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But Saul, still breeding threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues of Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he journeyed, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed about

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him, and he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" And he said, "Who are you, Lord?" And he said, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter the city, and you will

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be told what you are to do." The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice, but seeing no one. Saul arose from the ground, and when his eyes were opened, he could see nothing.

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So they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus; and for three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank. Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, "Ananias," and he said, "Here I am, Lord."

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And the Lord said to him, "Rise and go to the street called Straight, and inquire in the house of Judas for a man of Tarsus named Saul; for behold, he is praying, and he has seen a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him, so that he might regain his sight."

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But Ananias answered, "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to thy saints at Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call upon thy name." But the Lord said to him, "Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name

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before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; for I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name." So Ananias departed and entered the house, and laying his hands on him, he said, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me

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that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit." And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized, and took food and was strengthened. And may God bless to us this reading from his word.

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Amen. We begin tonight a six-week series designed to aid us in the spirit of self-examination, and I would like to consider with you some New Testament roads, what happened on them, and more personally, to ask the question, have we ourselves traveled those roads?

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You might call this a kind of devotional travelogue, and I invite you to join me so that together we might measure our progress in marching with our Master. First the Damascus Road. And I refer, of course, to the conversion experience of Paul.

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Every Christian spiritual journey begins with conversion. Personal encounter with Jesus Christ. Now it is difficult to describe exactly what this is, but permit me to make an attempt at it.

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Suppose that you see someone, anyone. This is a person to whom you have had no personal introduction. In fact, seeing this someone is very much like seeing some things. They're only an object to you.

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There is no personal relationship. Let's suppose further that this someone that you see addresses you, but what they say to you is a matter of relative inconsequence, and is in no way personal. In other words, your listening to them is very much listening to your own thoughts.

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You might just as well be thinking your own thoughts. Now let's take it a step further and say that this person that you see, and this person who speaks to you, says himself. That is, suppose he discloses himself.

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Suppose he reveals himself. Suppose he exposes himself from his heart out to you. And further, suppose that in response to this, captured by his act of revealing himself, you are led to reveal yourself, to disclose yourself, to expose yourself.

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In the moment that that happens, real encounter between that person and you, that person becomes no longer an object, but a subject. To put it philosophically, it's no longer a relationship between you and it. It now is a relationship between you and another person, what the philosophers call an "I-Thou"

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relationship. It becomes intense, and it becomes real because there is personal communication, because there is personal correspondence. And this is what happens in conversion.

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The conversion experience is not just when you see Jesus as some figure in history. And the conversion experience is not simply when you hear his words read to you, perhaps, in the pages of Scripture. The conversion experience is when you hear Jesus speaking to you, when he reveals himself

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as he really and genuinely is to you, and when you, convicted by the reality of that experience, are led by God's Spirit to open yourself to him. Now this does not happen to all people in the same way. Sometimes it happens in a moment.

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The thief on the cross for a moment, his encounter with Jesus was very brief, you might say it was a love at first sight kind of thing. But Paul, he has a dramatic experience one afternoon on the Damascus road, and then three days of darkness in which to think about it.

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And in that time he is changed. Timothy on the other hand is described in Scripture as growing up in a Christian home. There was no dramatic moment for him, there was no time in his life when, because of the witness of his parents, he did not know Jesus as his Lord.

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This experience of conversion is not necessarily the same in passion, or in drama, or in time, or in space. For each of us it may be different, but it is always the same in nature, namely, that it is a personal encounter.

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It is a revelation of Jesus, responded to by a revelation of the self. That's what conversion is. And that's what happened to Paul on the Damascus road. Now I'd like you to think of his adventure there with me in terms of the mood of the

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road, and the master of the road, and the meaning of the road. First the mood of the road. I've said that Paul's experience is not in its exact details the same as ours. Ours may be considerably different.

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But there were certain things in Paul's experience which it seems to me are kind of an outline of what appears in the experience of a lot of other people. What I mean is this. Paul was bitterly opposing Christianity.

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He was on his way to Damascus to try to wipe out all the Christians that he could get his hands on. Now that's a very typical attitude in people who are right on the edge of conversion. A lot of times people, when they feel themselves sliding into the arms of God, kick and claw.

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They realize that they're going to have to make significant changes in their lives if they accept what is coming to them and respond to it by offering themselves. And they'll do everything they can to hold back from it. Anybody who's been involved in evangelism will tell you that many times when you are

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seeking to bring another person to Christ, just before they come, you will find in them the most intense rigidity. C.S. Lewis, before his conversion, said he was brought "ticking and screaming" into the presence of God.

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That's often present in a person about to know conversion. Another thing that's often present that we see in Paul's experience is they're thinking long thoughts. Now this journey that Paul was on to Damascus was about 150 miles.

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And in those days they could only go about 10 miles in a day. And it was a desert journey. And Paul was a Pharisee and he was traveling with soldiers from the Sanhedrin. They would have been servants of the Sadducees.

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And the Pharisees and the Sadducees had no relationships with each other. So Paul wasn't in conversation with the other people in the caravan. His religion would have kept him apart. And not only that, but they also went through Galilee.

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And he had heard a lot about Jesus and he knew that Galilee was the place where Jesus had ministered. So all of these things you see were coming into his mind. He was separate, he was apart, there was a time for deep thinking, and he was no doubt

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engaged in it. And oftentimes, right before conversion, you will find that the heart on which the Holy Spirit of God has been working is a heart that's had some time to think some long thoughts. Now another characteristic that's found here is this.

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Paul had become dissatisfied with what he believed in. And this is often present in people who are coming into the converting experience. Paul had had the greatest teacher of his day, Gamaliel. He knew everything there was to know about Judaism.

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Paul had devoted his whole life to this question, "What must I do to be saved?" That was his mistake, you see. What must I do? He thought it was something that he could attain for himself.

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Pontilius' observance of the law would gain for him salvation. And so he gave himself to this with everything that he had. And suddenly, he was discovering that this was quite inadequate. His confidence in Judaism was collapsing.

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And it's easy to understand why, because you see, what Paul was recognizing was this. Here he was pursuing his religion with everything that he could, and what was he doing? He was going off to clobber some other people, which isn't a very religious act. In other words, he was face to face with the reality that after all this pursuit of godliness,

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it had led him to the place where he was lashing out at other people, which any person who has a sensitive spirit recognizes is far from the spirit of genuine faith, no matter what religious tradition is your own. So there was in Paul a sense of the inadequacy of his religious experience, and you often

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find that in people who are close to conversion. Another thing. Paul had just seen the example of a person who really loved Jesus. Paul had been present at the martyrdom of Stephen.

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He'd even held the coats of some of the people who were there while they threw stones at Stephen and crushed the life out of them. And many people who come under the converting power of God are led to that moment by seeing the witness of Christ-loving Christians.

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I know of a man who, during the Second World War, was the only Christian in his barracks. And the sergeant in that barracks ridiculed this young Christian boy in every way that he could. And one night when the boy was kneeling by his bunk in prayer, it took a lot of courage

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to do that in a barracks there in the Second World War, the sergeant picked up his boots and hurled them at that boy and hit him in the face. And then he went to sleep. That night, that boy polished the sergeant's boots and put them back by his bed.

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And the next morning when the sergeant saw them, his heart was touched. He saw something in that boy he'd never seen in anybody else. And the boy explained it with one word. Jesus.

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Many times the loving, sacrificial testimony of another is the prelude to conversion. And just one other thing that's interesting to notice about Paul. He was in direct confrontation with the Word of God written in the Scriptures. Remember that when Stephen was martyred, he spoke out of the Scriptures.

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He bore witness out of the Scriptures, the Scriptures to which Paul had given the study of his entire life. Paul had read that great passage in Isaiah 53 about the suffering servant. Paul had studied Psalm 22 when all the details of Christ's crucifixion were prophesied so

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many centuries before. And these kinds of questions were in the mind of Paul. And oftentimes the person just coming into the converting experience is being probed by the Word of God.

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They're confronting it in a way they've never confronted it before. So while I hold up before you this truth that not all conversion experiences are exactly like Paul, I must also say that the mood of the man as he headed into it, a resistance to faith, thinking long thoughts, an honest recognition of the collapse of his own religious

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system, the witness of Christ loving people and the probing power of the Word of God. These things were evident and they very often are almost invariably are in the converting experience. Now, second, beyond the mood of the road, notice the master who was met on the road.

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The important thing to remember is that the initiative in the experience belonged to Jesus Christ. Paul did not find Christ. Christ found Paul.

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The conversion experience is not a victory for the one found. It is principally a victory for the one who finds him. Christ finds Paul. Now that's consistent with all the biblical pictures.

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You know, the lost sheep doesn't go looking for the shepherd. The lost coin does not go looking for the widow. Even the lost son doesn't go looking for the father until the memory and the example and the teaching of the father have entered into his heart.

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The initiative, you see, always rests in the one who is looking. The one thing that you will find every person who has gone through a genuine converting experience saying is this, "It was not I who found God. It was God who finally found a way into me."

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I think it very interesting that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bissy Shelley both visited Chamonix in France almost at the same time. And Coleridge standing there at the foot of Mont Blanc, one of the most magnificent panoramas in all of the Alps and the highest of the Alps, said, "Everywhere I looked I saw God

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and the echo of God." And that's what he wrote in the book where you sign in there. Percy Bissy Shelley, he wrote his name and after it the word "atheist." Two brilliant men, two poets, two sensitive spirits, both seeing the same scene, both

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seeing it in the same way, one an echo of God, the other atheist. Why? I would submit to you that it is principally because at that precise moment the spirit of God was dealing with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but he was not dealing with Percy Bissy Shelley.

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The initiative, you see, belongs to God. It always belongs to God. The Damascus decision is God's decision. Now he comes to all of us at one time or another or in one way or another, but he doesn't come

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to all of us at the same time and he doesn't come to all of us in the same way. And what that means, my dear friend, is this, that when he comes to you, you must respond, for you do not know if he will ever come again or if he will ever come again in a way to which you will be sensitive.

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This is the imperative in the master that's met on the road. The initiative is his. It's only ours to respond. Now very quickly, what did the road mean in Paul's life?

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What happened to him because of the experience there? Well, the first thing that happened is his pride was destroyed. He found himself knocked off his high horse and in the dust. He came in arrogance and he enters the city blind.

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They have to lead him in. Everything crashes about him. There's no more arrogance in the man. All of his efforts have come to nothing.

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And I think that's a very important thing to remember. Whenever we come into the converting grace of God, we suddenly realize that we can contribute nothing to the experience. One of the things that troubles me very much in the church today is the fact that a lot

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of people are getting the notion that the way to find God is through knowledge. I can find God if only I can learn Greek and read the New Testament in the original language. I can find God only if I study theology. My experience of God will be better if only I take some seminary courses.

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Not necessarily so. It's not an experience of knowledge any more than it is an experience of any other devotional technology that you might imagine. As a matter of fact, the converting experience is the experience in which you recognize that

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none of the things you contribute have anything to do with it. It's like that man who got to the gates of heaven and St. Peter said to him, "You have to have 50,000 honor cords to enter here. Tell me what you've done and I'm going to tell you how many points you've got."

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And the man said, "I was raised in a Christian home and I never missed Sunday school for the 78 years of my life." St. Peter said, "Is that true?" He said, "That's right."

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St. Peter said, "That's marvelous. That's worth three points." Three points? That's right, three points.

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What else did you do? Well, I was a tither. I started out as a tither. I was reared as a tither.

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I gave one-tenth of what I possessed and then when I got along a little bit more in life, I increased it to 20% and then I increased it to 50% and in the last years of my life, I just gave everything I earned to the service of the Lord. And I did it with great joy and great satisfaction.

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St. Peter said, "Did you do that?" He said, "That's right." He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction." He said, "Did you do that?"

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He said, "That's right." He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction." He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction." He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction."

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He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction." He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction." He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction." He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction."

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He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction." He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction." He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction." He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction."

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He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction." He said, "I did it with great joy and great satisfaction." (high intensity electronic buzzing)