Three Stages Of Salvation Series

Three Stages of Salvation

Series: Acts

Chuck Sligh

May 20, 2018

NOTE: A PowerPoint presentation is available for this sermon by request at chucksligh@hotmail.com.

TEXT: Acts 26:18 – “To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me”

INTRODUCTION

Acts 25-26 detail various events of Paul’s false and unjust imprisonment, first under Felix, the governor of Judea and then by his successor, a man by the name of Festus. In chapter 26, Paul was given the opportunity to make his defense one more time, this time before Governor Festus and King Herod Agrippa, the last of the wicked Herods. In his defense, Paul explained how he came to be falsely imprisoned and he gave the testimony of how he came to Christ.

In verses 16-18, Paul says that after Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus, Jesus gave him a special commission to be a minister and a witness to what God had done in his life and to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles. Being strictly historical data (kind of like court files…Things only a lawyer would like), and most of it a recounting of what Paul has already said in chapter 24, there’s nothing particularly edifying to extract for us from chapters 25-26 that has not already been covered, so we won’t go over those verses in detail.

But this morning I do want to park on verse 18, our text. In this passage, Paul is retelling the story of his conversion. His conversion is described first in Acts 9 by Luke himself and Paul himself gave his first telling of his story before the Jewish council in chapter 22.

In our text, verse 18, Paul describes three distinct stages of salvation he went through.…that which PRECEDED it; that which ACCOMPANIED it and that RESULTED from it. Every person who ever trusted in Christ went through these three stages. Let’s examine them this morning:

I. THE FIRST STAGE IS ILLUMINATION – In verse 18a, Paul says God had told him, “To open their eyes…”

Illus. – When I was a child, I remember my parents taking us to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, part of the largest cave system in the world. It’s a massive labyrinth of caves and caverns that literally runs for hundreds of miles under the earth, with several underwater lakes, rivers and waterfalls. To this day, no one really knows for sure how vast it is.

I’ll never forget how our guide took us into the depths of the earth and then for a brief moment turned off the lights. When the lights went out, there was no reflection of the moon or stars, nor any reflected light from towns or cities—just pure, indescribable, oppressive, almost tangible, absolute blackness.

But there was something else that sticks out in my mind from our visit there. I remember seeing certain strange fish and crustaceans there that dwelled in the subterranean waters and lakes of the caves. These unique creatures were endowed with what looked like perfect eyes.

But in fact, they were totally blind. Though they looked perfectly normal, behind the eyes was a useless optic nerve that rendered the creatures completely sightless.

Nothing quite so clearly captures the picture of a person who has not yet found Christ. Like these cave animals, people without Christ have eyes, but they cannot see.

That’s how the Psalmist describes idols in Psalm 115:5: “…eyes have they, but they see not,” but three verses later, in verse 8, the Psalmist says, “They that make them [odols] are like unto them…” (Psalm 115:8).

In other words, spiritually speaking, if you are without God, you are as blind as a lifeless, inanimate idol made of wood or stone. You are blind to spiritual truth; you cannot understand it; you cannot grasp it.

That’s why the Bible is such a mystery to the unbeliever. Paul said that the Bible is spiritually discerned.

In 1 Corinthians 2:14 he said, “But the natural man [the phrase Paul uses to describe the unsaved person] receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

This means that a person who has never been saved cannot understand the Bible and the spiritual truths it contains until his spiritual eyes have been opened.

Illus. – My dad told of growing up in a dead mainline denomination church where in all his life he never once remembered hearing the Gospel preached. When he left home and joined the Air Force, he lived a wicked life.

Once, after a drunken brawl with Mom in which she knocked his daylights out with a whiskey bottle, Dad decided to reform and change his ways. So, he started going to church and reading the Bible.