Rev. Dr. M. Taylor Bach

Acts 9:1-19 Mark 4:30-34

Picture in your mind, if you will, two roads. One of them is like a one lane country road as you might find with the kind of bridge on it where you have to stop to let another car through just because there isn't enough space. That road goes over an overpass of an eight lane highway, only there are no cars on either road. There are only people walking. On the country road, there are very few. You look around and you think, “Where is everybody?” Those on it seem very happy and content. And on the eight lane road, it is crowded with lots of people walking and making noise and doing strange sinful things.

This is an adaptation of a parable that Jesus gave us about conversion. His point was, there is a narrow road for those who will get to heaven. There is a wide road for those who won't make it-that leads to hell. So as you are picturing this in your mind, what I would like you to think for a moment is&who is on the narrow road? Are you? And if you are on the narrow road, who is with you? As you go over that overpass, can you look down and see some of your friends and neighbors and loved ones, maybe some family members? Wouldn't you like to reach down and pull them up on the high road with you? How do we do that kind of thing? The scripture reading that we read this morning is about Paul's conversion. For a period of Paul's time, he was walking on that eight lane highway. He was filled with murderous rage. He was holding the coat of the people who stoned Steven to death. He was persecuting Christians. Then suddenly, God, on the Damascus Road struck him down, blinded him with light, gave him instructions to go see Ananias on the street called Straight, and learn about the faith and belief in Jesus Christ. The voice said, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Saul said, “Who are you?” The voice said, “I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting.” From that one episode, a great conversion occurred in Paul. Conversion in the Greek is a turn-around, a metanoia, a change of direction. Because Paul made that turn-around, that change of direction, he became radically different. But here is a catch. I don't know whether you have seen this as you've read the works of Paul. That is, that the conversion experience isn't a once and for all experience where at one point before you see the light, you are one way, and after you see the light, you are suddenly different&healed, cured, sinless. It doesn't quite work that way.

When I was in seminary, I studied a philosopher named Thomas Aquinas. We studied him adnausium. That means to the point where we were sick of him. (laughter) But he made a good point in making a distinction between act and potency. He said, “When there is a conversion experience, we have inside us the potency to be different.” The scripture that would go along with that would be 2 Corinthians 5:17. “Therefore, if anyone of you is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old is gone. The new has come.” But is someone a new creation just instantly? No. Someone is a new creation more gradually. One has to work at it in order to become a new creation. One has to actualize it  make it active.

My wife attended a funeral Friday and typed up some notes for me about the funeral. The funeral was the mother of one of her mother's best friends, and the son, Rev. Ricky Kyle, who conducted the funeral was a close friend of Jan's that she grew up with. He was a missionary and several years ago, I introduced him and his family to you all and asked you to pray for them because they were serving in Poland. They have come home now and they are living in Simi Valley, California, where he is pastor of a rather large church there. Sharon, his mother, was left a widow at a very young age as was Jan's mom. Both had very small children. Rick had what we would now call ADHD, hyperactive Attention Deficit Disorder and he was a very disruptive child, a pain to everybody. At that time he was labeled as BAD, always in trouble. Sharon never knew how to handle him or what to do with him. But Jan's mom loved him dearly and always held him tight and told him he was going to grow up and become somebody important, that he would be special because he WAS special. Sharon, in her frustration, searched for some answers and she finally found a Christian camp and sent him to this religious camp. When Rick got there, he was furious because she hadn't told him it was a Christian camp. Now Sharon herself was not religious and couldn't be considered a Christian, and of course, Ricky wasn't either. But after he got over his anger while he was at the camp, one night a preacher got up and proclaimed the love of Christ and how Christ loves us all, and no matter how bad we've been, we can get right with Christ. Right then and there, Rick gave his life to Christ and never looked back. A conversion experience! Shortly after he got home, his mom said to him, “If this Jesus can do this for you, He is definitely worth giving my life to.” And she gave her life to Christ as well and spent all the remaining years of her life serving Him and very happily so. She was so proud of Rick, she called him her favorite pastor. (My mother would probably do that with me, too, if she were alive.) Not all the attendees at her funeral were Rick's church friends that flew here to support him. A lot of the people attending the funeral were Sharon's family and weren't believers. Sharon had requested that Rick give her testimony at the funeral because she said she couldn't handle a forever without them. It is like being on that road and her family was down below and she wanted to pull them up to walk on the narrow road with her. She loved them so much! Like Rick said, his mom was not perfect but she loved the Lord. Then he quoted scripture, Romans 10:9-10, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” So we are hoping that her funeral had a great affect on the non-Christians that were present. And maybe some of them also saw the light and met Jesus and had a conversion experience as Rick did and his mother did.

Did you ever have a conversion experience? Is that why you sit in these pews? Did you think of it as a once and for all experience? Here is something to consider about Paul. In his epistle to the Romans which was written several years after his conversion experience, he wrote these puzzling words. In chapter 7:14ff, “We know that the law is spiritual but I am unspiritual (What? I am unspiritual? Paul?), sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good as it is. It is no longer I, myself, who do it but it is sin living in me.” (Emphasis mine) That is Paul speaking years after his conversion. “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good that I want to do. Know the evil I do not want to do, this I keep doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it but the sin living in me that does it.” These are Paul's words years after his conversion. Wasn't he instantly a saint? Apparently not. But here is the piece that is important. We grow gradually after our conversion experience. Yes, we are a new person. In potency we are a new person. It hasn't actually come about just with the conversion experience itself. But we have to make it come about and work on it. God's grace is sufficient to accomplish this. As we make it come about and work on it, there are areas in our life that dramatically change. Why? Because if we invite the Holy Spirit to live within us after our conversion, we call that the baptism of the Holy Spirit, then we change intellectually. Our beliefs change. Our belief system changes. Our priorities change. Our thoughts change. As one of the proverbs says, “As we think, so we are.” So as we change our thoughts, we become the new creation.

Secondly, we change morally. We may at first have difficulties changing our sinful behavior but each time we sin, we go back to God and repent and say, “Oh God. I did it again. I failed you. I failed someone else. Please forgive me,” and we try again. Consider a graph and at the moment of our conversion, our evil actions are up here, each time we go through this repentance and sin cycle, the morally bad behavior decreases until at some point it is almost not there at all anymore. So we change morally and we are a new creation.

Thirdly, we change emotionally. After we have been through this conversion experience, we are willing to face our own personal demons and change the things that go on within us. Maybe it is injuries from childhood - if you were abused or neglected or overprotected and smothered or something happened to you in childhood; you can now heal because the grace of God dwells within you. God's very own life itself dwells within you. You can radically heal these emotional injuries and change. Change emotionally.

Fourthly, you begin to change aesthetically. You begin to see things differently. You look out at nature and you begin to see the beauty. You want to take care of God's earth. You want to hold it as precious. You want to see the beauty of the things that He has created in this world. And it becomes marvelous. I remember when I was working on some of my own personal issues at one time; I had an erroneous belief in my head that everybody was unhappy like I was unhappy. I left my counselor trainer's office and walked outside. His office was in Lafayette, Indiana, and it was across from a public swimming pool. I looked over at the swimming pool and said, “Oh, those dear poor people. They are all so miserable.” And then suddenly, it hit me like a load of bricks over the head. They are laughing. They are playing. They are singing. These aren't miserable people. These are some of the happiest moments in people's lives. They are having a great time. But I hadn't changed emotionally yet and suddenly I was able to see things differently. I was becoming new gradually. It was like, “Oh my gosh. People really can be happy, can't they? Many people really are, aren't they?” As we become more and more Christian, our joy increases. As Paul said, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I say it again, rejoice, because the Lord is near.” We become joyful people. We laugh. We play. We sing. We are happy, as our conversion becomes more and more real to us. It moves from potency into action. We see the beauty in this world and find the OKness in people.

We change in our relationships&especially first with God our Father. We have the ability now through His love of us to return that love and love Him with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. Then we discover that as we learn to love ourselves because He first loved us, we can love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

Finally and this may surprise you, part of this being a new creation is to be a person of abundance so your finances may even get better. Why? Not because you inherit a bundle of money or you hit the lottery or you suddenly get a promotion at work. But you become better able to handle your money. You become more generous and as you give, you get back. Things begin to look better. God wants His Christian people to be people of abundance. He said, “I've come to give you life and give it more abundantly.” That is fascinating. So He wants you to have things that make you happy. He doesn't want you to worship things. He doesn't want that to be your life goal. He wants your emphasis and focus on Him. But He is OK with you being successful in life.

Conversion. To me, it is a lot like driving a car. This week, my son borrowed my car because his car was in the garage. He came into my office after he brought it back and said, “Your steering wheel is out of alignment. It keeps pulling to the left.” “Oh great!” As I was working on this sermon, I thought about a conversion experience and how it is like driving a car. It is correcting the wrong turns, correcting the pull towards sin and our sinful nature and now being able to go straight down that narrow road. You still have to keep your hands on the wheel. You can't fall asleep. You still have to have the basic mechanics working. But you are becoming a new creation. And you have the ability as Rick and his mother were attempting to do, of reaching down and pulling up your friends, your loved ones, your family, to that narrow road with you. We are called to do that.

There is a song about conversion that is one of my favorites. I have quoted it to you before.

“Something beautiful, something good. All my confusion He understood. All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife. But He made something beautiful, something beautiful of my life.”