Towne South Church of Christ

Saul of Tarsus was such a proud and arrogant man before he met Jesus Christ. He was proud of his heritage. Saul was proud of his education.
Saul was proud of his achievements.

He wrote later:

He was proud of what he had achieved. He was smug in his self-righteousness. He thought he was God’s gift to the synagogue. He was an ambitious man. If he was going to do something, he was going to do it all the way…give 110%. No doubt his ultimate goal would have been to be a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, the highest position in the Jewish hierarchy. Saul was determined that he was going to gain that kind of recognition and status. That may have been what drove him in his intense inquisition against the Christians. The book of Acts, chapter 9 begins:

Saul was a persecutor and a murderer. He tortured and imprisoned Christians. And he was proud of what he had achieved.

That’s what Saul was like before he met Christ. But what happened to Saul that turned him into what A. W. Tozer calls, “The World’s Most Successful Christian?” How did the persecutor become a preacher? How did a murderer become a missionary?

Let’s look at Saul’s conversion experience as it is recorded in Acts chapter 9 and as we do, I want us to realize that we will go through the same process in coming to Christ as he did, though it may not be as dramatic.
The first thing that happened to Saul was:

On the Damascus road, Saul was humbled by God. Before God could use him, he had to break his pride.

The Lord Jesus Christ appeared to Saul in His glory, in dazzling bright light and it knocked him to the ground.

Have you ever fallen down in front of people? You tripped or got knocked down? That’s embarrassing…that’s humbling. And here’s proud Saul getting knocked to the ground. God is buckling his pride. You know sometimes people won’t learn to look up until they first get knocked down. And then the second part of verse 4 says:

You notice all the sudden, Saul has a submissive attitude. He uses the term “Lord” which is a term of respect. It’s amazing how quickly you can be humbled. Here’s Saul groveling on the ground.

The second half of verse 5 says:

Think about how humbling that had to be. He was confronted with the fact that he had been dead wrong. He had violently opposed the idea of Christ’s resurrection. He was very public about his disbelief in Jesus Christ and here he was on his knees in front of the risen Christ. Everything he had thought, everything he had said and everything he had done was wrong. And there was no denying it.

Well, what do you do once you find out that you were wrong? You can’t go back and change the past. In Saul’s case Jesus tells him what to do. Verse 6:

Now, a physical handicap is something that will humble you pretty fast. Saul was blind and helpless. He had to be led by the hand. Now think about that: a proud, confident man, arrogantly marching into the city to strike terror into the hearts of Christians, and now he has to grope and feel his way around because he can’t see. Talk about being humbled. Verse 9 says:

Saul was crushed. He was so upset he was sick. God has a way of crushing our pride. He has a way of breaking down our defenses if need be.

The Bible says:

Pride has been called the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, because it keep us from God. Jack Cottrell wrote:

"It’s pride that prevents reconciliation to God, because it will not allow a man to repent. A man must be completely devoid of pride to acknowledge before his family and his friends and the entire community that the whole course of his life has been wrong, and that he is now entirely dependent upon and subject to a higher authority and power."

Are you a proud person? What’s it going to take for you to humble yourself before the Lord and surrender your life to Him? Will your health have to be broken? Your marriage? Will it take a financial disaster? The death of a loved one? Or the disappointment of a child or other close relative?

It shouldn’t take a catastrophe or hardship to humble us before the Lord. There are plenty of things in life that ought to keep us humble. Let me share three of them with you.

1. Exposure to other people.

The more you get out of your own little backyard and the more you travel and see other places and people, the more you realize there’s always someone better than you.

The second thing that ought to keep us humble is:

2. The memory of past failures.

I think people who are arrogant must have short memories. How can we be proud when we remember the dumb things we have done? What right do any of us have strutting around, puffed up with pride when we have made fools of ourselves countless times in the past.

But the third and most important thing that ought to keep us humble is:

3. Comparison to Jesus Christ.

When we open up the Bible and we see how perfect and good and righteous Jesus Christ is and how weak and ineffective we are in comparison, how can we help but be humble and teachable?

Years later after Saul’s conversion he wrote:

On the road to Damascus the Lord humbled Saul and he became a new man. And that brings me to the second thing that happened to Saul.

You see, we often measure success in terms of statistics and accomplishments, but God measures success in terms of sacrifice and scars. A good question we should ask ourselves is, “How successful would God consider me?”

Now, I want you to notice an important point about Saul’s conversion process and I think it helps to correct two erroneous and opposite extremes when it comes to baptism. The first extreme is overemphasizing baptism. There are some people who so overemphasize baptism that you get the impression that all you have to do is get a person dunked in water and they will be saved. If you ask them, “How is a person saved,” they will say something like, “They’ve got to get baptized.” Well, yes a person will need to be baptized. But more important than that is: have they placed their faith in Jesus Christ? Do they have a repentant, humble, submissive spirit to Jesus as Savior and Lord? Without genuine faith, humble repentance, and a submissive spirit to Jesus Christ, baptism won’t make any difference. Baptism doesn’t save us. Jesus save us through our faith that we place in Him.

But then there is the opposite extreme of underemphasizing baptism. Some people completely divorce baptism from the conversion process. But I want you to notice a detail about Saul’s conversion that we find in Acts chapter 22. In Acts 22, Saul is later called Paul, and he is telling about his conversion experience. In verses 15 and 16, Saul is retelling what Ananias said to him.

Think about this: Saul had met Jesus on the Damascus Road. He had submitted to Jesus, he called Him Lord. He did exactly what Jesus commanded him to do. He fasted and prayed for three days. He even received a miraculous healing. But he still needed to be baptized to have his sins washed away and to receive the Holy Spirit. Baptism is not how we are saved, it is when we are saved. Baptism is not the means of salvation, it is the occasion of salvation.

The Bible says:

We are saved by God’s grace through placing our faith in Jesus Christ at baptism. Baptism is a part of the conversion experience. We need to avoid the extremes of overemphasizing and underemphasizing the role of baptism in the conversion experience.

But Saul was converted and then he was transformed in a lot of different ways. Let me mention two of them before we close. First of all God gave him:

1. A new attitude.

Marching into Damascus Saul who later became known as Paul was arrogant and proud, but later he writes, “I’m the least of all the Apostles. I’m the chief of sinners. I’m a wretched man.”

When you come to know Jesus Christ, He gives you not a demanding, aggressive, assertive spirit, but a submissive, humble spirit. The Bible says:

The second transformational quality we see in Saul is:

2. A new ambition.

Years later he would write:

Saul could say, “I once was concerned with status and prestige, I wanted to serve on the Jewish Sanhedrin, and now I’m concerned with serving Jesus Christ and going to heaven when I die and taking as many people with me as I possibly can.”

If you’re concerned with status, accumulation of wealth, the approval of others and the pleasures of this world, God wants to humble you and change you. He wants you to be free from the burdening ambitions of this life so that you can begin loving Him with all your heart and serving others, for there you will find peace, fulfillment and everlasting life.

And when that happens, your friends will be dumbfounded. They’ll say, “You’re giving your money away. How much are you giving to the church?” Or, “You mean you’ve got to go home and go to bed so you can get up and go to church tomorrow morning?” This party is just beginning.

They don’t understand, but there’s a new ambition in your life: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to live your life for Him.

Dale Evans, the wife of Roy Rogers, said, shortly after her conversion to Christ, “All my life, I’ve searched for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but I found what I really needed at the foot of the cross.”

So did Saul of Tarsus, and so can you.