Text: Acts 9:1-9
Prayer Pointers:
That God would bring you into what He is doing
To stir in you a holy discontent with your ways
For all those who have died from terrorists’ plans
AND FROM STAGE RIGHT, Saul bursts into view, chewing the scenery and breathing fire. Almost we expect from him a Shakespearean soliloquy, a summary of his deeds, motivations and goals. Armed with warrants from the High Priest in Jerusalem, he arrives in Damascus ready to dispense righteous wrath.
And there is an intervention of, well, Biblical proportions.
Paul himself spends much time in his letters telling his readers how God moved him to a completely different way of being—the only way to describe it is as a death, and then something new, something different, a whole other life. To use a now hackneyed word, what happens to Paul is something radical—a profound upending of the foundations of the man’s life. Finally grasping Paul’s meaning, Luther realized that salvation was not simply something “added on” to the normal trajectory of a human life, but the interruption of that life, a redirecting of the path so that the person who departed from an encounter with God was no longer the person who entered into that encounter. Saul was heading in one direction, with specific plans in Damascus; God had other plans, and Paul went to all the known world telling the story, a soliloquy now about God’s deeds, motivations and goals.
May your day be grace-filled ~ Pr. Dave Brooks
-Detail, Saul on the Road to Damascus by Jenô Remsey