Called By His Grace | Galatians 1:11-24
Brian Hedges | September 3, 2017
Well, good morning. We’re going to be in the book of Galatians this morning, in the first chapter. I have kind of the tail-end of a cold, again, the second time around, so I actually want to ask Tim if you wouldn’t mind maybe getting me a glass of water. I just ran out and I’m afraid I’m going to need it. Thank you. That’s not a great lead-in to a sermon, but I hope you’ll bear with me this morning.
So, in studying any of the New Testament epistles, Bible scholars have often observed that sometimes it’s like hearing one side of a telephone conversation. These letters are written to very specific situations, and we get the letter but we don’t get details about the situation itself, except what we can get in the letter. So you kind of have to surmise, read between the lines a bit, to figure out what just was going on when that letter was written.
That’s particularly true in this letter to the Galatians. So to help you, I want to read to you a letter from Brother Joseph (a very good Jewish name) to the brethren in Galatia. I want you to imagine for a moment that you are one of the Galatian Christians. This probably sometime around 48, 49 A.D.
Keep in mind that there is no New Testament; you don’t have one. All you have is the Old Testament and the teaching that you’ve heard from these new evangelists and apostles and preachers who are going around preaching in synagogues and in other places talking about Jesus. You’ve heard the gospel from Paul just a couple of years ago, you have been converted, you’ve come to Christ, but then you get a letter from the highly-esteemed Brother Joseph, and this is what the letter says:
“Dear brothers of Galatia,
“We greet you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have heard how through the ministry of brother Paul you have been converted from the worship of dumb idols to serve the true and living God of Israel. We are glad you have made such a good beginning, but we are afraid that there are some very important things about the gospel Paul has omitted to tell you.
“We ourselves come from the church of Jerusalem, which is directed by the very apostles Jesus called and ordained. Paul, though, is an upstart. Why, he never even knew Jesus while he was on earth, and was certainly never commissioned by him as an apostle. True, Paul did visit Jerusalem just after he stopped persecuting us, and there he learned the ABCs of the Christian faith from the true apostles, but the message he now preaches bears no resemblance to theirs.
“I don’t imagine he even told you about circumcision. Why, this is the very way God has made it possible for you Gentiles to become a part of the new Israel. Jesus did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. Circumcision is just as important as baptism, nay, more important, for it will introduce you to a higher plane of Christian living.
“If you will observe the holy ordinance of the law, God will be pleased with you. We are just now forming a new association of law-observant churches, and we would love for Galatia to be represented. We are the true Christians. Jesus, our great example, pleased the Father by fulfilling the law, and so can you.”
Now, you could see how plausible that little letter would be to the Galatian Christians. That comes, by the way, from Timothy George and his wonderful commentary on Galatians.
This is the situation that the church, or rather the churches, of Galatia were facing. Paul’s credibility was being undermined, the gospel he preached was being brought into question, and these Jewish Christian teachers were pushing an agenda, and that agenda was one of law-keeping, and they had, they claimed, the Jerusalem apostles to back them, they had the Old Testament to back them. They claimed to be representing the true gospel. So Paul is having to deal with that in this letter.
Now, I give you that context just to set up the passage we’re going to read this morning, because we won’t really understand what Paul is getting at in the second half of Galatians one unless we understand the situation. So let’s read the passage, which is really Paul giving his testimony in order to answer the claim, the accusation, of these false teachers. We’re reading Galatians chapter one, verses eleven through 24.
“For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers. But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone; nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus.
“Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord's brother. (In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!) Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. And I was still unknown in person to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only were hearing it said, “He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” And they glorified God because of me.”
This is God’s word.
Now this is an interesting passage, because it’s giving us history. It’s giving us actually Paul’s autobiography. It’s probably the most extensive autobiographical passage from Paul that we have in any of his letters as Paul rehearses his testimony. He shares his testimony with the Galatian churches. He’s telling them about his life before Christ, about how he was converted, how he came to Christ, how he was called to be an apostle, and then about the first 15 years or so after his conversion, this period of time following his conversion, leading up to basically the writing of this letter.
So Paul is giving us a testimony, and he’s giving us in particular a testimony of God’s grace, how God’s grace was involved throughout this process, and he’s doing so in order to answer the accusation of the false teachers. He’s doing it to defend his apostleship and to defend the gospel of grace.
Now that’s the context, and what I want us to do as we walk through this is just look at Paul’s testimony in three stages and see what it teaches us about grace.
So we see three things about Paul. We see:
I. Paul the Persecutor [or we could say Saul the persecutor; Saul was his Jewish name, Paul was his Roman name]
II. Paul the Convert
III. Paul the Apostle
As we study this we see three things about grace:
I. Grace Needed by Paul the Persecutor
II. Grace Received by Paul the Convert
III. Grace Proclaimed by Paul the Apostle
Okay, so three legs to the sermon, three points. Here they go.
I. Paul the Persecutor: Grace Needed
You see it in verses 13 and 14 as Paul describes who and what he was before he came to Christ. There are two things to see.
(1) First of all, he was a violent persecutor. Verse 13: “For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it.”
You remember the story from Acts chapter nine. Here was this man, Saul of Tarsus, and he was breathing out threatenings and slaughter against this new upstart movement. It was a little sect; it just seemed like a little splinter movement within Judaism, and it seemed to Saul at this time that they were actually subverting the traditions of the fathers and ignoring the Old Testament, and they were blasphemously claiming that this man Jesus was the Messiah! He had been crucified, after all! Who did these people think they are?
So Saul, commissioned by the Pharisees and the elders, the Jewish leaders, Saul goes on a hunt. He’s hunting them down. He’s going to stamp this sect out. In fact, he’s even complicit in the just stoning, as he thinks, of the first Christian martyr Stephen, in Acts chapter seven. Saul was right there, guarding the robes of these men who stoned Stephen. That was Saul of Tarsus. Persecuting the church.
And then in Acts chapter nine he’s on the road to Damascus and he has this vision, and it changes him.
Saul was a persecutor, a violent persecutor of the church.
(2) Now, this is supplemented by a second fact, verse 14. He was also a religious zealot. He says, “I was advancing in Judaism.” Right here are the only places in Scripture that we have this word Judaism. Paul says, “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers.”
So here’s the deal: his persecution, as awful as that seems to us now, his persecution was actually part of his religion. Saul was actually a religious terrorist. That’s what he was. He was hunting down and persecuting people in the name of God, and he thought he was doing the right thing.
Now there are several things that are important about noting this. One, it just shows us that even in the Bible the claim of some people today, I’m thinking in particular of new atheists like Christopher Hitchens, who says, “Religion poisons everything,” that claim is, in a very nuanced way, actually substantiated by Scripture. Did you know that in the Bible religion without God is an abomination? Religion without God leads to really terrible things, really terrible evil. There’s no evil worse than evil that is done in the name of God.
Saul himself came to understand this. He came to see that all of his righteousness, all of his ritual, all of his law-observance, everything that he once thought was wonderful, that he put in the merit column, he eventually says it’s rubbish. It’s foul, it’s filthy, it’s refuse, the word he uses in Philippians chapter three: “The things I once counted as gain I now count as loss. For Christ I count it as dung.” It’s awful! It’s awful. That’s what religion without the gospel is, even so-called “Christian” religion. When you lose the gospel, it loses everything that’s good about it. When you lose Jesus, you lose everything that pleases God about it.
Paul’s pre-conversion state shows also how impossible it was for Paul to have come up with the gospel himself. I mean, he was the greatest enemy of the gospel, and now he’s this apostle. So it’s not something that he just invented.
It also shows us that Paul understood from the inside Judaism. We think that the people who were trying to lead the Galatian churches into this law-observance were Judaizers. They were Jewish Christians who were trying to impose the law on Gentiles, and Paul says, “Hey guys. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I understand from the inside out what Judaism is all about. I was zealous for the traditions of my fathers, but then something happened to me.”
It shows us, then, how desperately Paul himself needed the intervention and the rescue of God’s grace. That’s what we all need, isn’t it? We all need grace. Whether we’re like Paul or our need is somewhat different, we all need grace.
You remember that opening line of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, where he says, “Happy families are all alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In the same way you could say that the joy of Christians is similar; the joy of Christians is all alike, but our misery outside of Christ is very unique, our needs outside of Christ. We’re sinners in different ways; we’re unhappy, miserable, lost in different ways, and sometimes it looks very religious, like Paul in his self-righteousness, in his persecution, in his hatred for people who are different than he is.
Sometimes it’s very brutal and immoral; think of John Newton, the blasphemous slave trader in the 18th century who was converted, became the pastor in Olney and wrote that great hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Or think of C.S. Lewis: cool, collected, cynical, agnostic, and intellectual. He just doesn’t believe it; he just doesn’t believe it.
Those are very different kinds of people who need conversion, very different kinds of lostness, but they all need the same thing. They need grace, and that’s what we need outside of Christ.
There’s a great illustration of both the need for Christ and its transforming power in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. Some of you, I’m sure, are familiar with the story; you’ve either seen the musical, the play, or you’ve seen the movie, or maybe you’ve even read the book. Here are the basic details of the story.
Jean Valjean is an excon, right? He’s a convict who’s just been released after serving 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s hungry children, and he’s bitter. He’s a hardened, bitter man after all these years, and as soon as he’s released from prison he steals silver from a very kind bishop who had given him lodging. He’s promptly caught, and the bishop says to the police, “But I gave him the silver. I gave him the silver; it was a gift.”
In that moment, Valjean comes into direct contact with grace. Here’s an act of grace that is shown to him, and it shows him the enormity of his sin, the wickedness of his heart, and it confronts him with a choice. This is how the novel reads:
“Jean Valjean’s heart swelled, and he burst into tears. It was the first time he had wept in 19 years. He wept for a long time. He shed hot tears; he wept bitterly, more terrified than a child. His past life, his first offense, his exterior degradation, his interior hardening, his release made sweet by so many schemes of vengeance—all this returned and appeared to him clearly, but in a light he had never seen before he could see his life, and it seemed horrible; his soul, and it seemed frightful.
“There was, however, a gentler light shining on that life and soul. One thing was certain: that he was no longer the same man.”
Here’s a man who desperately needed grace given grace, and it changes him. He’s no longer the same man.
II. Paul the Convert: Grace Received
That’s what happened to Paul. Paul needed grace; here he is, Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor, but then look what happens to him: grace received when he’s converted in verses 15 and 16, point number two.
“But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me—” Stop right there. Look at what Paul says. This is really brief, but this is just packed with meaning as he describes what happened to him, the intervention, the rescue. What happened to him? This is one of the most compelling arguments for the Christian faith, that Saul the persecutor became the greatest apostle and evangelist the world has ever known! What happened to him?
Well, notice what Paul says. He says three things.
(1) He says, first of all, God “set me apart before I was born.” He “set me apart from my mother’s womb.” He’s using language here from Isaiah 49, the servant of the Lord, set apart from his birth; from Jeremiah one, where the prophet is set apart before he’s born. He’s using that language, he’s applying it to himself, and he’s essentially telling us that “God chose me, and he chose me before I was born!” It’s the doctrine of election, right here. Paul says, “God set me apart before I was born. He chose me. God did something here.”
(2) Secondly, he says, “He called me by his grace.” That word call is a very important word in Paul. It’s the word kaleó (καλεω), and it can mean to invite, but in Paul’s letters it usually carries the idea of a divine summons, a summons. So it’s an invitation with compelling power that secures a response. It is the divine effective call. It’s the call that summons us into a new reality, a new relationship, a new way of life. Paul says, “He called me, and he called me by his grace.”
Now, if we’re attentive to this letter we’ll know that Paul has just said to the Galatians, “You’re about to forsake the one who called you by his grace.” So there’s a comparison here between what God did for Paul and what God had done for them. Everyone who’s ever saved is saved because they are called by God’s grace. Well, that’s what happened to Paul. He was called by his grace.
In chapter five, verses seven and eight, he says, “You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion is not from him who calls you.” He’s appealing to their call. “God called you! He called you by his grace. He called me by his grace.”
(3) This brought about a change in Paul’s life, and then look at verse 16a, thirdly, “God revealed his Son in me.” “He revealed his Son in me.”
Now this is really interesting. Several key words here: the word reveal is the verb apokalupto (αποκαλυπτο). We get our word apocalypse or apocalipsis; apocalypse is the word for revelation. God revealed something. He revealed something; it’s an unveiling, pulling away the curtain so as to peer through and see a new reality. That’s the idea of this word.
It connects to chapter one, verse 12, where Paul says that he received the gospel by a revelation of Jesus Christ. Paul says here, “God revealed his Son in me.”
Now, this, I think, is important. The preposition here is the preposition, in Greek, en (εν). It’s not the preposition “to”, even though some translations say, “He revealed his Son to me.” Now, en can carry that idea of to, but usually that’s a different preposition in Greek. So why does Paul say, “God revealed his Son in me,” not just “to me”? “He revealed his Son in me.”
I think the reason is because something happened internally in Paul. It wasn’t just that he had a vision. He did; he had a vision of Christ on the Damascus road. He saw with his waking eyes the risen Lord of glory! “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” He saw him. But it wasn’t only that. Something changed inside. “He revealed his Son in me,” Paul says, and suddenly Paul is changed.
The church father Chrysostom said, “The revelation had enlightened his whole soul, and he had Christ speaking within him.” Something changed in Paul. There’s transformation that takes place here. Remember that Paul will later say, Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”
You know what it means to be a Christian? It means that Christ lives in you. It means that his Son is revealed in you; something happens inside your heart. It happened to Paul; he was transformed.
He says, “He revealed his Son in me.” His Son. Why does he call Jesus his Son? Why doesn’t he just say, “He revealed Christ in me”? I think it’s because sonship is such an important thing in this letter. Sonship. You remember that Paul in Galatians four will say, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’”
You see, every Christian experiences this. The Spirit of the Son comes into our hearts, and we cry out, “Abba! Father!” We are brought into this new relationship with God, we are adopted into the family of God. Paul experienced this, so it’s part of his testimony.
So three acts of grace. God chose him, God called him, God transformed him by revealing his Son in him, and these underscore for us the divine initiative and the free, unearned nature of grace. Paul didn’t deserve it. He didn’t deserve it. Of all people he didn’t deserve it! He was a persecutor of the church, a blasphemer. He didn’t deserve it, but God chose him. Paul didn’t seek God, but God sought him. God chose him.
Last night on the treadmill—on the treadmill, because I needed some exercise, and I thought, “Oh, I’ll listen to Martyn Lloyd-Jones.” So I looked through my Martyn Lloyd-Jones app until I found a sermon on Galatians one so that I could hear, “What does Lloyd-Jones have to say about this passage I’m going to preaching on tomorrow?”
One thing he said I immediately just wrote down on my notes. He said, “Christianity is not something that you take up; it’s something that takes you up.”
That’s what happened to Paul. He didn’t just evaluate the various religions of the world and then decide, “Yes, Christianity is the one.” No! Something happened to him! He’s arrested; he’s called; he’s transformed, and it’s all an act of divine grace, God’s initiative.
This is what happened to John Newton, right? Here’s this slave trader, here’s the blasphemer, the sailor, and he has an experience of grace, where God conquers him, God changes him, so much that he can say later in his life, “Though I’m not what I ought to be, I’m not what I might be, I’m not what I wished or hoped to be, I’m not what I once was, either, but by the grace of God I am what I am.” Completely changed.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.”
It’s grace! Grace arresting him.
That’s also what happened to C.S. Lewis. Now, C.S. Lewis was by no means a Calvinist, but Lewis also recognized the divine initiative in his conversion. In Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, there’s a chapter called “Checkmate”, where Lewis likens God to a chess player who outmaneuvers him, outmaneuvers him until the point of checkmate.
Lewis says, “Amiable agnostics will cheerfully talk about man’s search for God. To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.” God came hunting for him; he wasn’t hunting for God! God came hunting for him, and he recognized the divine initiative.
Just a few months before Lewis died, someone asked him about that in an interview. It was in Decision magazine. The interviewer asked him about this account of his conversion in Surprised by Joy, and he says, “You suggest there that you are compelled, as it were, to become a Christian. Do you feel that you made a decision at the time of your conversion?”
This is what Lewis said: “I wouldn’t put it that way. What I wrote in Surprised by Joy was that before God closed in on me I was offered what now appears a moment of holy, free choice, but I feel my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair. I was decided upon. I was glad afterwards at the way it came out, but at the moment what I heard was God saying, ‘Put down your gun, and we’ll talk.’”
Now that’s Lewis, who’s not a Calvinist. You don’t have to be a Calvinist to recognize that if you’re saved it’s because God sought you out. You trace back what happened in your life and you can see that it’s God in his providence who brought these people into new life.
He brought this book across your path, you heard this sermon, you saw this Bible verse, you were in VBS as a child by no choice of your own. You’re born into a Christian family; you could have been born in a Hindu family. Why are you a Christian? You’re a Christian because God sought you, because God called you, because God revealed his Son in you. He transformed you by his grace.
III. Paul the Apostle: Grace Proclaimed
So we see Paul the persecutor, who needed grace; Paul the convert, who received grace; and then he becomes Paul the apostle, and he proclaims grace. That’s what the rest of this passage is about, and I just want you to see three important details here about Paul’s apostleship. We don’t have to take a lot of time here, but to understand the letter you have to understand what Paul’s saying here.
(1) Number one, Paul says that he received the gospel by, or through, a divine revelation. Verses 11 and 12; we saw this last week, let me read it again. Verse 11, “I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.”
Calvin says that the whole argument, the main hinge on which this question turns is right here. Did Paul get a direct, divine revelation of the gospel? If he did, then his message is true, and the claims of the false teachers are indeed false.
So that’s what Paul claims here. He’s claiming, “I didn’t get it from—nobody taught it to me, I didn’t get it from anybody. No, I didn’t even get it from the other apostles. I saw Jesus! I saw Him! He spoke to me! He changed me! And the reason I am who I am now is because of what Christ did for me on that day on the road to Damascus.” Divine revelation. That’s his first claim.
(2) Here’s the second thing to see: Paul was given a special commission to preach to the Gentiles, verse 16. “God was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles.” There’s the reason.
So Paul’s commission, his apostleship, and his conversion are all bound up together. When God called him on the Damascus road, he called him into salvation and he called him to be an apostle.
And again, the language of Isaiah 49 is important. Those of you who know your Bibles, Isaiah 49, the servant of the Lord. Okay? Most of the time when we think about the servant of the Lord we think about Jesus, the suffering servant in Isaiah 53.
But that language is used in other ways, and when Paul uses this language here, the servant of the Lord, he’s thinking of the servant who will be a light to the Gentiles. And Paul sees himself in that role. He sees himself as God’s servant. In fact, in verse 10 he actually says it, doesn’t he? He says, “I’m not trying to please men, I’m the servant, not of men, but of God. I’m the slave of God. I’m God’s servant, and God chose me to be a light to the Gentiles.” That was Paul’s special commission. He was the apostle to the Gentiles.
(3) So, he got the gospel by divine revelation, secondly he was given a special commission to preach to the Gentiles, and then thirdly, Paul makes this point that his interaction with the other apostles was limited. You see this from the end of verse 16 all the way to the end of the chapter.
He says, “My immediate response was not to consult with flesh and blood,” or with human beings. “I didn’t go check this all out with the apostles.” That’s not what he did! And then what follows reads like a travel log, right? You read this, and he talks about how he didn’t go to Jerusalem, he did go to Arabia, he went to Damascus, then he does go to Jerusalem, but he’s only there for 15 days; he only sees Peter and James the brother of the Lord, none of the other apostles, he’s only there for two weeks.
Then he went to Syria, and then he went to Cilicia, and he’s not really known; he’s relatively unknown in the churches of Judea. The only thing they know is that the persecutor has become a preacher. “The one who once was against us is now for us,” and Paul says, “They glorified God because of me.” “‘He who used to persecute is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy,’ and they glorified God because of me.”
Now, what’s the point of all these details? Why all this history? Because Paul is building his case that he didn’t receive the gospel from men, not even from the other apostles, but from God himself.
He is countering the false teachers spurious claim, that Paul somehow changed the gospel. Paul says, “No. My gospel is the gospel. It’s the one and only gospel. It is the gospel of free, sovereign, justifying, transforming grace.” That’s the gospel. So Paul’s mounting his defense. That’s the whole point in this passage.
I just want to end in this way, by stressing once again the transforming power of grace. Grace transforms. Now, the emphasis in Galatians, the emphasis is on justification; justification by faith alone. We are declared righteous in the sight of God because of what Christ has done for us, declared righteous, justified by faith. But listen: justification always brings in its wake transformation. They’re not the same thing, but they go together. They go together. You can’t divide justification and sanctification.
Calvin talked about a double grace. It’s a double grace, and the two go together. And the reason is because you get Jesus, and if you get Jesus you get the Spirit of Jesus. If you get Jesus you get Jesus in his righteousness to justify you; you get Jesus in his Spirit to sanctify you. Christ is made to us wisdom from God and righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. What Paul experienced was not only the forgiveness of his sins, but was a radical transformation of his heart and life.
Once again—I’ll end with this—once again, Jean Valjean is such a great example in Les Misérables. When he encounters the grace shown to him by the bishop, Hugo says, “He was indistinctly conscious that the pardon of the priest was the greatest assault and the most formidable attack which had moved this fortress of evil within him, and if he yielded he would be obliged to renounce that hatred with which the actions of other men had filled his soul for so many years.”
If he receives the grace, it obliges him to renounce the hatred. It changes him. So there’s this war, there’s this struggle.
Now, I think, if possible, it’s even more poignant in the play, when you hear the song, “Who Am I?” Some of you will remember this, if you’ve ever heard it. I won’t read all the words, but let me just read a couple of lines, okay? Just a couple of lines from the play. It’s Jean Valjean, and he’s wrestling internally with what the bishop has done for him.
“Yet why did I allow that man
To touch my soul and show me love?
He treated me like any other;
He gave me his trust, called me brother.
My life he claims for God above,
Can such things be?
For I had come to hate the world,
The world that always hated me.
I’m reaching, but I fall,
And the night is closing in,
And I stare into the void,
Into the whirlpool of my sin.
I’ll escape now from that world,
From the world of Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean is nothing more;
Another story must begin.”
That’s grace. Jean Valjean is nothing more; another story must begin. Paul the persecutor becomes an apostle; he’s a different man. He’s a different man! C.S. Lewis the agnostic becomes the greatest apologist in the 20th century. John Newton the slave trader may be the greatest hymnwriter in the English language.
Grace changes us, transforms us. Grace means that if you trust Christ, if you believe in Christ, if the Christ the Son of God is revealed in you, grace means that who you were before is nothing now; another story has begun. “It is no longer I who live, it is Christ who lives in me.”
Let’s pray.
Gracious Father, how we thank you that you are a God of grace. When our hearts were dead and blind, deaf to your voice, you sought us out, you arrested us by your grace. You came hunting for us like the hound of heaven in that great poem by Thompson. You came seeking us through the ages and through the years. You sought us until you found us. So we thank you for that grace.
We thank you for the grace you showed to Paul and how you used this man to shape 2,000 years of history. You use his inspired letters in our hearts and lives today. We thank you that the same grace by which you called Paul is the grace by which you call us.
And Father, we pray this morning for anyone who’s never been touched by that grace. Maybe this moment they feel something like Jean Valjean, staring in the whirlpool of their sin, their hopelessness, their despair. Would you in this moment reveal your Son in them? In all of us, Lord, do this deep, transforming work.
And may it be said of us as well that whatever we were before Christ, we’re different now. Before cold, now warm; before self-righteous, now humble; before mean-spirited, now compassionate; before full of lust, now full of love. Wherever that change is needed, change us thoroughly; do that this morning, and may we be like Paul the apostle. May we be monuments of your grace and of your mercy.
As we come to the table now, may we be reminded once again of the gracious sacrifice Christ has made for us in giving his body and his blood in our behalf, and may we in these moments lay hold of Christ by faith as we fellowship with him at the table. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
