Today, doctors can literally give you a new heart … well, new to you at least. It once belonged to someone else. Someday medical science may be able to give us a mechanical heart … but I truly believe that only God can give you a change of heart. When I say that, I’m not talking about this heart [point to my chest]. This heart is only a muscle that pumps blood throughout our bodies. It has no feelings, no emotions.
When I say that only God can change a heart, I’m obviously not talking about a muscle, am I? I’m talking about our emotional or spiritual heart … and no doctor, no psychologist, no priest, no rabbi, no pastor can change a person’s spiritual heart … only God can.
Now … I’m going to go a little bit “John Calvin” on you right now and talk about “irresistible grace.” “Irresistible grace.” The perfect description of what happened to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus.
Before we get to the “irresistible” part … let’s talk briefly about “grace” itself. Grace is the free and unmerited favor of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. It is kindness from God that we don’t deserve. There is nothing we have done or could ever do to earn this favor … and it is irresistible because there’s no saying “no” when God wants you and calls you.
Many regard Saul’s conversion as the most important event in the history of the church since Pentecost. It is also regarded as second only to the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the most convincing proof of the truth of the Christian faith. More space is given to the telling of Saul’s conversion than any other story in the New Testament except for the crucifixion of Jesus.
How did this militant and enthusiastic opponent to Jesus Christ and His followers become Christianity’s most ardent advocate? Why would he go from zealously persecuting Christians to enduring the terrible suffering that he went through as a zealous follower of Jesus Christ unless he was convinced that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead? Through the Holy Spirit, Luke saw Saul’s conversion as a watershed event in the early church. He repeats the story of Saul’s conversion three times in the Book of Acts, his relatively short history of the birth and expansion of the early Christian church. You’ll find Saul’s conversion story in Acts 9, Acts 22, and Acts 26.
Saul was not a likely candidate to receive a new heart. Luke states in verse 1 that Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against Jesus’ disciples. He was a man consumed with one driving passion … to eradicate all of Jesus’ followers … if not from the face of the earth … at least from the nation and faith of Israel. It was not enough that he participated in the breaking up of the newly emerging Christian community in Jerusalem after standing by and witnessing Stephen’s death … he considered it his sacred duty to travel around Asia Minor and cities like Damascus to round up Christians and bring them back to Jerusalem in chains. As I said, he was on a crusade … a mission … to rid the Jewish faith and the community that he loved so much of this heretical new movement that was starting to spread like yeast or leprosy beyond Jerusalem. His fear of this new movement was so great and was such a powerful driving force that Luke tells us that he even arrested women as well as men … caring little about what happened to their children. He had such an intense hatred for Jesus Christ and His followers that he felt that any pain and suffering that he inflicted on them and on the Christian community and movement as a whole was justified. “Indeed, I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things against the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And this is what I did in Jerusalem: on the authority of the chief priests, I not only locked up many of the saints in prison,” he later confessed, “but I also cast my vote against them when they were being condemned to death. By punishing them often in all the synagogues I tried to force them to blaspheme,” says Paul, “and since I was furiously enraged at them, I pursued them even to foreign cities” (Acts 26:10-11). It wasn’t enough for Saul just to drive them out of the city of Jerusalem. His rage and hatred for these early followers of The Way was so great and so intense that he volunteered to go and hunt them down wherever they fled to find safety in the surrounding cities and countryside.
Saul was so zealous to protect the Law of Moses and the Jewish community because he saw them as an infection, a disease that was capable of spreading their dangerous heresy throughout Israel if it wasn’t surgically removed … and he saw himself as the scalpel in the hand of God and truly believed that he was doing a good and righteous thing to protect God’s chosen.
As Saul and his fellow zealots approached the city of Damascus, a bright light from Heaven suddenly flashed all around them and they fell to the ground. Saul heard a voice a voice demanding, “Saul, Saul … why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4). The other men heard a voice but saw no one (Acts 9:7). In his shock and confusion, Saul asks: “Who are you, Lord?” (Acts 9:5). He must have known to whom the voice belong because he called the speaker “Lord” but I’m sure that he wasn’t prepared for what he heard next. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:5).
“I am Jesus …” (Acts 9:5). At that same instant, Saul got a glimpse of Jesus in His glory. The brightness of the Shekinah glory was so bright that it struck Saul blind. The Lord commanded Saul to go to the city of Damascus and wait until the Lord spoke to him again.
There is no “human” explanation for Saul’s conversion. In fact, there is no human explanation for any true conversion because salvation is from the Lord and not from man. As Paul himself later realized, “… I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation from Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:12).
Salvation does not depend upon the fallen will of man … thank God … but rather on the sovereign will and power of God. Everything about Saul’s conversion came from God. Saul was not searching for the Lord nor was he searching or even praying for salvation. Why would he? He would have told you that he was already one of God’s chosen people doing the work of the Lord on behalf of God’s chosen people. The Lord did not appear to Saul on the road to Damascus and plead with him. “O Saul, won’t you please trust Me as your Savior? I have done everything that I can to make that possible. Now the rest is up to you. It’s your decision … I cannot force your will … but I really do wish that you would just open your eyes to the truth of my Son, Jesus.” Instead, the Lord knocked Saul to the ground and completely over-powered him. He struck Saul blind and then gave Saul direct orders about what to do next.
On the one hand, Saul’s sense that God had a mission, a purpose, for his life was correct. He was to be God’s instrument to fulfill a very definite task … but not the one that Saul chose for himself, amen? His mission, the one that God has planned for him, was to be “an instrument whom I have chosen to bring [Jesus’] name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel” (Acts 9:15).
Saul’s conversion did not hang on whether he exercised his “free will” or not. God had it planned from start to finish. As Paul put it in his letter to the Christian community in Rome: “It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy” (9:16).
Salvation does not depend on the merits or the good points of our nature but completely on God’s free grace. God did not choose Saul because He saw something of value in Saul’s nature … except for maybe his fire and passion. Saul had not done anything to make himself worthy of God’s grace. God didn’t look down through time and think, “I can see that Saul will choose me by his free will someday and make a pretty effective apostle so I’ll make him one of my elect.” That would have made God’s election depend upon something good in Saul … namely, his wise choice or his faith or his potential. If God grants salvation to someone, it is not because of anything in us but is the result of His grace … period!
The Bible is clear … if salvation depends upon anything in us, then no one would be saved. “It is written,” says Paul, ‘No one is righteous, not even one’” (Romans 3:10). The natural man or woman cannot believe in Christ or repent of their sins unless it is granted to them. As Paul once preached: “For it is by grace that you have been saved through faith, and this not of your own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).
Despite the way that this sounds, it is good news … great news, in fact! It means that God can take a man like Saul, breathing out murderous threats … a committed enemy of the Christian faith … and change his heart from one filled with intense hatred to one that is completely and totally submitted to God. Although Saul’s heart was changed instantly, there in the dust of the road on his way to persecute the Christians in Damascus, the fruits of true conversion develop and deepen over time. In fact, as Saul’s conversion demonstrates, the fruits of conversion will continue to develop and deepen over the lifetime of the one whose heart has been changed by God.
How do we know if a person’s heart has been changed by God? What are the signs that a person has been given a new heart? Well … let’s take a closer look at what happened to Saul. First, he was convicted of his sin. Before a person can become a saint, they must first see themselves for what they truly are. They must see themselves through the eyes of God. When Jesus asks, “Saul, Saul … why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4), He wasn’t looking for insight or information into Saul’s behavior. He was trying to get Saul to look into his own behavior. Saul thought that he was serving God but in reality, Jesus points out to him that he is, in fact, persecuting God’s people … and, in the process of persecuting God’s people, persecuting Jesus Himself. With every Christian that he harmed, it was like Saul was plunging a sword into the wounded side of Jesus over and over again. And when Saul saw this … when Saul understood that this is what he had been doing, he did not eat or drink for three days. Saul’s fasting and prayer was not a sign of his religiosity or his piety … it was a sign of his grief. When someone is in mourning over the loss of a loved one or they are overcome with tremendous grief, they tend to lose their appetite … and Saul was grieving and experiencing a deep, profound regret for what his sins had been doing to Jesus.
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There is no such thing as a truly born-again person who lacks a growing sense of their own sinfulness. The more we walk in the Light … with a capital “L” … the longer we walk in the Light, the more that the Light will reveal the sin of our hearts. Lamenting the shallow and spurious conversions of his day, the great preacher Charles Spurgeon made the following observation:
“This withering is a most necessary experience, and just now needs much to be insisted on. Today we have so many built up who were never pulled down … so many filled who were never emptied … so many exalted who were never humbled … that I the more earnestly remind you that the Holy Ghost must convince of sin, or we cannot be saved” (1708. The Holy Spirit’s Threefold Conviction Of Men | Answers in Genesis).
Another sign that we’ve been given a genuine change of heart is our humility. No one who gets saved boasts of their own righteousness. No one who gets saved thinks that his or her good deeds will commend them to God. No one who is saved thinks that it was their own brilliant choice or choices that saved them. It is entirely the work and the power of God in our lives and in our hearts.
Saul went storming off to Damascus with a letter from the Sanhedrin giving him the authority to arrest the followers of Jesus. Saul had been educated under the famous and respected rabbi, Gamaliel. Saul was ambitious and the eyes of his peers were on him. He was looking at a possible future as a member of the powerful Sanhedrin. But after the Lord struck him down, he became as weak and dependent as a little child. He had to be led by the hand into the city where he had to be fed and taken care of … and then God sends Ananias to give him a message … not some great teacher … not some powerful local politician or rabbi … but a humble man who did what God commanded him … with great fear, I might add … and then faded off into history.
Recognition of and obedience to the Lordship of Jesus Christ is yet another sign of a changed heart. When Saul asked, “Who are you, Lord?” (Acts 9:5) … boy, did he get an answer, amen? “I am Jesus!” And in that instant, he realized that Jesus was not only alive … as all of His follwers had been asserting … but that Jesus had been exalted to the throne of the Father … just as Stephen described Him that fateful day outside the Lion’s gate as Saul stood there and held the coats of those who stoned him to death. Rather than discredit Jesus as a kook or a false prophet, His death on the cross fulfilled Old Testament prophesy … something that Saul had been schooled in … which meant that Jesus’ death atoned for the sins of the nation and it meant that Jesus’ death atoned for his sins. Jesus’ resurrection confirmed Him as Israel’s Messiah and Lord of all the earth.
When Jesus tells Saul to get up and enter the city, Saul obeys immediately. After Ananias prayed for him and he regained his sight, the first thing that Saul does is not to eat but to get baptized and then have something to eat. Everyone who is truly converted recognizes the exalted authority of Jesus Christ and seeks to live in obedience to Him … no matter the cost, amen?
When Ananias laid his hands on Saul and prayed, “immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restore” (Acts 9:18). A transformation from spiritual blindness to spiritual sight is another sign of a changed heart. Don’t miss the beauty of Saul’s transformation. He began his trip being able to see physically but was blind spiritually. After his encounter with the Risen Lord on the road to Damascus, he ends up physically blind but gains his spiritual eyes or sight. What he formerly thought that he saw or understood … that Jesus’ followers were evil heretics who needed to be eradicated … he no longer saw them that way. What he formerly despised, he now cherished. Just as Jonah spent three days in the belly of a great fish, so Saul spent three days and nights in physical darkness to help him see the Light … both with a lower-case “l” and a capital “L.” When the scales fell from his eyes, he saw everything in a new “light” … the light that came from having encountered the blazing glory of the Risen Christ. In the words of the former slaver John Newton, every converted person with a new heart can say: “I once was lost but now am found; was blind but now I” what? Now I see!
Prayer is another sign of a changed heart. The Lord tells Ananias, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying” (Acts 9:11). As a devout Pharisee, there is no doubt that Saul prayed every day … three times a day, actually. Instead of ritualistically praying rote prayers like the Shema, Saul is really praying … and he is praying from the heart. How do I know? If you were struck blind, what kind of prayers would you be praying, amen?
Illness, such as blindness, was seen as a judgment from God … and, in Saul’s case, it was … or, at least, that’s how he “saw” it … so I’m pretty sure that he was sincerely praying for God to forgive the many terrible things that he had done. What I don’t know but hope is true is that Saul was also praying as a way of engaging in a relationship with God … praying for guidance and God’s will … praying to get to know God through knowing His Son, Jesus Christ. When we get a new heart, we seek out the Lord, we spend time with Him in prayer so that we can grow closer to Him … so that we can learn what His will, what His purpose is for us … and then we stay close to Him in prayer because He is the source of the strength and power that we will need to do His will, amen? When we get a new heart, we begin to pray in the true sense of the word for the first time.
When you get a new heart, you also desire … you crave … the fellowship of the Lord’s people. Saul started out towards Damascus to destroy the Lord’s people there. Thank God he didn’t accomplish his mission because he needed Ananias and the other Christians in Damascus to pray for him and help him during his time of spiritual transformation. Sitting in perpetual darkness, how welcome was the sound of Ananias’ voice and Ananias’ greeting … “Brother Saul” … must have sounded to Saul.
God didn’t need Ananias to remove the scales from Saul’s eyes. He could have as easily removed them as He did when He struck Saul blind on his way to Damascus … but He didn’t, did He? He sent Ananias to pray over him so that Saul would begin to see what he would so often preach later on … that he … that all of us … are a part of the body of Christ … that we are connected to each other in so many ways … and that God uses us … together … to not only care for each other but to work together to build His Kingdom and spread the message of His glorious grace and mercy and salvation.
When all this happened to Saul, the title of “Christian” didn’t exist and wouldn’t exist for another 50 years or so. We were called the followers of the “Way” (Acts 9:2). Followers of what “way”? The way of Jesus Christ. We were followers of His teaching. We were followers of His example. But the name also implied that we were the followers of the only way to God … and that way was to follow Jesus. We are called “disciples,” which means that we are followers or students of our Master, our Rabbi … Jesus Christ. We are called “saints” or “holy ones” … a unique group of people who choose to be set apart from the world. We call each other “Brother” and “Sister” because an organic and indissoluble union exists between Christ and us … which creates an indissoluble union between each other … like a family or the cells in the human body. When someone harms us, they are harming the Lord, which is why Jesus accused Saul of persecuting him by persecuting His followers, His children. People who have been given a new heart love the fellowship of other saints because we are members of one another. What affects you affects me … and what affects us affects the community, the body of Christ.
We learn another sign of a new heart from Saul’s experience in Damascus. That sign is the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. Ananias tells Saul that the Lord not only sent him so that Saul would regain his sight but that he would also be filled the Holy Spirit. Look at verse 17: “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight” … and read it with me … “and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Every Christian receives the indwelling Holy Spirit at the moment of conversion. It is the Holy Spirit that gives us the power to overcome sin. It is the life of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us that produces the fruit of the Spirit, amen? No Spirit, no fruit of the Spirit, right?
If you are seeking to live the Christian life by your own power, your own strength, guess what? You will fail. You will be defeated and frustrated. But if you live your life in submission and dependence upon the Holy Spirit, you will experience consistent victory over sin and you will experience the joy of salvation flowing into you, welling up in you, and spilling out of you.
The last sign that we see as the result of Saul receiving a new heart is his new purpose and direction in life … a new purpose and a new direction in line with God’s sovereign will for him. A truly converted person is no longer their own person … they are no longer the captain of their own fate. We have been bought with a price and in return, we live for God’s purposes. Saul was God’s chosen instrument … chosen not to persecute the followers of Jesus Christ but to bring Jesus’ name before the Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel (Acts 9:15). Everyone with a new heart and new purpose and a new direction will ask: “Lord, what will You have do with my life?” And they, like Paul, will keep asking every day: “Lord, what would You have me do for You today?”
Saul had a mission … one that was self-willed … one that was destructive … evil. He thought that he was serving God by eliminating these “heretics,” but he was only feeding his pride and lust for power. He was advancing beyond many of his contemporaries … climbing the ladder to success … but after he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, he became Paul … an earthen vessel filled with God’s treasure. He became “Paul,” whose purpose was to glorify God … even if that cost him his life … which, as we know, it did. Saul inflicted suffering on others … Paul would suffer a great deal for his Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. Saul despised the gentiles and would have nothing to do with them … Paul would offer them the chance of getting a new heart.
If God has saved you from your sins … if God has given you a new heart … there’s a reason for it. He has a plan … He has a purpose for your life. His purpose may involve changing the world around you or it may involve traveling to some part of the world you’ve never been to before. The main thing is for you to be a willing servant and a clean vessel … “useful to the Master … prepared for every good work” (2nd Timothy 2:21). Listen to the difference between Saul on his way to Damascus to rid the world of Jesus’ followers and Paul, who wrote this to his disciple, Timothy: “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the foremost. But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost [of sinners], Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in Him for eternal life” (1st Timothy 1:15-16).
Only God can change a heart. Saul’s conversion into Paul is an example of the fact that no one is too far from God or too far beyond God’s reach or God’s power to save, to transform a person, and give them a new heart … a heart for Him alone, amen? Paul is an example for us, encouraging us to pray for every sinner and to share the glorious Gospel of our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, with them. Paul’s example should inspire us to commit ourselves afresh to whatever purpose God has given us to do for His Kingdom. As Paul puts it:
“For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that One has died for all; therefore all have died. And He died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died and was raised for them. From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know Him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2nd Corinthians 5:14-17).
Let us pray:
