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.
