Acts 9:1-19

Acts 9:1

The Conversion of St. Paul.

That blessed war of aggression which Jesus Christ wages upon the evil one is a war which is made to maintain itself. Christ's soldiers are His captured enemies. Every soul won from resistance to the Cross is marked at once with the Cross-badge and sent into the field to win others. Perhaps the most notable instance of this in history is the conversion of Saul. Jesus Christ never encountered a bitterer or an abler foe; Jesus Christ never won a mightier captain for His army.

I. The important fact that such a man suddenly abandoned the Pharasaic theology and became the Church's foremost preacher amply justifies the detail with which the story is here related. The immediate occasion of Saul's change of life was quite as exceptional as the change itself was eventful. Christ directly called this misguided persecutor to Himself; He called him personally. And this personal manifestation of Him whom the heavens had received is, I suppose, solitary in Christian history.

II. The general nature of the change which passed over Saul is, I think, to be pretty well made out from what we know of the man before and after. If the punctilious and legal obedience he had been striving after was proved to have been consistent it was a gross breach of the law in its spirit, and he saw how unholy and unrighteous a life his had been. Saul's dialectic was quick enough to see that it must be the spirit and not the letter that God cares for. Yet there was little need for dialectic. The spiritual sense of the man, purged now from pride, which always blinds us, and illuminated by the Holy Spirit of God whom before he kicked against, saw what false education and self-righteousness had kept him from seeing, that the law by which alone we may please God is a spiritual thing. The moment this spiritual law of love to God and man, a law of heart motives, was made plain to him, sin revived, and he died. His mind reverted for help, turned round about in his loneliness to the names of those very disciples down in his note-book that he had come to arrest, and now, in a sweet vision, he seemed to see one of these friends of Jesus come into the home where he lay helpless and in darkness, and give him light. See how Jesus Christ must smite down that He may lift up. He first came in person by the way, and brought judgment, darkness, horror, and almost death. He came now, the second time, by the gentle words of His humble servant, came by the blessed sacrament of His Church, and so coming He brought light, peace, and the hope and desire of a better life.

J. Oswald Dykes, Penny Pulpit,new series, No. 469.