Jesus 4 Everybody: A Movement of Radical Welcome

We read God's word out loud together. This is about Saul.

As he traveled and was nearing Damascus, a light from heaven suddenly flashed around him. Falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" "Who are you?" "I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting," he replied. "But get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do." The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the sound, but seeing no one. Saul got up from the ground, though his eyes were open, he could see nothing. So they took him by the hand and led him into Damascus. He was unable to see for three days and did not eat or drink.

There was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias, and the Lord said to him in a vision, "Ananias." "Here I am, Lord," he replied. "Get up and go to the street called Straight, to the house of Judas and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul since he is praying there. In a vision, he has seen a man named Ananias coming and placing his hands on him so that he might regain his sight." "Lord," Ananias answered, "I have heard from many people about this man. How much harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. And he has authority here from chief priests to arrest all who call on your name." But the Lord said to him, "Go, for this man is my chosen instrument to take my name to Gentiles, kings, and afflictions. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name."

Ananias went and entered the house. He placed his hands on him and said, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road you were traveling has sent me to you that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit." At once, something like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight. Then he got up and was baptized. And after taking some food, he regained his strength.

When in Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him since he did not believe he was a disciple. Barnabas, however, took him and brought him to the apostles and explained to them how Saul had seen the Lord on the road and that the Lord had talked to him and how in Damascus he had spoken boldly in the name of Jesus. Saul was coming and going with them in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of Jesus. He conversed and debated with the Hellenistic Jews, but they tried to kill him. When the brothers found out, they took him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.

So the church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and was strengthened in their fear of the Lord and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, and it increased in numbers. — Acts 9:3-31

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

The Holy Spirit as the Main Character of Acts

We're studying this summer through the book of Acts, and we're looking at it through the lens of who is the main character. A lot of people might say the main character in this book is the man we're reading about this morning, Saul, known as the apostle Paul. But he's not the main character, neither is Peter, neither even is the baby early church. The Holy Spirit is the main character of the book of Acts, and that's the lens through which we're studying this entire book this summer.

I want to think this morning again about the person and work of the Holy Spirit. If I were to diagram for you a picture of the Trinity, it might look something like this. And I'm taking this from a man named Dale Bruner. If you read your New Testament, you read over and over about the relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son. God the Father delights in his son. Jesus praises the Father. The Father glorifies the Son. Jesus prays to the Father. There's this back and forth between how much the Father seems to delight in Jesus, how much Jesus seems to delight and praise the Father.

Now, if you notice my drawing, there's somebody missing: the Holy Spirit. And Dale Bruner, rightly I think, calls the Holy Spirit the shy member of the Trinity. So if I were to picture that on this board, here's where the Holy Spirit would be. The Spirit doesn't call attention to himself. The Spirit over and over calls attention to God the Father and our attention to Jesus the Son.

So you may be asking, why would we spend the summer then learning about the person and work of the Holy Spirit, if he's the shy member of the Trinity? If he doesn't want attention on himself, why would we look at this? And I have three reasons for this.

One is because there's lots of confusion around the person of the Holy Spirit. Lots of questions about whether I have to do something extra to receive the Spirit. The book of Acts will tell us about that.

Second is because I think Christians gain a lot of confidence when we really live into the sense of understanding of the Spirit's presence with us—how immediate and how present the Spirit is to us.

And third is I want you to be on the lookout for the Spirit's work.

The Spirit's at work all the time in this world, in the lives of other people. I want us to become observant and curious, and looking for the Spirit.

So I'm going to give you the application of the sermon right up front. You're not supposed to do this. A lot of you have heard sermons before—you know you don't do this. You get the application at the end, right? Here's the application: Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? That's the entire application of today's sermon.

Because we confess this all the time. We say the Apostles' Creed in this church regularly: "I believe in the Holy Spirit." Do you? Do we? We say we do, but functionally, do we? Do we actually expect the Spirit to be at work?

So today we're going to look at this passage in three parts. We're going to look at the welcome of the Holy Spirit, the welcome of the community of the Holy Spirit, and then finally, welcome, comma, Holy Spirit. Let's jump into this together.

Saul's Story: Barriers to Belief

Saul's story here is an excellent picture for us of how the Holy Spirit works in a person in conversion. He provides a great before, during, and after for this.

This morning, I want you to think of a name. I want you to think about the last person you might ever expect to become a Christian. Maybe it's somebody with intellectual barriers and objections. Maybe it's somebody who hates the church. Maybe it's somebody who finds even the practice of Christianity to be immoral. Do you have a name?

I'm guessing that the reason you picked that person is because of their objections, their barriers, their anger, their arguments against Christianity—and those stack up to make that person an impossible convert. But compare that person to Saul.

Saul had three levels of barriers against belief. First is moral barriers. Here's what he says in Philippians 3:

If anybody thinks he has reasons for confidence in his flesh, in his personal accomplishments, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews. As to the law, a Pharisee. As to zeal, a persecutor of the church. As to righteousness under the law, blameless. — Philippians 3

Saul is not saying, "I feel like I was a pretty good person before I met Jesus." He's saying according to how people are estimated in our culture, everybody else's estimation—I was better. I had all the resume, morally. This is not a person who's looking for Jesus. Let's be really clear about this. This is not a person we like those conversion stories about in the church—where the biker gang guy comes to faith, or the drug addict comes to faith, or somebody we consider really a problem comes to faith. This is a highly moral person.

But it instructs us about something. A person with high moral barriers to coming to faith, a person who's really, really good—that doesn't do anything to help a person come to faith. And in fact, it may be a barrier to that.

One writer says it this way: "It doesn't matter when the Titanic is going down, it doesn't matter if you're eight years old or an Olympic swimmer. You're not going to make it. It doesn't matter in the world's estimation if you are a very, very moral, righteous person or a very immoral person. There is a sense in which that doesn't count anything towards salvation. Everyone needs rescue."

We also see intellectual barriers in Saul. He's a scholar—the scholar among the New Testament converts in the book of Acts. What a scholar. In Acts 22, on trial, he gives this resume again before his trial:

I'm a Jew, born in Tarsus and Cilicia. I was brought up in the city, educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, zealous for God as all of you are this day. — Acts 22

In those few verses, he's giving you his list of educational background. He comes from the city of Tarsus, which is known as an intellectual center in the Roman Empire—rivals Alexandria, rivals Athens, furnished tutors for the imperial family. He received his Jewish learning in Jerusalem at the school of a very famous rabbi named Gamaliel. His training was thoroughly Jewish.

He shows himself over and over in his writings, and in his speech on the Areopagus—we'll read later this summer in Acts 17—to be a person of letters. He knows Greek philosophy. He knows the writers of his day, and he's masterful in handling the Greek language.

And here's a man who's predisposed in everything intellectually not to believe in God, not to believe in Jesus Christ, that God can become a man. Everything about his Jewish training had told him, God is one. That's the Shema.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

So for Saul of all people to go from "I believe in one God" to "I believe in God the Father, and there could be a God the Son"—this is intellectually impossible for him.

Let's say I gave you a map with all the cities and rivers and roads. As you navigate by this map, you realize you're not getting anywhere. You seem to be confused all the time. Well, that happens if you're mixed up about which way is north and which way is south. If you have your orientation off, everything reads backwards on that map.

So for Saul, everything in him was backwards from what God reveals to us in Jesus Christ. Everything in him was opposed intellectually, entirely to the consideration that Jesus Christ could be the Son of God. Intellectual barriers.

Now, here's what I want to say that nobody seems willing to say in our culture. We value sincerity, and if you're really sincere about what you believe or think, that's okay. We respect that, and that's good to respect that. But it is also true that someone can be sincerely wrong. Ask any math teacher. You don't get points for being sincere in math class. You get points for having the right answer. So it is possible to know lots of people who are intellectually way smarter than you, have lots of intellectual barriers to Christianity, and for that person to be sincerely wrong, because they've got the map upside down.

Emotional Barriers

Finally, emotional barriers. Look at verse one. We didn't read this, but it says that Saul came breathing threats and murder. The language there is that of a wild animal. In fact, that same term for what he's doing is used in the Septuagint to describe a wild boar. So here's Saul like a wild boar ravaging the church, killing Christians, dragging people out of their homes, putting them on trial. This is what Saul's orientation was. It's like a wild boar destroying a vineyard.

That's from Psalm 80.

He hated Christians. He hated Christianity. He hated the church.

Let me sum up all I'm saying about Saul in one word here: blind. The most operative image that's used throughout this passage is sight. Sight and an inability to see. Sight and blindness, eyes. The point is this—in this passage, God makes Saul able to see, unable to see physically, to show him that he had been unable to see spiritually. He was blind on the inside.

The Work of the Holy Spirit

I just want to push on this with you a little bit this morning. Without the Holy Spirit's work in a person's life, every person is blind and deaf to the message of the gospel. Maybe you've heard in church circles this is called total depravity. I prefer "total inability" to "total depravity" because total inability says that we are, by nature, blind, unable to find our way to Jesus. We would never choose him.

I remember hearing this illustration years ago. Imagine all of us are wearing blindfolds, and we're on a walk together. We're all in a line, hands on shoulders in front of somebody else, following one another. As we're walking along, somebody in front of us says, "Man, it feels like it's getting warmer. I guess that's the beach. I love the beach. I can't believe we're going to the beach. That's so great."

Well, as you're walking along, blindfolded, suddenly someone comes along and rips off your blindfold. And what you see is an entire line of people walking toward a chasm in front of them, an edge of a cliff with a giant smoldering fire at the bottom of it. And what that person has allowed you to do is to see what you thought was the beach is death.

This is what the Holy Spirit does in conversion. This is what the Holy Spirit does as we're walking along, moving toward death. We think it's life.

So here's the role of the Spirit in Saul's story and in every person's story. The Spirit has been called often the spiritus—the Spirit who remakes. That's this act called regeneration, making alive again. The Bible uses all kinds of different metaphors to talk about this. And here, blind to sight. When Jesus talks to Nicodemus, he talks about a person being born again. In Ezekiel, he talks about the dead bones being made alive again. In all of these, the Spirit is the one who initiates with sinners. The Spirit is the one who makes a person who is spiritually dead, spiritually blind, able to see, able to be reborn.

And this is the very first act in conversion. This is before there's a person laying hold of this and saying, "Yes, I do believe." This is before justification. This is before adoption. This is before the Spirit's work in sanctification or glorification.

This is the very first thing that happens for a person to come alive to believe is regeneration. Some of you are like, well, when does this happen? Theologians say this, my favorite answer, I don't know. We don't know. This is why some people's testimony is like, I can remember the day and the hour I became a Christian. Some of you are like that. And some of you are like, I think it was this year, this particular year in my past. And the reason is because timing of the Spirit's work in regeneration is mysterious. That's not revealed to us when that happens.

And let me just clarify this too. It doesn't happen when we baptize a baby. There's nothing we can do to make it so there's not—we don't believe in baptismal regeneration. Somehow, when I baptize a baby, perfect baby cry on cue, right? Like, suddenly, that's going to make this—we could make turn on the Holy Spirit switch. Can't do that. This is the Spirit's work.

But here's what we see over and over again. I want to make sure you understand this. God's yes is always stronger than anybody's no. Do you hear that? God's yes in Saul's life was stronger than all of his no's, his intellectual no's, his moral no's, his emotional no's. All of his commitments that said, no, no, no to Jesus, no, no, no to belief in this. The Spirit is the one who makes him alive when he's dead, and there's no indication that Saul at this point was like, I'm kind of a spiritual seeker. I've kind of been wrestling with this. Not at all. Saul, and this is what happens when Jesus speaks to him—Saul offers no resistance. God's yes stronger than our no.

The power of the Spirit, in many ways, is like the power of an acorn. I live in a neighborhood that still has sidewalks. I know some of you don't have those things, but we live in a really old neighborhood with concrete sidewalks. And if you try to walk and run on the sidewalks, you better be careful where you're going in our neighborhood because they're all broken, and they're all up and down. This is because we live in a city full of oak trees. And one of the things that's demonstrated over and over is the power of slow, tiny growth that's more powerful than concrete. The power of a little acorn stuck under a slab of concrete in the sidewalk in my neighborhood—the sidewalk doesn't stand a chance. And this is the same as the power I want to liken this to the power of the Holy Spirit. The power of the Spirit in conversion and regeneration is that same Spirit that has the power to break through concrete. All the concrete barriers, all the objections.

Now, let me be really clear. This doesn't mean that Saul's objections and barriers are unimportant. This doesn't mean you have a good friend who has all kinds of intellectual problems and philosophical problems and emotional barriers to believing. It doesn't mean that somehow those are all just erased. I mean, even through the process of a person studying and asking lots of questions and really wrestling, what is really at work—what we see over and over is really at work—the Spirit that's underneath all of that.

So again, my question: Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? Do you believe in the acorn power of the Holy Spirit in conversion, that God's yes is stronger than anybody's no? Do you believe that?

The Welcome of Community

The second thing that we see in this passage is not just the welcome of the Spirit for Saul, but the welcome of the community of the Spirit. I want you to consider several people in this passage had to grapple with the same question I just asked you. Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? Let me walk through them.

First, Ananias. This is not the same Ananias from Acts chapter five—a common name—but by God, by the Holy Spirit speaking through Ananias, he goes and visits Saul against his better judgment. I'd love to have heard the fuller version of Ananias' conversation with Jesus when Jesus said, go visit Saul. He'd be like, that's a good one, Jesus. Funny. Really funny. Right? And this would be like Jesus saying to you about, I don't know, twenty years ago, hey, we got somebody for you to visit. He's down at the Seven Eleven, tall, really long beard, named Osama bin Laden. Go for it. Right? This is unthinkable to Ananias. Saul, the enemy of the church? Saul, the one who's killing my friends? That's the one you want me to go visit?

See, Ananias had to wrestle with this same question. Do I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit? And eventually, we know by his actions that Ananias had to answer that question. He must have answered that question. Yeah. I guess I do, because he goes.

Second, Barnabas. This is the same Barnabas who we read about earlier, who gave a piece of land and laid the money at the feet of the apostles. And when Saul arrives in Jerusalem, the leaders of the church there are scared of him, of course. I mean, by this point, Homer's odyssey is like 700 years old.

Everybody knows the story of the Trojan horse. So you gotta believe Barnabas is like, this has gotta be a Trojan horse thing. Right? I'm gonna go visit Saul? That's who God wants me to go visit? And again, here's Barnabas asking the question, do I believe in the Holy Spirit? In the Holy Spirit's power to change anyone. And I think, again, by his radical welcome of Saul, by bringing him and presenting him to the rest of the church, Barnabas is saying, yeah, I guess I really do. I really do.

And finally, the church leadership in Jerusalem. I mean, this is the ultimate test case of their faith. I'm sure this is their Darth Vader, Voldemort, Sauron, all wrapped in one. Right? Like, yeah, right. This guy we have this baby church, and I sit with our session every month in our meetings. And if we had somebody like this showing up at our church, we'd be very, very careful. Right? We don't want to invite a shark into the goldfish tank. But again, this is what the early church leadership had to reckon with. Do we believe in the Holy Spirit? Do we believe that God can change anyone?

So again, my question for you: Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? It's evidenced by how we respond, by how we are welcoming. This passage also pushes us to ask the question, do we really believe that salvation is by faith, by grace alone?

Saul, who we're seeing his conversion, would later write this in First Corinthians:

God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. That would be us, just to remind you. God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the insignificant and despised things—that would be us—in order that no one could boast in his presence. — 1 Corinthians 1

I think most Christians honestly really believe, just deep down inside of us, we're just a little bit smarter, we're a little bit more moral, we're a little bit better than other people. That's why we're Christians. Not so. Not so. We're here because of the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit's work in you.

I wanna remind you of something. For every conversion story I know, except for one in my entire pastoral experience, there was an Ananias or a Barnabas. I only know one person who read the Bible and became a Christian by himself in my entire ministry. Everybody else I know, there was an Ananias who welcomed them. There was a Barnabas who welcomed them.

If you are here and a Christian this morning, I can almost guarantee that there is a name. There is a teacher, there's a mom or a dad, there's a sibling, there's a youth leader, there's a friend, there's somebody in your past who said, "You, do you believe this? You wanna come with me to this event? Do you wanna come with me?" Or raised you in a home where they said, "This is really real. This whole God thing, we're not making this up." There was an Ananias, there was a Barnabas in your life.

So anybody got a name? Anybody remember a name? Alright. On the count of three, I'm gonna ask you to say your names out loud. You ready? One, two, three.

Man, wow. That's awesome. Do you hear all those Ananias' and Barnabas' that God continues to raise up in the church? Guys, this is angelic history we're reading here. God is still doing this.

Our salvation is dependent entirely on the acorn-like work of the holy spirit in regeneration, but our faith is also dependent on the welcoming of community of the spirit, the church, the Ananias' and the Barnabas' who welcomed you. So we've talked about the welcome of the spirit, the welcome of the community of the spirit. Finally, I wanna end with this: Welcome, holy spirit. Do you believe in the holy spirit? Let's put our belief into practice.

How would we do that? We would do that by praying for people that we care about, people who are lost, for God to bring people who have every barrier to faith to faith by his work of regeneration, by bringing somebody from spiritual blindness to spiritual sight. So Christians, let me just remind you, we are people of prayer. We're people who believe that God wants to hear from us, and actually, in some sovereign way, uses our prayers for the accomplishing of his purposes in this world.

I love how Charles Spurgeon puts this. Famous preacher, he said:

If sinners be damned to hell, at least let them leap into hell over our dead bodies. If they perish, let them perish with our arms wrapped around their knees, imploring them to stay. If hell must be filled, let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go unwarned and unprayed for.

Jesus came to seek and to save the lost, and we see over and over in the gospels, his heart seems to be particularly drawn to the outsider. In First Timothy, it tells us that God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.

So when we pray for the salvation of people, we know we're praying something in alignment with God. Lest you want to play checkers with your reformed pastor this morning philosophically, don't use election as a way of checkmating me or thinking you can win this one. You know, Charles Spurgeon again said, it would be nice if the elect in Christ had a big E stamped on the back of their head, so we could tell who was saved and who's not. And then we'd know who to share the gospel with.

We do know that all God's elect will come to faith in him during their lives, but that won't happen until the day they're called home or until the Spirit makes them alive in him. And yet, we're called over and over again to pray. This same Jesus, who I believe believes in election, told us to pray for harvest workers for the harvest. Don't use election to get out of this call to pray for the lost, to pray over and over.

I think about the Old Testament. There are great stories of people like this. There's this little girl in Second Kings, and her Syrian captor is praying over this man, this general in the Syrian army, and she says,

If only my master would see the prophet who's in Samaria, he would cure him of his leprosy, and he would be saved. — 2 Kings 5

Consider the compassion Paul felt for his Jewish brothers and sisters. He said this:

If I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, I wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people. — Romans 9:2-3

Jesus instructed us to pray for harvest workers. So I want to call us this morning to pray for the lost. I'm not going to end the sermon the way I normally do, with a cute story or anecdote. I want to end us on the somber note of praying for the Holy Spirit's work in the lives of people we love.

I know there are people around you. I want to particularly call on you who are middle and high school students, because you're surrounded with people who are in your classes, on your teams, in your clubs with you, and to begin praying for God's salvation in the life of your friends. I know many of you don't have Christian friends, and you're longing for that. Let's pray for that.

Let's pray and cry out this morning for your family members. Many of you have brothers, sisters, parents, people you love dearly, and you spend Thanksgiving and Christmas and summer holidays with them. And it's hard, and you wrestle. Would you cry out to the Lord together?

Can we cry out for the Holy Spirit's work—that his yes would be stronger than any person's no? He's good for it. Let's go to the Lord in prayer together.

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Father, we thank you for your word. There's nothing like your word. Thank you for this challenge to our faith this morning. Lord, thank you for the challenge to our pride and belief that somehow we have something to do with our salvation, that somehow we're a little smarter, a little more memorable, a little better.

Lord, we thank you that salvation is entirely a work of your Spirit and your grace in our lives. Lord, I pray for our church. I pray for those who have given up hope on friends, family members. Pray that you would stir in them a longing this morning for your salvation work in the lives of their friends and family.

Lord, we pray this morning too that you would make us into a community of the Spirit who would never blink an eye at anybody who might come into our church fellowship. Lord, we thank you for the acorn-like power of the Spirit to change hearts. We pray that we would have the joy of seeing that. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.