Acts 8:3, 9:1-9 “All Can Be Saved”
After church one Sunday, after a having heard a sermon about salvation, a mother and father asked their seven-year-old daughter if she had understood what salvation was hearing the preacher talk about it. The little girl looked up at her parents with a big smile on her face, saying “Of course I know what salvation is. I saw the movie.”
The mother and father were surprised by this response and asked her what movie she was talking about. The little girl responded, “Don’t YOU remember?! The 101 Salvations!”
It is really hard to come up with a good joke about salvation! It is after all serious business, isn’t it?
Today we get to delve into the story of Saint Paul’s salvation. We have to remember that Paul had the name of Saul originally and that he was one of the people in the Temple cheering on the stoning of Saint Stephen. He also was the one who decided to go out after the Christians to bring them back to Jerusalem to stand trial and be punished. He is on the road to Damascus with letters of authorization to do just that. He was the self-appointed religious inquisitor of his day. He was a violent, hateful, and intolerant man. He seemed to take joy in seeing others suffer. He would go way out of his way to cause suffering in others lives.
For us today, we find it hard to believe still that this is the man that God would choose to help spread the gospel of Jesus Christ out into the world. We have to realize, as Oscar Wilde once put it so eloquently, “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
This is the truth to each and every one of us—not just us here in this church but every Christian on this planet. If you look hard enough, you will find the negative things in all of us. So, when we read and contemplate the story of Saint Paul’s conversion to Christianity we come to a moment of realization that if Christ could save Saint Paul, then there must be hope for all of us. What a comfort that is for us indeed!
Still, sometimes as Christians we look at others around us and we wonder about whether God could ever save them. We wonder if God could save an Adolph Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or other such wretched and bloodthirsty dictator. We see stories in the media about murderers and rapists, people being stalked, gunmen opening fire at schools and universities, suicide bombers, the list goes on and on. Honestly, I have a hard time reconciling the idea that these people can be saved.
At the same time, I know that God can do anything. That is God’s amazing grace! Even those people who do not deserve it can be and will be saved to God. All can be saved. I am not saying that all will be, but all can be. And, I am most thankful to God that it is not I who will have to determine who gets saved and who doesn’t! That is always between the individual heart and God!
Getting back to Saint Paul’s salvation, however, the first step in being saved is realizing that you need to be saved. In other words, one must come to the realization in one’s own life that one has sinned. Paul didn’t think he was sinning when he stoned Stephen. He did not think that he was sinning when he went out to persecute Christians. He thought he was being good and righteous in fact. It was not until Jesus himself appeared to Paul that he realized that he had sinned in doing what he had been doing.
An interesting thing happens to Paul when he is finally shown the error of his ways, he becomes blind. When this happens, we almost automatically think back to Jesus’ words in John 9:39, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” This is exactly what happens with Paul that when for the first time his eyes are open to the spiritual, he can no longer see what is physical. He is made physically blind. What does this really matter? He has seen Christ! He has seen his own sinfulness.
The second thing in being saved is to realize that you cannot save yourself! Paul when he is made blind continues on to Damascus with the help of the soldiers who were his guard. There, a believer and disciple named Ananias, hears Jesus tell him to go to the house where Paul is praying to lay hands on him to heal his sight. At first Ananias refuses to go, saying that he knows this man, this Saul of Tarsus, and that he has killed Christians in Jerusalem. The Lord is adamant, and Ananias goes to that house and lays hands on Paul, saying (and we can all read this together in Acts 9:17) “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he was able to see again.
In this is the realization that it was not just Ananias that saved Paul. It was Jesus sending Ananias. Jesus likewise sends us out to do acts of salvation for Him. We must always remember that it is Jesus who does the saving, we are just there as instruments of God’s grace and love. Jesus can save all and anybody. We can just lead people to that salvation—after that we are powerless.
One of my favorite stories of the history of our own Waimea Church is that one of the first missionaries to arrive here in 1820 was Samuel Whitney who had actually fallen overboard during the ninth-month voyage to get here from New England. The story goes that one of the deckhands saw him drop into the water and quickly threw a wooden bench in after him so that he would have something to float on while they turned the ship, the Thaddeus, around to rescue him.
That is so much like all we can do once we see somebody fall: We try to keep them afloat. Yet, if they do not want to grab on for their own salvation, that is entirely up to them. We might be able to turn the entire ship for them, but if they don’t first grab on, there is little we can do.
Even though you cannot save yourself, when the lifeline is thrown out to you, you will have to grab on in order to be saved. Paul did accept Ananias into his house and let him lay hands on him to be healed. You have to allow yourself to be saved.
The third thing that we must do when we are saved is to thank God afterwards. WE do this by truly changing our lives and living for Jesus thereafter. What good is salvation if it does not change anything in our lives? What good is this gift if we are not going to use it? To thank someone for a gift means that you do intend to use it. The greatest thank you is to see someone actually using the gift, yes?!
In the case of Paul, we can see in verses 20-22 that he takes his salvation and he uses it. Indeed, Paul becomes a tool or instrument of God’s love in Damascus. He stood up in the synagogue in Damascus and preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ, witnessing to his own salvation. Everybody was surprised to say the least that Paul was preaching in favor of Christ after having been so against Christianity to start.
This upsets some people so much that they want to lynch Paul now. This is the same man who came to Damascus to lynch Christians who is now about to be lynched for being a Christian himself. People were laying in wait at the gates to kill Paul. So, other believers put him in a basket and lower him out of the city walls through a window. What an amazing image that is for us again of how we cannot save ourselves!
Paul leaves the area of Damascus and heads back home to Jerusalem. Once there he connects with the Christians already there. Remember that there were already thousands that had come to the Lord at the time of Pentecost. Yet, the believers there in Jerusalem did not want to believe that Paul had actually been saved to Christ. They thought that Paul was trying to infiltrate them in order to persecute them.
Then, a man by the name of Barnabas stood up and witnessed for Paul that he had indeed accepted Christ and had even preached such in the synagogue in Damascus. He was accepted finally by the Christians, but then the Jews who had known him earlier wanted to take him out and stone him, so he was sent away from Jerusalem to minister in the north. The persecutor was now the persecuted for Christ’s sake.
From this point of view of salvation he wrote his letters out to the churches. The persecutor of men became the reconciler for God. Reading from II Corinthians 5:18 in Paul’s own words, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”
Did you hear that? “Not counting the trespasses. . .and reconciling.” Thank God we are not the ones who decide who is saved! God can save all people, all souls. One must only confess one’s sins, allow one’s soul to be saved, and live a life according to that salvation in thankfulness to God. Amen.