If someone asked you, “What is the basic theme of the Bible,” how would you answer?
What is the Bible all about?
I think that the primary purpose of the Word of God is to reveal Jehovah to us sinners.
In other words: to explain how we can delivered from our sins and to become saints of God.
“Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.”
Abraham was an idolater in Ur of the Chaldees, but the Lord called him unto Himself.
Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
There were David and Solomon, Daniel and Isaiah, Samuel and Sheba.
The salvation of Ruth and Lydia are wonderful, wonderful stories.
There have been literally hundreds of the sinful children of Adam whom the Lord has redeemed, and the record of their salvation has been preserved in the Bible in order to instruct us.
But out of all of those people, to the best of my knowledge, there has only been one such person, whose testimony has been recorded in three or more places, and that is Saul of Tarsus – the Apostle Paul.
We studied Saul’s conversion in detail when we examined Acts 9;
And here we have it again.
Below him stood several thousand spiritually destitute people – people much like himself just a few years earlier.
As he beckoned to them, they miraculously became quiet just a few minutes after attempting to beat him to death,
And Paul began to explain how he had traveled from the doorway of the High Priest’s office to the doorway to Heaven.
As I say, no man’s conversion is recounted in any more detail than Paul’s, or Saul’s as he was then known.
And I believe this means that God wants us to make sure we understand it.
This may be the best and most thorough example of salvation that we will ever have.
This may reveal as many of the details and means of salvation as we will ever need to know.
The Holy Spirit’s three-fold repetition of this man’s conversion to Christ,
means that this may be one of the most important events ever recorded.
Perhaps before we begin, we should notice what it is that the Lord requires of you and me as saints.
In Paul’s account of his salvation in Acts 26 he told King Agrippa about Jesus’ purpose in saving him.
Christ said, “I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee;
In situations of limited time and opportunity all Paul did was to retell the events that took place in his conversion.
All we really need to be able to do is to tell people what the Lord did the save our souls.
Or, I was experimenting with every sin that I could get away with when the Lord broke my heart & spirit.
Or, I was a member of a Baptist church, but I had never felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit, until…..
Or, my parents were Christians, and they lovingly taught me the gospel and I repented of my sin and trusted Christ as my Saviour when I was seven years old.
Using Paul testimony let’s consider four points this morning:
His corrupted religion, His religious corruption, his miraculous conversion & his desperate spiritual need.
Perhaps there is someone here who has never realized his own desperate need, but listening to Paul, the Lord might bring that home to his or her soul this morning.
Saul was a Jew
Actually he was of the tribe of Benjamin.
Saul was a child Abraham, Isaac and Jacob by birth.
These were men to whom the Lord had revealed himself before the written revelation began.
Without a doubt it was a blessed privilege to be a part of this line of people.
As we have said many times, to Israel “pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, & the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.”
There are eight things mentioned in those two verses from Romans, any one of which should be considered blessing of the highest order.
To Israel pertaineth “the adoption.”
They were not special in themselves; not Abraham, not Isaac and certainly not Jacob.
And out of the twelve sons of Jacob perhaps one stood out above the others, but as the sons and grandsons of Joseph multiplied, they arguably became the most wicked of the tribes.
It was God’s grace which provoked the Lord to chose to adopt Israel above all the nations of the earth.
He was talking about the glory which filled the Temple and the Tabernacle, when they were dedicated.
He was talking about the Pillar of Fire and Smoke by which Israel was lead about for forty years.
Perhaps he was referring to the Ark of the Covenant and the Mercy Seat were God met with Israel on the Day of the Atonement.
No other people had the blessing of the tokens of God’s presence.
These carried unconditional promises from the “God who cannot lie.”
They were promises of God’s future blessings to Israel – primarily through the coming of the Messiah.
To Israel pertaineth the covenants.
In the Law we see God’s absolute perfection and His demand of absolute perfection before any one of us can fellowship with Him.
And as a result, in the Law we see our absolute and utter helplessness before God, because the Law demonstrates our universal sin and corruption.
“By the law is the knowledge of sin.”
It was not by the will of Israel that Christ came into this world; it was by the will of God.
But it was the Lord’s will that through the nation of Israel that Christ would come.
And He did.
“When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”
Could there possibly be a higher blessing to a nation than this?
And yet, when “He came unto His own, His own received Him not.”
And he was a well-taught Jew.
He was “brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers.”
It could have been that Paul had received the best education available to a Jew in his day.
He certainly had the best teacher in the best seminary in the world at that time.
But what he was taught was not the same faith which had been revealed to Abraham, David or even Moses.
He had been told to pay more attention to the rules and regulations of his religion that to the Lord Who gave those rules.
He had been told that his religion of laws was the means by which he could touch the face of God.
He was inadvertently taught that through his personal, moral accomplishments he would become equal to the Lord Himself.
In other words, the pure and simple faith of Abraham had degenerated into the religion which Adam and Eve tried to possess when they first ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The religion of the Jews had degenerated into essentially the same as all the other human religious inventions.
It was another ego-centered, humanistic religion rather than theo-centric spiritual religion.
I am verily a man which am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia,
and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers,
and was zealous toward God, as ye all are this day.
And I persecuted this way unto the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women.”
For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge.
For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.”
We know that he was at the heart of at least one person’s murder.
We have to wonder how many of the deaths of the followers of Jesus he either caused or committed.
What sort of ingredients do there have to be in a person to make him a religious murderer?
How debauched and perverted does a religion have to become to make its followers assassins?
We have thousands of supposed “experts” trying to answer those questions in our society today.
Our newspapers are filled with accounts of religious suicide bombers, sectarian violence in professed civilized countries and plain old religious genicide in the third world.
We have nations fighting against others over what they profess to be differences in their religions.
What has to happen in a person’s heart, through his corrupted religion, to drive him to kill another person?
I suppose that every suicide bomber believes that his religion is the only true worship of God.
I am proud to be spiritually related to those Baptists who were beaten for their faith here on American soil.
I am proud to be able to hold up my King James Bible and say “this is the Word of God.”
I may think of another person as foolish for using another Bible version, but I don’t have the slightest desire to kill him.
I am proud of my Saviour; I am proud of the doctrines which the Lord has graciously taught me.
Yes, I am guilty of pride.
I don’t think of myself as superior to anyone.
If I possess anything at all it is because of the grace of God.
If you have a truer concept of God than someone else, it is because that knowledge has been given to you.
If you possess a more accurate copy of the scriptures it is because the Lord has been gracious towards you.
If you don’t possess a murderous heart, it is because the Lord has given you a new heart.
The Bible which Saul had been studying under the tutelage of Gamaliel declares, “Thou shalt not kill.”
Something went wrong in that man’s heart.
and in essence, he must have considered himself higher that the God of those commandments.
And I fell unto the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
And I answered, Who art thou, Lord? And he said unto me, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest.
And they that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me.
And I said, What shall I do, Lord? And the Lord said unto me, Arise, and go into Damascus; and there it shall be told thee of all things which are appointed for thee to do.”
The first thing to notice is that Saul was not looking for Christ Jesus.
Salvation is something which God initiates; it is neither completed by the sinner, nor begun by him.
They may admit that they swear, but they don’t realize what a sin it is to blaspheme God.
They may admit to lust, but they would deny to having committed adultery in the sight of God.
“We use great plainness of speech:
And not as Moses, which put a vail over his face, that the children of Israel could not stedfastly look to the end of that which is abolished:
But their minds were blinded: for until this day remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the old testament; which vail is done away in Christ.
But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the vail is upon their heart.”
lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.”
Something else here was that his salvation was personal even though he was in the midst of a crowd.
“And they that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me.”
There is an interesting difference between Paul’s account here and Luke’s account in Acts 9:
One says that Saul’s companions heard a voice and other says that they didn’t hear a voice.
Perhaps this is the same sort of thing.
And there are other people sitting where you are sitting who hear my voice, but not my message.
These things are even more true spiritually and in ways that only the Lord can see.
Don’t get angry at me for saying so, because that was how it happened.
And don’t get angry at the Lord, because it is His sovereign right as God to save whomever He chooses.
At that time God saved Saul of Tarsus, but apparently not any of the people who were with him.
And what was it that Saul DID to be converted from Jewish persecutor to God’s saint?
Well, let’s see: he walked the saw dust trail from the back row up to the Baptist altar just below the pulpit?
Was there anyone there to command him to repent of his sin and to believe on Christ?
What did Saul do to become child of God?
He did nothing at all to become a Christian.
“Suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me.
And I fell unto the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
And he said unto me, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest.
And I said, What shall I do, Lord?”
Initially, it probably had not crossed his mind that it was Jesus of Nazareth Who was speaking.
But even after Jesus explained Who He was, Saul humbly called Him “Lord.”
I cannot with total honesty prove that Saul repented of his sin before God, but I have no doubt that he did.
And as I see him begin to obey the Lord’s directives, I have no doubt that he believed Christ and put his trust in Him.
But I am convinced that this came after the Lord gave him a new heart; after his regeneration.
Repentance and faith are proof of regeneration; they are not the cause of it.
And since there is nothing that any man can do to cause his salvation, the Lord commands us to prove our salvation through repentance and faith.
Saul of Tarsus, Saul the persecutor, Saul the Jew became Paul the Christian apostle by the grace and power of the sovereign God.
As all conversions are, this was a miracle of God.
Salvation from sin is the work of the Lord.
Regeneration is the work of the Holy Spirit.
Atonement is the accomplishment of the Second Person of the God-head.
It is God who applies His salvation, not the sinner.
The Bible says that “no man seeketh after God.”
This world is plagued by religions which come in a thousand shades of ugly grey.
The people of this world need salvation and deliverance from religion.
Is this your need this morning?
Is your religion being used by Satan to blind your eyes to the finished work of Christ?
Whatever your religion is telling you, it is a lie, if it says that by certain works, you can be made a Christian.
I exhort you to repent of your sin and self-trust; put your faith in the Lord Jesus.
Throw yourself on the road as Saul did and sincerely say, “Lord what would you have me to do?”
He will tell you to repent and to trust Him.
He will tell you to love and worship him.
He will tell you to serve Him out of a thankful hear.
Have you even knelt before the cross of Christ?