What Now? (Acts) | Blind Devotion

Saul wasn’t persecuting the church because he hated God. He was persecuting the church because he loved God. His certainty didn’t come from rebellion. It came from devotion. And that’s what makes his story so unsettling, and so close to home.

Jesus didn’t stop him with a better argument. He stopped him with light. And the question that landed on Saul lands on us too: in your zeal, in your conviction that you know how God works, is it possible that Jesus is somewhere ahead of you asking, “Why are you persecuting me?”

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Want to invite you now to open your Bibles to or turn in your Bible app to Acts chapter nine. We've been in the book of Acts for a a little bit of time, and our plan is to just keep going until we we finish it up. And and so far, this is you know, this is as far as we've made it. And so welcome. If you feel like you're oh, I'm jumping into the middle. Oh, well, great. You can just go read Acts 1 through 8 by yourself and uh get caught up really, really quickly. Uh our teaching text for today is Acts chapter 9, and we're just gonna look at verses 1 through 9. Those there's a lot more in there we could discuss. We just won't have time for it. So you can follow along with me in your Bible as I read. Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. He went to the high priest and asked for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the way, whether men or women, that he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. And as he neared Damascus on his journ journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him, and he fell to the ground. And he heard a voice say to him, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Who are you, Lord? Saul asked. 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 they heard the sound, but they did not see anyone. Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes, he could see nothing. And so they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind and did not eat or drink anything. These are the words of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You know, up to this point of the story in the book of Acts, we've labeled people like Stephen and Philip, we've labeled them heroes. And we've seen characters like Saul, you know, exposed in the story as villains. And Saul in particular, maybe as the main villain in the story of the book of Acts. And I just want to say to us this morning, I think that's a mistake. We read here in verse 1 that Saul was still breathing out murderous threats. Now that does not sound like a good guy. This doesn't sound like sort of hero mojo here. And we draw the conclusion immediately: that's a bad guy. And we know where we stand. That's the bad guy. I'm the good guy, but I think the gospel wants us to resist this morning. So I'm going to ask you to try to resist this morning, making that move. I just want to encourage you to open your minds a little bit. Listen, Saul was not a monster. And I know what you're thinking. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, because after this story, uh he gets a new name. He's called Paul, and he becomes the apostle to the Gentiles, and the entire world has changed ultimately through this man and his missionary, courageous missionary journeys. I know he's he's not a villain because he becomes this other thing, but I'm not talking about Paul. I'm talking about Saul, this man, at this point in his story. Saul was the best version, actually, of what his tradition could produce. He trained under the greatest rabbi of his generation. He was described in his own words as blameless under the law. He was more zealous than anyone his age. And I so what I want you to catch this morning, we need to get this quickly so we can move through the rest of this and see how the truth applies to us. But what I want us to get this morning is this idea that Saul was not persecuting the church because he hated God. He was persecuting the church because he loved God. Sorry, Saul's, I'm gonna do that probably a few times. Saul's violence did not come from his rebellion. Saul's violence came from his devotion. And that's an important thing to see this morning. If the Spirit's gonna open our eyes and help ourselves see ourselves in this story. Saul had a complete picture of how God worked and who God worked through. If you asked him, he could give you chapter and verse. I mean, he knew the scriptures perhaps better than anyone. And all of it had him moving in exactly the wrong direction with all kinds of confidence. Have you ever done that? Filled with confidence, running forward in the wrong direction. I've done that. I've gotten lost, and I've gotten in trouble for it. My own wife. So we turned around and asked for directions, but maybe you understand what that's like. Here's an uncomfortable truth. The most dangerous religious posture is not irreverence. Hear this. It's not irreverence. The most dangerous religious posture is certainty. It's the kind of certainty that has closed itself off from being corrected by a living person, particularly Jesus. That's where Saul finds himself. And that's where many of us find ourselves, I think. Saul wasn't holding a weapon in one hand and a Bible in the other hand, thinking, I know this is wrong, but I'm gonna do it anyway. That was not where he was at. He was so completely convinced that what he was doing was righteous, which is what makes this story so unsettling and so personal. Saul is not searching for Jesus when Jesus finds him. Saul is not doubting his religious system or his beliefs. Saul is not open to a new way or listening to other people around him. He is moving fast and he is moving sure. And it's at this point in his life of devotion and faithfulness that Jesus stops him in his tracks. And notice that Jesus doesn't stop Saul with a better argument. Jesus doesn't stop Paul with a more compelling theological argument. Jesus stops Saul with the light. With the light. Verse 3 says, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. You know, though Saul was quite intellectual, I mean, we see him later debating the philosophers and the intellectuals in Athens. He was a very intellectual man, but that's not exactly where his certainty came from. Saul's certainty about the path he was on was much deeper than that. You know, people don't see the light because they hear a better argument. People see the light when they have an encounter. And some of us might be open to better arguments. Oh, I'd be willing to listen if I had a better argument. And rarely does that affect us. We need an encounter. What's the difference between an encounter and an argument? Rarely does an argument knock you to the ground. But here Saul encounters the light of God and he hits the ground. And Jesus says something that should stop us all cold in our tracks this morning. He says, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting what? Or who? Me. Me. Wait, was Saul actually persecuting Jesus? Jesus had already died. Jesus had already resurrected from the dead. How is Saul persecuting Jesus? It's because Jesus is so identified with the people that he's building. He's so identified and present in and through them that whatever Saul does to them lands on Jesus. The wounds that Saul is causing, the church, this early church called the way, this movement, this uh movement within Judaism, the way that Saul, or the wounds that Saul uh causes that movement reach all the way up. All the way up. And how does Saul respond? Why are you persecuting me? Saul responds with a question: Who are you? Who are you? What is this? I haven't encountered this before. Who are you? What I want you to see about Saul is his certainty is already gone. The confidence, the certainty he had in his pursuit to persecute the people of the way, it's already gone. One encounter, one moment, and his certainty is gone. I am Jesus, he says, the one you are persecuting. In one sentence, in one sentence, the entire architecture of Saul's faith and life come crashing down. I am the one, the people he was hunting, they weren't heretics threatening God. The people that Saul was hunting down, they were the body of the living God that Saul thought he was serving. And I think our instinct is to hear the story about Saul and put ourselves on the right side of the story. We're not the bad guy. We're not Saul in the story, right? I mean, that's not us. We're the good guys. Up to this point in the story, we've seen ourselves, we're the ones being persecuted, we're the people of the way. But what I'm asking us to do this morning is to sort of take a risk or have the courage to take an honest look today and ask ourselves this question: what if some of the ways that we move through our faith, our certainty about who is in and who is out, our certainty about how God works and who God works through, what if some of that has Jesus asking, Why are you persecuting me? It's gonna be a really difficult thing to see about ourselves. And so I'm gonna name some specific ways this might show up in our lives in just a second. And I want to do that not to accuse anyone this morning, but because Saul couldn't see it about himself until he was struck by the light. Saul needed something very drastic to help him understand or to see this about himself. And so before I get into these, I want to give you an image that you can hold on to. There is a sort of tell, there is a sign that shows up in almost every form of this sort of drift, this devotional drift into darkness. And that sign is this: it is we are quick to pick up a microscope. We are quick to allow the microscope to become the lens through which we see everything in everyone in the world and in the church and in our own lives. We examine other people with tremendous precision and energy. We look at their behavior and their beliefs and their failures and their fitness to belong or to serve in some capacity or to be called one of us. And we do that, why? Because we think, and somehow we pick this up along the way, that that's what faithfulness requires. That being faithful to God requires the microscope, the examining of all of these things. And so I'm gonna ask you for the next few moments to do what I believe the scriptures call faithful people to do. Don't worry about that door. We're just letting the spirit in. Uh I'm gonna ask you to do this for the next few moments. I'm gonna ask you to do what I believe the scriptures call faithful people to do. And it's this it's to put down the microscope, just put it away. And instead, I want you to just I want you to look in the mirror today. And I'm saying this not to shame you. Believe me. I I've been looking in the mirror all week as I've been studying this and asking the same questions I'm asking you to ask yourself this morning. I'm not asking you to look in the mirror to shame you, but but because the thing the reason I'm asking you to do it is because the thing that most needs examining is not out there somewhere. The thing that needs most examining is right here. It's right here. It's right here. When we find ourselves putting under other under the microscope, that is the sign that we are drifting. Our devotion is drifting into darkness. But the mirror, on the other hand, in the light of the mirror is where Jesus meets us. So let's look at the mirror together. I'm just gonna quickly go through this list of five signs we're practicing our devotion in the dark. Five signs that our faithfulness, our desire for righteousness, our aim for deeper devotion is actually pulling us further away from the light and deeper into darkness. Number one, here we go. First sign we're practicing our devotion in the dark is when our wounds lead to verdicts. I'm gonna explain these, but when our wounds lead to verdicts. What I mean by that is this someone hurt you. Or hurts someone that you love, maybe. And at first that hurt caused a real wound. I mean, a raw, legitimate, real wound. But what happens is wounds that we don't bring to Jesus often have a way of hardening. So we see our hearts get wounded, but if we don't bring that heart to Jesus, our hearts begin to harden. And a hardened wound then becomes a verdict. We make a judgment that that person that hurt us or the person we love is beyond reach, beyond change, beyond grace. And once you've rendered the verdict, you stop seeing yourself, sorry, you stop seeing them, that that as a person, and you start seeing them in some sort of category. They become the thing that they did. They become permanently defined by their worst moment. And here's the teaching underneath this: only Jesus gets to render final verdicts. When we take that job from Jesus, we're not protecting ourselves, we're not living faithful or devoted. We are positioning ourselves above the grace that found us, that saw us in our worst moment and didn't stop. That same grace that would have to reach them is the grace that reached you. I want you to ask yourself this morning: is there someone you've permanently written off? Now listen, I could spend 30 minutes making the case for what a healthy boundary looks like, and we need to have them, and this isn't about boundaries per se. This is about more of a posture, a heart, a way of seeing someone else. Sure, they don't get the same access that everyone else gets. That's healthy. But in your heart is there someone that you've permanently written off. Have you found yourself hoping Jesus doesn't reach them? That is the microscope. And Jesus is handing you a mirror. Number two, the second way we our devotion begins to drift toward the dark is when our concern becomes control. When our concern becomes control. This one genuinely looks like faithfulness from the inside. We can look at around at all the people in the church and we can begin to make determinations by the way that they vote or the way that they worship. Maybe you go to a church somewhere off-island or somewhere that has a little bit of a different worship expression. You begin to notice the way that people worship here. That's great. Observations are great, but determinations are not as helpful. And we make determinations too about people based on the kind of theology that they hold or the sins that we believe they are tolerating. And we decide things like this person shouldn't be in leadership, or this person shouldn't be serving. They call themselves Christians, but look at them over here. And so from the inside, this feels like protecting something really important. It feels like protecting the integrity of the body of Christ or protecting the witness of the church. But what is actually happening is that we have appointed ourselves the gatekeeper of a house that belongs to Jesus. And the criteria that we use to decide who gets full welcome or who is qualified or who deserves to serve. Those criteria are almost always more about our comfort, our personal comfort and our personal certainty than they really are about any movement of the Holy Spirit. Saul had criteria too. As I mentioned, he had chapter and verse. And Jesus says to Saul, you have no idea what I'm building or who I'm building with. You know the scriptures, but you don't know me. You see what's going on, but you can't see what I'm doing. And so ask yourself this question this morning. Is there someone that you've quietly disqualified in some way? Someone that Jesus might be actively calling, someone who might be stepping forward into more and deeper devotion, someone that you've begun to judge as a result of it. When did guarding the door start feeling more important than following Jesus through it? It just might be a sign that we've picked up the microscope and we've stopped looking in the mirror. Number three, third, third sign that our our devotion may be drifting toward darkness is when, in our lives at least, grace has a ceiling. Grace has its limits. This one sort of usually lives beneath the surface because it doesn't denounce itself as any particular sort of theology. It shows up more like a feeling, a kind of a hesitation or a hesitance, a quiet internal verdict that sounds like uh discernment, but is actually something else. We might think something like, I'm not sure God can forgive that. Or I don't know how He could use someone like this. After everything that they've done, I just don't see how. What we're doing in those moments is we're placing a ceiling on grace. We're deciding that there is a level of sin or there is a level of failure or brokenness that finally exhausts what God is willing to do, how far God is willing to go. But look at who's on the ground at the road to Damascus. Look who is it that's on the ground? It's a man who imprisoned believers, a man who stood watching and improved when Stephen was stoned to death, a man who, in his own words later, was the worst of sinners. It's that man. And Jesus didn't pass him by. Jesus stopped the parade on the road and he said to Saul, I want you. And so if grace reached Saul of Tarsus, the grammar of the gospel does not allow for a behavior or a history that outpaces the gospel or is willing to go further than the gospel of grace is willing to go. And so when we place that ceiling, we are not being theologically careful. We are deciding who deserves what God freely gives. So ask yourself this morning: whose name comes to mind when you hear the phrase too far gone? Is your picture of grace big enough to actually include that person? I'll be honest to say mine rarely is. And I need to continue to look in the mirror. Number four, there's two more. When is our devotion drifting toward darkness? Number four, when faith has a flag. When faith has a flag. You know, I want to be careful here, but I also want to be direct. Because this one feels very live, it feels real, and it's doing some significant damage to the body of Christ right now. And here's what happens: a political party or a movement begins to feel like the vehicle through which God is working in the world. And let me say this: I have encountered plenty of people on both sides of the partisan spectrum where this is true. Where each group believes that their party best represents Jesus and what God is doing in the world. This is not to target one or the other. I see it in both. Begins to feel like the vehicle through which God is working in the world. The issues that this particular party champions are the ones that feel like God's issues. And the people who oppose these issues or have a different view start feeling like they're the people who are God's opponents, that they oppose God. And then what happens is slowly, without anyone deciding to let it happen, a political identity and the Christian identity begin to fuse. And the opposing party starts to feel like opposing God, and the people on the other side start to feel like enemies rather than neighbors. And I'm not telling you which party is right, because I Believe either party is right because that's not what the pulpit is for. But I am telling you this: that Jesus refused to be recruited by the political certainties of his own day. The Pharisees, think about it, they wanted him to validate their resistance to Rome. The zealots, they wanted him to lead a revolution. And Jesus said no to them all, no to all of them. Not because politics don't matter, I believe that they do. But because the kingdom of God cannot be captured by any particular human political movement. And so ask yourself this morning: has my political conviction brought me closer to loving my enemies? Or has it given me permission to even have enemies on the other side of the coin? Are my politics making me more like Jesus, or are they making me more like the people who crucified him? Okay, number five. What's the fifth sign? Our devotion may be pulling us toward darkness, not toward the light. Number five, when the system becomes the savior. One, because I think that this one sort of underlies all of all other four. And two, because we have a very diverse church. We have people that are not already from other places who speak different languages. We have lots and lots of people who were just raised in different Christian traditions, different flavors of Christianity, different experiences in worship, different ways of seeing particular things about the Christian life. And so if I were to poll the this community this morning on any five topics, we'd I think we'd get some very diverse answers in the polling. Maybe surprisingly, maybe uncomfortably, and maybe in a way that would scare you a little bit. I'm not sharing that to scare that, to scare you with that. But I'm sharing that this morning to say that I think it's easy in a church like ours, we have a tendency to go, well, that's how this people, these, these people do it. I learned the right way, but this is how these people do it. And it's okay. Or I can tolerate it. Or Summer Street is like, you know, the easiest one to be a part of, or I can just handle it. And I want us to see that we all come from a specific place where we learned and were taught specific things. And some of what we bring in is very helpful, and it is a contribution to the life of our faith family here at Summer Street Church. But if we don't recognize that we're not the only ones or we're not the ones reading the scripture to see what it actually or really says, but we too have an interpretive lens that the conclusions that we've reached, we've reached through interpretation. Nobody just reads the Bible for what it says. You cannot read the Bible without interpreting it. And we and we've come from places that interpret it differently. Well, the problem happens when that system that we are raised in sort of serves us as a savior, or in the in the same capacity that the savior is meant to serve. We have this system, this framework for understanding who God is and and how he works and what he requires. And the system that you brought in, it's not bad. Theology matters, doctrine matters, the tradition of the church. These things really matter, but something can go wrong. The systems are just meant to be a window to help us, you know, see Jesus, to point us into Jesus. But those systems can become a wall very easily. Where questions we start to get feel like attacks, where growth sometimes becomes, starts to feel like a little bit of a betrayal to that system that you were grown in, grown, that you grew up in. Someone who worships differently or reads the text differently, they stop being a fellow traveler, and we start seeing them as a threat in some weird way. And you find yourself spending more energy defending your system that you brought in with you than following the Jesus whom the system was meant to reveal. This was obviously Saul's problem, a big part of Saul's problem. You know, a system that you cannot question has become an idol. If we cannot question the things we learned as we grew up, if we can't ask the question, then we've made that thing an idol. And an idol, no matter how biblical its origins, is not Jesus. Saul had the most sophisticated theological language of his generation, and it had him moving in exactly the wrong direction. Because he began to serve the system and stopped listening to the living God that the system was meant to reveal. So just ask yourself this morning: when is the last time Jesus did something that my faith framework couldn't account for? That I couldn't explain within my faith context, my upbringing. Oh, I've never seen that before. I can't make sense of that. Is the scaffolding of your faith, is it still pointing you toward the building, the kingdom as it's being built? Or have you started to have faith in the scaffolding itself? Here's the question, I think, underneath all five, okay? In your zeal, in your faithfulness, in your conviction that you know how God works, is it possible that Jesus is somewhere ahead of you saying, Why are you persecuting me? Is it possible? I don't want us to move too quickly beyond what happens after the light. Saul get off gets up off the ground, the ground that he cannot see any longer. He came to Damascus to arrest people. And he ends up being led into Damascus by the hand like a child. And we're told that for three days he neither eats nor he drinks. And this isn't an incidental detail. Luke, who's who's giving us this account, he wants us to understand that this is the moment, this the period of time where the old Saul is dying. Saul's been knocked to the ground by the light of Jesus, and he's dying. He cannot see, he cannot perform, he cannot produce, he can't do anything that gave his life meaning. Everything he built his life on, that's all been stripped away, his competence, his his certainty, his standing, his identity, all of it is gone. And what's left when all of that fails? What's left when Saul's system and certainty are gone? What's left? Only Jesus. Only Jesus. Not a system about Jesus, not a tradition that points people to Jesus, not a movement that claims Jesus, just the living person who stopped him on a road that he was so sure about and said, I know you, I've been watching you, and I'm calling you. Now here's what I want you to see this morning. Those three days are not just Saul's story, they are the entire shape of the Christian life. Jesus said it plainly, if anyone wants to come after me, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. The cross is not a piece of jewelry, it's an instrument of death. And Jesus says, pick it up. Following Jesus isn't a single decision that we make once and then we maintain. It's an ongoing process of dying and being raised to new life. A daily process. Take up your cross daily and follow me. Ongoing process of dying, dying to the version of yourself that needs control. Dying to the certainty that has become a wall. Dying to the judgments, the verdicts, the systems, the identities that you have fused together with the gospel that never actually were the gospel. It's dying to all of that and being raised again. Not to the same life with some minor adjustments, but to a life now seen and understood in the light. The light of the resurrected Jesus. You know, it's the kind of life where you begin to see other people the way Jesus actually sees them. Not through a microscope that catalogs their failures, but through the eyes of someone who knows what resurrection can do to a dead thing. What did he come to do? He came to make dead people live. And while we're sitting back trying to determine who's good or who Jesus is making good, we might do well to just pause a second and ask God, who are you making alive? Who are you calling from death to life? And then realize that his answer is, you are. You are the one who is dying. You are the one he is raising to new life. Where you begin to see yourself, not as the sum of all the certainties that you've collected along the way or all the your religious performance that you've been able to achieve along the way, but as someone being remade from the inside out by the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead. You cannot grip your certainty this morning and take hold of Christ at the same time. Your hands can only hold one thing. Now let me just close here with the good news this morning. The good news this morning is not that Saul cleaned up his act and finally got it right. That is not what happens in the story because Saul couldn't ever do that. He could never clean up his own life. He had blood on his hands. He's got no argument left. The good news is that Jesus came for Saul anyway. Not to validate everything he'd been certain about, obviously, not to recruit him into an even better version of the same system, but to find him, to call him by name, and then to rebuild him from the ground up. It would take years before Saul really becomes Paul. Years of God's work in his life. The same Jesus who says, Why are you persecuting me? is the Jesus who says, Now get up. Now get up. Come on. Let's go. The confrontation and the grace, it comes from the same voice. The voice that knocks him down is the voice that picks him up. And it's the voice that is moving towards you this morning. I just a couple of words for you today. For those of you maybe who don't follow Jesus yet, maybe you've come this morning and you've been carrying a picture of what the Christian faith looks like. And maybe it looks a lot like, or you thought it looked like what a version of it that I've described this morning, you know, people who are in and people who are out, people who are good and people who are bad, and people who keep the rules and people who don't. And maybe your experience with Christians has been somewhat, if you're being honest, they come off a little judgmental. Maybe they're a little too certain for your liking. Maybe they're more interested in who's in than who's out. And I just want to say to you this morning, that's fair, but that's a distortion of the real thing. Now, we Christians, we're responsible for the distortion, but it's a distortion of the real thing. The real Jesus is the one on the road to Damascus, not validating Saul's religion or misguided devotion, but stopping it and offering something entirely different in its place. So I think I can say with certainty, God, what he's offering us this morning is in essence the same thing. He's not offering you a new set of rules to perform. What Jesus is offering you this morning is his life, himself. I'm giving you me. You have me. For those of you who do follow Jesus this morning, without shame or judgment, can we ask ourselves honestly, is there a place where I'm gripping too tightly to my certainty about these matters? My certainty, my judgments about other people in the body of Christ? You know, I I don't believe in any way, shape, or form that Jesus is asking us to abandon everything that we believe today, far from it, actually. But I do believe what Jesus is asking us to do is to hold loosely enough to the stuff that we believe that Jesus can still surprise us from time to time. That we hold loosely enough to our certainty, control, belief, that Jesus, the real Jesus, can come and correct us from time to time. Loosely enough that when Jesus shows up on our road, we experience him in a way that our system cannot account for. I I think our our response today is to in some way, shape, or form, respond in the way that Saul did, to just simply honestly come this morning and say, Who are you, Lord? Who are you, Lord? And mean it. So as we prepare to come to the table this morning, what if we just for 10 minutes pretended like we didn't have all the answers about who God is, about who Jesus is and how he's revealed himself to us? What if we, like children, allow the Spirit to lead us by the hand through the gate this morning, ready to receive whatever it is that God has for us. Father, we ask you this morning to help many of us do what can be really hard to do at this point is to see part of what we've built our faith and practice on, to see that there are some irregularities in the foundation. That there might be some stuff there that won't hold up to see that God, maybe there's an opportunity for us to recognize that the problem isn't out there somewhere. It's it's in here and that the opportunity is here, that it's you and your grace who comes to us and blinds us by the light. May we no longer be blinded by the dark, but but by the light so that you might open our eyes again to something that's more true. To see not a system of belief about you standing in front of us, but to see you living, breathing, loving, resurrected Son of God. Strip everything away from us, Jesus, until there's nothing left but you. In Jesus' name. Amen.