Today I Got Up Different

Introduction (Antithesis)

Looking at your faces, I can see that many of you are perplexed! No, this isn’t what you’re used to. By now, the person doing the ordination and installation would be before you giving me the charge of the pastor straight out of 1 Tim 3! But pastor has decided to follow God’s lead on this one and place me, the candidate before you. So consider this as my first pastoral address. As such and for the time that is ours, permit me to speak to you today from an existential perspective.

Whenever we see that word word in the counseling and behavioral health realm, we link it with its meaning of having to do with our existence. Nothing shakes a person up more than the experience of almost not existing! Nothing bothers us or grips the very fiber of our being like God putting us on our backs and we find ourselves looking up not knowing whether to pray or cry, whether we’ll live or die. Nothing gets to us quite like an existential crisis! Nurse Nessa Coyle calls it the “existential slap”—that moment when a dying person first comprehends, on a gut level, that death is close.

So many of us today take life for granted. We assume we’re going to lie down and wake up the next morning. There’s always tomorrow I’ve got time to get it done. It’s not until something threatens our existence that we take our lives seriously.

We ought to live with integrity.

We ought to labor with diligence (it’s ok, y’all can help me early in my introduction)

We ought to lead with vision.

We ought to love with sincerity.

We ought to laugh with freedom.

We ought to obey the Lord

Yet most of us choose to complain rather than simply doing what the Lord has called us to do.

By the time we get to chapter nine, Jesus has promised to send the Holy Spirit and ascends to heaven before their very eyes. We’ve had the upper room experience and Peter’s Holy Ghost filled sermon, which resulted in over 3,000 being converted. Peter and John have healed the lame man at the Beautiful Gate. They’ve been arrested, Ananias and Sapphira have fallen dead at the apostles’ feet. Stephen has preached a powerful sermon, sees Jesus standing on the right hand of the father and is subsequently stoned to death. Simon the sorcerer is saved, and the eunuch has been healed.

Now, we’re following Saul’s journey to salvation some 3 1/2 years after Christ’s ascension. You know Saul…the pharisee, the scholar, the tent maker, the persecutor of the Christ’s followers. The same Saul who looks after the coats of the men who stoned Stephen to death back in Acts 7. The very same Saul who would later become Paul and go on to write 13 of the 27 books in the New Testament…that Saul. He has gone to the church and gotten permission to act as their deputy so-to-speak so he can arrest believers. He’s continuing his pursuit and persecution of the believers and all of a sudden, we find Saul smack dab in the middle of an existential crisis. That’s the story. Now let’s journey together and I’ll do my best to give you what God gave me about this story as it relates to our story.

Thesis

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to know let you know that it doesn’t matter what you do in this life. When God has a call on you, He will find you where you are and bring it to pass.

Relevant Question

That leads us to a question; and the question simply is this. How do you know when God is getting ready to use you for ministry? What does He do to get our attention? What did you do with the second chance He gave you?

Synthesis

I. The first thing God does when He’s tired of us playing around with our calls, gifts, and talents is He interrupts our plans in order to enact his own.

Not many of you know my story. I have walked a very long road in a short span of time. Taking different paths, running from God, three years of seminary, serving in other ministries, but never quite getting where I thought I would be. But if I were completely honest with you, I would tell you that even though I knew I was supposed to be a pastor, I never wanted to be. I once heard pastor Rod Parsley say, “If you can find anything else to do, then I beg you to do it!” Dr. Jamal Bryant would later come along and preach a message at the installation of Bishop Marvin Sapp called, “I Think I Want To Do Something Else.” That was me, I didn’t want this life. I had other things on my mind! Y’all know I love food and cooking. I wanted to be an executive pastry chef on a Disney Cruise ship! I did everything in my power to stay away from the pulpit. Then God put me in a place where I could no longer deny the call on my life.

Anybody ever been there? When God removes all of your excuses and you no longer see a way out of it? When he puts you in a place where you have no choice but to say yes Lord.

I said yes; then life slowed down. I sped up, but it slowed down. Here I was, I had finally accepted my call and the momentum stopped! Can I just preach to myself today? I can’t preach to you if I can’t preach to me! Because you see, this is the part of the process where we mess up! We begin putting conditions on God and try to supervise His performance. And when nothing happens, we find ourselves mad at God because God ain’t acting like God. He’s moving too slow for us and it feels like it’s never going to happen. I’ve done my part, why hasn’t the door opened yet? We’re caught between the prophecy, the promise, and the position; life is at a a standstill, and we decide to do our own thing. Oftentimes, in the process of getting things caught up, nip tucked, tied down, and dressed right! we lose ourselves And we wind up on the road to Damascus, sitting in the dust of our past as it clouds the road leading to our future. And out of that dust we hear a voice. The voice beckons and we kick it back and cast it aside. The voice gets louder and we cover our ears because we want to do our own thing.

Lean in a lil closer child of God let me (as the elders say) hope you right long in here.

Understand something when God has a calling on your life you can ignore it, you can run from it all you want, but you can’t stop it!

You won’t leave this earth until God’s promises and purposes are fulfilled in your life!

But much like Saul, we are determined to do what we set out to do! It’s our way or no way! It doesn’t matter how much we know about God, how many times He has proven Himself to us, it doesn’t matter our socioeconomic status, how much money we have, nor our educational achievements. It doesn’t matter where we are in our lives; at the point of impatience, we begin to ignore God! We know what we want, we know where we’re headed, and we don’t have time for God today! But God keeps on pursuing us. He has a plan for our life and it hasn’t come to pass yet. We can’t see it, but God has ordained it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.!!! But we’re querulous and we want it now!

Saul was on his way to arrest the followers of Christ. He’s headed to Damascus. Now walk with me for a minute here. He went to the church to get the letters giving him permission to arrest these people.

See this is why churches find it so hard to sit folk down for doing wrong! They’re too busy relishing in it because that person can sing, dance, teach, or preach and we need fill-ins every once in a while! We need to get the people going!

The name Damascus means a well watered place. All my gardeners out there know anything you water will grow! That means this place is teaming with life and abundance. And he’s headed there to bring death, chaos and destruction. This is why you have to be careful of all these folks who claim to come in the name of the Lord! Everybody got a word from the Lord. Some of them aren’t holy, they’re hellish! And they’ll take your ministry down with them if you let them. Along the way, he met the very man he didn’t believe in! Jesus told Saul, “It’s hard to kick against the pricks.”

That was an old Greek proverb, but it was also familiar to the Jews and anyone who made a living in agriculture. It was referring to what’s called an ox goad. That was a stick with a pointed piece of iron on its tip used to prod the oxen when plowing. The farmer would prick the animal to steer it in the right direction. Sometimes the animal would rebel by kicking out at the prick, that just made the prick dig deeper into the flesh. In essence, the more the ox rebelled, the more it suffered. Jesus was basically saying you fighting a losing battle son. Ain’t hurting nobody but yourself.

II. That’s why the next thing God does is He blinds you to distractions

The Bible says in verse 8 that Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. Look here, he started out with a tainted vision of his purpose. Check this, his encounter with his actual purpose caused him to go blind.

Many times, when we come to grips with what God really wants us to do, we find ourselves searching for direction. We don’t know which way to go or how to go about doing it.

When we speak of blindness in this text, many theologians like to equate this to spiritual blindness. But can I tell you ladies and gentlemen, the Bible describes it as physical blindness. You can be all deep and spiritual if you want to, but the Bible says he saw no man! Saul, and the men with him, heard the Lord, but, as verse 7 makes clear, they saw no one. He was blind for three days as a result of his rebellion.

Listen, we spend so much time bucking and running from God until we don’t see the damage it’s causing. The biggest deterrence to your walk with God is people. We worry more about what they have to say instead than what God has already said!

They become distractions, detractors of the vision God has for us. We see everything but the things of God. Sometimes, God has to distort our vision so we can’t see our distractions.

Understand something ladies and gentlemen, what we see sometimes dictate our motives. Saul looked at the followers and saw blasphemers. So he sought to stop them in their tracks for lying about a messiah and His being raised from the dead. He never sought to look at them as people, he looked at them as fools! This was a distraction that would have kept him from reaching that very same nation of people!

Sometimes, we become blinded by the motives and inspirations of those around us! “Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.” Y’all better hear me good on this fine Sunday afternoon. But here’s the tension in the text … those same men who led him by the hand into Damascus … left him by himself. Blind and helpless! The Bible doesn’t say they led him by the hand and stayed … it says HE STAYED for three days.

Some folk don’t reveal who they really are until you’re in trouble and need some help along the way.

It’s a hard pill to swallow when you realize the people you depended on the most during your journey only cared about the journey when it made them look good.

And when they can no longer use you, when you start saying no, when they realize they can’t get nothing out of you … they toss you to the side like a dirty rag.

These men were willing to help him further a false objective, but couldn’t stand by him when he needed them the most! As long as they looked good for the priests they were all in. I ain’t gonna touch that, but you better listen to me carefully children of the Most High God. People, our allegiances, false friends, workplace relationships, and toxic kinships will keep you from fulfilling your purpose in God.

I’m about to make y’all career church folk mad. Saul’s vision was distorted through his training as a pharisee. That means the church messed him up! He knew what he was taught and believed what he believed. He didn't agree with his teacher Gamaliel. Gamaliel basically said let God deal with it. He said if the movement is from God then it cannot be stopped!

You just missed your shout. Because anything that God blessed you with can't be stopped or taken by man.

They may not like it, but they can't stop it

They may try to make you feel bad about it, but you keep on smiling

They may laugh at you, but God will make them need you.

Saul didn't feel that way. They had to be stopped, and he was too prideful to admit he might have been wrong. He was what we call a Shammaite Pharisee, very militant in his approach to the law. There was one way! That sort of tunnel vision will cripple you in life and in ministry!

That’s why you’ve got to be careful of the cliques in the church

Only ushers allowed over here

Only the mothers can go there

If you’re not in the choir we can’t associate with you

If you’re not a deacon you can’t sit here

Pastors too good to speak to folk they just finished preaching to

Get yourself together!

You’ve lost your sight! You’re spiritually blind and leading the blind!

With God, there are no cliques! There are no theological presuppositions. God said I am that I am. In other words, don’t paint a picture of me because I’ve already shown myself. I’m God, I don’t need no fixing up! I’ve had conversations with some of the greatest theological minds in this area and some others and they all have their opinions. Everybody wants you to do it their way. Nobody’s talking about doing things God’s way anymore.

That’s what’s wrong with the church today. We’ve got preachers compromising the Gospel for the sake of numbers and they have forsaken the souls. We are conforming to the standards of those around us because they want to be entertained. We’ve got Preachers that have been preaching for 10 years still sounding like it’s their trial sermon; couldn’t exegete a text if you paid them. Educate yourselves, shift your focus! We’ve got folks who’ve never preached a sermon a day in their life; never even put one together, telling preachers how it oughta sound. What it ought look like and how it should make them feel. They want us to make them feel good.

Pardon my candor beloved, but I don’t care about how you feel! I was commissioned; we were commissioned to preach the Gospel of Jesus the Christ to a dying and sinful world. And though the Gospel may be the good news, it doesn’t always make you feel good. The only feeling we want from you is repentance! You can’t tell me how to talk about Him; I’ve got too much experience with him and you won’t even tell somebody what He’s done for you! Until you’ve put a sermon together or preached to a crowd of folk just like you, do us all a favor and close the portal that rests between your nose and your neck.

Stop letting folk distract you from what God told you to say and do and get back on the wall. Make no mistake about it beloved; people, pursuit, and purpose are not one and the same. God will use people to help you in pursuit of your purpose, but you gotta be careful you don’t focus your attention so much on the people that you abandon your pursuit, or you’ll miss your purpose altogether.

III. That’s why the last thing God does when he wants to change your life for ministry is He changes your perspective on things.

Saul ... I’m just telling the story. Can I tell the story? Saul is approached by a man named Ananias!

Ain’t it amazing how we rebel against God and then when he knocks us on our backside we wanna listen to what he has to say!!

The text tells us that Ananias entered into the house; and put his hands on him. And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.

Let me tell you something; I don’t care how big, bold, or bad you think you are. You can be the best of the best or the worst of the worst. It’s impossible to come into contact with Jesus and ever be the same again! You ought not be preaching and cussing. Saul went down one way, and came up different! When he got up he started preaching Jesus in the synagogues! What was it that changed in him? What caused his mind to shift from tyrant to crusader? From antagonist to protagonist?

Something shifted when Ananias laid hands on Saul. Something inside of him changed! Something supernatural happens when the right person lays hands on you, when the right person speaks a word into your life!

That’s why you've gotta be careful who you let touch you! Because some touches heal while others hurt.

Some are designed to release you while others keep you in bondage.

Many of us don’t even realize what happened! We don't understand why we’re stuck. We only see things one way, just can’t find our way out of the situation because We only look at things the way others have spoken them in our lives! What they initiate, we activate because we've visualized it. And what we perceive denotes our reality. We find ourselves dealing with that existential crisis I told y’all about in my introduction.

At the core of the crisis is trying to find yourself when you don’t recognize yourself. How to love yourself when you don’t even like yourself. Trying to make sense out of something when you don’t even know what it’s supposed to look like.

Fighting yourself while faking it in front of everyone else! I might look like I’ve got it all together, but inside I’m a mess. I’m a wretch undone. I’m a loaded shotgun with a bad aim don’t push me today. You might get just what you looking for. You want my title, but can’t carry the weight! Preach Pastor Smith! Y’all just don’t understand the preacher’s plight. Can’t even fathom your pastor’s tears!

Everything is looking like a waste of my time

Nothing is going right

The deacons done lost their minds

The choir won’t sing right

Folk I prayed for lying on me

I’ve got more stab wounds than crutches to lean on

I’m lonely, got nobody to talk to

Can’t have nice things cause you think I’m stealing the money

I’m tired

I don’t have the energy today

I’m frustrated

I wanna give up

This won’t work

That needs fixing

I’m about to have a mental breakdown

I know there’s a call on my life, but I don’t care

I don’t wanna sing anymore

I can’t preach to these folks anymore

I’m tired of praying

I don’t feel like fasting

I don’t want to forgive them in fact

I wanna cuss everybody out

She talks too much

I oughta punch him in the mouth

I feel like throwing in the towel

I wanna leave the church

But there’s something...

Bishop Walter Hawkins asked the question what is this that I feel deep inside? That keeps setting my soul afire. What is this that makes people say I'm mad and strange; that makes me want to run on in Jesus' name. It makes me love all my enemies and it makes me love my friends. Won't let me be ashamed to tell the world that I've been born again. Whatever it is; it won’t let me hold my peace.

Something made Saul get up different! When Ananias placed his hands on Saul the Bible says he was filled with the Holy Spirit, healed of his blindness, received water baptism, and began to eat and regain his strength. I’ve got a problem with this text. I’ve got a bone to pick and a fish to scale with God about this right here. Because I want to know why did it take all of that for Him to let me know He had work for me to do. Why did I have to go through all of that just to get here? All of the pain, the grief, the confusion. Folks lying on me, workplace strife, people trying to get me fired. Being misused; contemplating, initiating and almost executing the taking of my own life. Why did God have to put me through that in order to show me this? How did I get from stressed and depressed to pastoring and blessed? And what does Saul’s story have to do with today’s occasion?

Conclusion

Saul’s conversion experience was quick and dramatic in one sense, but it also involved a process, a process of at least three days. It was so profound, there are three accounts of it! Two of them recounted in his own words! It shook him to his core. Anybody ever had God shake you up? Saul underwent a spiritual transformation; a transformation not unlike my own. It happened quickly, yet it took a while. I found myself sitting in the dust on the road to Damascus in the presence of the Almighty! This road, it’s long, there’s about 135 miles between Jerusalem and Damascus. It’s about a 40 hour trip by foot or camel. It’s a lonely walk; it’s hot, it’s rocky; it’s desolate. That means you’ve got nowhere to go, you’ve got face the journey ahead. You’ve got to spend some time alone with with your thoughts. You’ve got to come face to face with your own demons and make some tough decisions. You’ve got to talk to God about your situation and do something different.

You see, the road to Damascus theoretically refers to a sudden turning point in a person’s life.

I came to tell you that just like Saul this preacher ain’t perfect!

I haven’t always done what thus saith the Lord!

I’ve lied, I’ve made mistakes, I’ve treated people wrong

I haven’t always been the best husband, brother, father, cousin or friend

But just like Saul God found me where I was

Just like Saul, I had an encounter with the risen savior

God stopped me on the road to Damascus

God touched me

God chose me

God decided to use me

He called me faithful

He anointed me

He set me up

He exalted me

He made me everything he needed me to be for His glory

Just like Saul! I went down one way, and I got up different!

I looked at my hands and they looked new!

Looked down at my feet and they did too!

And like my auntie Carolyn Rushing would say

I felt like walking

I felt like talking

I felt like praying

I felt like singing

I felt like shouting

Cause this morning when I rose

I got up different!!!

And that same Jesus who did it for me can do it for you

The same Jesus who held my hand will hold your hand

The same Jesus that picked me up

The same Jesus that turned me all the way around

Is the same Jesus that went up to a hill called Calvary. I'm feeling good and Baptist right long in here

They tell me they hung him high

Somebody said they stretched him wide

I hear tell they pierced him in his side

Somebody told me that he never said a word, but he purchased my salvation.

They laid him in a borrowed tomb!

Oh but Sunday morning!! Somebody shout he got up! I said he got up

And when he got up, he got up different.

He got up with all power in his hands

If you believe he got up why don't you shout yeah!