Conversion & Prophetic Ministry

Week Four - Day 4

Today's Reading -- Acts 9:1 to Acts 11:18

There's something new around every corner in today's reading.  The good news is starting to break in and bust out all at the same time.  The main players are a young man named Saul (who is to become know as Paul) and an early follower of Jesus named Simon (whom we now know as Peter).  Both had been raised within Judaism:  Paul had received an extensive religious education in Tarsus, a very metropolitan city within the Roman Empire; Peter had probably learned his basics of the faith in the synagogue in Capernaum, a small fishing village on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

These two men could not have been more different in backgrounds and in their initial reactions to the teaching and claims of Jesus. Peter left everything behind when Jesus issued the call to follow him. He sensed within Jesus the beginning of something new, something fresh but on the same hand something authentic about God.  Paul not only resisted the message of Jesus but was an active and destructive persecutor of the post-resurrection community in Jerusalem.  He consented to and watched Stephen being stoned to death, and "still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord" (9:1) he sought out authority to go out and hunt down those who had fled far out into the countryside. 

Dramatic changes, however, were to come upon the lives of these two men that would not only alter the course of the good news of Christ, but eventually bring them together in a common mission.  Today we see those beginnings as we read of Paul's dramatic conversion of faith in Jesus Christ as he is on the way to Damascus as a part of his plan to arrest some of Jesus' disciples.  Not only has his life experienced a complete "180" but so has his mission.  Instead of ridding Damascus of the message about Jesus, he is now a key player in bringing the gospel to his city to the far north of Jerusalem. 

And as for Peter?  His wanderings outside of Jerusalem have taken him to the west to towns along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.  As he goes he works signs and wonders among the Jews that are reminiscent of the ministry of Jesus.  He is truly a man filled with the Holy Spirit of God.  And then he receives a vision that helps him to understand that divine grace was not restricted to the Jews, and in his defense of his ministry to the other apostles in Jerusalem he argued, "If then God gave them (the Gentiles) the same gift (the Holy Spirit) that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?" (11:17).  

And so, Paul and Peter are off an running, knocking down barriers and challenging preconceived notions about the universal message of the gospel.  We are not only beneficiaries of their witness, but inheritors of their mission.