Acts 9:4,5

Acts 9:4

The Lord's dealing with St. Paul has been precisely the way of His dealing with thousands and tens of thousands whom He has sought to make in like manner partakers of the light of the everlasting life. Them, too,

I. He meets in the way. He hedges up that way with thorns so that they cannot find their path. He stands before them, as He stood before Balaam, with a drawn sword in His hand, willing them to go back to the path of duty and to choose the way of life. He shows them, too, His glory. The earthly in them stands abashed before the glory of the heavenly which is revealed to them, even as the stars of night fade and fail before the rising sun, and have no glory by reason of the glory which excelleth.

II. Notice another aspect in which St. Paul's conversion was but the pattern and exemplar of what every other man's conversion must be. We sometimes assume that there was no resistance of the old man in him, and that there could have been none so mighty were the spiritual forces brought to bear, to cast down the strongholds of sin and Satan in him, that in this respect at least his conversion was unlike any other. But everything indicates the contrary. We are not permitted to see what passed within him during those three mysterious days when, having been brought to Damascus, trembling and astonished, he saw no man, and did neither eat nor drink. But of one thing we may be sure that they were days of a mighty internal conflict; and in that "Behold, he prayeth," uttered by him who seeth in secret, in that, and only in that, at length there was a token that he had at last yielded himself the captive of Christ vanquished by Almighty love. And here, too, in these outlines of his conversion, we must read what must be the main features of our own.

III. The whole after life of St. Paul was a continuation of the work which on that day was auspicated and begun in him. And such must be our lives, such must be our conversion. Not something which we remember once to have been, not something which every day is receding into greater and dimmer distance, but something in the ever new power of which we are to live from day to day.

F. Trench, Penny Pulpit,No. 3656.

Reference: Acts 9:4; Acts 9:5. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. ii., p. 160.