Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

America was at war with Spain in 1898.

One of the most unusual incidents in the history of naval warfare took place.

One night Captain Freemont of the American ship Porter detected some strange object coming toward the ship.

As it came closer he saw that it was a torpedo.

Ensign Irving Gillis instantly took off his coat and shoes and leaped into the water.

He swam to the side of the torpedo, which was floating toward the ship and not being propelled rapidly.

He circled the war nose with his arm and screwed the firing pin up tight so it could not go off.

Then he pulled the disarmed weapon to the side of the ship.

He and his prize were hauled aboard and the ship was saved from destruction.

This very unusual experience is a parallel of the very unique experience of Paul on the road to Damascus.

He was, by his own admission, like an enemy torpedo sent to sink the ship of Christ's church.

He was armed and deadly, but Jesus leaped into the events of history and disarmed this torpedo and hauled it aboard the ship.

It became one of the great trophies of victory in the history of the church.

The point is that Paul's conversion experience is extremely unusual.

There is nothing like it anywhere in the Bible or Christian history.

It is a once in a history experience and it becomes a marvelous basis for the study of Christian experience.

There is more Scripture dealing with Paul's conversion than with any other in the Bible.

The story is repeated three times in the book of Acts.

The word experience is from the Latin expertus, which means to try out, to prove, or to test.

An expert is one who has had experience, for he has tried things and proven by testing what works.

An experiment is the testing to see if a theory is real and can be proven.

Each of these words have the same meaning.

Paul here in Acts 22 is an expert witness on his own behalf as he defends himself before an angry mob that wants him dead.

His defense is not an armchair, ivory tower, theology that he has reasoned out.

His defense for being a Christian and a lover of Gentiles is his experience with the living Christ.

Paul did not study and reason his way into the church.

He was dragged in, and in his testimony he makes it clear that he is a Christian, not by any design of his own, but by the sovereign design of Christ who chose him.

Paul's cataclysmic conversion is probably the most famous conversion in all of history.

It was not only a turning point in Paul's life, but in the life of the Christian church.

From this point on Christians would be moving out into the Gentile world, and they would no longer be confined as a movement within Judaism.

In this message we want to look at this event from the point of view of what it has to say about Christian experience.

First-

I. EXPERIENCE IS PERSONAL.

This is Paul's personal testimony, and it fits nobody else in all of history.

As far as the record goes, nobody else on this planet was every converted by getting knocked to the ground and blinded by the presence of Christ.

What happened to Paul was a once in a history experience.

It falls into the category of-

1. Moses at the burning bush.

Nobody else has ever seen God in a burning bush.

2. Adam walking with God in the garden.

3. Daniel in the lion's den.

4. Daniel's three friends in the fiery furnace.

5. Jonah in the belly of the whale.

The point is, there are all kinds of things that happen in this world that are unique and personal.

They are not commonplace experiences that happen every day.

God does not punch out people with a cookie cutter making them all alike, as if they were parts of a machine on an assembly line.

People can have a lot in common, but every one of us is unique.

God threw the mold away after making us, and not just the very unusual person.

All of us have so much in common even with Paul.

We have two eyes, two legs, and two arms, and we could go on and on with the list of the many things that we have in common.

The ways we are like Paul could fill a book.

Nevertheless, he was unique and different from us all, and from all the other Apostles.

It is his radical difference that calls our attention to the fact that experience is so personal.

How we respond to our distinctiveness is the key to our self-image and our happiness as Christians.

God obviously intended Paul to be unique and different from all the other Apostles.

There was much about him that was nothing to be proud of.

He was the only one who persecuted the church, and so he was the only one unworthy to even be called an Apostle.

He said that he was the least of the Apostles, and in I Cor.

15:8 where he lists the resurrection appearances of Christ he says, "And last of all He appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born."

Paul was not only the last and the least, he was the only Apostle who did not have a normal birth.

He was born again, but not like the others who had natural birth.

They walked with Christ and lived with Him.

They came to love and understand Him, and by an act of their will surrender to Him.

This was not the case with Paul.

They Greek word here for abnormal birth means abortion, or premature birth.

Paul was not ready to be born into the kingdom of God.

He was like Macduff in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

"From his mother's womb untimely ripped."

Paul did not grow and develop to become a Christian.

He was thrust into it prematurely, and like a premie baby he was not fully formed.

He was something of a monstrosity, and the Christians still feared him as a fierce enemy.

He was like an unformed fetus, and still a product of the law.

He needed a lot of care before he was formed and developed in Christ.

The other Apostles had three years to be formed and shaped by Christ.

Paul alone was the aborted Apostle who was speed forced into the kingdom.

Paul is not proud of his uniqueness in the sense that it was good for him to have been so blind and cruel as a persecutor.

He says in verse 9, "For I am the least of the Apostles and do not even deserve to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the church of God." Paul did not consider his personal distinctiveness as good, or as a badge of honor.

It was a disgrace that he was a persecutor of the church.

But Paul goes on in verse 10 to say, "But by the grace of God I am what I am."

Because of God's grace he worked harder than anyone who was born naturally.

In other words, he did not let his negative experience and uniqueness hurt his self-image.

He let it lead to a positive exaltation of the grace of God, and so to his own positive self-worth.

We are dealing with a paradox here that hinders Christians from developing a healthy self-image.

The paradox is that Christians who have not been wild and anti-Christian like Paul feel that there conversion has not been radical, and so they feel they have missed out.

On the other hand those who have been like Paul, and have been enemies of Christ, feel they are held back and are second class Christians because they have been such awful people before their conversion.

The result is that Satan wins both ways, for Christians who have been too good or too bad both developed a poor self-image and settle for being mediocre Christians.

What we need to learn from Paul's personal experience is that how you are born again is not any more important as to your value as a Christian than is how you are born of the flesh is important to your value as a person.

Do you ask anyone you admire if they were born premature or not?

Do you ask if they were born in a hospital, at home, or in a cab?

The personal experience of being born may vary a great deal, but none of these differences play a role in the value we place on a person.

We do not say, "I would like you to meet so and so, but keep in mind he comes to us by way of caesarian.

So also we do not make an issue of one's personal conversion.

Did it happen on the road to Damascus, or while kneeling by a bedside after a great struggle?

Was it after long thought and study, or was it instantly by conviction at a crusade?

There are hundreds of different factors in people's personal experience of coming to Christ.

All that really matters is that they confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God has raised Him from the dead.

It is the Lordship of Christ that counts and your submission to Him, and not the means or methods by which you came to experience it.

Being conformed to the world is clearly condemned, but we often do not see the harm in trying to conform to others experience in the church.

It is almost always a pain to feel the pressure to be something you are not.