"Our Brother, the Murderer" Sermon: Acts 9:19b-31

“Our Brother, the Murderer”
[Acts 9:19b-31]
January 24, 2010 Second Reformed Church

Saul had been on his way to Damascus when Jesus struck him down, blinded him, and revealed to Saul that Jesus is God the Savior, Whom Saul had been persecuting. Jesus instructed Saul to go to Damascus, as he had planned, and to wait further instruction, and Saul obeyed and fasted and prayed.

Jesus came to Ananias, one of the Christians in Damascus and told him to go to Saul and heal him. But Ananias was hesitant – Saul had come “breathing threats and murder” – he had come to capture, try, and kill Christians. But Jesus assured him that Saul had come to faith and was going to be used by Jesus as His representative to the Gentiles. So Ananias went to Saul, once a murderer, now, his brother, and healed him, baptized him, and commissioned him in the Name of Jesus.

Saul stayed for some time in Damascus with the disciples there, and Saul went from synagogue to synagogue – remember, he had papers from the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem to go into every synagogue and search for Christians. So, when he stood up in the synagogue, the Jews thought he would speak against the Christians and demand that they be given up. But, instead, he got up and preached that Jesus is the Son of God.

Our text tells us that the Jews were amazed and confounded: “Isn’t this Saul of Tarsus that the Sanhedrin sent to rid us of these Christians? Isn’t this Saul of Tarsus who caused such terror in Jerusalem among the Christians? Isn’t he here on the authority of the chief priests to stop this kind of talk – and here he is zealously preaching the very message that he was sent to stop What has happened to him?”

We know what happened to him – Jesus happened to him. Saul wasn’t the same person any more. All of his knowledge of the Old Testament was blossoming in him as the Holy Spirit helped him to understand how everything in the Old Testament points to Jesus. And he went from synagogue to synagogue, proving the that the text does proclaim that Jesus is God the Savior, and no one could refute him. In fact, the more he preached Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament, the better he understood the Old Testament and was strengthened in his preaching and understanding by the Holy Spirit.

If you are a Christian, you know that something is different about you – you’re not the person you once were. If you grew up in the church, the difference may be more subtle – perhaps you can look at your life and conceive what you might be like if you didn’t believe in Jesus – what you might be willing to do and believe if you didn’t believe in Jesus. We are different, and we must be different.

Let us understand, first this morning, that when God causes us to believe in Jesus savingly, we become new people – “new creatures.” Saul would write to the Church at Corinth: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (I Corinthinas 6:9-11, ESV). “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (II Corinthians 5:17, ESV).

When Jesus makes us His own, we cannot continue in our sin; we cannot continue to be and live as we once did. Now, will we sin now and then? Yes. We shouldn’t, but we will, because we will not be perfected until Jesus returns. But we are to be zealously fighting against our sin by the Power of the Holy Spirit Who lives in us. And we are certainly not to happily, unrepentantly continue in the sins in which we once engaged.

Those who believe in Jesus are not what they once were, as Saul explained to the Corinthians: if we were once murders, Christ welcomes us and tells us to murder no more. If we lived lives of sexual immorality, Christ welcomes us and tells us to be sexually immoral no more. If we were once thieves, Christ welcomes us and tells us to steal no more. If we were gossips, or gluttons, or busybodies, or lazy slobs, Christ welcomes us and tells us to sin no more. If we believe in Jesus, we no longer happily, unrepentantly desire to follow after our sin. Will we be tempted, yes, but we should also desire not to sin, and, by God’s Grace, we will not sin as we once did.

At this point our text says, “when many days had passed.” Scholars believe that this was actually a period of three years, as Saul mentions in his letter to the Galatians, “I went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem” (Galatians 1:17b-18a, ESV). After his conversion, Saul spent three years in Arabia in study and prayer before he continued the ministry to which Jesus had called him.

Then he returned to Damascus and began to preach again, and when he did, the Jews plotted to kill him. But the plot was made known to Saul, and his disciples lowered him out through a window, through the city walls, and he escaped to Jerusalem.

Let us understand then that when God causes us to believe in Jesus savingly, our old friends many not understand, and some of them might be angry with us. In this country, we may not have people try to kill us, like they tried to kill Saul, but if a Muslim becomes a Christian, he is often shunned and in some cases, his life might be sought. The same is true in China and in some parts of Africa. Family members and friends still kill converts to Christ in the modern world.

We’re much more polite in US. I have a friend who tells me that “I will grow out of this religion stuff.” He thinks this is a phase that I will move beyond one day. My grandmother always said that she didn’t understand all this religious stuff, but she guessed it was fine if it helped me – if I needed that kind of a crutch. One of my friends who is now “old enough” that she says she doesn’t need Jesus any more yells at me and tells me to stop talking about religion if it comes up in conversation.

If we truly believe in Jesus, we will be different people and we will believe different things, and some people will not like that or understand it. We have to be patient with them, pray for them, calmly showing them the Gospel without beating them over the head with it. But if Jesus is the Truth, we can’t keep quiet – we can’t not talk about Him, we can’t not live as He has called us to live, we can’t not have His Gospel affect every part of our lives.

We see, in a way, the other side of the coin with Saul. Saul was a persecutor of Christians, a terrorist, and now he claimed to be a fellow believer – a brother in Christ. But when he arrived back in Jerusalem, the apostles were afraid of him – he had overseen the capture and murder of Christians and now he was claiming to be their brother? They didn’t believe him. Depending on how notorious our sin is, it might be difficult for our fellow Christians to believe our confession of faith.

But there was one, Barnabas, the “son of encouragement,” who we met back in chapter four, when he sold a piece of property that he had and gave the whole sum of the sale to the Church – Barnabas talked with Saul and got to know him and brought him back to the apostles and said that he believed Saul. And Barnabas told them how Saul had met the Lord Jesus on the road, and how Jesus has spoken to him and called him to preach, and how he had been zealously preaching that Jesus is the Son of God the Savior in Damascus during the past three years.

And Saul went out among the people of Jerusalem and began to boldly preach that Jesus is God the Savior. And he argued for the faith with the Greek Jews who were in Jerusalem. But within a short time, the Jews in Jerusalem sought to kill Saul. His brothers, the apostles and the disciples, having seen his confession in action, believed his conversion, and for his safety, they smuggled him down to the port at Caesarea and sent him on a ship back to his hometown of Tarsus in Turkey.

Let us understand, thirdly, then, that it may be hard for some people to believe that some of us have come to faith in Jesus. So we understand that our confession of faith is not enough to prove our changed lives, we must live out our Christianity before the world. As Saul would write to the Church in Ephesus: “Now this I say to you and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ – assuming that you have learned about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created in the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

“Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom your were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:17-32, ESV).

And James, the brother of our Lord, wrote, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing” (James 1:22-25, ESV).

When you got ready for church this morning, did you look in the mirror? Have you ever asked what you looked like when you got here? Have you ever asked how your hair looked? Have you ever forgotten if you had all your clothes on or put your make-up on – even for just a moment? There have been times when I have forgotten what I was wearing or if I was wearing an article of clothing – if for just a moment – and I know that some of you have asked me how your hair looked.

Charles Colson was President Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man.” It was said that if the president asked Colson to run over his grandmother, he would have done it. After Colson was imprisoned, after Watergate, he became a Christian. And it took time for people to believe that he was truly a believer. It took him living out his Christianity before the world for some time before he was believed.

Charles Watson – the man who actually committed the infamous “Mason murders” – also became a Christian in prison. There are still people today that question his conversion. In his book, Will You Die for Me?, he tells of how Manson would hold a knife or a gun to each “family” member and ask him if he would die for him – and at that time, Watson said he would. But now he confesses Christ in prison and lives out the Gospel in those circumstances.

What we believe is important. What we say we believe is important. But if we don’t live it out so others look at us and understand that we do what we do and say what we say because we are believers in Jesus Christ, then something is wrong, and they really don’t have any reason to believe us, do they? Could someone look at your life and only explain it by your being a Christian? That should be the case.

Let us look at our lives and see if there are areas in which we are doing things that do not live up to Christ and His Call on our lives. Let us see if there are areas in our lives that we need to work harder at to bring them into conformity with what we say we believe. Let us see if there are things we have been doing that we really shouldn’t be doing if we are truly believers in Jesus. God has indwelt us in the Person of the Holy Spirit and He will enable us to do these things.

Our text this morning ends with one of Luke’s interludes to show he is moving from one thing to another: “So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.” Luke tells us that at this point there was a lull in the persecution of Christians. Why?

We might be tempted to say that it is because Saul was now a Christian, and that would be true to a degree – Saul was a zealous persecutor of the Church. But we need to remember that he was not the only persecutor of the Church – as we see, the Jews were seeking to kill Saul wherever he went.

A greater change that made for this lull was the change in government around the Roman Empire: Saul was in Jerusalem – in this morning’s reading – around 36-37 A.D. In 36 A.D., Governor Pontius Pilate was replaced by Vitellius, and the High Priest, Caiaphas, was replaced by Jonathan. And in 37 A.D., Emperor Tiberius died and was succeeded by Caligula, who appointed Herod Agrippa over Palestine. For a short time, these changes kept the larger forces busy and decreased the persecution.

And we are told that during this time the Christians walked in the fear of the Lord – they lived in a way that showed that they were in awe of God – that they respected and worshiped Him, and they received comfort from the Holy Spirit – especially through the reading and preaching of the Scripture. And God was pleased to cause the Church to multiply.

Believing savingly in Jesus changes everything – it made a murderer like Saul a brother to those he had set out to destroy. All those who believe in Jesus savingly are transformed – metamorphasised – into something new – have you become a new creation?

Our old friends may be confused or angry as we let them know of our coming to faith. They may not want us around any more – they may even become violent towards us. But we are called to live out Christ before them that they, too, might come to faith.

And Christianity is more than just a set of beliefs, it is living them out. We must live as God has called us to live, or there will be no reason for anyone to believe that we have truly believed. How are you living?

Let us walk before God, knowing Him as He is revealed in the Scripture, humbly worshiping Him as our God and Savior. Let us draw our comfort from the Word of God and from the Holy Spirit Who lives in us and gives us the strength to stand for Christ in peace.

Let us pray:
Almighty God, we thank You for calling us to Yourself and changing us. Help us to love all of Your people and welcome all those who confess faith in You, and cause us to live out our faith that others might see that we truly believe in You alone for our salvation. And may You receive all the glory. For it is in Jesus’ Name we pray, Amen.