Conversion - A Sermon for Easter 3C based on Acts 9

I have just posted my sermon for today on my preaching blog Proclamation.  An excerpt follows.  If you want to read the sermon in its entirety, click here or on the link at the end of this post.

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This was my message for today (April 29, 2007).  It is based on the story of Saul’s conversion.  You can the read the scripture text from Acts 9 here.

I remember now the time, I can show you the place.
Where the Lord saved me by his wonderful grace.
But I do not know the how, and cannot tell you why.
But he’ll tell me all about it . . . in the by and by.

This was the chorus of a song I remember singing in the church I attended as a child and youth.
Members of the Bloomfield Church of God were big on remembering the place, day and even time when they committed their lives to Jesus.
Church services would often include testimony times, during which members would stand up and say something along the lines of:
I just want to thank God that I have been saved, sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost.
I remember when I gave my heart to Jesus,
and ever since that day my life has never been the same.
Thank God, I’ve been borned again.

You see, we were big believers in being born again.
And this was way before the idea became a part of popular culture.
In 1976, former Watergate conspirator and convicted felon Charles Colson wrote a book using as its title the phrase “Born Again,”
In it he described how he came to Jesus while serving time in prison for his crimes.
Later in that same year you may remember that Jimmy Carter described himself as born again, the first time for any future US president,
in of all things the first Playboy magazine interview of a U.S. Presidential candidate.

Being “born again” became a popular thing to be.
In the mid-seventies about one-third of US citizens claimed this description for themselves,
but by the year 2000, this had risen to more than 45% of Americans.
Even Ronald Reagan called himself a “born-again Christian.”
This from a man who never attended church while President,
and who was a lifetime Presbyterian,
and who here has ever met a born-again Presbyterian?
But the people in my little hometown church knew all about being born again.
I remember the night my dad and I attended a church service there for the first time.
It was during a revival,
and at the end of the service some of the brothers and sisters in the faith gathered around my dad to pray him through to salvation and victory.
Five or six or more people surrounded him and began praying out loud that he would turn his life over to God.
I saw tears running down my dad’s face,
and I began to cry too until one of the women of the church came and took me to the church kitchen and gave me some milk and cookies.
And though I can’t really tell you what happened after I left,
I do know that after that night my dad was a changed man.
He stopped drinking and smoking and cussing.
He started attending church every time the doors were open,
four or five times a week,
and a few years later he started preaching himself.
Something happened to my dad that night,
he was “born again,”
and given a new lease on life . . .
transformed from the old Jimmy Humes into someone new and different.

One word for such a change is “conversion,”
and our reading this morning from Acts records one of the greatest conversion stories ever told.
It is, of course, the story of Saul’s conversion.
Saul of Tarsus, who in time would become the apostle Paul,
the author of almost half of the books in the New Testament,
and the single most influential person in determining Christian theology and doctrine,
did not begin his life as a follower of Jesus.

To read more, click here .