Shane Hughes 8-31-25

Two stories couldn't be more different because of the people that were being baptized, couldn't be more apart. Penelope, who grew up at this church, who has been a part of our youth group forever. Renee, who's newer to our church and has a very different story. But both of them found their way to meet Christ in the waters. And they've both been transformed and changed.

And I want us to think about what it means to be transformed, to convert, to experience the power of God through baptism. And this is where we are in the story thus far. In Acts chapter nine, Saul and I'm going to use Paul and Saul interchangeably because his name changes halfway through the story. And that's just confusing. But hang with me.

So sometimes I'll say Paul, sometimes I'll say Saul. I just mean the same dude. Saul is aggressively locking up Christians. And the reason that he's doing that is because it would be ridiculous to imagine that God would take on flesh. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that the Emperor of Rome does and claims.

And so Saul is doing what he thinks is right. And then in chapter nine, everything turns on a dime. And he experiences something that forces him to re examine all the assumptions that he held. It's kind of like the way the discovery of germ theory it led from one doctor in London, R.A. removing the lever on a pump. It cured the cholera epidemic that was happening at the time.

And any. And it forces doctors to re examine everything they think they know about medicine or Jerry Jones. Trading Michael Parson makes fans re examine their confidence in Jerry Jones, trying to figure out what's going on. But what happens in Acts chapter nine is both a conversion and theophany. Those two things are not the same.

Conversion is when you change your mind about an idea and it forces you to re examine and change your actions. You go on a new course of life. Theophany is when you encounter God. And sometimes we confuse these things or conflate them, but they're not. They're not the same.

It just so happens that they both happen in Saul's life at the same time. Because theophany doesn't always mean change. You think it would. You think it would mean change. Except in scripture, that's not always the case.

For example, Jonah hears a word directly from God. Go to Nineveh to preach, and it doesn't really change him. In fact, he goes the opposite way. He tries to get as far away from there as he possibly can. In fact, throughout the entire narrative of the story of Jonah, Jonah never really has a transformational moment.

He's the only one in the story that doesn't. Jacob wrestles with God all night, and he still kind of remains a jerk for the rest of his life. So it's possible to have theophany without conversion. It's possible to have an encounter with God and not be changed. It's also possible to convert without theophany.

So the story up to now is that the Gospel is spreading in Jerusalem and Judea. And the second part, where our story begins is the spread of the Gospel to the Gentiles. And the story right before this one is the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. And in the course of that narrative, the eunuch asks the question, hey, here's water. Why can't I get baptized?

Now, Church of Christ uses this in one way, but there's a much deeper question that's happening in Acts. Can somebody that's not Jewish, can a Gentile be accepted into the Kingdom of God? Not only a Gentile, but an Ethiopian? Not only an Ethiopian, but one that works for the queen. He's part of the empire.

Can this person become part of God's kingdom? It makes us ask the question, who is the kingdom of God for?

Does God really care about all the boundaries that we've set up and created? But Saul gets this letter from the high priest to gather up more followers of the Way. And he's on the road, on the way to do what he believes is right. I mean, he's already held the coats for those who killed Stephen in Jerusalem. He goes door to door, dragging men and women that are Christians to prison.

So on the way to Damascus, he encounters the risen Christ. Others hear the sound but don't see it. And when Saul arises, he's blind for three days. I gotta tell you, this is not a typical conversion. And you might feel as you read this conversion, that your experience is less because God didn't speak to you, because there was no blinding light, because there wasn't three days of darkness.

And then some stranger comes in and lays hands on you and prays, and suddenly you can see again. No, what you have to realize is that this story is unusual. Saul, the entire time, believes in his whole heart that he's doing the right thing. In Galatians, he describes himself before his conversion as someone who is more zealous than anyone else. And later, in Acts 23, Paul's reflecting on his experience, and he says that he had a clean conscience up to this point.

It's not guilt that leads him to Jesus, it's not the dark night of the soul or longing for God. The. There's no deep despair. There is simply new data given to him by God that takes his entire life back to the drawing board. And so your conversion story may not be that epic.

Mine's not. In fact, mine is pretty boring. If I could say it in three senses. My conversion story is it was time. That's all I could tell you about, was about this time of year.

It was early September, and I was in Wednesday night Bible class. And there's something that just clicked over in my heart and in my mind. And I realized, it's time. Now's the week to do this. I'd been going to summer camp.

I had been studying God. There wasn't a time where I wasn't going to church. And it was the right moment. And so I told my youth minister, hey, I think it's time for me to be baptized. And he said, Sunday or right now?

And I said, why not now? And so we called my parents, and they came up and I was baptized. It's not. It's not exciting. It's not the.

The power of a person who was rescued from the grips of addiction or violence. It's not the. The power of a prisoner who's cut to the heart from the way that they caused harm and they must make amends. It's not the power of the person who's lost everything and hanging on to the ledge of life when God intervenes. It's pretty boring.

But if you look at the story of my family, it gets a little more interesting. Because my grandfather. My grandfather had three, maybe four brothers, and they lived as coal miners in Kentucky. And he was wild. And his brothers had this reputation.

They would get their check on Friday, and most of it was gone by Sunday morning because they'd spent it in the bar. And so for most of his life, he just assumed that wild living was the way to go. And then he met my grandmother. And my grandmother was the 13th child of a Church of Christ preacher. And she took one look at him, and he took a good look at her, and she said, if you want to court me, if you want to date me, I'll do it one time.

Sunday morning after church, you can meet me in my father's house and we'll have tea, but you have to come to church with me. And then as the chorus of their relationship grew, they realized they were in love. They wanted to be married. And she had one thing, one stipulation. She said simply, I love you, but I don't love all that.

And so if you want me, you've got to leave all that behind. And without missing a beat, my grandfather left Kentucky. They moved to Indiana. He became a life insurance salesman, pretty big change from a coal miner, and then later a deacon and an elder. And he served this little church in Highland, Indiana, for the rest of his life.

And he had two sons who were believers. And I am the first son of one of those sons. If there's any story that I have that I am the fruit of my grandfather's faithfulness, of his courage to quit what he was doing and to find something new, to find a new place, that's my story. It was time. It makes sense for me.

Tim Keller notes that when Paul was knocked to the ground, he was having a collision with the truth.

What Paul was encountering for the first time in his life was a God that he didn't create, a God that had his own reality, a God who's actually there. Saul had constructed a God in his mind, a God that he wanted, because look at verse five. Look at Paul. Saul's question. When he encounters Jesus on the road, he asked the question, who are you, Lord?

Because I thought I knew. And this new data doesn't make sense. Saul thought he knew who God was. He thought, for example, that God would never become a human being. He thought that God would never set aside the temple or the sacrifices.

And therefore, because he thought he knew who God was, he thought Christians had to be wrong. And so he was persecuting them. He thought they had to be wrong. What happens on the road to Damascus is he discovers that the God that he thought was the God he constructed was actually so much more a God that he wanted, not actually. Not the God that's actually there who has his own reality.

And here's my suspicion. This is just a guess. I think that if you went around Abilene, you found somebody at Walmart and you asked the question, they would probably tell you that they believe in God. And maybe they've spent some time thinking about it, maybe they've read a Bible or a book or two, and most of them land somewhere at. And this is just my guess, but I think I'm right.

If there is a God, I bet it's a God of love and it's a God who accepts people. And it's also a God that doesn't ask very much of you. And it's a God that mostly just wants you to be happy most of the time. Now, I think that kind of God is very different than the God that Saul had in his mind. But they're the same kind because they're just a construction that God cannot help you or save you, that God cannot transform you because that God is not greater than you, that God is just a projection of your own heart, that God is not real.

What you need more than anything else is a God that is not a projection of your own needs. And this is why a person that experiences disappointment or doubt or loss or anger or frustration at God for something that God did or did not do is actually closer to understanding God than the person whose understanding of God is never challenged. Does that make sense to you? When you experience loss and grief and disappointment and frustration with God, you're actually closer to God than you were before because you're serving the real God. You're experiencing the real God, not just the one you made up your mind.

One of the marks of conversion is that God unsettles you, disturbs your peace and your sense of self, your autonomy. God challenges that. My conversion story is so boring. It's time. So I met Christ in the water.

But I want to tell you is that I have been converting ever since. Since that moment, I had to realize that it. If Christ is the Lord of my life, then I have to get rid of a lot of the selfishness that exists in my body, and I have to be faithful to those around me. And so when I got to college, I realized what it means to be a good friend, to serve others. And when I got married, I realized how selfish I was.

And then when I began to have kids, I realized how much fear I have about the future and how much even more selfishness that I thought I had dealt with before. The deeper and deeper I get into relationships with other human beings, it challenges that notion of the God that's in my head with the reality of the God that exists in this world.

God is coming at Saul and confronting him and challenging him and providing new truths that are going to realign his world. Saul will get his eyesight back, but he will never see the world the same again. And neither will you.

Jack Lewis, when he's speaking about his conversion, C.S. lewis, he speaks about it that he. He got into the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, and they were going to go see the zoo. And he said something happened between those moments from when he got into the motorcycle sidecar and when he got out. He said he just.

He wasn't Christian when he began, and he is when he's done. And it's. It's an interesting story. But what's deeper than that story is his friends who patiently and kindly led him gently into the love of God, who challenged his falsehood, who challenged his supposition, who challenged his selfishness, and gently, step by step, took him closer and closer to where the Holy Spirit could speak into his life. It wasn't just one moment in a motorcar.

It was years of faithful friends loving him into the gospel. And sometimes that happens. Sometimes that's the story of your life, that you are loved into the gospel or you're gently argued into the gospel, or you're just being kindnessed into the Gospel. Those are what bring us together. C.S.

lewis writes about that experience before glad closed in on me, I became aware that I was holding something at bay or shutting something out. I felt myself being there. And then given a free choice, I could open the door or keep it shut. But I chose to open. Now, he continues, I say I chose.

Yet it doesn't really seem possible to do the opposite. Amenable agnostics will cheerfully talk about man's search for God. To me, they might as well have talked about a mouse's search for the cat because it was God who had been pursuing him week after week, month after month and year after year that that Lewis might know God's love. And it actually takes Paul quite a while to figure this out. That the text talks about three days of blindness.

But later he talks about three years that Paul spends in Arabia trying to see how Jesus is the center of the story. This is what Mike talked about a few weeks ago when they talked about the author of Hebrews comes across Psalm 110. The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, and I will make an enemy a footstool of your enemies. And that author realized for the first time my Lord is Jesus. And it completely reimagines how he understands Scripture and the Temple and Melchizedek and all of those different pieces.

High priest. All of those things change on that one realization. It takes Paul three years to figure that out.

All of Scripture changes the suffering servant in Isaiah, that's Christ. All the prophets point to him.

Here's what I want you to take away.

You are not baptized just to renounce your sin, but to let God transform your heart.

Willie Jennings is a profound African American theologian and he's a Baptist preacher. And he grew up in the aftermath of the Civil rights movement and the effects of Jim Crow in the South. And he has this line that's just been sticking in my head. And I I can't get it out this week. He says there is no rationale for murder that remains intact in the presence of God.

What he says is there is no way that you can hate or kill your brother and sister after you've experienced the full presence of God. There's just no way possible logically that those two ideas can remain standing in your head. Yet they do. Richard Rohr writes that Christianity is meant to be a way of being in a world that is simple, non violent, it's shared and loving. However, we have made it into an established religion and all that goes with that and avoided the lifestyle change itself.

One could be greedy or racist, selfish and vain throughout most of Christian history and still believe that Jesus is one's personal Lord and Savior. Then he writes later, the world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on earth is too great.

You are baptized into Christ, but you're also baptized into the church. First century Baptistries, they had eight sides because they wanted to throw your mind back to the story of Noah and those eight people that were saved in the ark. And in the same way that they were saved in the ark, we are saved in the church. That's how we experience God's salvation. But the church is never going to be this grand scheme, this religion.

It's always going to be people living next to people trying to figure out how not to be selfish to those whom they love the most. That's what it always is. It's always going to look simple, it's always going to look non violent. It's always going to look sharing and loving. It's never anything else.

Anything else is just you imagining God in a way that God never desired to be known.

And so today I want to invite you into a greater story. I want to invite you into a deeper story. Because maybe in your life you've never experienced that moment of transition of conversion. Maybe you've never put all the pieces together. Maybe that last piece of data hasn't just slipped in and you realize that Jesus is the way.

And that's fine. This church is going to love you into the gospel and it'll take as long as it takes. And that's fine with us because we are confident that then in the end, God gets what God wants out of your heart. But the other thing I want to challenge you to do this week is to continue your own conversion story. Your baptism doesn't end in the water, it ends in the presence of God.

And so every day you are challenged to see God in a new way to see yourself in a new way to let. Let the data of God's word transform the choices that you make. And that's the conversion that I want to invite you to. Not in a moment of bright, flashing light, but a moment of steady, continuous discipleship. Because I think that'll change your life.

And I know it'll change our church. It just might change the world. Would you please stand as we sing?