Recovering from a Bad Start

Psalm 30; Acts 9:1-9

          I have a friend who lives in Virginia.  I don’t know if she still does this, but she used to keep Exodus 2:12 posted on her refrigerator door, something she would see first thing every morning.  It’s about Moses: “He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.”

          I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that’s what I want to see first thing in the morning!  It was good for my friend, though.  This verse was a reminder to her that Moses, the great prophet of Israel, was also a murderer.  Remember, the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt when this occurred.  They were also slaves in Egypt when Moses was born, and his mother feared for his life.  You may recall the story of how she made a basket of bulrushes, made the basket watertight, placed her infant son in it, and then put the basket into the river’s edge among the reeds.  The Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter then came to the river to bathe, found the basket and baby and took him to be her own child.  So, Moses, a Jewish child, grew up in a royal Egyptian home. 

          When he was a young man, Moses observed the harsh slavery of his people. One day he saw an Egyptian soldier beating a Jew, one of his kinsmen.  That was when he looked this way and that and then murdered the Egyptian soldier and hid his body in the sand.

          That’s a pretty bad start to life.  Not only did his mother abandon him to a basket in the river.  And not only did he grow up in the home of the oppressive enemy of his people.  But Moses murdered a man and then tried to cover up the murder.  Despite all that, Moses became the great prophet of the people of Israel, the one God used to deliver the people from slavery.  My friend liked this verse because, despite his bad start, Moses recovered, and God used him in a mighty way. 

          Exodus 2:12 was a reminder to my friend that, despite her past, God could use her too.

          A bad start is sometimes an indication of how something will end.  When things get off to a bad start, sometimes we’ll say “it was doomed from the beginning.”  When something starts badly, it is hard to turn it around, isn’t it?  Hard, yes; impossible, no. Moses is proof that God can help us recover from a bad start.

          The Apostle Paul is another good example.  We all know how God used Paul.  He was the first great missionary of the church.  Many of the letters we have in our New Testament are letters Paul wrote to the churches he started.  Oh, he ended well; we all know that.  As an aged man, he wrote to his young friend Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith….”  He ended well, but that was only after he too recovered from a very bad start.

          Many of you know that Paul was originally named Saul.  We first meet Saul in Acts 7:58 where Luke describes him as “a young man.” In this introduction to young Saul, Luke says that an angry mob laid their coats at his feet as they stoned to death a man named Stephen.  Stephen was an early Christian leader in the church in Jerusalem. Saul was there to witness and, Luke says, to approve his stoning.  Most likely the young Saul heard Stephen’s prayer that day too.  I can’t help but wonder about the impact these words had on Saul.  As the angry mob stoned him to death, Stephen prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

          That’s our introduction to Saul.  He was a religious zealot who believed he was protecting his own religion.  These new Christians were a threat to his beloved faith, and Saul was simply defending God and all things righteous.  Here’s how The Message translates Saul’s behavior: “Saul just went wild, devastating the church, entering house after house, dragging men and women off to jail.”  Today we would call him a terrorist.

          Now, that’s a pretty bad start!  In fact, I can’t imagine a Christian missionary having a worse start than that.

          So what happened?  Well, what happened is the event recorded in our text from Acts 9, Saul’s dramatic Damascus road conversion.  This is not only one of the great stories in the book of Acts; it is the event that turned Saul’s life around. New Testament scholars suggest that the importance of this event is indicated by the fact that it is told three times in the book of Acts, here by Luke and then two other times (chs. 22, 26) by Paul himself.  One scholar calls this Saul’s “great reversal.”  (NIB, Robert W. Wall, p. 150)  I prefer to call it Saul’s “great recovery.” 

Luke says that Saul was still on a tirade, “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.”  He went to the high priest and asked for permission to go to Damascus, about 135 miles north of Jerusalem.  It was to be a search and destroy mission.  His intent was to arrest any who belonged to “the Way,” an early description of the followers of Jesus, and bring them bound to Jerusalem.  As he approached Damascus, perhaps anticipating with pleasure the misery he would soon bring upon the unsuspecting Christians, suddenly a light flashed around him.  He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

Okay, you familiar with the Old Testament see something important here.  When God called the great leaders of the Old Testament, God called their names twice. “Abraham, Abraham.”  “Jacob, Jacob.”  And as he stood before the burning bush—“Moses, Moses.”  This was Luke’s way of saying that God was calling another great leader.

Listen to the question.  “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”  Saul had persecuted Christians, the church, remember? On the road to Damascus, Saul learned an important lesson: to persecute a follower of the Lord is to persecute the Lord.

“Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.  He used the title “Lord.”  We don’t know if that was an acknowledgement of faith or respect, like the word “sir.”  Most likely it was the latter, “sir,” because Saul didn’t even know who was speaking.  The voice replied, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” 

This must have been quite a spectacle for Saul’s traveling companions.  They heard the voice too and saw no one, except Saul.  They watched him pick himself up off the ground.  They saw him open his eyes, eyes that now were blind.  And look at this picture.  They took terrorist Saul by the hand and led him, like a child, into the city of Damascus.  Luke says that Saul was blinded for three days and that he neither ate nor drank.

That’s what it took for Saul to become Paul.  That’s what it took for Saul to recover from his bad start and become the church’s first great missionary.

Now, here’s the good news of this text.  There’s no start that’s so bad that we cannot recover.  None.  Not murder.  Moses proved that.  Not persecuting the church.  Saul proved that.  The good news of our faith is that there’s no start that’s so bad, nothing in your past that is so bad, you cannot recover from it. 

In my work, I meet people who struggle to believe that.  They become slaves to something they did in their past.  They’re not just being dramatic either.  It was bad.  Egregious.  If I mentioned some of the things, you’d wince.  So the issue is this: is it possible for that person ever to be freed from that?

Some of you know the name Scott Peck.  He was a psychiatrist who wrote some very insightful books about religion.  The first became a best seller:  The Road Less Traveled.  What some people don’t know is that Dr. Peck was not a Christian when he wrote that book.  He was a seeker but hadn’t found the religious system that fit him.  So, he began a deliberate study of the world’s great religions.  He was seeking his place, his religious home.  He finally chose to become a Christian, and here’s why: the Christian concepts of sin and forgiveness.  Forgiveness gives people a chance to start over, to have the past with all its mistakes and failures wiped away.  After he became a Christian, he wrote another book:  Further Along the Road Less Traveled.  Here’s something he writes in that book:

The one prerequisite for membership in the true Church is that you be a sinner.  If you do not think you are a sinner, you are not a candidate for the church.  But the other side of the paradox is that Christianity holds that if you confess or acknowledge your sin with contrition, then it is wiped out….  It is as if the sin never existed.  You can start over again, fresh and clean every time.  ( p. 158)

Maybe we all need Exodus 2:12 on our refrigerator door.  It is a reminder that there is no start so bad we can’t recover.  None.  Thanks be to God!

Closing Prayer 

Lord, someone here has gotten off to a bad start.  He knows it.  And he needs to recover.  Help that person to enter your Kingdom like a child.  Amen.