Enemies Turned Instruments

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[0:00] Well, here we are. Time for the sermon. And the sermon text today is from Acts 9, verses 1-20. Acts 9, 1-20. Let's see. Acts 9. And a little bit about this. We're continuing with Easter now, and Jesus just keeps appearing to people, and in this case, he appears to somebody named Saul on the way to Damascus. And what we find is that the resurrection leads to action. We had Mary Magdalene and also those two travelers to Emmaus. They immediately went and told other people that they found Jesus alive. And that's the important thing, is that once people have this encounter with the resurrected Jesus, something happens in their life. They get motivated. They become active. They have to tell the story because they're not going to be able to tell the story. And so, they're going to be too good a story not to tell other people. But we also find, especially in Acts, that part of telling means suffering. And so, the apostles, when Jesus commissions them at Pentecost, they go and preach and they teach, and they are imprisoned, and they're beaten, and they receive a lot of persecution on behalf of the name of Jesus. One of the people who was persecuting the early church is a man named Saul of Tarsus. And we

[1:24] hear the story about the stoning of Stephen. Stephen was one of the disciples, not the apostle, but a disciple. He was stoned to death. And the book of Acts records that Saul watched this and approved of this happening. So, he was delighted, actually, that Stephen was killed in this way. And we find that Saul had developed a great hatred for the followers of Jesus. And we're going to delve into why that was a little bit later. So, this week, we have another really dramatic story, great story. It's told very well about how a person who's filled with hatred is transformed by an encounter with the risen Jesus. And as you know, he ended up becoming one of our most important Bible writers. He became the apostle Paul. So, let's go to our reading, Acts chapter 9, 1 through 20. It goes like this. Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples.

[2:24] He went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Who are you, Lord? Saul asked. I am Jesus. I am the Lord. I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting, he replied. Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do. The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless. They heard the sound, but did not see anyone. Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes, he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days, he was blind and did not eat or drink anything. In Damascus, there was a disciple named, Ananias. The Lord called to him in a vision, Ananias. Yes, Lord, he answered. The Lord told him, go to the house of Judas on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying. In a vision, he has seen a man named Ananias. Come and place his hands on him to restore his sight. Lord, Ananias answered, I have heard many reports about this man and all the things he has done.

[3:54] He has done all the harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem, and he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name. But the Lord said to Ananias, go. This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.

[4:21] Then Ananias went to the house and entered it. Bracing his hands on Saul, he said, Brother Saul, the Lord, Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here, has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.

[4:40] Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul's eyes and he could see again. He got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength. Saul spent several days in the house of Ananias, and he was able to see again. He was able to see again, and he was able to see again. He got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength. Saul spent several days in the house of Ananias, with the disciples in Damascus. At once he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God. Let's pray.

[5:04] Heavenly Father, thank you for your word. And we ask that you would add your blessing to it. In Jesus' name. Amen. So as I mentioned, one question that does come up is why is Saul so angry? What is it that why does he care so much that there are Christians going about doing things, right? Here were some people, the Christians, they believed Jesus was the Messiah, they taught a new way, Jesus had cast out demons, he had been killed, and then raised again. That's what they believed. It didn't mean that Saul believed it, it's just he knew that that's what they believed, so then why did he care? For example, in modern times now, I hear about people with strange beliefs all the time. I mean all the time. Like, there are so many people who believe so many weird things, I can't even begin to catalog it, but I've told you about one group of them that kind of had a bit of a, they had their 15 minutes of fame about a year ago. They're called the Breatharians. The Breatharians believe that they don't have to eat any food at all, but they can get all the nutrients that they need just by breathing air, and so they take these giant breaths. They're very skinny people, and I kind of think I know why, but they take in these giant

[6:19] breaths and they say, Oh, that tastes like a ! It's so good, and it just filled me right up, and then they don't show you how they exhale then, because of course all the air goes back out again, it's carbon dioxide. And so here's the Breatharians. I don't agree with them. Like, I think they're wrong. I really, I think on the science, you know, there's just no nutrients in air. It's, you have to get it through food or drink. It's, I think, I think I'm right. I mean, somebody could contradict me, that's fine. So, but I don't need to go and destroy the Breatharians. I don't care about it that much, right? It's just not a, it's not a problem for me. If, if they're right, well, great. And if they're wrong, they're going to get really hungry before long, and they're either going to eat food or they're going to die of starvation, which is sad, don't get me wrong. But it's pretty hard to change other people's minds. I'm not very good at it. I can't change their minds. I think hunger is a very good teacher. It can teach them all kinds of things. I think that's the best thing that I can do. So, I'm not really too worried. I mean, it's funny, but I'm not too worried that I need to go and fix this problem that the Breatharians

[7:32] have, which is that they have a wrong view of how nutrition works. So, then you could kind of ask yourself, why is Saul so motivated to destroy the Christians? Can't he just leave them alone? In fact, this is advice that was given earlier in the book of Acts. In Acts chapter 5, there was a Pharisee, just like Saul, who was a Pharisee. And he said, you know, Saul, named Gamaliel, who was present at the Sanhedrin, which is the ruling council, and they were deciding what to do with the disciples that they were persecuting. And this is what Gamaliel said in chapter 5, verse 38. He said, 5 Therefore, in the present case, I advise you, leave these men alone, for if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. It just won't work.

[8:22] But, Gamaliel says, if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men. You will only find yourselves fighting against God. Good advice. So, in other words, just leave them alone. If there's nothing to this Christianity, it will go away by itself. It's a fad that will come and go and it'll be gone. We don't have to worry about it. But if God is with them, we don't want to get in God's way. So, either way, the answer is to stay out of their way. Now, why was it, and think about this, why was it that Saul found it so hard to do that?

[9:04] Well, I think we want to start understanding why that was the case. Because of the time that he was in and the culture that he lived in and actually what it meant to be who he was. 5. So, fundamentally, this is about Saul's identity is on the line here when he's angry about Christianity. It really meant something to be who Saul was. He was really kind of at the pinnacle of the religious order and of the social order in some important ways. He was a Pharisee, someone who defined himself in relationship to the law and his ability, he thought at the time, to keep it fairly well. Later on, he realized he was not able to. 6. He was also ethnically Jewish, so he had a long history and a social system around him that reinforced who he was. There were all sorts of other cultural and religious things that he did that continue to define his identity. Like, he could only eat certain foods and he could not share a table with certain people like Gentiles and so on. And you do this long enough, you really have a good sense of who you are because it's very well defined. 7. He was very self-made. 8. He was very self-made. 9. He was very self-made. He was very self-made. 11. He was very self-made. He was very self-made. He was very self-made.

[10:30] He was very self-made. 15. He was very self-made. 16. He was very self-made. 17. He was very self-made. 18. He was very self-made. 19. He was very self-made. 20. He was very self-made. 21. He was very self-made. 22. He was very self-made. 23. He was very self-made. 24. night. The parable of the Good Samaritan really hit home because people totally understood getting robbed on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho. Everybody got that. Even two weeks ago, we saw that Mary Magdalene didn't want to go to the tomb of Jesus on Saturday night when she really could have. She had to wait another 12 hours until Sunday morning when it was safer to walk about. And when the world is uncertain, the world is difficult, you sort of double down even more on who you are because it's that bedrock. It gives you a sense of identity. As we've said, it gives you a sense of security. So here's the problem. Well, actually, I'll go back to how Paul put it. This is how Paul describes himself later in life, looking back on his life at this point. In Philippians 3, he says, If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews. You already see three or four,

[11:54] five actually, identity markers right there. As to the law, a Pharisee. As to zeal, a persecutor of the church. As to righteousness under the law, blameless, or so he thought. And so right there, Saul is summing up like this is, the Saul brand. This is the package. This is what you get when you get Saul. You get this long list of things, some of them in his control, some of them out of his control. These are all the things he is. And that gives him safety. It gives him security. It gives him identity in the world. I probably belabored this a bit, but I want you to understand that one of the dynamics about the early Christian movement was that it was really at first, at least to outsiders' view, it was just a sect. or a subdivision of Judaism. And so new believers, new believers in Christianity, that is, were almost all Jewish at first. All the disciples were Jewish, right? And there were already several subgroups of Judaism that we knew about. There's the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes who kept to themselves. And so a new group comes along that believed Jesus is the Messiah, and they kind of actually fit in for a while at first in the synagogue. And they would go there and they would continue to read the Old Testament in the synagogue and have, they even kept

[13:19] the kosher laws, the laws about their food. And it was only over time as, for example, Peter got a vision that he could stop keeping kosher food, so that over time the Christians continued to differentiate themselves from Judaism. But at the very beginning they were worshiping in the synagogues. And it's in this difficult in-between period that Saul is active trying to persecute the church because he has identified that the Christians really cannot be in the synagogue because they're, they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. They're witnessing to the resurrection and other Jewish people are becoming Christian Jewish, Christian Jewish people. So this actually, just a historical note, is that this continued until about close to 100 AD when Judaism really made an effort to differentiate itself from Christianity because the lines were still a bit blurred. And so they developed something called the Birkat Haminim, which was a curse against the heretics. And they inserted this curse into the standard synagogue prayers. And when they started doing that, a Christian really couldn't attend the synagogue anymore. Because they would have to say a prayer cursing themselves. And they didn't want to do that.

[14:45] And so it was really like, you know, when the boys make a clubhouse and then they put a sign on it that says, no girls allowed, something like that. It was, that's what they did. They put a sign on the, on the door of the synagogue and it said, no more heretics. We've, we've kind of survived with you. We've kind of gone in parallel for all these years. But by 100 AD, this separation was very much full. But up until the end of the time we're in, Paul is taking it upon himself to sort of cleanse the synagogue of Christians.

[15:18] And I think he was worried of a takeover. I think he was observing what was happening. Stephen dies by stoning, doesn't defend himself in any way. What, what is it with these people? Why do they bear up under so much suffering and persecution? They seem awfully dangerous. And so Saul cared that, that the church would be able to do something about it. And so he was worried about the fact that there were Christians in the synagogue in Damascus and elsewhere. He couldn't treat them like breatharians. He couldn't take Gamaliel's advice and let them be because they were chipping away at his identity. They were changing what it meant to be Jewish. And that's dangerous. If you were to chip away at somebody's security or something they spent their whole life building, this is why the game of risk is so bad, right? You build this empire and then somebody comes in and destroys it. And then a friendship is ruined. I've seen it. It's kind of funny, but it's kind of sad at the same time. But people are going to react when the, your security, when their security and something they've built their whole life building is threatened. The world changes and there's these reactions that come to it. And you can try all the more to insist that the world should go back to the, to the way it was.

[16:33] So the synagogue should go back to the way it was before the Christians arrived. But you can't really go back in time. Things just can't go back. Things just keep changing. And this effort to wind the clock back doesn't work. And if, when it doesn't work, you try harder and you try to force it to go back to where it was. And we, as people, actually, we don't at first believe the reality that tells us that things have changed. We're, we're difficult that way as humans. We adjust slowly to change. And sometimes we adjust ungracefully to change. And we have all these sort of strategies for coping with change that often, often sometimes look like the stages of grief. Like we can deny, we can get angry, we can bargain, you know. Only at the end is there acceptance. But that can take a long time or never in some cases. Never sometimes people ever adjust to change.

[17:31] There's anxiety that comes about and that can lead to anger. And I think this is where Saul was. Why did he care so much? Because they were changing his religion. They were changing his identity. When he talks about the seven things that made him who he was, they were, they were chipping away at a good number of those.

[17:52] So, he thought he needed to get rid of them. And he watched with approval as Stephen was stoned to death. Then he went on his own crusade to Damascus to cleanse the synagogue there of any Christians that he could find. Now, I'm going to give you a little bit of a summary. Now, we get to the miraculous part. The resurrection appearance. Now, it's a little long, a little bit after Jesus was resurrected. Some time had gone by. But still, it's a resurrection appearance. And you know the story. At its core is that Jesus reaches into Saul's life and gives him a new identity.

[18:30] This is what's happening in this case is he kind of has to deconstruct Saul. So that all the things that he's done in his life, he's going to be able to do it again. All the things that made him who he thought he was could get dismantled. And then Jesus would slowly start to put Saul back together because he was his chosen instrument to bring Jesus's name before all sorts of people.

[18:55] Now, what's great about this is the existential crisis, the identity crisis happens for Paul almost immediately because he hears Jesus's voice. And he says, who is this? And Jesus says, I am the one. I am Jesus. Like there's no, it's not a question mark. Like this is some ethereal, no, this is Jesus. This is Jesus.

[19:18] And then Saul must have had this moment, and I don't know how long it lasts, where he might have said to himself, so Jesus is real. And what the Christians have been saying about him must be true too. And if that's true, that means that I've been on the wrong side of this all this time. And can you imagine in just that moment, sort of looking back on your life, even though you're blind and going, oh, I have put my chips on all the wrong horses here. That's a gambling metaphor. So just so you know, it's, but don't gamble. You know, I put my chips. I don't know why I picked that one. It's, I don't know. I should find a better one someday. But I put all my chips on one horse and it was the wrong one. It didn't win the race.

[20:09] I should have gone with Jesus, but it's not too late. So you can say it seems that Saul's conversion was instant and it was instant in the instant he realized how wrong he was. But I think it took time for him to collect himself. He was given a few days where he didn't eat or drink. He just was sort of stewing with that. Then he was given a vision that was kind of one of those sort of double confirmation visions. He was given vision. Ananias was given a vision. When they got together, they were able to compare their visions and they thought, well, this definitely must be miraculous. And then Ananias was able to lay his hands on him and heal him of his blindness.

[20:52] And what happens? Right away, it's very interesting. The minute it seems or the hour, the very same moment, Paul goes and gets baptized. So as Paul, or I just said Paul, but I meant to say Saul. Saul gets baptized. He's converted in that moment.

[21:10] And then a few days later, he starts to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is who he says he is. And if someone had told me that I could get through seminary in one week and not take on any student loans, I would have definitely done it that way. Like it would just been so much easier. Like one week, crash course. Now you're a preacher. You're done. But it wasn't really that easy. It wasn't that quick.

[21:40] We do see that the appearance of Jesus leads people into action. It leads them into telling Jesus's story. And that happens right away. But in another way, it took a long time for Saul. If we read further and we read in other parts of the New Testament, Paul, for one thing, changes, Saul changes his name to Paul. I'm so used to calling him Paul. It's hard to call him Saul. He gives himself a new name. And it's a new name for a new person. But he also had to take some time and process all this. So it says in the scriptures that from there he went away to Arabia for three years before starting his own ministry. He may have been preaching in a synagogue a few days after his conversion, but he did then go take three years away in kind of in the wilderness. And we don't know exactly what he did during that time. What I think happened. I think it's a little bit of a mystery. But what I think happened is that he was getting to know Jesus better. And he was getting used to the new person that he himself was becoming in Jesus. So his identity was being rebuilt. And you could call that a resurrection of a sort. The old Saul had died and the new Paul had been born again, but was still just a baby and needed to grow and needed to learn.

[23:04] Although he never also. There is some carryover. And I think this is interesting. He never forgot about his old life. He held on to his regrets about what he did for the rest of his life. And I can only imagine he looked back on that time where he watched Stephen getting stoned and where at first he had approved of it. Now, when he looked back on it, he probably looked back on it with terror and terrible shame. This is what he says in First Timothy chapter 113. He said he writes. Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man. So he kind of gives us his his resume as Saul. I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief. The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. And this is the next verse is actually the one I like to quote to you so often and ask that you memorize it. First Timothy 115. Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Of whom I am the worst. And I have to believe that when he says I am the worst, it's not just false humility, but it's him looking back at Saul. And saying that was a blasphemous, violent, persecuting person.

[24:34] Now, Jesus answered him. Jesus has saved me, but I am the worst of all the sinners in the world. So let's wrap up. Paul's anger and his motivation was a response to change that was coming. And I think that's a good word for us when change comes into our world. How do we handle it? How do we encounter it? What stages do we have to go through? How soon can we get to acceptance? There was a change in Saul's world that threatened his security. It threatened his identity. And how he understood who he was. And it was a threat to his ethnic and national identity too. Don't forget patriotism is a big part of all these things. People have their own country, their own land, and they're really, really into that. And as I've said before, there's no sort of sections in heaven for different countries. There's no American part of heaven.

[25:30] It's just heaven for all of us. So Saul took action with violence and force, but Jesus had other plans for him. And I think maybe he saw a lot of potential there. I think God in his wisdom could see things in advance, saw somebody like Saul, and said, that guy's a real mover. That guy's got a lot of fire. We need him on our team, right?

[25:58] And that's the most amazing thing about God. And I think this is the good news to hold on to. Both for you and for people that you may have met. The most amazing thing about God is how he deals with his enemies. He doesn't keep them as enemies. He's not interested in having enemies, really. He doesn't want to destroy them. He doesn't want to burn them. He wants to turn his enemies into his friends. He wants us to become instruments, chosen instruments, to take his name in front of the world. Now, I don't think it's wrong to say that the resurrection of Jesus was not a miracle. I think that the resurrection of Jesus, the one who can overcome death, thinks that we, I'm talking to us now, he thinks that we can still be transformed and resurrected ourselves. And I think even that we must be transformed. We must be changed. We all need this Damascus Road experience, where Jesus says, what are you doing?

[26:59] What are you doing? Where are you going right now? Are you sure you really need to do that? Why are you working so hard to avoid change? Can you really get other people to do what you want? Can you get a breatharian to eat a Big Mac? You can't, right? Don't spend time on that. Spend time with me. Come away to a place of solitude and learn who I am.

[27:28] Learn who I am. And learn who you are in me. And then start telling my story. And you know what? You're going to suffer for it. That's the promise. Never forget who you used to be. Never forget that it will cost you in this life to bear the name of Jesus. Never forget the ways you tried to stop Jesus' work in your life. And Jesus says, you don't forget it, but know that I forgive it. And we will use your mistakes. And we will use the changes as God has done. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others. And remember how great you were for others.