Down the news. Some of you guys got bad cake and shakes. I don’t know what you’re on.
All right, here we go. I asked you last night to write some definition of the call of God—what you felt the call of God was. I’d just like to read some of the answers.
“The call of God [is] to do as the Lord would have you do in your life, as He directs you, in that way. You do as He has planned for you to do. Do that the Lord would have me do, not what I would like to do.”
Do you know how old that little baby was? I mean, I don’t know who wrote that answer, but it was a dude who wrote it.
“The calling of God is what He wants for our life. There is a special goal for each one of us to reach, and God has a plan for us to fulfil that goal through His love.”
That’s pretty good. I didn’t notice how his head just fell right down.
“It means that we might be joint heirs as sons of the living God. He has called us to Himself as a people. We are His body and are living stones, to which Christ is all things. He is our I Am. He is all things and everything we need.”
I wrote that one. You like that? That’s a good answer. I didn’t understand it. It was over my head.
“The call of God is when God calls us out from the world to not only save us from our sins, but also to work in our lives so that, when we see Him, we shall be like Him.”
“The calling of God means, to one, that it is a time where God specifically calls you to do something. It is in His will for you to do—not going out and doing something on your own, but with God backing you all the way. It doesn’t have to be big, but to help the body.”
“It means that God calls everyone. First, He calls them to become one of His sons. Second, He calls all of His sons to become, or answer, a certain position in the body of Christ. Third, many are called, but few are chosen.”
Thank you, Reverend So-and-So. Yeah, a poem at the end I didn’t read:
“The calling of God to me [is] knowing totally that the Lord has a place for me in His work, whatever it is, and knowing in my heart that this is what the Lord wants for me as His servant.”
“The call of God in my life is to do what He wants me to, to be what He wants me to be, to go where He is to go. But right now, I wait. I wait patiently. I wait for His call in my life. Sometimes it is so hard. I sure wish He’d tell me soon, but I know His timing is perfect. God bless you.”
“It is a call of God to be different from the rest of the world, which most of you are, and to be a loyal witness for God, who loves us.”
“When God asks you to receive this gift of eternal life by becoming born again through Christ…”
“It means that God is giving you a chance to be with Him by sharing His name to others, in your own profession and practice.”
“The call of God to me means when He has directed me unto Him to do what He wants, when the Lord has brought me to Him and leads me to do His work.”
“The call of God [is] when God purposes us, after receiving His Son, into a ministry job for a more fulfilling walk with Jesus, in order that the fullness of Christ might be manifested in us to His work.”
That could have been in Ephesians somewhere.
All right, so these are some of the answers. Now, last night we talked about the calling of God, and we said that the calling of God usually has several different points to it:
Now we want to look at Paul’s life, as we talked about. I’d like to do this through Acts 9, and we’re going to read Paul’s testimony of how he became a Christian.
Paul was going the wrong way, but became a Christian when God called him.
Now, I’m sure most of you know the background of Paul’s life. I will briefly go into it tonight, but I think most of you know the story of Paul pretty well. Acts 9.
Verse 1. Now Saul—that’s Paul; that’s his old name, Saul—still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus. If he found any belonging to the Way—that means the Christians—both men and women, he might bring them in chains to Jerusalem.
And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus:
and suddenly there shone round about him a light out of heaven:
and he fell upon the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him,
Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?
There’s the call, right there.
And he said, Who art Thou, Lord?
And He said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest:
but rise, and enter into the city,
and it shall be told thee what thou must do.
The men who travelled with Paul stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing. Leading him by the hand, they brought him into Damascus. He was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank.
We will read more of that later on. But I want you to listen to this for a second: What was Paul like? Does anybody know what Paul looked like?
There is a very interesting passage written in a book from about A.D. 150. It was called The Acts of Paul and Thecla. It was supposed to tell of the life and events of the Apostle Paul and this woman named Thecla, who was a famous martyr in the early church.
Although the book is fictitious—that is, it tells stories about Paul that he really did not do—it gives a description of Paul. I wrote it down from this book. This is the way they described him.
Now, the thing about this is that the book was written around A.D. 150, when there could still have been people around who had either seen Paul or at least heard about him. So there is reason to believe that somewhere in this description, you get an idea of what Paul looked like.
They said Paul was “a man of small stature, bald-headed, bow-legged, well-built, with eyebrows meeting, rather long-nosed, full of grace; for sometimes he appeared like a man, and sometimes he had the countenance of an angel.”
Now, although we do not know whether that is a true description of Paul, it could have been. Paul was a Jewish man, and according to this description he had a crooked nose and crooked legs, and yet there was a certain strength in him.
Certainly we know that Paul had a strong personality. Paul said, “When I was young, I was studying with all those men who were going to go into the ministry of the Jewish church, and I did better than most of them.” He studied the Bible—that is, the Old Testament—and he studied with great teachers, like Gamaliel, who was a great Jewish teacher.
Paul was really a strong personality. When he decided he was going to do something, he did it. He was really strong.
Now let me ask you a question: What was Paul’s problem? Obviously, Paul was whacked out of his head, because he was going around chaining up Christians and bringing them to Jerusalem, where they were beating them and doing all kinds of things.
Paul was also there when Stephen was stoned. Stephen was a beautiful Christian. He had a smile on his face, power in his words, and performed great miracles. Stephen preached one day, and they stoned him to death. Paul was standing right there, yelling, “Kill him! Kill him!”
What was the matter with Paul? Obviously, he was a religious fanatic, but what was down inside him? What was wrong in there? I know we cannot really psychologise Paul, but has somebody got any ideas?
Well, Satan, I guess indirectly we could say Satan had control of his life. But let’s hear a little bit more.
You know, have you ever noticed that sometimes, when somebody actually doubts something, they get more zealous on the outside? Sometimes people are not sure anymore about what they believe, so they act twice as zealous: “Oh yeah, you’ve got to believe that!” But they do not really believe it; they are having trouble inside. Maybe that was part of it.
Perhaps Paul was empty inside and was feeling, “What is all this stuff? I have learned all the Jewish laws, and I have learned all this stuff. Is there something that is not real?” I don’t know.
Let’s turn to Galatians 1, just to look at one verse that I think mentions something Robert brought up. Galatians 1:14.
And I advanced in the Jews’ religion beyond many of mine own age among my countrymen,
being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers.
He said he was extremely zealous for his ancestral tradition. He was trying to keep up the traditions that had been handed down by the Jewish nation. He was really zealous.
Let me ask you a question: Why would an intelligent man be so zealous that he would even go around murdering, or certainly torturing, people? What is wrong with somebody like that?
Do you hear what he said? He said Paul might have been under conviction, and God was speaking to him, and he was lashing back. What do you think?
Do you know when Paul really got dealt with? After Stephen was stoned, Paul went further and decided to go around and get more Christians and bind them up.
Why would somebody be super religious? Underneath it all, when somebody acts like that, they think somehow they are going to gain the approval of God by doing it. “If I am super zealous, God will love me. If I go around killing Christians, the Jewish God will approve of me. I can get acceptance that way.”
Paul knew the law well enough to know that he was a sinner. You just could not possibly keep the law.
So there was Paul. When we see him in Acts, he is on the road to Damascus, driven by hatred and prejudice. He is going down the wrong road.
This young man, maybe in his twenties, was going down a deadly path of destruction, becoming a murderer and an insane religious fanatic. This guy was going off the deep end.
In Acts 9, we see how God saved Paul. You know how He did it? He saved Paul by dropping him dead in his tracks and getting him to stop going down that insane, suicidal road.
So we have Acts 9:3:
And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus:
and suddenly there shone round about him a light out of heaven.
He fell to the ground under the power of the light. The light was so powerful that it knocked him off his horse, right down on the ground.
Then he heard God’s call. You remember last night we said, “If God cannot speak to you and me, then we have a false tradition.” The call of God means God wants to speak to each individual Christian.
Now, God spoke to Paul in an unusual way, and he was an unusual man. I am not saying you have to be knocked off your horse, but God does want to speak to you. I mean, speak to you—not indirectly, not in some subtle way. God wants to really speak personally to you.
That is the call of God. Paul heard a voice say, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” This is the call of God. God was dropping him down in his tracks and trying to help Paul see what he was doing wrong.
Paul says in Acts 9:5, “Who art Thou, Lord?” Maybe Paul was twenty-two years old, let’s just say. Do you think he had ever had an experience like this before in his religion?
He studied and he prayed. Do you think he had ever had an experience like this? He gets knocked off, his head is on the ground, and he hears a voice from heaven. No, huh?
Well then, let me ask you another question. If he had never had an experience like this before, how come, when the voice says, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” he says, “Who art Thou, Lord?” Why did he say that? How did he know to say that?
Paul had studied in the Old Testament how God came down sometimes. He came down on Mount Sinai. He came down on the tabernacle. He came down on the temple.
You know what happened when God came down? Although it had never happened to Paul, he had read that when God came down, sometimes He came down in a powerful light. It came down—boom!
When God came down on the temple, there was so much glory there that men could not even go into the temple. The same thing happened with the tabernacle. When God came down on Mount Sinai, it was so powerful that immediately, when Paul felt this power and this light, he knew it was God.
So he heard this voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” He said, “Well, who are You, Lord?” For the first time, Paul heard Him calling.
How come Paul had not heard God calling before? Do you think God tried to call Paul before this?
His heart was not open to hear what God was saying. Why? He was so stubborn in his fanaticism. He was going to do his own thing.
God really calls a lot of people, but a lot of times people’s hearts are so hard—they have already decided what they are going to do—that they just do not listen.
This day, God knocked him off his horse, dropped him in his tracks, and said, “Now, Saul, you are going to listen to Me. You are going on a deadly track, the wrong way.”
“I tell you, Saul, you do not realise this, but when you have been going around persecuting Christians, you have been bothering Me.” Saul, Saul, why are you hassling Me? “You are messing with Me.”
Paul really feared God. Paul believed in God. When you have God talking to you, saying, “Hey, you are messing with Me,” Paul got shaken. Paul said, “Well, who are You? Who is talking?”
The answer absolutely bombed out everything in Paul’s life—everything. If that voice had said, “I am the Lord from Mount Sinai, who gave the Ten Commandments,” Paul would have said, “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”
But the voice said something worse than that. The voice said, “I am Jesus.”
“You know, the One you have been running around persecuting? The One whose people you have been stoning and harassing? That is Me talking to you out of heaven, with heavenly light and heavenly power and divine power.”
When Paul heard, “I am Jesus,” everything he was doing in his life—his whole life—just died. All his eggs were in one basket. He was a fanatic who was going to persecute Christians and become a great Jewish leader by doing it. His whole life just died.
You know what Paul said at that point? The first sane thing Paul had probably said in a couple of years. He said, “Lord, what do I do now? My whole life has been going in the wrong direction. Okay, I see. You called my attention to it. What do I do now?”
Jesus said, “Paul, get up and go into Damascus and wait, and I will give you more instructions.”
I remember last night I said the call of God talks about so many things. But here is the first part of the call of God: God calls us to salvation. That means God calls us out of the wrong path that we are on.
How many of you know what the Greek word ekklesia means? It means church. But do you know what ekklesia means in Greek? It comes from two words, and it means “called out.”
The first part of the call of God is that you get called out.
God takes you and says, “You have been on an ego trip. You have been going to school, and you think you are pretty cool, dude. You get pretty good grades. You are pretty popular. You are going in this direction. I am calling you.”
Or maybe you are into drugs or something like that. God says, “I am calling you.” Or maybe you are into the world of sports. You are just a sports freak. You eat, talk, sleep, and think sports. You do not have time to pray or be with your family; it is all sports. God is calling you.
It does not really matter what you are a fanatic about. When God calls you, He says, “You are into some kind of a trip that is dead, like Paul’s. I am calling you out.”
Thank God He called us out. God is a loving God, even when He has to deal with us kind of tough.
I do not believe anybody here was knocked off their horse, saw a blinding light, and got up blind. But I do thank God that I know many of you, somewhere along the line, God came and said, “Now, Robert, I am calling you out,” or, “Dana, I am calling you out.”
The first thing God does when He calls is He calls us out, for our own good.
How come God called Paul? God called Paul because He chose Paul. Can you tell me where that is in the Bible? How do we know God chose Paul?
Acts 9:15 says God chose him as a vessel. And Galatians 1:15 also says:
But when it was the good pleasure of God,
Who separated me, even from my mother’s womb,
and called me through His grace.
From the time Paul was conceived, God set him apart. He chose him. Then, at the right time, He called him.
Would you turn to Romans 8? I just want to show you one thing about this matter of choosing. I know sometimes this is kind of hard to understand.
Romans 8:28:
And we know that to them that love God all things work together for good,
even to them that are called according to His purpose.
Now verses 29 and 30:
For whom He foreknew, He also foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son,
that He might be the firstborn among many brethren:
and whom He foreordained, them He also called:
and whom He called, them He also justified:
and whom He justified, them He also glorified.
That is a lot of words. Let me just explain something—the best I can understand it. How come God chose Paul? According to verse 29, the first thing is that God foreknew.
You know what “foreknew” means? It means God knows beforehand what is going to happen. God knew what was going to happen with Paul. God knew Paul was going to turn to Him. God knew Paul was going to be a faithful servant. God knew Paul was a sinner.
Knowing that, when God gave him opportunity, he would respond, God chose him. Paul was going to be shaped into Jesus. He was going to be part of the body of Christ and conformed into the image of Jesus.
So it says God foreknew, then God predestined, and then God called. When did God foreknow about Paul? What year? Infinity B.C.
When did God predestine that Paul was going to be shaped into the image of Jesus His Son? Infinity B.C.
Now, when did God call Paul? Not in infinity. A lot of people think around A.D. 37 or 38—make it A.D. 40. Of course, that was when Paul was alive.
God already foreknew, predestined, and chose him; then He called him. The verse goes on to say that He called, then He justified. He says, “Now I called you; now your sins are forgiven.” Then He glorified—He shaped Paul into the image of Jesus.
God has a wonderful project. But it all goes back to the fact that God knows exactly what we are going to do. Brothers and sisters, God knows what your future is too.
Some of you are going to be faithful servants of God. Thank God for that. Some of you are going to turn from God, and God knows.
God bases His choosing and His calling upon what He knows, just as was the case in Paul’s life.
When Paul was on the road to Damascus, he said, “Lord, what do You want me to do?” God said, “You go into Damascus and wait, and then I will tell you what to do.” So go back to Acts 9. We pick up in verse 11.
The story continues. God had already called Paul: “Paul, why are you persecuting Me?” Now God speaks to him a second time.
And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go to the street which is called Straight,
and inquire in the house of Judas for one named Saul, a man of Tarsus:
for behold, he prayeth.
God knows. Verse 12 says God gave Paul something while Paul was praying. He had seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in and laying his hands on him so that he might receive his sight.
Ananias said, “But Lord, we know that Paul is really an evil man.” God said, “I have already chosen him, and I chose you to go see him.” Ananias said, “No, no.”
But Ananias went over there. In Acts 9:15, when Ananias argues with God and says, “I have heard all about him,” the Lord says:
Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto Me,
to bear My name before the Gentiles and kings, and the children of Israel:
for I will show him how many things he must suffer for My name’s sake.
So Ananias departed and entered the house. After laying his hands on him, he said:
Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared unto thee in the way which thou camest,
hath sent me, that thou mayest receive thy sight,
and be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight. He arose and was baptised. He took food and was strengthened. For several days he was with the disciples who were at Damascus.
And straightway in the synagogues he proclaimed Jesus,
that He is the Son of God.
All those who heard him were amazed. “Is this not the man who in Jerusalem destroyed those who called on this name, and who had come here for the purpose of bringing them bound before the chief priests?”
But Paul kept increasing in strength and confounding the Jews who lived at Damascus by proving that this Jesus is the Christ.
Remember I said that when you hear the call of God, sometimes you hear more than just a call to be saved. What did Paul hear? Paul heard the calling to preach Jesus.
He had only been saved a few days, and he was already in the synagogue preaching, saying, “Jesus is the Messiah.” Everybody said, “Hey, I am surprised!”
He could take the Old Testament scrolls and read the lines, read the lines, and say, “He is the Messiah.” The more Paul did, the stronger he got, because he also heard the call to service at the same time he heard his call to be saved.
Thank God Paul really got switched to God. But it all goes back—and I am going to end with this—to the fact that God spoke to Paul.
Now, God does not expect you to do the impossible. Before you could ever minister anything like Paul—who here could ever be like Paul?—before we could ever minister faithfully, can I tell you something? You need to hear God speak.
If you have got a secondhand religion tonight, it is not going to cut it. When you try to be faithful and you go to college and you want to be faithful, if you have not heard God speak, you are going to have a real hard time.
When you get married, you might say, “Oh, I am going to marry a Christian man,” or something; that would be great. But when you get married, you go through the problems people go through when they get married. If you have not heard God speak, you are going to have trouble when you are married.
All I am saying is that God wants to speak to each one of you personally. What has got to happen is that you have to open your heart and not be so stubborn as to say, “I am going to do what I want to do,” because that is what Paul did, and it shut God out of all kinds of things.
I do not know what the timing is or how God is going to call you. I feel, knowing some of you, that God has called some of you already in a clear way.
But this mysterious, deep call of God you spoke about that night has to come to your life if you are going to be a real disciple of Jesus.
I thank God for my brother Paul, because Paul put up with beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, and all kinds of persecution. One of the reasons was that he had heard from God.
If you guys really were like John the Baptist and all that, and you really had a word from God, I tell you, it would be different right now. If you go around and say, “Listen, I heard Him speak,” everybody would say, “Yeah, this guy—this is not his fault.”
But in this day, brothers and sisters, we need God to speak. We have got to open our hearts to hear firsthand from God’s own voice.
Can I tell you this little history? On the road to Damascus, God spoke to Paul—voice to voice: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” Paul heard that word.
But the people around him heard a noise, but they did not hear the voice. Yeah, it is mysterious.
Then, when Paul was there in Damascus, just waiting for God, do you know how God spoke to him the next time? In a vision. It was not a voice.
As Paul was praying and fasting, he saw a vision of a man named Ananias. I do not know whether he had a T-shirt or a knife—no, I do not know—but anyway, he knew the guy’s name was Ananias.
Do you know the way God spoke the third time in that story? Through Ananias. Paul’s heart was so open that when Ananias came in and said, “God told me to come here and pray,” Paul knew, “This is God speaking to me.”
Ananias spoke to Paul and said, “God sent me to bring you your sight.” He prayed, and Paul received his sight. His heart was open, and he said, “This is God.”
In the mystery of God, sometimes God speaks to you through somebody.
I am just praying that you guys are being normal—that, as Christians, you guys will be able to say, “I have heard God speak to me. I have been saved. God pulled me out of the wrong road. I have been saved by Jesus Christ.”
“And God has given me something to do. God is telling me to be holy. He spoke to me Himself.”
Brothers and sisters, this is the way, the truth, and the life.
Father, I just pray that You will call Your children. I know many here have received You, have sensed within them deeply that call to repentance, that call to accept You as their Lord and Saviour.
Yet even now, Lord, even though they have accepted You, they have grown hard in their hearts and do not hear Your calls.
Lord, just like You broke into Paul’s life and called him while he was in sin and while he was closed-hearted, oh God, I pray, if You need to even break into our lives and speak to us, do it, or else we might go through the barricade and right off the edge.
Help us, God. I pray that there would not be anybody in this room who would not hear Jesus calling and saying, “Karen, Karen, when will you come to Me?”
Oh Lord, I pray that You will speak personally and that Your children, those You have chosen, will open their hearts to hear Your voice.
What a wonderful God we serve. It is true, even like that silly song in Samuel, Lord. It is true that You want to speak to Your people. Oh God, open our ears so we can hear. Please help. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Can we just sing “He Is Lord” together? He is Lord.