s first name twice, God is saying, look at me, eyes up,
give me your attention. He says this in the gospels. Remember Martha? She’s huffing
in the kitchen and rattling pots and pans because Mary’s, you
know, getting to be with Jesus and she’s in there having to
cook the rice and the beans and the bread and all the rest. And
he says, Martha, Martha. And there’s so many other places
in the scripture where the name of the person is mentioned twice.
And he says, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And you
could gloss over that very quickly, but that’s a rather interesting
statement, isn’t it? Jesus is up in heaven. He’s ascended. He’s the Lord. He’s sitting at
the right hand. He’s waiting for God to give the command and
the trumpets to sound and the second coming to take place and
all God’s redeemed to be brought into heaven. But he says very
importantly to Saul, you are persecuting the church, therefore
you are persecuting me. And we have a helpful explanation
of this in Paul’s letter to the Colossians where he says, when
he writes to the Colossian church, I am being filled up with what
is lacking in the sufferings of Christ Jesus. It’s quite a
powerful statement Paul makes there to the Colossian church.
He’s essentially saying the risen Christ has left us on earth to
do his mission. And all of the evil, all of the
persecutions, all of the anger, all of the wrath, all of the
resentment that’s aimed at me will be received by you, the
apostles, the preachers, the Christians, the church. And so
when we are persecuted across this globe, it is not we who
are being persecuted ultimately. No, it is Christ. This was brought
home to me recently, maybe a year or two ago. I have lunch with
a pastor friend over in the Durham area, and we ask each other how
things are going, what’s up in your life ministry, and sometimes
we tell each other the problems. And so I was telling him one
time several years ago, names will be changed to protect the
innocent. There’s some people that don’t like me, that’s what
I told him. And I said, how do you know that? Well, you can
just tell, they sit in church with their arms folded, You know,
we’re starting to unfold your arms, I can see. But I said they
they they look at and they say it. And he said very quickly,
it’s not against you. It is against Christ, and that
brought some consolation to me, it still hurts. But ultimately,
when people reject the church, when they reject the elders,
when they reject the minister, when they reject you, they’re
rejecting not you as a person, but they’re rejecting Christ.
And so the apostle Paul is met with this accusation by the judge
of the earth. You’re persecuting me. You stone
Stephen, you stone Jesus. You stone people in this church
or in this region or in this era of church history. When you
do this against my people, it is against me. And so Paul is
greatly influenced by Gamaliel. He for sure had a great imprint
on his life from Stephen, the first saint and martyr. but Jesus
leaves an indelible mark on him. He’s blind. He cannot see until
Ananias touches his eyes. He’s literally stunned. This is a greater encounter really
than John on Patmos. This is a greater encounter than
Isaiah in his commissioning. there before the altar of God.
This is better than Moses at the burning bush. He’s met Jesus,
the risen Lord, and it’s as if he’s been hit by a stun gun.
He’s had all the juice, all the jolts and volts of heaven itself
enter his body and God has his attention and his life will be
forever changed. You know, sometimes we hear conversions,
we hear testimonies. And we think, you know, my testimony
is not that exciting. And I want to say something to
you about conversion. When God takes a sinner and changes
them into a saint, it is a mighty work of God, no matter what,
you know, you, you, we grew up, I grew up in the eighties in
church, right? Most of us in here. And what’s the best testimony
to hear? Well, I was on drugs. I listened
to rock and roll, I rode motorcycles, I spiked my hair. You just go
through all the American evangelical no-nos. I danced, I played cards,
and then I met Jesus, right? And we got, oh, wow. And the
emphasis is not on God, it’s on the person. But when God converts
a young one, an old one, an in-between one, when he converts a child,
an adult, a male, a female, whether he converts you out of being
a drug lord from a Mexican cartel or a kid who grew up in Sunday
school, it is a mighty thing that God saves. So don’t ever
think that your conversion is insignificant because Paul was
a worse man or the drug dealer or the guy in prison, whatever.
Don’t ever think that. Another thing to think about,
though, We quickly write people off. I remember being in discussions
with other students in seminary back when 9-11 took place. What
would you do if you were king for a day to Osama bin Laden?
What would you do if you were king for a day to Saddam Hussein? And most of us, you know, it
was about stringing them up and putting a bullet somewhere and,
you know, whatever. And maybe one said, I would preach
the gospel and hope they would be convinced and converted. and
come to faith. That’s the magnitude here of
Saul’s conversion. And we see that as we look at
the next person that Paul, Saul, bumps into. That’s Ananias. Ananias
was the poor sap in Damascus whom God came to and said, there’s
this guy named Saul. And don’t you imagine the hair
on his neck stood up. There’s this guy, Saul, who’s
on the way from Jerusalem and I’ve met with him and now you
need to meet with him and I want you to lay hands on him so that
he sees and lay hands on him so that the Holy Spirit comes
upon him. And just like Moses, Ananias is kind of like, but,
but, but, but, but, but remember Moses, I can’t speak. I need
somebody else to go. Ananias says, but this guy’s
a killer. He’s got a shiv. Isn’t that what they carry in
prison? He’s going to pull something out of his tunic and I’m not
going to be Ananias anymore. I’m going to be food for the
worms. You’ve got to be kidding God.
But what does he do? He takes God at his word. He
receives Saul, now Paul, into his home. He lays hands on him.
His eyesight returns. He receives the Holy Spirit.
Saul of Tarsus is now Paul, the apostle. Now, wonderful thing
for Ananias to trust the Lord, to take him at his word, and
to believe that God can do mighty works of conversion. And isn’t
it a neat thing to think back through church history how there
have been many like this. St. Augustine, one of the worst
sinners, drove his mother to her knees for years, prayed and
prayed and prayed, Monica did for her son, who did it all. You opened up his closet and
he had a t-shirt for everything. He’s been there, he’s done that,
he’s got the t-shirt, and he’s even got an illegitimate child
from a teenage relationship. And yet God comes to him a bit
slower than he does with Saul, but he comes to them and he converts
him. We hear this over and over. We
see this over and over throughout church history. God does this. And so let me encourage you.
Don’t be afraid to minister to people that may not be like you.
They may not think like you, they may not look like you, they
may not believe like you, but you never know how God might
use you to minister to them in a mighty way so that he can use
them. Poor Ananias. But don’t you know
he wrote a tell-all, and he put it in the bookstores in Jerusalem
and Damascus, and he was a well-known man. But Saul bumps into Ananias. This is gonna come a little later,
but Saul is gonna bump into another group, that’s the apostles. He’s
gonna go to Jerusalem. Oh, wait a minute, not this guy. In the yearbook, least likely
to become a Christian, right? Least likely to be nice to Christians,
least likely to preach the gospel and save sinners. But Paul comes
and he shares the content of what he believes. This is sometime
later. And the apostles say, you’re
good to go. They pair him up and send him off and he becomes
the greatest missionary, spreading the gospel, as Jesus declared,
from Jerusalem to Judea, through Samaria and to the ends of the
earth, even in Rome and Spain. And so the apostle will meet
the apostles. And he will become one of them
serving the living God. One last group. Not an individual,
but a group. Saul is going to meet the Roman
Empire. If you look in the back of your Bibles at the maps, the
maps where Saul goes out and he makes his way around the Mediterranean
coast and he preaches the gospel, establishes churches, reasons
in the synagogue. He gets beaten and run off and
let down in baskets. He makes tents for a season.
He bumps into the likes of Lydia. He has a wonderful and exciting
time as a minister. And then he will return to Jerusalem
to maybe give money to the poor. or to report back on his work,
he’ll grab a few more people, you know, change out his socks
and toothbrush and he’ll pack it up and he’ll go out again.
And this time he goes a little more, but he doubles back and
he visits and he has four missionary journeys, possibly five like
this, where he just labors and labors and labors. And he shares
the good news of the gospel with the Roman empire. And in God’s
providence, the Roman roads were built. In God’s providence, the
Jews have been scattered and there were synagogues all over
the place where he could meet and preach. And it’s the same
today. Isn’t it interesting? You know,
the Apple products are kind of ubiquitous. Maybe some of y’all
are Samsung people or Droid or whatever. But, you know, the
righteous are Apple people. And do you think do you think
when Apple came on the scene, they said, you know, we’re going
to we’re going to host every Christian podcast. We’re gonna make a technology
so that the church can flourish in the 21st century. That was
not their intention, but wasn’t at God’s. And I hope you are
encouraged to see that God is the sovereign selector of resumes. Those we choose would not do. with such joy and dogged determinism
as Saul of Tarsus, Paul the apostle. God is the sovereign selector
of resumes, and when he calls a man and gives him the power,
the unction, the blessing of the spirit, there’s no end to
what that person can do. This sovereign God also has a
sense of humor. Can’t you imagine a tense group
of disciples huddling up in a room, there’s been persecution in Jerusalem,
and who’s at the door? But Saul of Tarsus, now the Apostle
Paul, God does wonderful and sometimes funny things. And he
could have divinely thumped Saul off the face of the earth. And
we could have read chapter nine of the Acts of the Apostles,
and it said, and God was displeased with Saul. And fire came down
from heaven and consumed him. And they took his body outside
the city and he dropped on it. That could be the story. But
God has a sovereign sense of humor. Another thing for us to
think about is God does not work with worldly wisdom. You know,
so often today, it’s where’s your degree from? How eloquent
are you? Do you look good in a suit? Is
your tie knotted just right? Your stripes diagonally the right
way? Is your family picture beautiful?
Look at church websites when they brag on their pastor. Oh,
it’s, you know, today this is it. So-and-so left an enticing
business, you know, where he made all this lucrative, you
know, success, whatever. He left it for the gospel ministry.
Well, good for him, right? What will last? I’ve got friends
in gospel ministry. Well, I managed this big portfolio.
And I said to them, you look back at that portfolio longingly
as if it’s gonna go with you into eternity. He is no fool
who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he can never lose. And so God uses men and women
and boys and girls in all kinds of ways we can never imagine.
And so let us trust our sovereign God knowing that he wisely sends
us into the world to preach his gospel, the saving power of Jesus
to those like Saul. It may be kids who’ve been in
Sunday school their whole lives, but either way, that’s how he
works. Let’s go to him in prayer. Lord,
we ask that you would bless us with an understanding of how
you work, that you work wisely and that you use ordinary people
whose Family picture would not get them hired, but you use them
in a mighty way to let the gospel be known. And we can’t help but
think, Lord, that without Paul, without his writings, without
the effects of his work, we would not sit here today knowing what
we know, believing what we do, and doing church in the Pauline
way. So we’re grateful. We’re blessed.
And may we carry on this tradition for the glory of God and the
good of those who need to hear of Jesus and be saved. We pray
all this in the name of our great savior. Amen.