We pray for us, church. Let's pray together. God, thank you for new life. Thank you that you're still alive, rescuing, saving people, and that you still reach into our lives and do what nothing in this life can, which is bring change and hope and joy. And so, God, we ask you to do it again.

Keep doing it in thousands and thousands of ways all throughout this city. God, use us in that. Father, speak to us now. We need to hear your voice. That's why we're here this morning.

So I pray you would speak to us and open our eyes to see, open our ears to hear, and may our hearts feel all that you have for us this morning. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Well, hey, good morning, church. Good to be with you. Acts 9.

If you got a Bible, if you're watching online, or if you're at one of our campuses, welcome. We're glad that you are here. We're looking at probably the most famous conversion, it's been said, in history, the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, or the Apostle Paul. I'll use both those words today. It's the same person.

And I want to ask the question: how does conversion work? When you move from unbelief to faith, when someone turns from not believing in Jesus to believing in Jesus, how does that happen? What goes on when that takes place? He changes us. We know the Gospel gets into our lives.

You become a new person. You don't just get a fresh start. It's not just a new leaf or like a mulligan in golf, where you're going to do the hole again. No, you're a whole new person, and you're forever changed. And I want to look at and ask the question: how does that happen?

How does conversion work? Okay? Acts 9 shows us maybe, again, the most famous story of this, when Saul meets Jesus or when Jesus met Saul. So we'll read this, and we'll walk through this. Okay, so here's what Acts 9 says.

We're in the Book of Acts right now. The church is spreading, and Saul wants to kill it, is the context. It's kind of all you need for this story. Acts 9: But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, that's the church, the Christians, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now, as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him.

Notice it surrounds Saul. And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" And he said, "Who are you, Lord?" And he said, "I am Jesus, whom you're persecuting. But rise, enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do." The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul rose from the ground. Although his eyes were open, he saw nothing.

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, so this is a Christian in Damascus already, named Ananias. And the Lord said to him in a vision, "Ananias." And he said, "Here I am, Lord." And the Lord said to him, "Rise and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul, for behold, he's praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he may regain his sight." And Ananias pushes back against that. We'll come back to that here in a bit.

Verse 17, 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 so 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 taking food, he was strengthened. So Saul goes through conversion.

What happens when someone is converted? What takes place in this? The Gospel, we know, gets into our life. It gets into our bones. And we believe, and that changes everything.

But what takes place in conversion is what I want to try to answer for you in the story of Saul. Now, to be clear on this, to be a Christian, to be right with God, you have to be converted. There's no option here. As Jesus would say, you must be born again. You must go through this conversion.

However, there's no one-size-fits-all for everyone. There's no one picture that says it needs to look like this for everyone's story. Yours might be very explosive and sudden, and there's light and there's tears, and you burn all of your secular music and get a big Bible. That happens a lot in the '90s. That's a thing.

Others of you, it might be more gradual. It could be a process that you take some time, asking questions and wrestling through doubts and walking through things. It's a long time. Let me give you a story of the second most famous conversion, I think, in history, was C.S. Lewis.

C.S. Lewis was a hard-boiled atheist. That's how he referred to himself. He did not believe in God, and he hated that God, which is strange. I don't believe in God, and I hate him for not existing.

That's where Lewis was for a long time. And he had friends who invested in him and walked with him for literally decades, and here's how he describes his conversion. Okay? I was driven to Whipsnade, that's a zoo, and he was driven there because he didn't drive a car. So his brother, Warren, had a motorcycle, and Lewis would sit in the little sidecar, down with little goggles.

Warren also drank a lot and would drive, so you might get saved, too. So he's driving to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did. That was it. That's Lewis's conversion.

Decades long of conversations and searching and thinking, and I got there, and I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought nor in great emotion. That could be your kind of story of I just kind of believed at some point. Some of you know the day. You know the minute that you said yes to Jesus.

Some of you have no idea when this was. It just kind of happened. Lewis would say it was like waking up and realizing that you're awake. You've been sleeping. All of a sudden, you just wake up.So the point is, it looks different for all of us.

I will never say to you it has to look exactly like this. I will say to you it has to happen, and that's what we're looking at here this morning. So what takes place in conversion? Three things. Encounter, earthquake, embrace.

Okay? So I'll unpack those for you, and then we'll get you off to lunch, wherever it is, okay? There's two Qdobas now, so just saying. All right, let's get to work. Number one is encounter.

You have to encounter Jesus in some way. Saul's encounter is very dramatic. Jesus appears to him. He just shows up. All this light is around Saul, knocks him to the ground, blinds him.

He comes in contact with the risen Lord, and notice what happens in verse three and four. "A light from heaven shone around him." He falls to the ground, heard the voice saying, "Why are you persecuting me?" Which is a whole other sermon. And he said, "Who are you, Lord?" Now, why does Saul call him Lord? Why does he look up, hear Jesus speaking, and call him Lord? Well, I think because in the Old Testament, whenever God would show up in light, and he's blazing with glory, there's all of this, there's lightning and thunder and all these things happening, he's always sitting on something.

You know what it is? A throne. So I think Saul likely saw the risen Jesus sitting on a throne in all of his glory and all this beauty, all this light. It knocks Paul down. He's blind now.

Can you picture this? He's on his knees trying to find his keys, his wallet, his phone. He's lost everything. He can't see now. The light is so strong, it knocks him down.

He bumps into light, and they have to lead him by the hand, so he's likely in shock over seeing this because he just saw the risen Lord, and he encounters him in this way. Now, Saul's story is unique. It doesn't have to look like this for you, but there has to be an encounter in some way. You have to encounter Jesus and come in contact with him. The one that Saul saw, you also have to with the eyes of faith.

You have to see him in some way. Let me just say it like this. You got to deal with Jesus. If you're a thinking person, you just have to figure out where you are with him. Now, in some small degree, we have to experience what Saul experiences here.

He comes in contact with him. So you have to deal with Jesus. You just don't have the option not to. He just said too much. He's done too much.

There's too much that we know about him, and he demands a response. There was a guy years ago, a philosopher named Peter Kreeft, has a little book called "Jesus Shock," and he looks at all the places in the Gospels where Jesus shows up to someone, where someone meets him, and he says you can boil all those encounters down to really three responses. There was terror, there was hatred, or there was mostly worship. People either were terrified, scared to death of him. Who is this man that can walk on water and stuff?

Or they wanted to kill him because they hated him, but most of them worshiped him and called him Lord and called him God. But what Kreeft says is, no one just merely kind of liked him. No one had this casual view of who Jesus was, like, "Yeah, Jesus, cool guy. I mean, fun at weddings, fun hang, but not my thing." No one responded that way. You had these very visceral responses, and they're very decisive.

So you have to decide. It doesn't matter what age you are, where you are in life, you have to figure out how do you orient your life around-- You may end up hating him. You may end up rejecting him. Hopefully not, but you can't ignore him. He's just done too much.

He's not like other religious leaders in history. If you just do some searching on world religious leaders, they all do the same thing. They point. They say, "If you want salvation, you want the way, you want enlightenment, you want truth, you want God, there it is. Go do that." And Jesus comes along and says, "If you want salvation, it's me.

If you want truth, it's me. If you want the way, I'm the way. If you want God, I'm God." He points to himself. They all point to something out there. Jesus points to himself and says, "If you want to know the way, you must come to me.

I am the way." Truth is a person, not just some concept or idea, so you just have to deal with this. So I followed for some years Joe Rogan. He's a podcaster. He has millions of subscribers. By the way, his podcasts are three and a half hours, and we listen to that.

I'm going to try preaching that long and just see who's left. I don't know. We'll try it one day. But Rogan, years ago, if you kind of follow his story, he thought Christianity was laughable about four or five years ago. He actually thought that it was a religion that someone made up because he was smoking mushrooms.

That's what he thought. And now he attends church in Austin, Texas. Not a Christian yet, as far as I know, but he attends church. What happened? He got smart guys around him that told him, "You can't treat Jesus like that.

You have to deal with him." And so have you dealt with him? I'm going to ask it like this. Have you encountered him in this real personal way? Because if you have not, you can. He really is alive.

He really is on his throne. He really is blazing with beauty and glory and light. He really is all that you long for, and you can actually know him in a really real and personal way. But you have to encounter him. All right, that's one.

Number two, there's an earthquake. And that might be more dramatic than maybe we signed up for, but something is shaking in Saul's life. At the very core of who he is, plates are moving in Saul's life, and he's in this moment of upheaval for three days. I think we might neglect these three days in his storyWe think, yes, he saw the light, boom, he's in. But for three days, he is in utter darkness, starving, and he's fasting.

So verse nine says, "For three days he was without sight, neither ate nor drank." So he's in utter darkness. He cannot see anything. He's praying, and he's not eating. He's fasting, not for his gut health, but because he's in upheaval. You wouldn't eat or drink anything either.

Because he is having to reconsider everything that he believes, everything that he knows to be true about who God is has just been questioned in this moment. And I think I can prove to you what he's doing in these three days. Okay? I think that Saul is rethinking everything he knows about the Old Testament scriptures. Saul's a Pharisee, okay, which means he is a trained scholar in the Old Testament.

He knows this. He could recite entire books for you. Okay? He would have three PhDs if he were here today. So he knows the scriptures.

In his mind, as a Jewish man, in his mind, they all think Messiah is coming. They're all waiting on the Messiah to come. The idea, though, of the Messiah dying on a cross would be absurd to Saul. He had no category in his brain for God's chosen one, because the Old Testament says, Deuteronomy says that if you die on a tree, if you're put up on a tree and you die, you're under the wrath of God. You're cursed.

So there's no way in Saul's mind that the Messiah could be under God's curse and hanging on a tree. Absolutely unthinkable. And then Saul met him. Saul saw the one that they hung on the cross, and it shook everything for him. He's blind now, and I think in these three days, he's doing some Bible study, in these three days.

He's going back into the Old Testament in his mind because he has this from memory. He's going back through thinking, okay, Isaiah said there's this king coming, but wait, he's going to suffer for us. He's wounded, he's pierced, not for his own sins, but for our sins. And by his stripes, we are healed. And Jeremiah said that this new covenant is coming.

What if all of these lambs, all this blood, all these offerings were actually pointing to one lamb, to one single offering? And the Psalms say God's Holy One would not see corruption, but David, that can't be David. David's dead. But yet it says David would always have a son on the throne forever. And Zechariah says that Messiah would come in weakness and on a donkey and in humiliation.

And Saul goes, "I've missed it. This is him. He's here. This is God's Son. This is the one we've been longing for.

I've missed all of this." Now let me prove that to you. Okay? We didn't read this, but chapter nine verse 20, after this happens, immediately after the three days, he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues. So he goes to Damascus to arrest people, and now he's the guest speaker proving to them that Jesus is who he said he was. Verse 22, "But Saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving." Proving with what?

The Bible, the Scriptures, that Jesus was the Christ. So Saul's entire world has changed now. So Saul's brilliant. In three days, he processes all of this. He's praying, thinking through all this, and it dawns on him, this is it.

And his life is just in upheaval. He questions all that he thought to be true, and his life is forever changed in those three days. And for 2,000 years, this same Jesus that Saul saw has been doing this. He's been crashing into stories and rearranging lives and producing these little personal earthquakes. All these shifts are happening.

All that you thought you trusted in and believed and longed for, it was all wrong, and Jesus comes and sets everything right. Let me give you a story. You might know the name Blaise Pascal. Maybe Pascal's Triangle. You might've slept that day in class.

That's okay. Pascal was a 17th century philosopher, mathematician, uber brilliant man. His idea of God was just intellectual. It was just a fun conversation, no personal relationship, did not think that God was personal. In 1654, Jesus shows up, though, one night.

He calls this the year of grace, 1654, Monday, 23rd November, from about half past 10 at night to about half an hour after midnight. Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars, not that God, but the real one. Certitude, heartfelt joy, peace, God of Jesus Christ, my God, your God, joy, joy, joy, tears of joy, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, may I never be separated from him. Earthquake is what happened there.

And again, you have to have one of these. It could be something like this, where there's fire and there's light and it's thunder, lightning, it's dramatic. Or it could be like C.S. Lewis. It's very gradual.

It's very quiet. It's a process. But at some point in your story, this shift begins to happen, and you start to recognize that everything that you've leaned on for life starts to feel wobbly for you. It's not holding you up the way that you thought it would. And you start to recognize, I think I need to go to Him.

And it feels a bit unnerving. You feel a bit undone. You feel a bit exposed. But if that's happening for you, that's a great thing. Don't overlook that thing.

So encounter, earthquake, and then the final move is embrace. This is the best partSo I mean this in two ways, is that one, Saul embraces Jesus. At some point in these three days, Saul does what he says we should do from Romans 10, "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved." At some point in those three days, Saul does that. Can you picture Saul starving, thirsty, blind, on his knees? The one he came to stop, he's now confessing that Jesus is Lord, believing in his heart that God raised him, because Saul just saw him, and now he's saved.

Now he's in the family. The final move has happened. Some of you need this to happen. You've been asleep, and you need to wake up. You need to embrace Him and turn to Him.

And by the way, when that happens, when this embrace happens, all this upheaval, all this encounter, all this happens, and you embrace Jesus as your savior, that's day one of being a Christian. You don't have it figured out yet. You don't have to. Okay? You become a Christian, not an angel.

You don't become sinless on day one. In fact, you recognize how sinful you actually are, most likely. Before I met Jesus, I was awesome. I thought I was awesome. Like I was the most humble guy I knew.

I was top three most kind guy, at least top five most generous guy. I met Him, and my numbers plummeted. My rankings plummeted. Okay? You realize there's some stuff, but Jesus died for all the stuff, and He grows you, and you get stronger in Him, and you walk with Him, and you grow, and you find Him as your greatest treasure.

That's a process. So this is just kind of day one. But it has to happen. You have to embrace Him. So that's one sense in which there's this embrace.

The other sense is which Jesus has now embraced Saul. He brings him in. And you might miss this. You kind of can rush past these things, but Ananias comes into the story. Ananias is a Christian, and he knows about Saul.

Word has spread. This guy's trying to kill us. He has a warrant for our arrest. This guy is an enemy. He wants to stop us, and Jesus appears to Ananias and says, "I want you to go to him and encourage him and help him regain his sight." And then Ananias pushes back and says, "Lord, this guy's evil.

I'm not going. This guy wants to destroy us. I know what he's done to other people in the church. I'm not going." And Jesus responds and says this too. We didn't read this part, but here's what he says: "But the Lord said to him," that's to Ananias, "Go, for he is a chosen instrument," don't miss this little phrase, "of mine." "He belongs to me now." Do you realize what just happened in that moment?

Jesus says, "Ananias, go to Saul." Ananias says, "I ain't going. Get somebody else." And Jesus says, "He's mine now. It's okay. You can go to him. Saul's in the family now.

I love him. I gave myself up for him," is the way Paul would talk about that, "and I have this plan for him to proclaim my name to Gentiles and kings and children of Israel. Go to him. It's okay now. Saul's one of us now." And so he goes to him, and this is verse 17, "So Ananias departed and entered the house.

And laying his hands on him he said, 'Brother Saul.'" He just called the guy that wanted to kill him three days ago brother. Brother Saul. And I must insert some sarcasm here. The Lord Jesus who, the one who appeared to you. Saul's like, "Yeah, I got it.

I know who you're talking about, bro. I know. The one that blinded me, yes." "He sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit." And the way Paul would later write in Romans about that moment, whenever the Holy Spirit fills you, you know what Paul would say, Romans 5? "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit." That's what just happened to Saul. God's love has been poured out into his heart.

Jesus calls him mine. He belongs to me now. And then verse 18, "Immediately," something like scales, "fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized." Saul's just been reclaimed, as we say around here. And I love this, "And he took food and was strengthened." I wonder if it was the Lord's Supper.

I don't know. But couldn't you imagine Ananias saying, "This is the body of Christ broken for you, the blood of Christ shed for you"? I don't know that. "And for days he was with the disciples at Damascus." So you realize that Saul, who's there to arrest and punish and imprison people like Ananias, Ananias just puts his arms around him and calls him brother. Saul's in the family now.

We're related to Saul because of this. This is what Jesus does. Jesus embraces him. He brings him in. This is what the embrace of J-- The Gospel does this.

We're utterly welcomed in. God's love has been poured into our hearts. His life has been poured into us, and He ushers the door open. He brings us in, and now there's this massive table set for us. We get to sit down and feast with Him.

That's what the Gospel does. The Gospel is like this. It's breaking to a feast where we come in and we dine with Him. We taste and see how good He is. We experience His kindness, His goodness, His love toward us.

It's like a feast that somebody else pays for. So years ago, my wife and I went out to San Francisco Bay Area just to vacation, play for a few days, and I was big into CrossFit then. I don't know why I would do this, but I would go to a gym on vacation. It sounds terrible now, but my shoulders worked then. No shin splints.

And so I would go to a gym. So I find this gym, and I go. It's packed when I get there, and there's this guy just working the room. The guy's just talking to everybody. He knows everybody there.

Comes over to me, asks me where I'm from. I'm new here, all this stuff. I'm like, "Just, man, just go over there," is what I wanted to say. I didn't say that.And he asked me where I'm from, and as soon as I said Austin, Texas, food became the conversation. "Man, have you been to this place?

They got this taco here, this thing here." I'm like, "Yes, I live there. Please go over, just bounce somewhere else, okay?" Thank God he didn't. So we keep talking, and for some-- I don't know why he does this. He was a chef in that area. His restaurant wasn't far from where we were.

He randomly invites us to make a reservation for us and cook for us that night. I have no idea why. And as he's talking, the guy behind him, his eyes are just getting bigger, and he starts doing this, like, "You should go." So we go. We get there, it has all the sights and sounds and smells, and for three hours, this guy cooks for us. I can see him in a little window there where the kitchen is.

He's just smiling, laughing. He'll bring something out. He'll tell us all about this thing. "We flew this thing in here." Go back in there, cook more. For three hours, we're eating appetizers and entrees and desserts.

He's bringing all this stuff out, and at some point, it dawns-- The food, by the way, is unreal. I've never seen or tasted food that was this good. And at some point, it dawns on me, I've got to pay for this. And so I start doing this nervous menu math like, "Okay, that was 47, we have three of those. 68, why is that price like-- Okay, we got two of those.

This is going to be a $1,000 meal." And so as the night-- I'm trying my best not to put a damper on the mood of the night and just eat my nerves and my feelings away as all this food's just coming out. Finally, it's over. We're exhausted. We're sweating. He's sweating.

He comes out laughing, talks a little bit longer, and I'm waiting for a bill about this long. And at the end of the night, he comes out and he says, "And by the way, this was all on me." And I saw Jesus. He was just right there. I've never in my life been that happy. We sprint out of that place like we robbed the place.

We're like, "Can you believe this? I have no idea." Unbelievable. Do you realize this is what life in the kingdom is like? When He embraces you, you find that when you embrace Him, you find He's already embraced you, that He moved first and He loved you first and He came and got you, and He has burst the door open for you, and He utterly welcomes you in. And you get to sit down and savor and taste and see all of His goodness, all of His kindness toward you.

Amen. This is what life in the kingdom is like. And by the way, He paid the bill. You don't pay for this. Someone else already paid for it.

He died. He was crushed. He was wounded. He rose again. And you don't have to pay Him back, by the way.

If you're trying to pay Him back, you've misunderstood the Gospel. If I ask you, "Are you a Christian?" And you say, "Man, I'm trying to be," you've just misunderstood what grace is. This overflows to you. You just get to drink this in and rejoice in this and bask in God's smile over you. Do you realize that if you know Jesus, God is smiling at you?

There's no frown, there's no scowl, there's no Dwayne Johnson, one eyebrow raised. That's not how God looks at you. He utterly smiles over you. So here's how Saul talked about this, Paul talked about this. Acts 9, he's breathing murder and threat.

By 1 Timothy 1, written decades later, here's how Saul talks about this: "Though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me." It wasn't just enough. It overflows for you. "With the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus." I love the word formerly. That was the past.

And if you don't know who Jesus is, that can be your word. "Yeah, I used to be this, but His grace overflowed into my life." Now, Ben mentioned this, there are three hearers here today. Some of you are certain. You know Him. He's yours.

You belong to Him. Some of you are uncertain. You're like, "I had this thing. I went to this camp once. I don't know.

I'm just kind of wrestling with it." Some of you are certainly not a Christian, and we're glad that you are here. You're not in trouble by anyone here. We're glad you're among us. But here's the thing, the answer is the same for all three groups. Go to Him.

If you know Him, go to Him and keep going to Him. If you're uncertain, then go to Him. If you're not a Christian, then go to Him. He's the answer for all of us. So will you go to Him?

Will you run to Him? Will you find your life and your hope in Him? This is what conversion, this is what the Gospel does for us. Let's pray it keeps on happening over and over and over again. Let's pray together.

God, thank you for your Word that gives us so much life, so much hope. Thank you for the Gospel, that it has forever changed. It changed Saul, and it changed us. And I pray that if there are those that don't know and are uncertain, that you would meet them. For those that have never considered you, would you open their eyes and would you bring them to yourself, and would you embrace them as your own?

God, thank you that your grace overflows to us, that no matter what our story is, that you can rewrite that for us, and we can say words like formerly, or I used to be this. Thank you for the Gospel that rescues us. May we live like we believe this, and may there be much joy in this city because of our hope and trust in you. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.