Good morning my “Walking with Jesus” friends,
When is the last time someone said to you “I was wrong! I know I was confident, absolutely sure of my opinions. I know I ridiculed you and others who questioned me… but now I see the fallacy of what I was so confident about. I have had a significant change of my mind and my heart. I’ve changed. I’m not the same person I was.”
Maybe it was a person who had rejected God, as an atheist for a long time, but then came to understand God and His truth. Maybe it was a person who had believed carefully packaged distortions or even lies of politicians or philosophers or Hollywood, but now they have come to understand God’s truth. Maybe it was a person who mocked you for believing the Bible or believing Jesus, and now the Holy Spirit has opened their mind and heart to Jesus Christ.
Since Easter, I’ve been leading you in following the story of what took place in the months and years after Jesus returned to heaven, and His close friends and followers spread His story and truths in Jerusalem and the surrounding region. We’re in Acts 9 and looking closely at the dramatic events linked with Saul the Pharisee’s transformation. It’s safe to say Saul was becoming famous in Jerusalem as a fast rising star in the world of religious scholars and zealots. He was a Pharisee, possibly a member of the ruling Sanhedrin. Saul had been absolutely opposed to Jesus with every fiber of his being. Saul had been given responsibility to oversee the execution of Stephen the Deacon, and was leading the ambitious and sometimes violent opposition to all followers of Jesus anywhere. (Acts 8:1-3)
On his way to Damascus, Saul had been blinded by a bright light encounter with the resurrected Jesus, and instructed to go into Damascus and wait. (Acts 9:3-6) A Damascus follower of Jesus named Ananias had a vision and Jesus told him to go to the house of a man named Judas who lived on Straight Street, in Damascus, and there rendezvous with this Saul of whom he’d heard so much terrifying news. Ananias did, and Ananias led by the Holy Spirit, prayed over Saul and Saul’s sight miraculously returned. Saul asked to be baptized and he was, declaring his allegiance to Jesus as his Lord and Savior.
I doubt any of us can imagine the inner struggle and turmoil Saul must have wrestled with in those days of change struggle. To declare Jesus to be his Lord and Savior would mean renouncing his strong opposition to Jesus. Remarkably, quite quickly Saul began proclaiming Jesus as Messiah in Damascus, claiming he had changed his mind and was now a follower of Jesus! It was too much of a change, for almost everyone. Could anyone really believe it was possible for such a total, 180 degree reversal in only three days? So Saul was run out of Damascus by Jews trying to kill him. (Acts 9:23-25)
Word, of course, had come back to Jerusalem that Saul was acting crazy in Damascus! Rather than arresting the Christ followers, he was actually claiming he had become one of them! Rather than recruiting Jews to help him find and arrest Christ followers, the report was that Saul was actually preaching in the Damascus Synagogues that Jesus was the Messiah and trying to convert the Jews to be followers of Jesus! No news could have been more startling, more confusing to both the ‘disciples’ of Jesus in Jerusalem and the Pharisees who had commissioned Saul to Damascus!
Luke, the author of the book of Acts, next writes this: “When Saul came to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples of Jesus, but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he really was now also a disciple.” (Acts 9:26)
Friends, one of the important things in reading the Bible is to remember no single book has the complete chronology or detail of history. We need to carefully take all Scripture together when considering an event or a portion of history. As we are reading here in Acts 9, Luke seems to be giving us an easy to follow chronology, but look at Galatians 1:11-24. Galatians is a letter written by this Saul himself, years later as the apostle Paul, writing to the Jesus followers in the province of Galatia, about his life transforming Damascus encounter with Jesus and his recollection of these days which Luke writes about in Acts 9.
Saul/Paul’s focus in Galatians 1 is not so much the chronology of the events, but the importance that the Gospel, that he later proclaimed and wrote, was not taught to him by any person but by direct revelation from Jesus, through the Holy Spirit of God. Notice Saul/Paul writes: “when God…was pleased to reveal His Son to me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia, and later returned to Damascus. Then after 3 years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him 15 days. I saw none of the other apostles, only James, the Lord’s brother…” (Galatians 1:15-18)
So Saul is telling us there is a 3 year gap between Acts 9:25 & 26. From his childhood, Saul had been a passionate, zealous student of Jewish writings and Old Testament Scripture. He had been totally convinced, for many years, that he was absolutely right in his opposition to Jesus, based on his many years of study. But his Damascus road encounter with Jesus, his 3 days of blindness, his encounter with Ananias and his baptism, his initial days of preaching in Damascus all combined to convince Saul he needed time alone with the Holy Spirit to sort it all out, to wrestle with his years of training and figure out how Jesus could possibly be God the Son, Immanuel, and how Jesus’ death and resurrection could provide salvation atonement for any repentant person. Saul really needed God’s help to understand how the Old Testament, the law of Moses, and the very clear sacrificial system of Judaism, was now being completed in Jesus and available to even Gentiles!
There was no seminary or Bible school for Saul. The apostles had not yet started writing their accounts of Jesus so there was nothing for Saul to read about Jesus. So Saul was led by the Holy Spirit, into a prolonged time of solitude and study with the Holy Spirit of God, in ‘Arabia’. We have no record of exactly where Saul went for this ‘self-study’. But in those months, Saul’s well educated mind and his passionate heart were profoundly, totally, completely and very carefully refined and renewed by God Himself.
Saul writes: “The gospel I preach is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1:11,12) Saul/Paul wanted everyone, then and now, to understand this: the Gospel he powerfully proclaimed was NOT something he developed on his own, not something an angel taught him, not something he learned from any living human being… but Jesus Himself was Saul’s teacher, through the power of the Holy Spirit, in those many months of solitude and study! Saul was experiencing what Jesus had promised His disciples: “when He the Spirit of Truth comes, He will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on His own, He will speak only what He hears… He will bring glory to Me (Jesus) by taking from what is Mine and making it known to you.” (John 16:13,14)
Saul says he came back to Damascus many months later a passionate, confident, convinced proclaimer of this Gospel of Jesus Christ unlike anyone had ever heard it or understood it. Saul began proclaiming the gospel of God’s salvation of any human being, by their repentance of their sin and full trust in Jesus Christ, and the outpouring of God’s grace upon them in their life transformation through ‘regeneration’, their ‘redemption’, their ‘reconciliation’, their ‘adoption’, their ‘justification’, their ‘sanctification’! Saul became the most articulate, most intelligent communicator of these deep spiritual truths of God that has ever lived. 13 and possibly 14 books of the New Testament are authored by this Saul, later known as the apostle Paul.
I’d like us to pause right here and contemplate this question: how important is God’s spiritual truth to you? What is the priority of God’s truth in your life?
How much time per week, per day do you spend doing with Saul did… meeting alone with God and asking God to teach you, by the power of His Holy Spirit? Can you say you have an appetite, even an almost unquenchable appetite for God’s Word, or… is it a chore for you, a struggle to find time to open your Bible for a few moments? Look deeply my friends into your soul. Can any of us even begin to imagine what that season of study with Jesus was like for Saul? What if 2021 became the year you and I prioritized our time with Jesus and asked Him to awaken in us a hunger for God’s Word, like Saul had…and then immersed ourselves in it? Who would you and I be by the end of 2021? Saul was almost unrecognizable by anyone who had known him before!
Now as you ponder that… consider this powerful video report of the power of God’s Word:
Today’s Scripture is Galatians 1:11-24.
Choose below to read or listen.
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Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
Have a comment or question about today’s chapter? I’m ready to hear from you, contact me here.
Pastor Doug Anderson 262.441.8785
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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