The Transforming Power in Prayer

Text: Luke 11:1-13

Have you ever driven yourselves crazy asking what is the Trinity’s will for me. What does God want me to do with the life he gave me? Did you walk away a bit disillusioned with no clear distinct answer? Or at some point, as is the case with most ministers, did you settle into the notion that you are definitely called to a specific task that's going to take considerable preparation and therefore set out on that journey? Or did you just figure you would do what you want, be a good person, a good citizen of a Christian nation, and do good and not trouble yourself with the will of a God who's not involved in our lives until we're standing before him on judgement day?

God’s will—what is it? That is a big question and I would just as soon answer it with I haven’t got a clue. There have been times when I thought I knew what the Trinity’s will for me was. I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing, things were going good and then out of left field comes a zinger that changes everything. I find that the topic of God’s will gets highly speculative when we deal with it as some sort of specific step-by-step plan that God has for our lives that if we figure it out and follow it we will have a most wonderful life. I am a bit suspicious of that way of looking at the Trinity's will mostly because it sounds more like ancient pagan notions of fate rather than anything biblical. If we take the Bible in its entirety we find that God does have a grand scheme plan for history that includes my life that ultimately ends with our becoming like Christ Jesus, united to him by his incarnation and by the fellowship of the Holy Spirit we share in his relationship wit the Father. The specific step-by-steps of that plan are not for us to know though we can and do get hunches of it from time to time. But, what is most important for us is that we be God’s people, we be the children of God who reflect his image in the creation. Therefore, the Trinity's will is more about who we are and how we live than about specifics that have to happen. We are Christ’s disciples, beloved children of the Father as he is, and it is the Trinity's will that we increasing grow up into him.

Let me say a little more about this, the Trinity does have a specific plan for history. It is that the Good News of Salvation in Christ is to go out into all the world until the Father calls things to an end with Jesus' return, and then the resurrection of the dead, the final judgement, and God’s establishing his kingdom where we serve and worship God in eternal bliss. Within that plan the Trinity calls people to specific tasks and these people seem to have no doubt as to their calling. The called ones are who we are. We bear the task of proclaiming the Lordship of Jesus Christ and living under his commandment to love one another so that we in our life together are living proof of what is to come.

Our individual tasks in this calling are varied yet there is one calling, one invitation, common to us all and it is that we all know salvation in Jesus Christ, that we all come to know and share in the steadfast love and faithfulness of God the Father as Jesus the Son himself does in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Salvation is an actuality in our lives now due to Jesus' presence in our lives changing us, healing us, transforming us through the work of the Holy Spirit from the sin and death of our broken humanity to be more and more like him. Salvation is that in Jesus Christ God did, is, and will reconcile the world to himself and has made it possible for us to have an intimate and being-changing relationship with God the Father through Jesus the Son in the Holy Spirit. The Trinity’s will for us each and us together is that we all be saved, that we all be in this transforming relationship with him. Salvation essentially is that the Trinity in through, and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit has brought us into himself, into this new form of human being the Bible calls “in Christ” and is transforming us to become the image of Christ in living union with him.

Therefore, I conclude, that ultimately the Trinity’s will is that we all become like Christ Jesus, which is that we be humans who are indwelt by God partaking of his nature. It is our task, our calling, to let that happen. The Trinity’s will is that we become like Jesus Christ. St. Athanasius of Alexandria the key theologian behind the Nicene Creed said, “He became what we are so that he might make us what he is.” St. Irenaeus of Lyons the dominant theologian of the 3^rd Century in his work “Against Heresies” wrote: “our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.” John Calvin also gets in on this line of thinking writing; “This is the wondrous exchange made by his boundless goodness. Having become with us the Son of Man, he has made us with himself sons of God.”

Having set that stage I must go on to say that when we are talking about the Trinity’s will and how it applies to our lives we are really talking about a struggle of wills—the Trinity’s will with our own. To be like Jesus is to have two wills—the will of the Trinity and a human will. Jesus kept his fallen human will fully in line with the will of the Father and that is our goal. There is one problem though, our wills are corrupted, bent by sin to be self-oriented rather than God-oriented. The problem is complicated by the harsh reality that there is nothing that we can do to change our wills outside of praying. Indeed, Jesus himself prayed ceaselessly. Prayer is the one thing necessary that we do in the pursuit of knowing and living the Trinity's will for us. In prayer is where our human spirit and will unite with the Holy Spirit so that the Trinity’s will for us to become the image of Christ can be done here on earth as it is in heaven. God’s will for each of us is that we be united with Christ so that we can become like Christ and prayer is the primary setting where this happens. It is when we are in prayer, sitting at Jesus’ feet in the presence of the Holy Spirit that God’s kingdom begins to come.

Now, if prayer is the place where the Trinity works most powerfully in us, then the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray is of utmost importance. The purpose of the Lord’s Prayer as best as I can determine it is to make us like Christ. Praying the Lord’s Prayer continually from the heart opens us up so that the transforming power of God in the Holy Spirit can work mightily in us---mightily! Praying the Lord’s Prayer will help us to know God as Jesus does, as loving Father. Being in that relationship is where we are saved. Praying this Prayer will open us up to God’s kingdom coming into us now and God’s will being worked in and through us. To ask for our daily bread is to increase our faith in God’s provision for our needs and make us less reliant on material things and our own sufficiency. To ask God to forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors forces us to accept our own sinfulness as well as to bear the cross of being forgiving. Praying for God not to lead us into times of trial where we are tempted to deny Christ and rather deliver us from the evil one makes us aware that God does not tempt us to sin and when we feel temptation we know to resist it and God will deliver us from Satan.

           The Trinity calls each of us to be continuously in prayer. Paul says “Pray without ceasing.” Yet, a constant state of prayer is not something that we can achieve on our own. It is a gift from the Trinity that feels like a constant awareness of God’s presence in our lives. Praying the Lord’s Prayer constantly throughout the day when our minds would otherwise be occupied by worry and what not is particularly rewarding. In time we find ourselves changing, transforming in our goals and desires for life. We find ourselves hungering and thirsting more for the presence of the Lord in our lives. We find ourselves “wanting to want to love God” as St. Teresa of Avila once said. The discipline of prayer actually changes the way the brain chemically works. It forges new neural pathways. If you know anything about the brain chemistry of addiction, prayer is the only way around the “stinking thinking” that feeds addiction. AA has been telling us that from day one. When Jesus’ disciple’s asked him to teach them how to pray as John the Baptist taught his disciples they were wanting just this—a disciplined way of praying that would draw them closer to the Father and change them. So, Jesus taught them this prayer. Therefore, my friends, pray it. Pray it ceaselessly and from the heart and you will find yourselves changed. Amen.

So What?

Text: Colossians 1:15-28
          The town of Colossi lay in south western Turkey on the Lycus river. In its heyday it was an important trading center and it controlled passage through the Cadmus mountains. Yet when Paul wrote to Colossi, the city had lost its glory. Laodicia and Hieropolis, its neighbors, had surpassed her in importance. To make matters worse, Colossi’s name dissappeared from historical records after 60 AD when an earthquake stroke the city.
          Colossi may have been an unimportant city, but Paul considered the small church there important enough to write them a letter. Why? Apparently there was a false teaching making its way through this small body of Christians. Scholars disagree over what to call this false teaching for the letter itself never spells it out. Some call it Gnosticism because of some basic similarities. Others, stating that Gnosticism did not occur until the mid second century AD, hold that this false teaching was a form of Judaism that had been swayed by Greek or Hellenistic beliefs. But, what to call the false teaching is not half as important as the consequences this false teaching had for early Christianity.
          The challenge this false teaching brought against the gospel was the very elemental question “So what?” So what about this Jesus who died and was resurrected? Did he really free us from the spiritual powers that surround us and control our lives? Does faith in Christ really give us access to God? The false teachers answered these questions by saying not quite, that Jesus is only a halfway solution to controlling the spirits and for gaining access to God. These false teachers believed that faith in Jesus was only a guarantee to eternal security and that one must practice self-denial, observe specialholy days and times, and worship the celestial powers as means of ensuring control over the spirit world and of gaining access to God.
         Even today the question “so what” is still around. For reasons of our own personal faith we must know for ourselves if Jesus death and resurrection is relevant. We have all at one time or another asked what does knowing that my soul is eternally safe have to do with whether my children are safe at school and whether my job will still be here tomorrow. Even today we wonder how we can control the spirits around us. Sometimes Monday seems to be everyday of the week. Everything has gone so wrong that we could vehemently swear to the existence of evil powers in the universe who constantly go out of their way just to get us and we long for a way to control them. Some days we really are willing to try Shirley Mclean’s new diet that’s guaranteed to give us a less complicated place in life the next time around. Even today we wonder if God is really out there. If we can really know God. We will see that Paul’s answers to the so what’s being asked in Colossi are just as relevant to our so what’s today.
         These false teachers in Colossi were influenced by an ancient belief that spirit is good and matter is evil. It follows that God who is spirit cannot touch evil matter and therefore could not be the creator of this world. So these false teachers taught that God put forth a series of emanations that went further and further away from God like ripples in a pond. These emanations were spiritual beings and as they became more distant from God they grew more and more ignorant of and even hostile to God. It was one of these hostile emanations who created the material world in which we live.
          This false teaching puts forth several challenges to basic Christian belief. This teaching claims that God did not create the world in which we live, that God can not be involved in this world, and that all of creation is evil and hostile to God. To these challenges Paul responds that Jesus is the image of the invisible God and in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, that in and by him all things were created and hold together, and that through Jesus God is reconciling to himself all things.
          Jesus is the image of God. Jesus is like a photograph of God. When we look at Jesus in him we see the nature of God. The blood of Christ’s cross shows us the extent to which the Triune God of grace was willing to go to reconcile us to himself. We see that God is faithful and long-suffering not an evil emanation. Paul also says that in Jesus the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. Jesus was not only a photograph of God. Jesus was God. By saying that Jesus is the fullness of God, Paul is doing away with all those emanations and proving that God is involved in this world to the extent of becoming physical matter.
          Furthermore, Jesus is the very power in or by which the Trinity created this world and holds it together. With these words Paul is boldly stating that God created this world and is intimately involved with it, sustaining it. If Jesus shows us the nature of the true God then the God who created this world is good and not evil and that this world is also good, not evil. Everything that brings order into this world -- all thrones, dominions, rulers and powers -- these all have their place in the fullness of God and they are part of the Trinity's involvement in this world.
           Paul was not naive. He could see that all in this world was not good. Paul knew that accidents and disasters happened as if some evil god were whimsically playing with us. Paul could see there were some very cruel people who did heinous things. Paul himself had suffered much for the sake of Christ and the church. Paul was aware bad things happen to good people. And this creates a problem, the question, if God is so good and is involved in this world why does this world appear so evil? This is the question that all belief system’s must answer and those false teachers in Colossi had come up with a good one.
          Paul responds that in Jesus Christ God the Trinity is pleased to reconcile all things to himself. Reconciliation is the third aspect of the Trinity's involvement in this world. The Triune God of grace has created this world and sustains it. When this good creation appears evil, our God who suffers with us is involved in its reconciliation. We ourselves have been ignorant of and hostile to God in the evil works that we have done. If the Trinity can change us and continually work in us to shape and form us into the likeness of Christ, then the Trinity can change all of creation.
          Thus far, Paul has made some very basic theological statements about God, about Jesus, and about the world. These statements offered a different and hopeful world view to the Christians in Colossi. In Jesus they saw that God is good. This world is good. They could trust the fundamental elements of life as they knew it. So, now we must answer that fundamental question, “So what?” Paul has given us a good basic belief system, but we must know for ourselves if Jesus death and resurrection is relevant.
          This Jesus through whom the Trinity creates, sustains and reconciles is not so far removed from us that we can not see him. Jesus is the head of the body, the church. We, the church, are Christ’s body and within us lies a mystery. Christ Jesus is within us. In each one of us the Trinity is at work first creating, sustaining and reconciling each one of us to himself and then we are to be a part of the Trinity's works of creating, sustaining and reconciling in the whole world. Through us people see the hope of glory.
          Once we did not know God. Once we were hostile to God and worked against God. Now we want to work for and with God. We will do this provided that we continue securely established and steadfast in faith without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that we heard. Hope is the elemental core of our faith. Jesus’ resurrection gives us hope not only for our eternal situation but more so to live faithfully now for him for we know that our works in him are not in vain. Our hope comes from seeing in our own hearts that the Trinity is creating, sustaining, and reconciling us. God the Holy Spirit is at work in us changing each of us to be more like Christ Jesus and our fellowship here to reflect more clearly the image of the communion of love that the Triune God of grace is. We are the “so what” of Christian faith. The way we treat one another is what makes the gospel relevant. The Christian faith is only as relevant as we have faith to believe in and participate in the creating, sustaining and reconciling work of God in Christ. The relevance of the Christian message lies with us in the task of reconciliation. Amen.

A Lawyer Joke, If I May

Text: Luke 10:25-37

There's something about the parable of the Good Samaritan that I bet you didn’t know and that’s because I’m making it up. It is actually one of the earliest recorded lawyer jokes in existence, if not the earliest. It’s a lawyer joke and in the Bible. Go figure. Amazing book, the Bible is. There's actually some humour in it. Everybody likes a good lawyer joke and I won’t go into the reasons why because that would entail telling a few and I wouldn’t want to offend (i.e. slander) any lawyers from the pulpit for fear of getting sued for appearing to be guilty enough of being responsible for what my own actions appeared to do though untenable in a criminal court under section so and so of the banality code. Did that make sense? I think I might be moving from the area of law into claims adjusting. But anyway, I think that here in the Parable of the Good Samaritan we’re looking at a lawyer joke. It may not seem funny to us because the sense of humour comes from a culture different from our own and nearly 2,000 years old. Nevertheless, it definitely has a punch line that we should get.

Now this lawyer joke seems to revolve around a trick question that the lawyer asks. He says, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Well there you go, this is your typical lawyer up to the typical task of asking a typically tricky question to try to throw us off. Those tricky lawyers. The trick is that there is nothing a person can do to gain an inheritance—nothing. Inheritances are granted and usually along bloodlines. You can’t earn them. Actually, it’s the other way around. There are things you can do to loose your inheritance. You can’t earn it, but you can loose it. Actually, that is the punch line of the little joke about the Priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan that's also in this text.

           Let's have a look at that joke first. The two people who were doing their best to earn their inheritance from God—the Priest and the Levite—are actually the ones who stand to loose their inheritance because of what they neglect to do. They didn't show compassion because they were afraid of breaking the “dead clause” in the Temple Law. The “Dead Clause”was that if you touched a dead person, you could not go into the Temple for several days because it made you impure, unclean, or unholy. One did not bring death before the LORD God. Helping this man would complicate things for the Priest and the Levite because they worked and lived in the Jerusalem Temple. They weren’t willing to risk being put out of their home and work for a few days to save a man’s life. So, here’s the first punch line: Though the inheritance is free, it comes at a cost. Trying to earn your inheritance by being obedient to laws rather than acting merciful, compassionate, and just can actually lead to loosing it. Now this little joke would have made our lawyer friend a little uncomfortable because like most of the things Jesus said it hit too close to home. As an expert on the Law, the lawyer would have been associated with the Priest and the Levite and would have done exactly what they did in walking on by.

           Well, the punch line is going to grow here a bit as the lawyer begins to justify himself. In Jesus day a lawyer or scribe was an expert in both the general themes and the details of the rules of the Temple Law. These folks knew what you could and could not do and they also knew the loopholes. This leads us to another thing we are supposed to find funny in this joke: how Jesus turns the expertise of the lawyer back on the lawyer. As I said a moment ago the lawyer asks Jesus a loaded question of “How can I earn my inheritance?” Well, Jesus being smarter than the lawyer (Ha. Ha. Joke. Get it. Jesus is smarter than a lawyer.) refuses to answer the question and instead makes the expert answer it himself. “What does the law say?” Jesus asks. Well, of course the lawyer has the right answer. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and your neighbour as yourself. “Right answer,” Jesus says. “Do this and you will live.” Well…our lawyer just has to go and be a lawyer. He has to determine the extent of the Law by asking, “Who is my neighbour?” He’s working with the loophole of “Who deserves compassion and who does not?” If he can qualify a group of people who do not deserve compassion, then he’s off the hook.

Well, Jesus has a field day with that bit of banistering. Jesus turns the question around on the lawyer too. He makes it go from being “Who is my neighbour?” to “What kind of a neighbour are you?” That’s a real knee slapper. I think I might roll around on the floor here and bust a gut. Jesus doesn't stop there he keeps going. He compares the lawyer to a Samaritan—a Samaritan. You know what a Samaritan is? They lived down the hill from Jerusalem. They were mixed along the bloodlines, if you know what I mean. Now, this joke of Jesus' has become an outright insult to our lawyer friend because Jesus is suggesting to the Lawyer that a Samaritan was a better neighbour than a Priest or a Levite and therefore this lawyer.

That’s an insult if I've ever heard one and since it's Jesus “meek and mild” who didn't cry when he was a baby who's doing the insulting we might ask why. Well, Jesus wants to make clear what his kingdom is all about. It is about the inheritance of eternal life. It is a free gift. God the Father grants us this inheritance freely in and through Jesus Christ the Son by means of him becoming human as we are, living and dying as we do on account of sin. “He became what we are by nature to give us what is his by nature” and he had to go through death and out the other side to do it. Thus, God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit raised him from the dead and in so doing defeated sin and death once and for all. Jesus is now ascensed into heaven where he ever-intercedes for us until his return. And it doesn't stop there. The Father and the Son send us the Holy Spirit to live in us in humanity that we may share in the risen humanity of Jesus the Son as adopted children of God, the living signposts of the new creation coming. As children of God by adoption we freely share in Jesus' relationship with the Father—a life of faithfulness, hope, and compassion rather than a life of uncertainty, anxiety, despair, and self-absorption.

It is impossible to earn what the Trinity has freely done for us. Our only possible response to this grace is to love God the Father back with the love of Jesus Christ the Son that he has also implanted in us by the Holy Spirit coming to live in us. It is Christ Jesus' love in us that makes it possible for us to love the Trinity with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbours as ourselves. We can’t do this of our own capacity. Without the power of the Holy Spirit living in us we can’t love God the Father rightly in, through and with God the Son. Instead, we try to manipulate "God" for our purposes. We try to make "God" work for us. “God, I’ll do this for you, if you’ll give me my inheritance.” God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not like that. The Trinity just simply loves us and wants to be a part of us and want us to be a part of Him. And that is the healing to our brokenness that the Trinity freely gives. It’s just there. We need only get on with living in it.

This little thought of God’s healing presence being given to us freely necessitates a question—“If we can’t earn it, then how do we know we got it?” Well, there’s a real and wondrous sense awakened in each one of us that God the Trinity really does love us. The declaration that the Gospel makes is that we of no act or effort of our own have been made God's children by adoption through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. We need only begin to pray that the Trinity will cause us to know this personally, to know who are in Him. Paul says, “your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). Just start praying and following and the Trinity will let you know who are are in Him.

The personal knowledge of the Father's love for us gives us a sense of trust, of peace, a calmness that really only comes from beyond us. It also makes it much easier to be kind, patient, and compassionate and to forgive. And, this is where we find the real punch line of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Showing mercy to others is the only appropriate response to the Trinity's grace. Showing mercy is how we love each other and how we show our love for The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If we have this inheritance of eternal life which is Christ living in us, then mercy is the fruit which comes from it which we must nurture and bear forth. When Jesus says, “Go and do likewise” he means for us to discipline our lives to let the Trinity's grace and mercy shine through us, to let his Spirit destroy all hate and heal all hurt that is in us. Showing mercy is not how we earn our inheritance. Rather it is how we keep it. Go and do likewise. Amen.

It's about Conversion

Text: Acts 9:1-22
         The last two weeks I have left you with a prayer to pray. Remember? It was "Who are you, Lord?" This prayer comes straight off the lips of the Apostle Paul as he stood before Jesus on the Road to Damascus. It is evident that Paul knows that he is in the presence of his God as he understood him for a faithful Hebrew would call no one Lord except the LORD God. Yet, in this moment he realizes he does not know his Lord whom he had for all his life served with such righteous zeal. Seriously, he was on his way to Damascus to round up disciples of Jesus for possible execution and he believed he was being faithful to what the LORD God wanted of him. Yet Jesus confronts him with his very self, calls him by name twice, and Paul goes from saying Jesus was a fraud to proclaiming to his fellow Jews there in Damascus that Jesus is the Son of God. The LORD God appeared to Paul and called him to a new ministry, the ministry of proclaiming the Lordship of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and that they are now included in the people of the one true God and that they should live accordingly by responding to the Holy Spirit's drawing them to Jesus and enabling them to have faith and empowering them to live in the Spirit in Christ faithful to the one and only true God.
         Paul's encounter with Jesus living and ascended there on the road to Damascus changed him at the core; something we call conversion. Conversion happens when the Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to us and plants in us a desire to be like him and share with him in his relationship to the Father and so we strive to live accordingly something we call faith or "cruciformity" as some recent scholars have begun to speak of it; conformity to the self-denying love oriented way of live which Jesus lived. It is not proper to say "I converted to the Christian faith." But rather, "I was converted."
         Paul here is a great example of conversion. His encounter with Jesus living, resurrected, and ascended wrought a change in him that ran deep, deeper than just doing a 180 with respect to this Jesus movement. He was changed at the core. You see, Paul was a driven man, driven by hate. Verse 1 reads, “Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest….” I can’t get over Luke’s use of the word breathing to describe how Paul actively hated the followers of Jesus. It seems Paul needed to hate them as much as he needed air to live. But Paul, meeting Jesus there on the road, being struck blind and having to be lead around trusting someone else, and then being healed and forgiven by the Christians changed him. It converted him. His hate-driven so-called righteous zeal became what he writes at 2 Corinthians 5:14: "For Christ's love compels (or better, controls) us."
         Charles Spurgeon, probably the greatest English preacher of the nineteenth Century, writes about Paul in a sermon he preached on this text: “That indicates a tremendous reversal of this man's (of Paul’s) whole approach to life. He is now experiencing the lifestyle which belongs to a Christian. ‘You are not your own; you are bought with a price. You will be told what to do.’ That is what conversion is: It is a change from thinking that you can run your own life, to an acknowledgment that God holds the program in his hands, and he has the right to tell you what to do. This was the first thing Paul experienced when he became a Christian, this right of Jesus Christ to be Lord, and to tell him what he was to do.” The conversion that Paul went through was from doing his own thing driven by hate to doing what Jesus wanted him to do and in turn, being driven by the love which drove Jesus. He was converted or, even better, called from what he thought his beliefs about God wanted him to do to doing what the Trinity actually wanted him to do. Many congregations today need to undergo conversion.
         This episode from Paul’s life is a good example of what conversion looks like in our lives. As Spurgeon said conversion is the awakening in our lives that God, not us, is holding the program in His hands and that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has the right to tell us what to do. How that awakening comes to each of us is as different as each one of us is from another. But somewhere in there we’re going to meet Jesus Christ and he is going to change what compels us.
         A sure mark of conversion in our lives is that we begin to pray. The first thing that Paul did when he got to Damascus was pray. So it is with us, we begin to pray, but differently. Conversion changes prayer from our expressing needs to an infinitely distant God into becoming a wanting to know Jesus and his presence with and in us and his love for the Father and the Father's love for us his children. The prayer of conversion truly is "Who are you, Lord?" It is knowing that we don’t know what to pray so we sit silent and listen and let the Holy Spirit pray. As Romans 8:26-28 says: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” When we come to the point of not knowing what to pray we can just be quiet and know that the Holy Spirit will and is praying the Trinity's will for us. Indeed, Jesus himself ever-intercedes for us.
         Another mark of conversion is the Holy Spirit awakening in us the sense that there are specific ministries that the Trinity wants us to do. He lays on us a specific sense of needing to serve in Christ Jesus' own ministry in particular ways. Immediately after regaining his sight Paul begins to go to the synagogues, the houses of worship to tell God's people that Jesus really is the Son of God and he did this using all the gifted knowledge he had gained from being a well-schooled Pharisee. Paul was a remarkable student of the Hebrew Scriptures. He was perfect for the task. So also, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will take you and your talents, give you a few more, and use you to build up the body of Christ in love.
         Another mark of conversion is suffering. Jesus said to Ananias about the purpose he has for Paul, "Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name." Being Christ’s disciples involves suffering. Conversion is not a matter of our getting things right with God so that things will begin to work out for us. Rather, Christ suffered and so will we for his names sake. We will suffer inwardly with remorse, regret, disillusionment, and just groaning inwardly as the Holy Spirit works in us, breaking us of our own willful spirits that fight against the Father's will until he settles us in the sureness of the Father's love for us. We will suffer for others. It breaks our hearts when people we love walk away from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Moreover, in conversion we are awakened to seeing beyond ourselves to seeing the hurts and needs of others that we suffer with them. Just as Jesus called Ananias to go to Paul to heal him, so also we will find that the Trinity's love drives us to get involved in the lives of others to bring healing in Jesus' name. Another form of suffering is persecution. The more we become like Christ the more there will be people who hate us because of Jesus.
         The final mark of conversion is being filled with the Holy Spirit. Spurgeon writes: “No one can manifest the suffering of Christian love without being filled with the Holy Spirit. This man (Paul) needed such a filling. As Ananias laid his hands on him he was filled with the Holy Spirit. There were no tongues, no sign, no manifestation; there was simply a quiet infilling of the Holy Spirit, just as occurs today with anyone who believes in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit came to live in him, to dwell within him to fill his life and equip him to manifest the love, the suffering love, of Jesus Christ. That is what Paul experienced. Immediately it changed his vision. Scales fell from his eyes. I think this is both literal and symbolic. All those long, built-up prejudices of a Pharisee against Gentiles; all the bigotry, the pride and the prejudice that twisted and distorted his view of the Gentile world; all of it disappeared in one moment.” My friends, that is conversion. May we know it too. Amen.