At this moment in the life of our society, there is a growing consensus, at almost every level of the culture, that the best way to communicate who you are and what you believe is to talk about it as your “story.” This is what I hear voice after voice after voice saying, as I listen to the dialogues that are going on around me. More than that, I have become increasingly convinced that the only way to think faithfully about the Bible is as the true story of God’s gracious dealing with mankind through his Son Jesus Christ, a story told perfectly by men carried along by his Holy Spirit to write that story down without failure and without lack. These days, it really is all about the story. Perhaps it always has been.

So this morning we’re going to talk about the story of the conversion of the radical rabbi Saul of Tarsus into a fire-breathing follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re also going to talk about your story of becoming a follower of Jesus—which is a story only you can tell. Most important of all we’re going to talk about Jesus’ story. That’s the story that every last one of his followers needs to be able to tell.

At this point in the story of the Acts of the Holy Spirit, Saul has long since begun going by the Roman name Paul. He has just finished his third trip around the eastern half of the Mediterranean world. He is now at the very epicenter of the Jewish world of that day, the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. He has been accused of defiling the Temple, attacked by a violent mob of fanatically committed Jews, and arrested by a detachment of Roman soldiers. Both because they want to protect him from the mob and because they suspect him of being a terrorist they’ve been looking for, they have chained him up and are about to take him out of the Temple into their barracks. They have brought him to the top of a staircase and are about to whisk him out the door.

Acts 21:39-22:21

This is the famous story of the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus. The story is told three different times in the book of Acts:

• 9:3-9 à Luke telling the story for Theophilus

If you were here on Palm Sunday of last year, then you heard me talk about this telling of the story.

• 22:6-8 à Luke telling Theophilus about Paul telling the story to a crowd of agitated Jews in the Temple

This is where we are today.

• 26:12-15 à Luke telling Theophilus about Paul telling the story to King Herod Agrippa II

We’ll look at it when we get there later this year.

Those are three separate tellings of the same story. Today, there are three different stories our Lord is asking you to think about: Paul’s story (the way we hear it here), your own story, and the story of the Lord Jesus Christ.

ONE Hear Paul’s story

Just listen as Paul tells his story to the very people who were just trying to beat him to death. The first part of his story is:

     A How Paul heard about Jesus

22 ¹ “Brothers and fathers, hear the defense that I now make before you.” ² And when they heard that he was addressing them in the Hebrew language, they became even more quiet. And he said:

³ “I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city (that is, Jerusalem), educated at the feet of Gamaliel (that is, the same Gamaliel we met in chapter 5 of this book) according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers (that is, a Pharisee like his tutor Gamaliel), being zealous for God as all of you are this day. ⁴ I persecuted this Way (that is, the Christians) to the death, binding and delivering to prison both men and women, ⁵ as the high priest and the whole council of elders (that is, the Great Sanhedrin, The supreme ruling council of Sadducees  Pharisees in Jerusalem) as the high priest and the whole council of elders can bear me witness. From them I received letters to the brothers (that is, other mainstream Jews), and I journeyed toward Damascus to take those also who were there and bring them in bonds to Jerusalem to be punished.

Paul is just summarizing everything that we know from reading the middle chapters of this book. Before he met Jesus, he was the worst kind of bad man: the devil-driven man who is 100% sure that he is on God’s side. Later on, in one of the letters he’ll write, he will speculate that the whole reason God ever chose to use such a wicked man as Saul of Tarsus was to show the omnipotent power of the grace of God to forgive and transform anyone.

The next thing Paul talks to his attackers about is

     B How Jesus showed himself to Paul as Lord

⁶ “As I was on my way and drew near to Damascus, about noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone around me. ⁷ And I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ ⁸ And I answered, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said to me, ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting.’ ⁹ Now those who were with me saw the light but did not understand the voice of the one who was speaking to me. 

More than a few people have asked the question, “What about repentance and faith? It never says anything about how Paul repented or believed!” You can see his repentant faith in what he says next:

^10a And I said, ‘What shall I do, Lord?’

This is what true repentance is: a change of mind that leads to a change of life. This is what genuine faith is: the entrusting of everything you are to all that Christ is (Savior and Lord, master and friend, conqueror of your will and lover of your soul). The reason Paul didn’t have to say that this was repentant faith was that everybody who was listening would have known that. It would be like informing people that the sky is blue. The reason Saul calls Jesus “Lord” and asks what the Lord wants him to do his because he is now a repentant believer.

^10b And the Lord said to me, ‘Rise, and go into Damascus, and there you will be told all that is appointed for you to do.’ ¹¹ And since I could not see because of the brightness of that light, I was led by the hand by those who were with me, and came into Damascus.

There is not one of us in this room who had as radical and astonishing a conversion experience as that. But every last one of us who is saved today is someone who has been converted, somebody who has repented of sin and trusted in the savior as Lord. That’s what it means to become a Christian.

     C. Paul’s baptism and his new family

¹² “And one Ananias, a devout man according to the law (that is, the law of Moses), well spoken of by all the Jews who lived there, ¹³ came to me, and standing by me said to me, ‘Brother Saul, receive your sight.’ And at that very hour I received my sight and saw him. ¹⁴ And he said, ‘The God of our fathers appointed you to know his will, to see the Righteous One and to hear a voice from his mouth; (which is exactly what just happened to him right outside Damascus—although It will be far from the last time Paul sees his Lord Jesus Christ and he hears from his mouth) ¹⁵ for you will be a witness for him to everyone of what you have seen and heard. ¹⁶ And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name.’

We said very little about verse 16 when we first looked at Paul’s story back in chapter 9, and we’ll not say a lot about it right now. Just this: Ananias is not saying baptism will wash away Paul’s sins, but that calling on the name of Jesus will wash away Paul’s sins. x2 [[ ]]

If you’re thinking to yourself, “well that sure was a handy little switcheroo,” I feel you. If you’re going to believe that that is how Paul understood what Ananias was saying, you’re going to need some more extensive explanation! That is why I plan to preach a whole sermon on the subject a week from today. You’ll definitely want to come back for that! For now, it’s enough to know that he did get up and get baptized. Let’s get back to the story.

     D. Paul’s second vision of the Lord Jesus

¹⁷ “When I had returned to Jerusalem and was praying in the temple, I fell into a trance ¹⁸ and saw him saying to me, 

Alright, two quick observations. First, soon after his baptism as a Christian, Saul went to the Jerusalem Temple to pray like any good Jew. I’m telling you, the early Christians did not consider themselves to be anything other than good, faithful Jews. They didn’t see any tension or contradiction at all between calling themselves Christians and calling themselves Jews. In their mind, the two were the same thing.

Second, Paul says he fell into a trance and had a vision. If trances and visions are just too freaky for you you’re probably going to have a hard time with biblical Christianity. Maybe it’s time to rethink things.

Third, Jesus showed up again and spoke to Paul face to face

¹⁸ and saw him saying to me, ‘Make haste and get out of Jerusalem quickly, because they (that is, the people of Jerusalem) will not accept your testimony about me.’ ¹⁹ And I said, ‘Lord, they themselves know that in one synagogue after another I imprisoned and beat those who believed in you. ²⁰ And when the blood of Stephen your witness was being shed, I myself was standing by and approving and watching over the garments of those who killed him.’

Then, true to his usual way of doing things, Jesus just ignores Paul’s objections and repeats the command, except with a totally unthinkable flourish:

 ²¹ And he said to me, ‘Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’”

What happens next is so extreme that it too will require a whole sermon. I’ll preach that two weeks from today, if the Lord keeps me alive that long. For now it’s enough to know that the mob that had quieted down to listen to Paul started screaming again, and that was the end of Paul’s story. What matters is that Jesus told Paul that his whole life from that point on would be devoted to telling the world about Jesus.

We needed to look at Paul’s story of coming to Christ today for two reasons. First, that’s what this passage is all about, and we’re supposed to be studying the Bible, for crying off key. Second, it gives us a handy template for thinking about how to tell our own story of how we came to Jesus.

TWO Know your story

That is to say, think through how you came to know Jesus as your Lord and Savior. I Highly doubt that you will ever have an occasion to talk to an unbeliever or a questioner about Paul’s conversion. But you will get to talk to them about how you came to know Jesus as Lord. So use the story of Paul’s conversion to help you think through the story of your own conversion. Every step of what we just said about how Paul met Jesus can be used by each one of us to talk about our own testimony of coming to Jesus. And since the only story I can tell with any authority at all is my own, I’ll go ahead and do that. As you listen, be thinking about how you could tell your story the next time you get a chance.

     A. How you heard about Jesus

My parents enrolled me in the cradle role of the First Baptist Church of Cutler Ridge, Florida, when I was 2 weeks old. I knew the name of Jesus before I knew my own name. That doesn’t mean that I knew Jesus—only that I knew about him. Just like Paul had plenty of time when he knew about Jesus but did not yet know him personally, most of us had knowledge about Jesus for months or years before we had a personal encounter with him.

Like Paul, and maybe like you, the story of how I heard about Jesus is really a story of fundamentally empty information about somebody I didn’t really know. On the other hand, there’s probably at least one person here Who can clearly remember when you first heard about this man named Jesus. I’d love to hear your story some Sunday evening soon. That’s one of the things that are 5:00 PM service is all about.

At any rate, the point is that you should know and should be able to talk about how you heard about Jesus.

You should also know and be able to talk about

     B. How Jesus showed himself to you as Lord

For Paul, it was a sudden, unexpected, and literally blinding crisis. For me a little less. The truth is, sitting through Baptist sermons and then standing for Baptist altar calls Sunday after Sunday, year after year, I prayed to receive Jesus hundreds of times. But I never once consciously repented of sin and trusted in the savior, that I can remember. I don’t recall ever hearing that I was supposed to do that. My mother read to me every night from Taylor’s Bible story book. She had me seated by her side in church every Sunday. My young mind was filled with knowledge about Jesus. In particular, I heard a lot about and cared a lot about heaven and hell. But I didn’t know Jesus as Lord. I knew what it meant to obey my mother and father, and most of the time I even did. But I didn’t know Jesus as Lord.

Jesus showed himself to me as my Lord in the summer of 1980. The youth group of the First Baptist Church of Sunrise FL was at summer youth camp on the campus of the Florida Bible College on Hollywood Beach. I just turned 15. After so many years of hearing about Jesus, I was confronted for the first time with the realization that Jesus Christ was intentionally, individually calling me to come and follow him. No longer was he just my parents Lord. He was more even than the Lord of the universe. He was calling me to trust him as my Lord. My commitment to him that summer in 1980 was to trust him enough to go wherever he wanted me to go and do whatever he called me to do. It was to truly, utterly believe in, trust, and follow him, my Lord Jesus Christ. Of course my answer was “yes.” How could it conceivably have been anything else?

     C. Your baptism and your church family

I had been watching people get baptized for years. I knew that everybody who really believes in Jesus is supposed to get baptized. But I was never willing to do it, because I was too shy to ask. What happened to me when I really came to know Jesus as Lord was that I suddenly cared more about what Jesus said than about what everybody else might think, and even more than about what I thought or how I felt.

So the first Sunday after we got back from summer camp, I asked our deacon chairman to baptize me. The next Sunday he did. Since then I have followed the Lord Jesus, as a member of the First Baptist Church of Sunrise, FL, then the Plantation Baptist Church in Plantation, FL, then the First Baptist Church of East Bay in Riverview FL, then the Old Forest Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg VA, theb the Mission Creek Baptist Church in Edwardsville, KS, and now the First Baptist Church of Dundalk, MD. More than once I have backslidden, and then returned to repentance. A few years after my baptism, I distanced myself from church entirely for a couple of years. God rebuked me, and restored me. To this day I struggle with remaining sin, like every Christian does. None of us will be fully free of it until we see Jesus face to face. Yet our Lord has been constant in his care for me, and will be until the end.

     D. How you encounter Jesus as Lord now

I present myself to the Lord every week in worship—the Word, the ordinances, the singing, the giving, and the gathering. I meet the Lord every day in the Bible, in prayer, and in fasting. The Lord confronts me constantly in my conscience and by words of encouragement and correction from other Christians—especially my wife and kids. Jesus is the biggest part of my life. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that there is no part of my life that Jesus doesn’t claim as his own. To be honest, he has to remind me of that on a regular basis.

Please understand: I say this not because I’m a pastor, but because I’m a Christian. Every believer who was a true believer, not a make believer, goes on personally encountering Jesus throughout the rest of his life. He may get angry at Jesus. He may find himself afraid of Jesus. He’ll sometimes find himself hiding from Jesus or running from him. He will often find himself passionately loving Jesus and yearning to follow him closer and serve him better. But if you really know Jesus, Jesus will never elicit from you a yawn and a shrug. In other words, if Jesus just bores you, you have every reason to be grievously alarmed about the state of your soul. If there’s no new life in you, why should anyone believe that you have experienced a new birth?

Real Christians encounter Jesus as Lord.

THREE Tell Jesus’ story

There are lots of different methods and plans for how to tell the story of who Jesus is and what he has done. The Four Spiritual Laws, the Romans Road, and hundreds more. Most of them are perfectly useful and helpful for pointing people 2 the information they need to know to come to know Jesus. However, almost all of them expect you to memorize a bunch of Scripture. In the next few minutes, I’ll show you a plan that only requires you to memorize half of one verse.

The verse is 1 Peter 3:18a For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.

And then you need to remember four words, and know what they mean: Christ, cross, swap, God.

The word Christ literally means the “anointed one.” You could also translate it as “the promised one” or “the chosen one.” The ancient Hebrews, carefully studying their scriptures (what we now call the Old Testament), believed that God had promised to save his people from their sins and to save the world from theirs through one man who would come at one point in history. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was that man. He was the Christ. If you want to talk some more about why we believe that, I’m happy to dive as deep down that rabbit hole as you want to. For now let’s just go on.

The word “cross” refers to the wooden torture device on which Romans publicly executed their most heinous criminals. Jesus the Christ died in blood and agony on such a cross on trumped-up charges. Christians believe that his death, far from being an accident or a defeat, was actually the culmination of God’s merciful plan to both satisfy the righteous demands of his holy justice and save his people from their sins by Allowing his precious son to take upon himself the punishment—the death penalty—for every human being who will truly turn from this sin and put his trust in the savior Jesus Christ. That’s what it means to say that “Christ suffered for sins.”

The word swap means “switch” or “exchange.” On the cross, Jesus the just, righteous, sinless one Took my injustice, my unrighteousness, my sin upon himself and destroyed it by dying in my place. He bore the penalty for my sin. But there is so much more good news! When I turned from my sin and put my trust in that crucified and resurrected man, Not holy did I receive remission for my sin, but I also received justification. That means call of the justice, righteousness, holiness, and purity of the spotless Lamb of God was wrapped around me. It’s not just that God cancelled all the negative debt that I owed. It’s that he clothed me in the positive righteousness of his son Jesus Christ. Jesus for me. That’s the swap, the switch, the exchange. And that’s the gospel!

God just means God: the creator of the ends of the earth, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Before I met Jesus I did not know God. But Jesus gave himself on the cross so that I might become a child of God. I am no longer under the just and righteous condemnation of the holy God. Now I am a beloved member of his family. And Jesus is the reason. Not me. Not my good works. Not my religion. Not my kindness to people. Nothing in my hands I bring; simply to his cross I cling. I know God today and we’ll know him forever because Jesus gave himself for me 2000 years ago.

1 Peter 3:18a For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.

And then you need to remember four words, and know what they mean: Christ, cross, swap, God. And, no, you don’t need to be able to use all the fancy words that preachers use. You just need to know what those four words mean and be able to put it in your own words: Christ, cross, swap, God.

Remember that verse and those four words. Next time you’re talking to somebody about this story of how you came to Jesus and they ask you to explain to them who Jesus even is, try this. Let me know how it works.

what God wants them to do

• repent of your sins and trust in the Savior right now
• talk to me about baptism scratch
• Learn to tell your story and start telling it often
• learn to tell the story of Jesus, and start telling it often
• “What if I was baptized when I was too young to even realize what was going on?”
• conversion vs confirmation tonight