Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Every single person has something called a worldview.

A worldview is simply our understanding of our world, the purpose of life, and how we fit into it.

There are many different worldviews because people believe very different things regarding our world and our overall purpose.

Some people have an atheistic worldview and they see life as a cosmic fluke.

As a result of this worldview, everything the atheist sees is seen through a lens of cosmic abnormality.

We aren’t supposed to be here.

Life is due to chance.

As a result, there truly isn’t a purpose to life and we should do whatever we believe in our heart and mind to be best.

Many people operate with this type of worldview.

There are other worldviews, as we know people who believe in “god” but don’t hold to a Christian worldview.

They believe that there is some sort of supernatural force out there but they don’t know who or what it is.

As Christians, we hold to a Christian worldview, and we see things in our world through the lens of Scripture.

We let the Bible tell us what is right and wrong rather than our culture dictating right and wrong.

Al Mohler talks often in his daily podcast about adhering to a Christian worldview and how we naturally see things differently than the rest of our unbelieving world simply because we look at God’s Word to tell us how to think, live, and respond.

Whenever your worldview tells you that your purpose in life is to work really hard with the hopes that your good works will make you special and receive good from the world, you’ll work really hard but you’re ultimately doing it for selfish purposes.

Did you know that many people in our world operate with this idea?

Social media is a hotspot for such interaction.

We see people in our world act extremely nicely to others but they don’t act nicely in order to forge a friendship or to make someone else feel good… Their motive for acting nice is to do what?

To sell them something.

We are naturally selfish people and it’s so easy to see through that lens.

What we have to be reminded of, church, is that Jesus changes the way that we think.

He changes the way we live.

He gives us a new purpose and a new lens to see the world through!

Jesus changes everything about us and His Word promises this type of change as we see that we are born again - we are a new creation - as a child of God.

This is good news!

This morning as we make our way to Acts 9, we will see the power of God’s grace in the life of Saul.

We met Saul a couple chapters ago at the stoning of Stephen.

We noted how he was persecuting the Church.

Now we will see this same man fall to his knees and have his entire world flipped upside down.

I pray that as we study this morning, you would examine your heart and evaluate if Jesus has flipped your world upside down.

Are you serving Him or are you still seeking to serve yourself?

Let’s read this morning

Who Was Saul? (1-3)

We read in this text a relatively popular story: The Damascus Road experience as Saul encounters the resurrected Christ and is changed forevermore!

This is a wonderful story with implications that continue to reverberate in the church to this day.

But let’s consider the context and the magnitude of this story for a moment.

Who is Saul at this moment in time?

He’s not the passionate missionary that we see later on in the book of Acts.

He’s not the expert public Christian speaker as we’ll see at Mars Hill in Athens.

He’s not even a friend of Christians at this point in time… He’s an enemy of the cross and is persecuting the bride of Christ.

Why is Saul doing this?

Is Saul an evil person who intentionally wants to be a jerk?

No.

We read that he is zealous for the law.

He believes that he is in the right and a faithful follower of Yahweh and, as a result, he desires to persecute these heretical followers of Jesus Christ.

Whenever we believe something that is incorrect there will naturally be consequences.

Say that you’re preparing to bake some cookies and you think the recipe calls for you to bake them at 400 degrees but in reality, you’re supposed to bake them at 350.

You believe that you’re right, but just because you think you’re right it doesn’t always mean that you are.

There is a consequence for following the directions incorrectly.

In this scenario you just have a bad batch of cookies, but we know the consequences for believing something that is wrong can be far more severe than just that.

Let’s say that you believe that it is safe to turn left from the church parking lot onto Highway J.

You look both directions and it appears as though it’s safe.

You believe you’re good to go!

And as you turn, a semi truck tops the hill going 50mph.

You might believe that you’re safe one moment and the next moment you realize that you’re not so safe.

Actions have consequences, and even if we believe that we’ve done the right thing, there are times where we are simply wrong.

Saul believed that persecuting Christians was the right thing to do.

He defended his actions by saying that he was being a faithful servant of God.

Saul called himself at this point in time a pharisee of pharisees

This wasn’t a man who was lacking much!

In fact, this was a guy who had guts and had strong belief that he was following the law perfectly.

He was a pharisee of pharisees.

He had studied under the greatest teacher of the law of his day, Gamaliel as we saw back in Acts 5:33-42.

This man seemed to have it all figured out… Yet, he will eventually call himself the chief of sinners.

He will say that he was lost.

He would lost his legendary status with the Roman and Jewish authorities and eventually be thrown into the same prisons that he threw Christians into.

Who is this man?

He was a passionate Jew who believed he was in the right.

Look in our text, we see that he was breathing threats and murder against followers of the Way.

This was not a nice man - if you were a Christian, he wanted to see you thrown in jail or worse.

Why was this the case?

Because many Jews viewed Christians as not only a threat, but as people who had perverted the Scriptures and had invented a false religion.

This was of paramount concern for Saul and others.

Do you know that there are people in our world today who are sincere and genuine followers of their respective religion who are equally as lost and confused as Saul was? It’s easy to confuse sincerity and belief with correctness.

The reality of the situation is that Saul was wrong.

He worked really hard, but he believed in the wrong thing.

Likewise, there are people today who try really hard and are sincere Jews, Muslims, Atheists, Mormons, and others who genuinely might be good people!

But those things don’t mean that you are following the correct worldview.

We read in Scripture that there is one way and that way isn’t an ideology, religion, or work, it’s a person and His name is Jesus Christ as John 14:6 shares with us

Jesus makes it black and white.

We read in the Bible that before Christ, we were all lost.

Maybe our past wasn’t as checkered as Saul’s was as he persecuted the Church and threw Christians into prison, but we all have a past.

What I want to be perfectly clear on this morning, friends, is that God knows your past and wants to change you from those former ways and beliefs.

Consider God’s grace in this text with Saul.

Saul was an enemy of the cross, he was killing Christians, yet we see that God has a plan for his life and God’s grace is sufficient to save even a man like him.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, if God can turn a terrorist into a missionary - He can change your life too.

Consider, has Jesus changed your life?

Have you experienced His grace and provision in your life?

Have you been raised to walk in newness of life?

Was God Done With Saul? (4-9)

Luke tells us that Saul is on his way to Damascus in verse 3.

This man had a vendetta against Christians of all shapes and sizes and Jerusalem wasn’t his only work zone - he wasn’t going to rest until the blood of Christians was spilt across the region.

Saul might’ve been the first leader of persecution against the Church, but he wouldn’t be the last.

Did you know that it is estimated that more Christians have died for their faith in the last century than in all the previous centuries of the Church combined?

Why is that the case?

Because Christians have always been a persecuted people to some extent.

Jesus told us as much in John 15 as He said

Saul persecuting the Church wasn’t something out of left field - Jesus said that His followers would be persecuted.

We look around our world today and we see Christians being persecuted, kidnapped, tortured, and even killed and we wonder why it’s happening.