Paul's Story

 

Listen for God’s word to you from Galatians 1:11-24… 

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother. I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie. Then I went to Syria and Cilicia. I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only heard the report: “The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” And they praised God because of me.

 

To help the Galatians understand more about God’s grace and how to plug their lives into that grace, Paul tells the Galatians his personal life story. Essentially, Paul’s life story has three acts to it. 

First, he tells the Galatians…

Who He Was 

Paul tells us three things about who he was. First, he tells us that he was a Persecutor of the Church. Paul says… "For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it."   

We get a picture of what Paul did and how he lived in the book of Acts. We get introduced to Saul (whose Roman name is Paul) at the end of Acts 7 during the stoning of Stephen. There we read, “Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul.” So, Saul/Paul was there at the stoning of Stephen, one of the first deacons of the church, and Saul/Paul did not object to it. Then we read at the beginning of Acts 8… “But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison.” 

Then, at the beginning of Acts 9 we read… 

 Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. Paul describes his behavior in slightly different language in Acts 26, beginning with verse 9… I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And that is just what I did in Jerusalem. On the authority of the chief priests, I put many of the Lord’s people in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. I was so obsessed with persecuting them that I even hunted them down in foreign cities.

 

So, it is clear, both from Paul’s own words in his letters, and from the book of Acts, that he was a persecutor of the church. The second thing Paul tells us about his former way of life is that he was… Advancing in Judaism. He says, “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people.” 

What does this mean? The word in Greek is προκόπτω. The word was originally used of a pioneer cutting his way through brushwood. The key thing is that Paul saw himself as advancing in Judaism beyond his peers. There is, I think, a note of pride in this statement. Paul was upwardly mobile as a teacher and leader within his faith community. 

I remember one time when I was young attending a Billy Graham Crusade with my parents. My personal experience of Billy Graham is that you could hardly hope to meet someone humbler than Billy. But my story is not about him. There were many pastors in attendance from all over the country for the Billy Graham School of Evangelism. We were having breakfast one morning with Billy Graham’s photographer, Russ Busby, in the hotel where everyone was staying. Suddenly there strutted into the room someone who was obviously looking around to see who noticed him. Someone in my family asked, “Who’s that?” And Russ responded, “Oh, that’s so-and-so, he’s a television pastor who thinks he’s somebody.” 

That, it seems to me, was Paul’s attitude before he met Christ on the road to Damascus. He thought he was really “somebody”, a somebody who was advancing beyond his peers, climbing the ladder of religious success. 

The third descriptor Paul gives us of his former life is that he was Extremely Zealous. Paul says, “I was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers.” 

In Acts 26:5 Paul tells us that he “conformed to the strictest sect of our religion, living as a Pharisee.” The Pharisees were zealous about their obedience to Jewish law. For example, it was not enough for the Pharisees to simply recognize the Sabbath. The Pharisees spelled out exactly what one could and could not do on the Sabbath. Jesus often ran afoul of the Pharisees’ petty rules. It is these rules, these traditions, that Paul was zealous to follow.

Whom He Met 

But then Paul met Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus and it changed his life and his perspective on everything. In this passage, Paul relates three essential aspects of how his life changed because of meeting Jesus. 

 First, Paul says that God set him apart. Paul says, “But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb…” That little word “but” calls attention to the great contrast in Paul’s life between the way he was before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus and the person he became afterwards. Paul recognized that everything that happened to him in Christ was part of God’s eternal plan. Paul truly believed that he was set apart, from his mother’s womb, to be the apostle of Jesus to the Gentiles. Whereas Paul had great confidence in himself before his conversion, that confidence was transferred to God and his Son Jesus Christ thereafter. 

 The prophet Jeremiah said something similar about his own calling. In Jeremiah 1:4-5, the prophet says, The word of the Lord came to me, saying, 5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” 

 I wonder, do you see God as having a special plan for your life as well? I believe God has a special plan for each one of us. 

In Psalm 139 the Psalmist says… 

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. 

 God had a special plan for Paul, for Jeremiah, and he has a special plan for you and me. 

 Secondly, Paul says that God called him by grace. There it is again… the dominant theme of Galatians… grace. God had a plan for Paul and set him apart from his mother’s womb. And then, at just the right time, God called Paul by his grace. In fact, he literally called Paul. 

We read in Acts 9 about the conversation Paul had on the road to Damascus. A voice asked 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.”

 

We may or may not hear an audible voice like Paul/Saul heard. But we are nonetheless called by God’s grace. In other words: God does not have to call us. God does not owe us anything. But even as we are in our headlong pursuit of our own selfish life agendas, just as Paul was, God calls out to us, and he calls out to us in grace. And by calling out to us he shows us his undeserved favor. He stops us in our tracks and reveals to us a better way. 

 This leads to a third descriptor Paul gives of his meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus. He says, God revealed his Son in him. I love Paul’s way of phrasing this: God was pleased to reveal his Son in me. Usually, we talk about God revealing something to us. But Paul says that God revealed his Son in him. 

When we read the account in Acts 9, the revelation is clearly portrayed as something that happened outside of Paul. And Paul himself, in recounting his own story in Acts 26, clearly refers to the revelation as something that happened outside of him. “I saw a light… I heard a voice… I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.” 

 And yet, here in Galatians, Paul refers to this same revelation as something that happened in him. This suggests to me that there is something both objective and subjective about revelation. The revelation of Jesus Christ comes from outside of us… but it makes no difference until that revelation gets inside of us and we respond to it personally. Clearly, Paul did that. He responded personally to the revelation of Jesus, and it changed his life from the inside out. I wonder… have we experienced a similar change from the inside out?

Who He Is Now 

 This leads me to talk about the third act in Paul’s life. Not only does Paul talk to the Galatians about who he was and who he met on the road to Damascus, he goes on to talk about who he is now. Again, Paul tells us three important facts about himself. 

 First, he says that he has become a preacher of the faith he once tried to destroy. Paul says that he was personally unknown to the churches in Judea… They only heard the report: “The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” And they praised God because of me. 

To my way of thinking, Paul is Exhibit A when it comes to proof of the life-changing power of Jesus Christ. If we want to know whether Christianity is true and whether it works, we don’t have to look much further than Paul. But the same transformation that Jesus worked in Paul, he has worked in countless people over the last two thousand years. The same amazing grace that changed the life of Paul can change your life, and mine. 

Our desire ought to be the same as Paul’s desire, that others would praise God because of us, that others would praise God, not us, when they see, when they witness, the life-changing power of the grace of Jesus Christ at work in our lives. In a way, we should not even have to tell others about it. They should so evidently see the power of God’s grace at work in us that it would cause them to question: “What is going on here?” As Lloyd Ogilvie once said… 

 The people around us can always read our hearts by our faces. The inner things we live with will always show up on our faces. The soul is dyed with the color of our commitment. Our task is not to argue, philosophize, speculate, cajole, but to live a life that demands an explanation. Is there anything about us that would force people to say, “Now that’s living! That’s the way I wish I could live!” A joy-filled life will always demand an explanation… 

 The second thing Paul tells us about his new life is that: the gospel he is preaching is not of human origin. Paul is at pains to make this clear. He says it in about as many ways as he possibly can… …the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it… my immediate response was not to consult any human being. I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was… This begs the question: if Paul’s gospel is not of human origin, where did he get it from? He is telling us that he did not receive the good news about Jesus in the way most of us receive it. I would dare say that most if not all of us are here today, worshipping in this church, because some human being, somewhere, sometime communicated the good news about Jesus to us. Paul is saying that is not how it worked with him. 

So, how did Paul receive the good news? Paul tells us: he received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. Paul got the good news direct from the source. When did he receive it? Presumably, Paul is referring to the revelation of Jesus he experienced on the road to Damascus. But his words also suggest that he learned more about Jesus, from Jesus, when he went away by himself to Arabia. Perhaps Paul went to the very same place where Elijah went hundreds of years before and heard the still, small voice of God. (1 Kings 19:11-13) 

 Ultimately, the “where” and the “when” don’t matter. What matters is that Paul received the good news by revelation from Jesus Christ and he shared that good news with others. He did not keep it to himself. In fact, he could not keep it to himself. As Richard Halverson once wrote… 

For the New Testament Christians, witness was not a sales pitch. They simply shared, each in his own way, what they had received. Theirs was not a formally prepared, carefully worked-out presentation with a gimmick to manipulate conversation, and a “closer” for an on-the-spot decision…but the spontaneous, irrepressible, effervescent enthusiasm of those who had met the most fascinating Person who ever lived… They had encountered Jesus Christ, and it simply could not be concealed. They witnessed not because they had to, but because they could not help it… Madison Avenue, with all its sophisticated know-how, can’t improve on the strategy. Nothing is more convincing than the simple, unembellished word of a satisfied customer. American business spends millions of advertising dollars annually in an attempt to achieve it. The simplest Christian does it effortlessly when he tells a friend what Christ means to him. 

 Paul told his three-act story to the Galatians in order that they might experience the same grace that had changed his life. I wonder: What is your three-act story? And are you sharing it with others? Are you sharing with others what Christ means to you? I hope so. That sharing might just change someone else’s life… by the positive power of Jesus Christ.