Today’s reading: Ezekiel 19; Galatians 1
A hugely significant part of Paul’s testimony and witness for the Lord was based on how dramatically things changed when he turned to Christ.
I had the chance to teach at church yesterday morning. We are going through 1 & 2 Kings, and I got to teach on Hezekiah. The focus of my teaching was on how impactful and influential one person’s choice to be faithful to the Lord can be, an how it is our small, daily choices to be faithful to the Lord that tend to lend the greatest weight to the gospel we proclaim. But one point I made at the end is that, for as important as our faithfulness is, none of us will do it perfectly, and, at times, the choice to turn from faithlessness to faithfulness can speak just as loudly as the choice to be faithful in the first place.
So that’s all still very fresh in my mind as I am reading Galatians 1 this morning.
But thinking about Paul’s testimony, if he were merely a well learned and somewhat influential Jew who turned to the Lord and was able to argue, as Paul does, for Jesus being the Messiah from the Jewish Scriptures, certainly he could still have been used powerfully for the Lord, but it would have likely looked very different. Paul persecuted the church so publicly, and so violently, that the Christians didn’t believe him when he first claimed to be a follower of Jesus, and many times he leans on those credentials to make the case that his words should be considered seriously. Throughout his ministry, Paul has the ability to say to his opponents, “I turned from a lucrative, influential position among the Jews, where I was hunting down Christians from city to city, to become a persecuted Christian myself, giving up the wealth and influence I had available among the Jews, all in the name of Jesus. Tell me why else I would possibly do that other than this being true.”
If you’re anything like me, there have been times of failure and sin in your life that have felt like they spell the end of any real influence you could have for the Lord, but we can’t forget that repentance is powerful. We serve a good, loving, and merciful God, and He is waiting and ready to restore us and continue to use us when we repent and turn back in faithfulness to Him. And often, those turns back can give us a powerful voice for Him when people around us see the change and ask, “Why would you do that?”
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