There is an old Southern expression: if you see a turtle on a fence post, you know he didn't get there by himself. The turtle looks quite proud of where he is. He had help.
Whatever you have accomplished, whatever is on your resume, however many letters you have after your name — you had help along the way. A parent or a grandparent. A teacher, a coach, a Sunday school teacher, an older mentor in business. Somebody, or several somebodies, got you where you are. None of us is self-made.
This morning we watch God call an unusual man to himself and use him enormously, and even he does not get there by himself.
God calls us to himself
Saul of Tarsus is a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, a Greek scholar, and tough as nails — and he has made it his mission to hunt down the followers of the Way, dragging them off to be arrested and in some cases put to death, because he is certain he is doing God's will. When you were a Christian in those days and you heard Saul of Tarsus was on his way, you did not want to hear him knocking. This was not better call Saul. This was better hope they don't be calling Saul.
He is on the road to Damascus to arrest more Christians when a light brighter than the sun knocks him off his feet, and a voice says, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? He asks who it is. I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
Notice: Saul was not looking for Jesus. Jesus came looking for Saul.
Some of us can point to a moment when we decided to follow Christ. That happened to me at fourteen, and I am not downplaying it. But that is our experience of it, not the whole truth of it. Scripture says that apart from Christ we are not sick and we are not having a bad spiritual hair day. We are dead. Dead people do not make decisions. Dead people do not pray prayers. Not unless the Spirit of God comes into that death and breathes life into us, the way he breathed into a lump of clay in Genesis 2. You may have felt that you came to him freely, and in a sense you did — but if God had not been calling, you would never have come.
God does the heavy lifting. He has to.
God commands us to do the follow-up
Then God sends a man named Ananias, with an address: the street called Straight, the house of Judas, ask for a man of Tarsus. Holy GPS, Batman. Don't you wish he would do that for you? I don't trust the GPS in my car. I would trust that one.
But put yourself in Ananias's sandals. Lord, that man is public enemy number one. He has hurt too many of my people. You want me to go there? I can imagine him praying, Lord, here am I — send Barnabas. Here am I, Lord. I understand Silas has some time on his calendar.
The Lord's answer is that Saul is a chosen instrument, and I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name. That is an odd sales pitch, isn't it? Come to Jesus and you will suffer a great deal. Any takers? But there is a price to following Christ. It won't cost you anything — it is all done by his grace. It will just cost you everything, because at that point you hand him the keys.
This is the only time Ananias appears in the Bible. What if he had said no? God would have found somebody else. But we would not be reading Ananias's name two thousand years later.
Is God nudging you toward someone you would rather not talk to? You can say no. Or you can say, here am I, send me.
God creates us for community
We are made for one another, not for isolation. It is why solitary confinement is such a severe punishment. And now I am going to do something that makes me uncomfortable, because I put a higher premium on preaching clearly than on my own comfort.
The reason I am in this wheelchair is that twenty-six years, seven months and nine days ago I woke up on a Wednesday healthy as a horse. I had always been healthy — I had never spent a night in a hospital for myself since Mama Keller brought her baby boy home from the hospital in Kansas City. March 3rd, 1999. It was a long Wednesday, and it ended at the church we had planted downtown, where an actress was performing a one-woman Easter play.
Somewhere during that play I began to notice strange sensations in my feet. Numbness and tingling, the way it feels when your foot has gone to sleep. My legs started to feel heavy. I said nothing to anybody — my oldest daughter was sitting right next to me, ten years old at the time. I helped strike the set. Then I went to the emergency room instead of going home, and that began the worst night of my life. By the next day I was paralyzed from the waist down. Twenty-four hours after that, from the chest down. A virus had left an enormous lesion on my spinal cord. Transverse myelitis. Extremely rare.
What it has left me with is a right side of my body with decent motor control and almost no sensation, and a left side with sensation and almost no motor control. So the right side does all the work the left side will not do. It has done the heavy lifting for twenty-six years, and I don't mind telling you the boys on the right are getting tired of carrying the freight for the guys on the left.
In case you have not connected the dots: we are the body of Christ. If you had the ability to give me back the full use of my left side, I know you would do it.
The body of Christ has no spare parts and no excess members. If you are not engaging your part of it, we are not all we could be. We are crippled without you.
Jesus allowed his body to be broken so that we might be made whole. Is it asking too much that we give our all, in light of what he has given, to make his body whole?
