The Gentile Pentecost (Acts 8-15)Sýnishorn

God gets His key man

The conversion of Saul of Tarsus is of such astonishing significance, (not just for the church, but for world history), that it is narrated more often than any other event in the New Testament apart from the resurrection of Jesus.

No less than three times in the book of Acts itself, Saul’s life changing encounter with the risen Christ outside Damascus is narrated from slightly different perspectives in slightly different ways. (This is in addition to several other references to his conversion in his letters.)

Jesus turns around this militant, violent, aggressive religious murderer and makes him one of the greatest and most holy, loving and influential people ever to have existed. (Some years ago I attended a public lecture in which the secular speaker said that in her opinion Saul/Paul was one of the most influential people ever to have existed.)

Saul, who was later called Paul, became …

the church’s greatest missionary,

the church’s greatest church planter,

the church’s greatest theologian,

and he wrote thirteen of the twenty-seven documents in the New Testament. One of these documents, Romans, has influenced and continues to shape the development of world history. (The contemporary historian Tom Holland speaks of the ‘ripples of revolution’ that continue to come from Paul’s letter to the Romans.)

What Jesus did with Saul of Tarsus is an encouragement to every one of us, because what God did for Saul is a picture of what He will do for all disciples. The change that the Lord worked in Saul is a lighthouse, a beacon, a demonstration of what the Lord will in time fulfil in each of us.

God turned Saul around because He needed Saul for gospel work! God got His key agent ready for His key work. In Acts 8:15 the Lord states that Saul is His chosen instrument to take the gospel to the Gentiles.

Saul’s conversion is in itself the most encouraging evidence of the victory of Christ over all evil.

Just as God was getting His people ready for the second major outpouring of the Spirit, so we can be sure the Lord is getting His people ready for all He is going to do.

‘Tremble O earth at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turned the rock into a pool, the hard rock into streams of water’(Psalm 114:7-8). Watch out world! God’s here and He is working!