Father, God in heaven, how we thank you
that it's possible for your kingdom to come
to be within us here upon earth.
And how we thank you, Lord, that you
do bow down your ear, as it were,
and listen to us.
That when we pray to you, we're not
sending prayers across to the outer reaches of
the universe, but we're speaking right into your
ear.
And you hear every word we have to
say to you.
You even know the thoughts of our hearts.
So, Lord, as you know the thoughts of
our hearts this morning, look upon them.
Holy Spirit, we ask that you would take
your word, make it alive, apply it to
our hearts, invigorate our souls, and give us
that spiritual food that we need to grow
up into the measure of the stature of
the fullness of Jesus Christ.
And we ask it in Jesus' name.
Amen.
This message is entitled The Ultimate Conversion.
It is all about, in Acts chapter 9,
the conversion of Saul of Tarsus into the
apostle Paul as we know him.
I'd like to read through the text in
chapter 9, verse 1 down to verse 9.
Then Saul, still breathing out threats and murder
against the disciples of the Lord, went to
the high priest and he asked letters from
him to the synagogues of Damascus.
Now, Damascus, you must understand, is 200 miles
away from Jerusalem.
You may think reading your Bible, it's just
down the street.
He's persecuting people around Jerusalem and now he's
sort of exhausted all those to arrest and
imprison and kill there, so he just wants
to go down the street to Damascus.
He needs to go 200 miles now to
find more Christians to arrest, persecute, and murder.
That's how thorough his persecution has been.
He is, you might say, the devil's champion
on planet Earth at this point in time.
Without question, he is the devil's champion and
he is the most unlikely human being on
Earth to be converted because he is the
greatest persecutor of Christianity in Jesus Christ.
Verse 3, and as he journeyed, he came
near Damascus.
Suddenly a light shone around him from heaven
and then he fell to the ground and
heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul,
why are you persecuting me?
And he said, who are you, Lord?
And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom
you are persecuting.
It is hard for you to kick against
the goats.
So he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what
do you want me to do?
Then the Lord said to him, arise and
go into the city and you will be
told what you must do.
And the men who journeyed with him, a
large entourage of powerful men that would be
used to help him capture Christians, arrest them,
and bring them bound back to Jerusalem.
So it's a large entourage of tough men,
temple police soldiers, whatever.
These men who journeyed with him, verse 7,
stood speechless and they heard a voice, but
they saw no one.
Then Saul rose from the ground when his
eyes were open.
He saw no one, but they led him
by the hand and brought him to Damascus.
And he was three days without sight and
neither ate nor drank.
We'll stop there for today because there's so
much there.
As I said to you, this is the
most unlikely individual to be converted, I think,
on the face of the earth at that
time.
But this is the kind of thing God
specializes in.
The Lord loves to rescue sinners.
And the whole process of salvation is so
marvelous to behold, it really is.
How many of you know the hymn Amazing
Grace?
Do this.
Very good.
Do you know who wrote it?
You say Amazing Grace, it's a great song,
must have been a wonderful saintly man.
He was a man by the name of
John Newton.
John Newton went to sea, like most sailors
of his day, at a very young age.
And he worked on slave ships, slave trading
ships.
He would go back and forth from Britain
to Africa and then around to countries where
he would sell the slaves.
For a while, he worked on slave ships
and then he began to be the captain
of one himself.
He sank into the lowest kind of debauchery
and evil and sin in his life imaginable
and became a horrible person.
In fact, at one point in a brawl
on board ship in a storm, the fellows
on the ship that hated him took him
and threw him overboard because they hated him
so much.
Another one of the guys on the ship
wanted to rescue him.
So he get this.
He took a harpoon and he harpooned him
and drug him back onto the ship.
We're calling this debauchery because that's what it
is.
And in the process, saved his life.
He sank so low that eventually he became
the slave of slaves and was chained up
and ate his food out of what was
something like a dog bowl chained to the
ground by this person he was a slave
to.
He finally got free.
And along the way in his life, a
couple of women back in England began to
pray for him.
Then someone gave him a copy of a
book by one of those old writers, one
of those books that continues to be published.
The book is called The Imitation of Christ.
The author is Thomas Akempis.
He read that book and got all of
the knowledge into his head, but he did
not come to Jesus Christ.
He carried the knowledge around in his head
and continued to sink into his sin.
Finally, he was in the storm at sea
and the Lord quickened all that knowledge of
Christ from Thomas Akempis book to his heart.
And he came to know Jesus Christ personally.
Then God, in the great wonder of the
process of salvation, when he went back to
England, introduced him, made the Lord made sure
that he became friends with John and Charles
Wesley, George Whitfield, William Wilberforce.
And these are the kind of men that
he was able to, quote, hang out with
the rest of his life.
He became a great pastor during that time
of the Great Awakening in Great Britain.
When it came time for him to die,
he said, I want to write the words
that will be on my tombstone.
I want to write them myself.
And this is the epitaph that he wrote.
And it's there on his tombstone today, says
this John Newton clerk, once an infidel and
libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was
by the rich mercy of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ preserved, restored, pardoned and then
appointed to preach the faith he had long
labored to destroy.
I look at that account and I can't
help but think of the man in our
text who is suddenly converted after he had
long labored to destroy the faith of Jesus
Christ.
In this passage that we've read, I see
basically four things that happen in a great
conversion.
First of all, there's the contact with Christ
and his people.
Secondly, there's the conviction that happens, then the
conversion and then the consecrated life to Christ
after contact, conviction, conversion and consecration to him.
That's how it happens.
Let's talk about it.
First of all, the contact, the contact that
Saul of Tarsus had with Christianity and with
Christ brought pretty much a violent reaction.
And that is because initially of his beliefs,
you see, as a Jew, he was a
Hellenistic Jew.
As a Jew, he believed and was looking
for believed in and was looking for a
Messiah who would come, who would be a
militant Messiah, who would throw off the yoke
of the Roman government.
They were all looking for that kind of
Messiah at the time of Jesus.
That's why they rejected him.
So wanting a Messiah who would throw off
the Roman yoke.
And knowing that Jesus Christ claimed to be
the Messiah and the son of God, to
then see him die on a Roman cross
in humiliation and defeat made it impossible for
him to believe Jesus Christ was the Messiah.
It was a contradiction of terms to him,
flew in the face of everything he believed.
That is the reason he wrote later in
writing to the Corinthians that he said to
the Jew, the cross is a stumbling block.
That's why, because they were looking for a
Messiah who would throw off the Roman yoke
and be a conquering king.
Instead, he died as a criminal on a
cross and weakness and defeat, a stumbling block
to the Jews, he said, because it was
to him.
And he said foolishness to the Greek.
Because who is going to want a Messiah
or a savior who can't even, quote, save
himself, but that's to misunderstand the heart of
God, to misunderstand the cross and to misunderstand
the resurrection and to misunderstand who he was
and the plan of redemption.
So because of his beliefs, he rejected Christ.
And you find him in Acts, chapter six.
If you just hold your place, turn back
to Acts, chapter six, verse nine.
He was disputing.
These beliefs in the synagogue that he attended,
which was the synagogue of the freedmen.
And there, Acts six, nine, it says there
arose some of what is called the synagogue
of the freedmen.
That would be Cyrenians, Alexandrians and those from
Cilicia.
That's where Paul was from, Cilicia, Tarsus and
Asia.
And they were disputing with Stephen now because
Saul was the champion of all these people,
the smartest, the fastest and the one who
had been tutored by Gamaliel.
You know, he would have been the foremost
one to dispute with Stephen.
And he lost.
He lost the debate.
Geniuses are sore losers.
Not that I would know personally, but I
have known some.
So he lost the debate and it infuriated
him.
And in verse 10, it says they were
not able to resist the wisdom and spirit
by which he spoke.
And then they secretly induced men to say
we have heard him speak blasphemous words against
Moses and God, and that becomes in Stephen's
sermon his answer to all of that, which
was all false.
So because of their beliefs, they rejected Jesus
Christ and the Christian message.
They could not believe and Saul could not
believe Jesus was the Messiah and the son
of God because he had died on the
cross and defeat his beliefs.
His beliefs then generated within him his belligerence
that was just unbelievable.
This man realized that Jesus Christ in his
mind was dead.
However, his movement was not.
So he made it his life's work to
exterminate Christianity.
Christ is in the grave.
I'll make sure all other Christians end up
dead and in the grave, too.
I will personally lead a movement to exterminate
Christianity.
And that is what he gave himself to.
So in Acts nine, one, you read, then
Saul still breathing threats and murder against the
disciples of the Lord, went to the high
priest and asked for letters from him to
the synagogues of Damascus.
So if they found any who were of
the way, that's what they called Christianity in
the beginning, because Jesus said, I am the
way, truth and the life, whether men or
women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.
He didn't care if you're a man or
if you're a woman, he would still seek
to bring you bound to Jerusalem and breathing
out murder.
It says here, bring you to your death.
His belligerence knew no bounds.
He was at this point, sadistical, driven by
darkness and by Satan himself and gone to
the extreme of even going all the way
to Damascus.
He is such a fascinating man to study,
because if you look at his background, he
was born a Roman citizen.
Cilicia was a Tarsus.
Tarsus was a Roman province born a Roman
citizen.
Thus, he had the freedom to travel all
around the Roman Empire later, born a Roman
citizen, but raised his father was a Pharisee,
raised in the way of Judaism, even to
the point that he was tutored by the
greatest rabbi the Jews ever had, Gamaliel.
It is said that when Gamaliel died, the
reverence for the law of God died with
him.
That's very believable, because if you recall, when
we studied acts earlier, the Sanhedrin, the ruling
body of Israel, was made up of almost
entirely Sadducees by the time of Jesus Christ
and the Sadducees, as opposed to the Pharisees,
did not believe in the afterlife, did not
believe in anything supernatural, did not believe in
angels, not believe in miracles.
They were utterly liberal.
They were the ones that stepped forth to
be the rabbis in the future and thus
liberal.
So Gamaliel, you remember, stood up among them
all.
And it was Gamaliel who said when they
were taking the apostles and mishandling them and
wanting to kill them, Gamaliel said, leave them
alone, because if this movement is of God,
you want to be careful lest you'd be
found to be fighting against God himself.
Gamaliel, though not converted to Christianity, had a
great reverence for the law.
He tutored Saul of Tarsus.
So his background is amazing.
He's born a Roman.
He's tutored by Gamaliel.
He's a genius.
His writings reveal an intellect that is monumental.
Further, to add to this interesting blend, he
was schooled in Tarsus at the university there,
which was one of the three great universities
in the world.
You had Alexandria, you had Athens and you
had Tarsus.
And he was schooled there as a Greek.
Greek culture, Greek education, Roman citizen tutored by
Gamaliel, Pharisee of the Pharisees.
So he's the ultimate Jew, the ultimate Roman
citizen and the ultimate Greek.
No wonder he ends up the apostle to
the Gentiles.
It is amazing to contemplate how God sovereignly
works in your life before you're ever born
again, looking toward what he's going to do
in your life after you are born again.
The truth is salvation begins in eternity past.
The truth is we're saved out from eternity.
God knew you from eternity past, the Bible
says.
We'll study that in the future.
You know, talk about predestination for knowledge and
so on.
So all those light subjects.
Thought I'd toss out a little distracting teaser
right here.
But you look at the background of this
individual and he has this incredible blend and
he's so brilliant and he can move in
all circles of life and he does in
the future.
And, you know, something just before I move
on.
I just want to say this.
If you're born again today, you know, Jesus
Christ, you can look back at your life
and you can see the hand of God
upon your life before you were ever born
again, molding and shaping you.
And he's he's using it all now toward
what he's called you to in your life
here with him on this planet.
Salvation is a wonder to behold.
His beliefs caused him to reject Christ.
His belligerence caused many people to die and
be imprisoned.
His background is phenomenal and amazing and was
used in the rest of his life in
his ministry.
One thing I want to mention at this
point before we go on to the conviction
on the Damascus Road is I don't know
how you imagine Paul at this point, Saul,
but I look at a guy like this
and I look at his background and I
look at his influence and I picture a
man of huge stature.
Huge.
I mean, he's got a gigantic intellect.
He is so influential.
I picture a William Wallace type.
William Wallace, the great braveheart in Scotland.
They say he was seven feet tall.
You say, no, that's legend.
No, it isn't.
I have been to the Wallace Monument in
Scotland and I've stood in front of his
Claymore sword that they have in a glass
case.
He was seven feet tall.
How do you know that?
Because they made your Claymore sword by measuring
from your chin down to the ground.
And that's how long your sword was.
And I have a copy of his sword
in my office.
So don't ever mess with me.
So I imagine this William Wallace type.
The amazing thing about Paul is that he
was for ten historians.
Give us this information.
He was about four ten and he had
kind of a hunchback.
So take four ten, bend him over and
you get him down around four feet.
I mean, he's already funny looking at very
bushy hair, which sort of wrapped around his
face because he had such bushy eyebrows that
they write of him as having one eyebrow.
You know, the one eyebrow.
Look, you don't see it too often these
days.
And I hope we don't have it here.
But pick up some tweezers at Walgreens after
and get some help.
Anyway, he he's got this bushy hair, this
one eyebrow crosses face.
They say he had very buggy eyes.
He stooped over.
He's four ten.
And they said he had really skinny, spindly
legs with knobby knees.
So just imagine this guy running around through
a froggy individual.
That is so amazing to me because he
had this huge intellect and yet he was
so funny looking and even references that in
some of his writings.
You know, I'm not this great presence when
I'm among you and everybody's like, yeah, tell
us about it, you know.
So what that says to me is this.
When you look in the mirror, you know,
I don't know what your reaction is.
A few of you are the beautiful people.
You probably love it.
But for the rest of us, when you
look in the mirror, you look at your
life and you look at what you are,
you think, oh, how could God ever use
me?
Well, look at how God used this funny
little man.
So funny.
And his appearance.
And how touching that later in his life,
by the time he died, that little body
of his was scarred from head to toe,
literally the scars he had from the blows
that were meant for Christ that fell on
him.
Whatever you look like, whoever you are today,
God can use you and he wants to.
So here's this man and his contact with
Christianity.
Let's go to his conviction.
He's traveling now down the road, probably went
out the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem and down
that old road that's been there for so
long, all the way back to the days
of the Silk Roads that ran back into
China and everything else, the trading caravan routes.
And he goes down this road to Damascus
and he's traveling along and you can just
imagine him strategizing.
And he is in his life at the
peak of his hatred for Jesus Christ and
Christianity.
He has never been, in a sense, farther
from being converted.
So it's not as though he's going down
the Damascus Road thinking, you know, maybe when
I get to Damascus, I'll check out Christianity,
go to a Bible study and think about
coming to know Jesus.
No, bear in mind, he's going to Damascus
to get people, arrest them, take them back
to Jerusalem and see that if he can
have them killed, if possible, as he's journeying
along in this state, the conviction of God
comes to him.
By the way, conviction is only something God
can bring.
Conviction and condemnation are two different things.
Do you know that it's helpful to understand
that condemnation is woe is me and nothing
but allows.
I'm just a crumb.
I'll never be any good.
I messed up.
God doesn't love me.
That's condemnation.
And that's very unhealthy.
Conviction is the light of God shining into
your soul.
A holy God showing you your condition before
him.
And always with the conviction of God comes
the light to find the way out of
your sin into his light and his love.
OK, understand the difference.
So we come to his conviction and that
always has to happen to bring you to
true salvation.
He is suddenly, as he's traveling along, bathed
in the light of the living Christ, who
he thinks is dead.
Acts nine three, as he journeyed, he came
near Damascus and suddenly a light shone around
him from heaven and then he fell to
the ground and he heard a voice saying,
Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?
He is on a long journey, suddenly interrupted
with the light of God, and that is
how it happens in life.
You're on your journey in your life.
You're living out your deception.
You may even have the light of the
gospel in your head, but not in your
heart.
And suddenly Christ comes to you in such
a way that it makes all the difference.
It is what you could say the ultimate
life changing revelation of Jesus Christ to your
heart.
And so suddenly he's bathed in the light
of the living Christ.
He's not dead.
He finds out he's living.
You realize, of course, it would be his
greatest nightmare to discover that Christ was alive.
His greatest nightmare.
I mean, it unravels everything about his whole
life now.
And now he finds out suddenly this light
shines around him from heaven.
In verse three, when you read the light
shone around him from heaven and then he
fell to the ground, that light, as he
describes it, because his conversion is described three
different times in Acts.
That light is brighter than the noonday sun.
Imagine how bright that is.
So that light suddenly shines around him and
no wonder he falls to the ground and
he hears a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why
are you persecuting me now at this point
in time?
You have to realize where his mind is
at.
He knows the gospel.
And he we know that he knows it
because when they stoned Stevens, he was standing
there holding the coats of the individuals who
were throwing the rocks.
Remember that Stevens sermon in Acts chapter six
is absolutely flawless.
It's the longest sermon on Christ in the
book of Acts, and it is the most
detailed, the most detailed.
And he was there and he heard that.
And he didn't just hear it.
He never forgot it.
You know how I know he never forgot
it.
Because who wrote the book of Acts?
Luke.
Luke was not there in that sermon.
Luke was Paul's physician who attended him in
his ministry because he was always getting stoned
to death and shipwrecked, things like that.
So he had his own private physician.
Paul gave that sermon back to Luke word
for word to write down in Acts chapter
six because he never forgot one word of
it.
So he had that photographic memory.
He had that kind of brain.
You only need one exposure to it and
stays there.
So he had the sermon word for word
of Stephen in his mind with every Christian
he sent to their death.
And there it was in his mind.
But you know how when you hate something
and you want to get rid of it
and as you're there, you're just you have
that thing in your mind going around, around,
around, around, around.
The very thing that you don't like is
going around and around and around in your
head.
Every time he persecuted a Christian to their
death, the gospel was going around and around
that sermon.
It was going around and around.
And he had never in his whole life
seen anyone die like Stephen.
Never.
He sent a lot of people to his
death.
You know where we read in the first
few verses and then saw still breathing out
threatenings and murder.
The Greek word there that's translated murder is
the Greek word for knows she's 10 times
in the New Testament.
And it's translated murder in almost every place
except Hebrews 1137.
I think it is.
But here's the point.
When you put the phrase together that's in
the original Greek, it is literally he was
inhaling murder.
He was inhaling murder.
And so as he is treating God's people
like this, it's with the whole time, the
whole sermon of Stephen in his head.
So when the light of the glory of
God and Jesus Christ suddenly shines on him
and knocks him to the ground into the
dirt, it took that kind of revelation and
light from Jesus Christ to take the light
of Christ from his head to his heart
as he slammed down into the dirt.
The truth of Christ is effectively slammed down
into his heart.
And finally, he believes it.
Finally, he believes it in a moment of
time.
Thoroughly then convinced of his sin, which was
what?
Rejecting Jesus Christ.
What is the one sin that will shut
you out of heaven?
One sin rejecting Christ.
So in verse four, says then he fell
to the ground and he heard a voice
saying, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting?
My people, does it say that?
No, it says me.
Why are you persecuting me?
You see, that's the point that he realized
everything I've been doing has been against him
and he's alive.
Not only is he alive, he's right here.
He's right above me.
And he's just got his face in the
dirt.
He's in the ultimate point of brokenness and
humiliation.
Why are you persecuting me?
And so there is the conviction.
The moment you come to realize that the
greatest sin in your life is rejecting Jesus
Christ and that God will hold you accountable
for that, that's the moment you can be
saved.
And you must, with all your soul, feel
the guilt of that sin.
Does that make sense to you?
Now, follow this very closely.
To then design a church where nobody ever
goes out the door feeling guilty is to
emasculate the gospel.
Because until you feel your guilt through your
whole soul for rejecting Christ, you will never
be born again.
How sad it is today that so many
pulpits are designed to keep people from ever
really feeling guilty.
They're keeping them out of the kingdom of
God.
Now, I don't think we should make people
feel rotten and worthless and guilt in that
sense, send them out the door, you know,
feeling like losers.
That's a different issue.
But we must all feel our guilt of
rejecting Christ.
To come to him, be rescued and then
cleansed of all that guilt.
And then we have the peace that passes
all understanding.
Salvation, the conviction, why are you persecuting me?
You know, there's one other thing here.
And that is when he says, Saul, Saul,
why are you persecuting me?
That says that Jesus Christ takes the persecution
of his people very personally, very personally, so
that whatever happens to you from others because
of your love for Christ, know this, he
feels it.
My Bible tells me that Jesus Christ is
on the right hand of God and he
ever lives to make intercession for me, right?
That means his eye is ever on me.
He knows everything that's happening to me so
he can intercede for me.
Thus, when I am persecuted, when the devil
assaults me, he takes it personally because really
it's against him.
It's because of him.
Hebrews 725 says, therefore, he is also able
to save to the uttermost, to the full
extent those who come to God through him,
since he always lives to make intercession for
them.
So when I am persecuted, when I feel
the pain of the fiery darts of the
devil, when I feel the insults and and
the rejection and the betrayals of all the
Judas types around me in the body of
Christ, he feels it, too.
I thank God I have a high priest
who is not untouched my infirmities, with my
pains that I go through and he is
able to minister to me.
Why are you persecuting me, he says.
And right here, the theology of the body
of Christ was born in the heart of
this man.
And later he unfolds it in First Corinthians
and Ephesians.
Touch the head to touch the body.
So he is flooded with the light of
God, deeply convicted.
And you know what the shock of all
of it was, I think?
To find out that he was fighting God
himself.
Don't forget here.
This man is you'll never find a more
religious man in your whole life.
He is steeped and flooded with religion.
And in verse five, he said, who are
you, Lord?
And the Lord said to him, I am
Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
It's hard for you to kick against the
goads.
It's really hard for you to deal with
that sermon of Stephen that echoes over and
over in your head, isn't it?
It's really hard for you to see his
smiling angelic face as you held the coats
of the men that stoned him to death
and you watched his blood stain the dirt.
It's hard.
You're the most miserable man on the face
of the earth.
It's hard, isn't it?
Yes, Lord, it's hard.
And his misery ends at that point because
he quits fighting God.
But, you know, he came to realize something
very powerful beyond even that.
Who are you, Lord?
What does he say?
Well, I'm from Nazareth and did a few
miracles in my day.
You may have heard of them.
No.
Who are you, Lord?
I am.
I believe there's a long pause there.
Who are you, Lord?
I am.
Moses standing at the burning bush.
God says, I want you to go to
Egypt and be the deliverer.
Well, who should I tell them has sent
me?
I am.
Who are you, Lord?
I am.
Gamaliel back in the meeting with the Sanhedrin.
Be very careful how you handle these men,
lest if this movement is of God, you
be found to be fighting against God himself.
Who are you, Lord?
I am.
I'm fighting the I am God.
Jesus Christ is the I am.
He is God.
And this is why he never refers to
him as Jesus of Nazareth.
And his writing, always the risen Lord, always
the risen Lord, because this is where he
met him.
He met him as God, the I am.
And he realized he was fighting against God.
The moment you realize you're fighting against God
is a moment.
You're ready to stop because guess what?
Everybody that fights with God loses.
Your arms are too short to box with
God.
You will lose every time.
And he's loving enough to do what it
takes to bring you to the point where
you can be rescued as Saul was here.
And I thank God for that.
I thank God for that.
So listen to this.
When this individual was most convicted, he was
most violent and then he was suddenly saved.
When you're praying for people in your life
that you know and love and they seem
to be getting worse, Lord, I've been praying
for them.
All my friends are praying for them.
They're getting worse.
Lord, evidently, this person would never be saved.
They can't be.
They're only getting worse.
They may be the closest they've ever been.
So the contact with Christ and his people
comes to the conviction.
And now the conversion happens.
He has said, who are you, Lord?
He tells him now, verse six.
So he trembling and astonished said, and here's
his profession of faith.
Lord, he is now his Lord.
Lord, what do you want me to do?
Later in Romans 10, he says, you want
to be saved.
Believe in your heart on the Lord Jesus
Christ and confess with your mouth.
He is Lord and you will be saved.
That's what he did right here.
He didn't say, who are you, Savior?
He didn't say, Savior, what would you like
me to do?
It's wonderful and fantastic to know Christ as
your savior.
But he's called Savior very few times in
comparison to how many hundreds of times he's
called Lord in the New Testament.
Who are you, Lord?
He immediately surrendered his life to the Lordship
of Jesus Christ.
There wasn't any for Paul.
There wasn't any.
I'll take you as Savior now.
Thank you very much.
Put a bumper sticker on my chariot and
maybe later I'll make you Lord, you know,
get around to some discipleship type stuff.
But I'm just not ready for that kind
of commitment now.
So, Savior, what would you like me to
do?
And I'll think about it.
It's optional.
I know.
No, Lord, I'm yours.
Everything I am.
Everything I got, everything I am, everything I'm
not.
What do you want me to do?
And you know something?
He never stopped asking that question.
And that's why from the day of his
conversion to the day an axe flashed in
the sun and his head was severed from
his body in Rome, the day of his
death.
You followed Christ and his will for his
life.
Would you have me to do, Lord?
May God help us to ask the Lord
that every day that we live and he
will lead us as here.
He says, here's what I want you to
do.
We'll keep it simple up front.
Arise and go into the city and I'll
tell you what you must do.
Radical conversion.
What do you want me to do?
Go on into the city.
I'll tell you there.
So that's how the Lord changed him.
But what is amazing to me is how
the Lord chose him.
You may not see this here at first
glance.
Look at verse seven.
As the men who journeyed with him stood
speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no one
saying no one.
The Greek word they're saying in the Greek,
the word is theoreo means to stare when
you stare at a movie, you get our
English word theater from it.
They're staring and staring and staring.
They see nothing, but they hear a voice.
They don't understand it.
These men are not converted.
They do not see what he sees.
They do not have the experience he has.
This is the way God does it in
evangelism and salvation.
You can have hundreds of people hearing the
gospel.
One suddenly sees and understand and is converted
and arises and goes forth in Christ.
The rest just walk out unmoved.
Let me happen here today.
I hope it doesn't happen to you where
the person next to you is totally moved
and you're just off in La La Land
thinking about the burger you're going to order
after church as soon as you screech out
of the parking lot in your car.
They stood hearing a voice, but seeing no
one.
Maybe you hear a voice right now, but
you do not see Christ.
I pray that God opens your eyes and
your heart to him.
God is sovereign and salvation is what I'm
saying, and he does it in his time.
We don't know if they were converted later.
We do know that he was the only
one that day.
And so he says, OK, I want you
to now go on to Damascus.
And so after his conversion, this is what
always follows.
It works like this.
You have contact with Christ and his people.
You have deep conviction for your sin that
leads to real conversion.
And then what always follows in the Christian
life is consecration to God.
You're separated in your life to him.
Go to Damascus and wait.
And God made it very convenient for him
to go and be separated to him because,
verse eight says, then Saul arose from the
ground and his eyes were open.
But he saw no one.
Greek word there is blepo.
From which we get, I don't know what,
but he saw.
Just kidding.
He saw no one.
What is amazing is that he saw everything.
He saw everything.
They stared and saw nothing.
He now is looking and he sees everything,
though he is blinded.
He's blinded because the light of God in
the face of Jesus Christ was so bright
it affected his eyes.
And after three days, when Ananias comes to
pray for him, it's as if scales fall
off of his eyes.
So they led him by the hand into
Damascus.
What a scene.
You can see him charging down that road.
I am Saul, the persecutor.
When I get to Damascus, we're going to
arrest some people.
We're going to see some people die.
And then now, after charging in front of
the entourage, all arrogant.
All smart, erudite, influential champion.
Now they're leading him by the hand.
A little 4'10 guy hunched over.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
Oh, thank you very much.
Then they drop him off at this house
in Damascus and take off.
And he's just sitting in there till Ananias
comes.
So for three days, he has no food
and no water.
And he's blinded.
You ever have somebody take your picture and
the flash goes off and that thing is
there, the light?
Imagine out of nowhere, the light of God
and Jesus Christ goes off right in your
eyes.
No wonder he was blinded.
That's all he could see was the light
of that face.
The last thing he saw before he went
blind was the glorious living face of Jesus
Christ.
So for three days, he sat there contemplating
what had happened to him, who he had
seen.
And you know what had to have happened
to him.
The Lord not only took him aside for
three days, he took him and turned his
world upside down.
And you know what else he had to
have taken him because he took him from
darkness to light back across to everything he'd
ever learned in the Old Testament from Gamaliel.
He had a great reverence for the law,
but didn't have the light.
And so when Paul is converted and God
gives him the light of Jesus Christ, when
he starts to write his epistles, no one
can equal him.
Peter, who lived three years with Jesus Christ
physically on this earth, said, when I read
the writings of Paul, some of them are
hard to understand.
Some of them I can't even understand.
They're so deep.
This man, radical conversion, a Jew by birth,
a citizen of Rome, education, Greek, completely unique,
it seems, but totally suited for what God
had called him to not so big physically,
but gigantic spiritually.
You know what all of this tells me?
It tells me this.
God can convert anyone, even you.
And it tells me God can use anybody,
even you.
It tells me that no matter how big
or little you are, he can make you
gigantic for you.
Paul, the apostle, became gigantic for who he
was spiritually.
God doesn't want you to become Paul.
There'll never be another.
He wants you to become gigantic for who
you are.
And he has every intention of leading you
into that, to where you fill out in
your lifetime before your work is done here,
the full sphere of your life that God
has planned for you, containing all of Christ
that you can possibly contain and your life,
containing all the works that he has for
you, ordained from before the foundation of the
world.
For you are saved by grace through faith
that not of yourselves, but it is of
God, the gift of God, lest any man
should boast for you are his workmanship created
in Christ unto good works.
And those are the things that you will
do for the glory of his name in
your lifetime.
And they are many and they are wonderful.
Let's pray, shall we?
Thank you, Jesus, that you are a rescuing
God.
Thank you, Lord, that there isn't any sinner
so deep in the darkness that you cannot
bring them out into the light.
And thank you, Lord, for saving us.
Lord, for any here listening to this message
today that doesn't know you, may this be
the day you open their eyes and bring
them to a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.
If you don't know him today, give your
heart to him right now.
Tell him, Jesus, take me, I'm yours.
And then follow him.
Turn from your sins and follow Christ and
he will lead you.
Lord, we thank you for this time and
we ask you to continue to cause these
truths to affect and to alter our lives
into your image.
And we ask it in Jesus' name.
Amen.