25th May 2025

New Testament Heroes 16 – 25/05/25 – Martin Mowat

Readings: Acts 9:17-25 & Acts 9:26-31

As you know we’re working our way through the book of Acts, and we’re doing this for two reasons.
One is that we are learning from the heroic example of some of the key figures.
The other is that seeing how the church was born and brought up, in the hands of these heroes of the faith, helps us better understand who we are, and who we should be as a church today.

Before we get stuck in to any heroes today, can I just say that there’s one unsung hero that has been present throughout the series, and that’s the Holy Spirit, without whose intervention the church would not have been born, and without whose constant support it would never have developed in the way that it has. In two weeks’ time it will be Pentecost and our good friend David will be preaching. I have no idea what he’ll be saying but I’m looking forward to hearing him. 

Ananias, last week’s hero – recognised God’s call – put aside his understandable human fears and concerns, stepped way out of his comfort zone, put his trust in what God had said to him, and reached out to a man in desperate need of a Christian who would befriend him.

As I have moved forward in my own christian walk, I can look back and see how God has done that for me too.

God told him why he needed to go, “This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel.” and had told him that Saul was praying. For Ananias, that was enough.

At the risk of repeating myself, he did several interesting and inspiring things.  What lessons can we learn from Ananias today.
- He recognised God’s voice, and his call …
- He put aside his understandable human fears and concerns …
- He stepped way out of his comfort zone ….
- He put his trust in what God had said to him ….
- And reached out to someone in desperate need of a Christian who would befriend them.

Now we’re going to turn our attention to Saul.

Did you notice that Luke is still referring to him as Saul, and not Paul? Was there a moment when his name was changed as was the case with Simon Peter?

Apparently not, according to one site I visited. Although we know nothing at all about his family background, except that he was a descendent of the tribe of Benjamin, it’s possible that his full name was something like Paulus Beniamin Saulos. 

We often have this misconception of Saul of Tarsus becoming the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, but actually it wasn’t until chapter 13, when he’s in Cyprus with his friend Barnabas, perhaps as many as 15 years later, that Luke starts to refer to him as Paul. 

That’s all a bit of an aside, but for our convenience, I’m now going to start referring to him as Paul – it’s easier.

We left him last week being befriended by Ananias, being baptised, and that would have been in public, and also being filled with the Holy Spirit.’  

He hadn’t seen any of this coming, but now he was opening himself to personal change.  It’s interesting to note in passing that Jesus did not hark on about what Paul had done in the past, but on what he would do in the future, which was to “be his chosen instrument” taking the gospel to the gentiles. In his eyes the past is the past. He sees us in the same way, it’s our future that he’s concerned about.

Paul, who had been tearing the church down, was now intent on building it up, and he didn’t waste any time. We just heard that he spent several days with the disciples in Damascus and that straight away he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God,astonishing all those who heard him.  Well, you would be astonished, wouldn’t you? 

But it seems that quite quickly they became more than astonished. They didn’t trust him and they thought that what he was doing was probably all a huge deception, that he was like a spider, trying to lure them into his web. So, they wanted to get rid of him, and permanently.

That’s not a very Christian attitude, is it? In their defence, they felt that the very future of the church was under threat.

How easy it is to make judgements, and then based on those judgements, to take the law into our own hands, to work out our own solutions, and then do something stupid.

Shouldn’t they rather have got on their knees and asked God what was going on? Shouldn’t they have asked for revelation and for wisdom? Shouldn’t they have trusted God to defend his church?

But no.  They were afraid. Their personal security came first. 

And so, reminiscent of Joshua’s spies in Jericho his followers took him by night and lowered him in a basket through an opening in the wall.

 When he got back to Jerusalem, not surprisingly, he got a pretty frosty reception there too, for the same reasons. 

But God was one jump ahead.  In the same way that he sent Ananias in Damascus, he sent our hero Barnabas, who bravely took him under his wing and brought him to the apostles. 

Once Barnabas had explained to them how Saul on his journey had seen the Lord and that the Lord had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had preached fearlessly in the name of Jesus, the apostles accepted him.

But Paul’s troubles weren’t over.  The Hellenistic Jews, do you remember, they were the ones who had adopted the Greek language and culture, they took a turn at trying to kill him. 

So the believers took him down to the port of Caesarea, put him on a boat back to his home town of Tarsus, up in Turkey, and there he seems to have gone to ground for what was perhaps as long as 10 years. What he did during that time we don’t really know.

But whatever he did, those 10 years must have raised lots of questions in Paul’s mind. Questions like ”What are you up to, Lord?” 

But I expect those 10 years were also important years of development for Paul, of preparation, of maturing, of character change, and so on. 

How might God be preparing us for what he wants us to do? Even when nothing seems to be happening in our lives, God will be at work if we let him.

And then, one day seemingly out of the blue, our hero Barnabas showed up at his door, and Paul was ready. That’s another story that we’ll come on to.  As for the book of Acts, it now turns its attention back to our other hero, Peter.