📖 Bible Characters II — Unit 11: Paul — From Persecutor to Apostle of Grace

There is no more dramatic turnabout in all of history than the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. One day he was the fiercest enemy the young church had, hunting down believers and dragging them to prison; not long after, he was the church's greatest missionary, willing to be beaten, stoned, and finally killed for the very name he had tried to destroy. What could account for such a reversal? Only one thing: on a road to Damascus, Saul the persecutor met the risen Christ — and the grace that mastered him there is the same grace that can master and send any life.

Subject: Paul — from persecutor to apostle.

Proposition: The grace of the risen Christ, who appeared on the Damascus road, can master and send any life.

We will trace three movements in the life of Paul.

I. A Deadly Mistake

Before he was Paul the apostle, he was Saul the Pharisee, and he was deadly in earnest. He was, as Luke puts it, "breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord." He led the way in arresting Christians, and when Stephen was stoned to death, the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul, who stood there consenting to his death. Paul never softened what he had done:

And yet, in his own eyes, Saul was not a wicked man at all — he was a religious one. His confidence rested entirely in the flesh, in his pedigree and his performance. He was "circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee... concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless" (Philippians 3:5-6). Here was a man who had everything religion could give and was still dead wrong about the most important thing in the universe. His zeal was real, but it was zeal without knowledge, and it had made him an enemy of God while he thought he was serving Him. That is the most dangerous mistake a person can make — to be sincerely, religiously, and completely wrong. Saul reminds us that a person can be moral, devout, and busy in religion and still be utterly lost, needing not merely to try harder but to be met and changed by Christ.

II. A Dramatic Meeting

Then came the day that split Saul's life in two. He was on the road to Damascus, carrying letters that authorized him to arrest still more believers, when suddenly a light from heaven, brighter than the noonday sun, flashed around him and he fell to the ground. Out of the light came a voice:

Trembling, Saul asked, "Who are You, Lord?" And the answer changed everything: "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." Notice what the Lord said — not "why are you persecuting My people," but "why are you persecuting Me." To touch the church is to touch Christ Himself. In that moment Saul learned that the Jesus he thought was dead was alive, and that the believers he was hunting belonged to a living Lord. Blinded by the glory, he was led by the hand into the city, and three days later, through a disciple named Ananias, his sight was restored and he was filled with the Spirit. When the Lord first sent Ananias to him, Ananias was afraid, for Saul's reputation had gone before him; but the Lord said, "Go, for he is a chosen vessel of Mine to bear My name before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel." The hunter of the church had been chosen to carry its message to the world. The persecutor had become a believer, and his only question now was the right one: "Lord, what do You want me to do?"

Everything Saul had once counted as gain he now saw in a new light:

His pedigree, his law-keeping, his blameless record — all of it he now counted as loss, even as rubbish, compared with knowing Christ. For he had discovered the heart of the gospel: that a man is not saved by a righteousness of his own, earned by keeping the law, but by a righteousness received through faith in Christ. The proudest law-keeper of his generation became the great preacher of grace.

III. A Determined Mission

The change was not in word only; it remade his whole life. The very energy that had driven Saul across Judea to persecute Christians now drove Paul across the known world to preach Christ. City after city, he carried the gospel — to Jews and Gentiles, to common people and kings — planting churches everywhere he went. From Antioch he sailed across Asia Minor and into Greece, reaching at last the very heart of the empire in Rome. He reasoned in synagogues, stood before governors and King Agrippa, and finally appealed to Caesar himself; and even his imprisonments became pulpits, for from his prison cells he wrote letters that still feed the church today. And it cost him everything. He was beaten with rods, whipped with thirty-nine lashes again and again, stoned and left for dead, shipwrecked, hungry, cold, and imprisoned. Yet through it all he never flinched, for he was a man under orders:

He could no more stop preaching than he could stop breathing; the love of Christ compelled him. And when at last he came to the end, awaiting execution in a Roman prison, he did not look back with regret but forward with triumph:

What a way to finish — the man who began by trying to destroy the faith ended by keeping it to the death.

The Resurrection Took Away His Ignorance

How do we explain a transformation so complete? Saul gained nothing in this world by it — no wealth, no comfort, no safety, only hardship and finally a martyr's death. No clever argument and no earthly reward turned him. The only thing that accounts for it is that he truly met the risen Lord:

There it is — "by the grace of God I am what I am." Paul never got over it. The man who had once trusted in his own blamelessness now called himself the chief of sinners and pointed only to grace:

Next to the Lord Jesus Himself, Paul may be the most influential person in all of Christian history — the writer of much of the New Testament, the apostle to the nations. And the whole of it traces back to a few moments on the Damascus road when a living Christ stopped a raging persecutor in his tracks. He met the risen Lord, and nothing was ever the same.

Grace Alone

This is the lesson of Paul's life: grace alone. What Saul could never earn by all his law-keeping and all his zeal, the risen Christ gave him freely. The chief of sinners became the apostle of grace, not because he reformed himself, but because grace laid hold of him. And the same grace is offered to us. If the risen Christ could stop Saul of Tarsus on the road, master his hatred, and send him to the ends of the earth, then no one is beyond His reach and no life is too far gone for Him to use. He is still meeting people on their own Damascus roads, and to all who answer, "Lord, what do You want me to do?" He gives the same grace that made a persecutor into an apostle. No résumé recommends us to Him, and no record disqualifies us from Him; grace alone makes the difference, from first to last.