Against Jesus?
““As I was on the road, approaching Damascus about noon, a very bright light from heaven suddenly shone down around me.
I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’
“‘Who are you, lord?’ I asked.
“And the voice replied, ‘I am Jesus the Nazarene, the one you are persecuting.’ The people with me saw the light but didn’t understand the voice speaking to me. “I asked, ‘What should I do, Lord?’ ”
For our staff devotion we read through the account of Paul’s testimony before the crowd in Jerusalem.
This was the beginning of a captivity that would continue until his death.
We might think going into captivity marked the beginning of the end for Paul but he was actually just getting warmed up.
He would travel to Rome, speak to kings and write a significant portion of the New Testament we call the Pauline Epistles.
The essence of his message in our passage is this:
I was against Jesus until I met Jesus.
I am a professed Christian and yet I need to take inventory of my life. Am I meeting Jesus or is my energy and devotion kicking against him?
Each of us can meet him on the road. I’m so grateful he meets us even when we’re driving the wrong direction.
I think it might be better if stopped to ask for direction but in our neglect of this he sometimes needs to knock us down before he can pick us up.
I can be grateful for this too because I’d rather see him from a prone position than gallop on upright in blind oblivion.
And when he comes may I truly hear his voice and see His light shining so that the things that I thought I saw would fade and things that I have not seen would become clear as rising sun.
So may His light and His voice arrest the fog of our own self determined life
And may we ask with Paul, “What should I do Lord?”