GRACE - The Painful Truth

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting”

Can you think about the feelings and shame Saul must have felt when the risen and ascended Jesus met him on the road to Damascus? Wow! What a uptake that was. Saul's whole life was wrapped up in following the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and to understanding the law of Moses. He was a true blue die hard Pharisee and was very good at being just that. He thought that he was the best by his own thinking and he was convinced and positive in his righteous and thinking before God. The sad thing is he was zealously persecuting the very God that he thought he was humility serving righteously.

Just think when he heard those words ,“Saul, Saul, Why persecute thou me?”, what he must have thought. In a split second, in a heart beat, in the twinkling of a eye, Saul went from thinking that he was a great friend of God to a person who help put God incarnate and some of the Lord's followers to death. What a staggering blow that he came face to face with. Now what was to happen to him because if it was the god he served it would be instant death! The god that Saul knew would have stricken him down immediately. But this did not happen to Saul. The God that Paul finally came to know and serve revealed his sin and showed him the way to true salvation. Oh what mercy! What a merciful God we serve. In the most painful point in Saul's life he found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

All of us should thank God for that Grace even if we did not sin as bad as Saul did. Thank God for that Grace. We need it just as bad as Saul did. When we hear that truth about ourselves we should be no less humble as Saul was and be thankful of God's Grace. The plain fact is we were all once enemies of God. That is our true nature. (Romans 5:10) We must make no mistake about it speaks the painful truth that we sometimes do not want to hear and that truth can be very humbling, in fact incredibly humbling.

The thought here is God wants us to walk in this kind of humility. No redeemed and saved person is above being spared knowing their offenses before the Lord, because that is the only way that we can stand in his Grace. If we have pride or stubbornness in how we relate to God let it be undone by the truth of God's Word and the comfort of knowing His Grace is sufficient.