Trusting Your Change
Saul spent several days with the disciples in Damascus. At once he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God. All those who heard him were astonished and asked, “Isn’t he the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on this name? And hasn’t he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests?” Yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah.
Acts 9:19-22 (NIV)
Saul spent several days with the Damascus disciples and eventually started preaching. What a change from wreaking havoc on the movement that spread a gospel message about Jesus all the way over to preaching about this same Jesus Himself! From leading the charge and exercising the authority to have followers of the Way arrested—now he’s going around inviting people to experience a personal relationship with Jesus for themselves! What a change! Saul has had some kind of experience, hasn’t he?
Some of us, if we had been there in Damascus that day, would have, by default, asked the question: But has he really changed? And if he has, how do we know he has truly changed? We know he’s been through some things that should have changed him, but how do we know for sure? Is it because he’s preaching now about Jesus? That may result in change, but it doesn’t guarantee it. It’s the theological tension that each of us is trying to manage.
Sometimes you may react in ways that speak more to who you were before than who you are now in Christ. Sometimes you may still become the prisoner of your doubts. You haven’t broken all your habits. You can’t always tell whether your prayers are getting through. You may really wonder what it all means, or if you want to live the rest of your life like this. You may love what the Lord has brought you, but you may not like all of it because He’s made you give up a lot.
So have you really changed, and is it really worth it to have surrendered to the change in the first place? We all wrestle with this when facing the pushback of life.
You need to trust the change and know that your faith is inviting you to press forward. It’s clear that whatever was a part of the several days Saul spent with the disciples in Damascus, it served to deeply root the change Saul experienced. It defined the ministry and the mission of his life, and just like that, Saul went from antagonist to preaching.
The Lord has changed you and the change is real. Faith starts with belief in Jesus, but it is fueled by believing that you’ve been changed in order to live your life in fellowship with Him and to live your life sharing Him with others. Faith is fueled by your belief that your change is real.
Why Do We Pray?
Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord.
Genesis 4:26 (NIV)
Charles Spurgeon would describe it this way: true prayer is neither a mere mental exercise nor a mere vocal performance. It is far deeper than these. Prayer is a spiritual transaction.
The function of prayer is never to influence God; the purpose of prayer is to change the one who is praying. Everybody is looking for ways to live past pain and human loss. And they find that the best option is to pray, not to change the outcome of terrible events, but to change their own thinking with regard to them. They pray to change their emotions in response to it all, to change how they view life, how to process pain and make healthy choices after traumatic things have happened. In order to change, they need to pray.
It is a transaction between the Creator of Heaven and those on earth. Whoever Enosh and Seth are, what we are told about them is that they apparently saw value in the transactional benefit of prayer, the transactional benefit of calling on the name of the Lord. They engaged in prayer as a transaction with God. They express pain and praise, detachment and emergence, loss and replenishment, death and life. They exchanged what was stagnating their lives for what God gave them to keep on living.
We too have surrendered to a similar kind of exchange when we say: God, I’ll give You my weakness. I know You’re going to give me Your strength. I will give You my insufficiency because I know You’ll give me what has the capacity to make me more than sufficient.
Maybe you have asked yourself, when did prayer become so convoluted? If you look at it originally, it is simple. It’s transactional. It’s an exchange: our human weakness and the decline of our human interaction for the sovereignty, grace, mercy, and power of our God.
The Bible
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16-17 (NIV)
Whatever is believed about the Bible these days, your life cannot be as God intended without it. You can’t ever fully understand yourself without the Scriptures. You cannot feed a healthy ethic without the Bible. Whatever opinion you have with regard to the Bible being an antiquated old book, Paul teaches that the Scriptures are breathed out by God.
What that means is that God is the source of the inspiration, and that’s the key. He is the source of the inspiration, and the effect His breathed-out inspiration has on your life is based not really on its efficacy, but on whether you value it enough to plant it in the good soil of your life.
Far too many people have shaped opinions around the Scriptures without testing their ability to transform life because they never planted it deeper than their surface intellectual suspicions or the Bible’s perceived outdatedness or its cultural “irrelevance.” However, the Scriptures cannot be understood if you come at them believing they are something other than the breathed-out expressions of God.
The Scriptures are only understood and valued when they are planted in good soil in the human spirit, meaning: “I plant it believing that it’s God’s breath, and I want to understand what God has been breathing out. I want to know why He is inspiring this kind of revelation because it teaches not only what I am to do; it teaches who I am.”
What to Do with This Story
”But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him.
Mark 16:1-6 (NIV)
They went to the tomb to make sure that the final part of Jesus’s story ended well, to offer and steward respect for His life, respect for His dying, respect for their customs, and devotion to their God. What they discovered is that the story they were motivated to help end right was really a story that was still ongoing.
It’s as if the angel were saying to them, “I know you came to put appropriate punctuation on a powerful life, but this story isn’t over. The story continues.” In fact, this belief that the story did not end at the tomb is what faith in Jesus is all about.
It’s the hope that restores, renews, reinvigorates, refreshes, and revises each and every one of us every day. And its message is this: no matter how close to the worst you can get, in Jesus Christ what looks like a story ending is always a story continuing.
There will be seasons and circumstances in our lives that hit us in ways we could never have imagined. Sometimes, we will turn corners on paths in life that we thought were stretching out before us with enormous possibilities. When we’re finally starting to believe that we can embrace joy, a sudden unexpected blow can hit us in places so deep that we don’t know if it represents the final negative punctuation to our stories. I’m talking about sicknesses, setbacks, mistakes, and regrets that we can’t wrap our brains around.
But here’s the lesson of this passage: do not give up on the rest of your story. Because if you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, your story is not over. It is still continuing.
The One Constant
The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, “Hosanna!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Blessed is the king of Israel!”
John 12:12-13 (NIV)
The cries of Hosanna that day signaled not a symbolic celebration of victory. It was not just the prelude to feast and festival and all that is attached to a holiday. That day, the people were laying down palm branches and waving them in the air because Jesus was the arrival of a long-awaited victory. Jesus represented the answer to their collective prayers and Jesus was the reward of their spiritual discipline on the day He entered the city. The cries of Hosanna were stretched now in both directions: back to celebrate the Passover, and forward to celebrate the coming of the kingdom of God.
John is precisely descriptive when he says that there are two crowds. When Jesus enters the city, one crowd is simply described by John as a “great crowd.” They are there because they’re joining others to celebrate the Passover. They were initially there for historical observation. But then there was another crowd. This other crowd is populated by those who followed Jesus into the city because they decided they needed to be near Jesus after watching Him raise Lazarus from the dead. That miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead was the confirming proof for many that Jesus was the Messiah. They had been long anticipating Him.
One crowd is there holding palm branches based on what they have heard about Jesus. The other is there based on what they have seen Jesus do.
So, what’s the point? The point is this: there is and there always will be variability in the reception of Jesus Christ. It will vary like this consistently until the Lord returns.
Both crowds are singing and saying and celebrating the same thing: Jesus is my king. The one constant—what remains consistent from generation to generation—is the variability in the reception of Jesus.
