Acts 9:19-30

Acts 9:19

Damascus Arabia Jerusalem.

We see from this chapter:

I. The minute care which God has over His people. He gives to Ananias the street and the house in the great city of Damascus where Paul is sitting in his blindness, and sends him thither to his help. But though the commission came to Ananias supernaturally, we are not to imagine that similar things similar, I mean, in kind, though lower in degree are not occurring now. So let the people of God take comfort, whereever they are and whatever be their circumstances. God knows everything about them, and in some way or other He will manifest His care for them. His letters are all accurately addressed, and none of them go astray.

II. God gives special training for special work. This was furnished to Paul, not only by his conversion, but by his communings with the Lord in Arabia. He who would preach the gospel with power must be himself a believer in the Lord. The secret of true, heart-stirring eloquence in the pulpit is, next after the power of the Holy Ghost, that which the French Abbé has very happily called the "accent of conviction" in the speaker. He who would preach to others must be much alone with his Bible and his Lord, else when he appears before his people, he will send them to sleep with his pointless platitudes, or starve them with his empty conceits.

III. We learn, lastly, to give a cordial welcome to new converts and new-comers in the Church. Ananias went as soon as he was sent, and said, "Brother Saul!" How these words must have thrilled the heart of the blinded one! So again, in dealing with young converts, how slow some are to believe in the genuineness and thoroughness of God's own work! It was not so with Barnabas, and it ought not to be so with us.

W. M. Taylor, Paul the Missionary,p. 47.