Thank you for being here this morning and our title is God Making Friends Out of Enemies, a study of Saul of Tarsus. So let's look to the Lord in an opening prayer. Father God, we ask you to help us as we probe this topic this morning and some of the texts on your word that relate to Saul of Tarsus who later became Paul the Apostle. Now we ask you to help the speaker this morning and the hearers that might receive your word. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. We all know we're living in a very divisive time in history. Christian and secular-minded people have never been more divided and alienated from one another. Civility seems to be breaking down in many places. Anger and violence come from both the left and the right. There seems to be no common ground with which we can talk to one another. Christians and non-Christians alike seem to be passing in the night when it comes to common language, definition, and terms. The Christian church seems to be under real attack and persecution in the USA and serious persecution worldwide. Here, Christians only experience council culture maybe and sometimes loss of jobs but not physical danger. what is to be done in a time like this and how do we make friends for Christ and win over our enemies in such a time or should we just give up and withdraw and avoid all contact with enemies of Christianity well we may have our best example of God making friends of enemies in the life and conversion of Saul of Tarsus you may remember him as Paul the Apostle author of 13 New Testament books, and perhaps the most fruitful servant of the Lord in the New Testament era, not remembered so much today as Saul of Tarsus. But at this moment I want to examine first the man, Saul, and the enemy of Christianity. We barely think of him as an enemy of Christianity, but indeed he was a major enemy. and did much harm for a short time. We first see him at the martyrdom of Stephen in Acts 7, 58. Let me turn there real quick. It's his first appearance on the pages of Scripture. You know that Stephen was the first martyr and he was stoned to death. And as he was dying, there was a heavens opened and he had a vision of Christ. He appeared to him as a moment of death. And he cried out and he said, look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. Then the people that were executing him cried out and ran against him with one accord and they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul. Now, we believe he was more than just an observer. He might have been the instigator or was certainly part of the trial. We don't know if he actually threw a rock at Stephen, but he was giving consent and was an accomplice. And then he knelt down, Stephen, and he cried with a loud voice, Lord, do not charge them with this sin. And when he had said thus, he fell asleep. This was the first appearance of Saul of Tarsus on the pages of Scripture. And then in chapter 8 we see that he actually was a leader in the persecution that followed. He was consenting to his death, that is Stephen, and at that time a great persecution arose against the church which was in Jerusalem. And they were scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria except the apostles. and a devout man. And the men carried Stephen to his burial and made great lamentation over him. But as for Saul, he made havoc of the church entering every house and dragging off men and women committing them to prison so we see continued his nefarious ways in acts chapter eight and of course we had the text read already this morning acts chapter nine and i'm just not going to be able to go through that verse by verse that's why we had it read but he continued threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord in Acts chapter 9. And he went with permission, we think he got a certificate or some kind of authorization from the Sanhedrin. You know that was the same body that maybe a few years earlier had executed Jesus or authorized his execution at the cross. So this is the same Saul of Tarsus and he has an unexpected interruption on the road to Damascus. On the road to Damascus where he was going to persecute and arrest Christians, he was suddenly confronted. Suddenly a light shone around him from heaven and he came face to face with the risen Christ, Acts 9, 3. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? He must have been one surprised man. And Saul then asked two questions. And we think at that moment he was having a revelation. We think he saw Jesus and was probably converted at that moment. And he said to him, who are you? A very logical question. He didn't have no idea that this man that he was persecuting was the Son of God and the Savior. And the answer came from Jesus Himself and He said, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. And He was not persecuting literally Jesus. He was persecuting His servants, His body, the Christians. We are the body of Christ. when even in our imperfections when people come against us and come against the church they are persecuting Jesus and we need to always know that and then Jesus said to him it is hard for you to kick against the goads Now, I grew up in a family where we had two veterinarian uncles, and when I was a teenager in my years of 14, 15, 16, up to my graduation from high school, I spent some summers working with my uncle, who was a veterinarian down in the lower part of the state. Spent a whole summer there. And he was a big animal doctor, so he worked with cattle. and i never remember these cattle are very hard to control hard to manage and when they wanted to brand them or give them vaccinations they had to run them through these chutes and we had these electric prods that had batteries in them and they would stick them in the backside of the cattle and he would move along pretty quickly you know you could control him but you couldn't control him with a rope or any other way you couldn't speak to him but the goads worked and this is what i think he's speaking about paul had been goaded And we don't know how much it worked on his mind, but he was probably being goaded at the martyrdom of Stephen. And he says, it's hard for you, Paul, to kick against the goats. And most of us, prior to our conversion, had these kinds of situations where someone would testify or speak and we would listen, but we didn't listen. And so he was converted, I think, at this moment, baptized a few days later. But he said, Lord, what will you have me do? Good question for a new convert. And I think, really, all of us should have a question like that. He had two questions at his conversion. His first one was, who are you, Lord? And once he realized that this was the Son of God, the living Christ, The next question is, what will you have me do? What will you have me do? And I think God's got projects and missions for all of us in his kingdom. It says, Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, he says, That not of yourselves, it is a free gift of God, not of works should any man boast, lest any man should boast. So we're saved purely by grace through faith. But we often forget verse 10, where the same Apostle Paul said, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works. which God hath beforehand ordained that we should walk in them." And I think he's saying that there are things that God wants you to do once you're saved and you're to seek those out and walk in them and accomplish them. Don't just go through life a pew sitter with no job in the church or in the body of Christ. In the life of Paul today we're going to look at five things. In the time remaining I think we do have a good bit of time left and Jeremy's going to put the slide up. In the life of Saul of Tarsus we're going to examine five aspects around his conversion. that can encourage us in our personal witness today and seeing people saved today okay great there it is that's my outline and we'll just leave it up and we'll go through these points fairly quickly we've already looked at the main text a text act 758 and as Stephen was dying he cried out for God's forgiveness for his persecutors And I think God answered that prayer. We don't know about the rest of the men and perhaps women that were there for that event, but we know that he was praying and probably was praying for Paul. He may not have known his name, but he was praying for God's forgiveness for his enemies. And I think God answered that prayer. Sometimes we pray for years for lost family members. These are not empty prayers or lost in God's kingdom. God hears them and some will be answered, maybe not all. One example of a prayer like this was the prayer of the martyr William Tyndale. Now he was not praying for the salvation of the king, but he was praying for a situation. William Tyndale was the preeminent scholar and translator of the English Bible. And he fled England and went to Brussels, or Antwerp I believe, to carry out his mission but he was later arrested and burned at the stake by agents of King Henry the 8th. You may remember him, he was the one that had so many wives and he was not a friend of Christianity as we would define it. Tyndale's good deed of translating the Bible into English was not appreciated by Henry the 8th. Tyndale had translated the entire New Testament and much of the Old Testament before he was arrested and executed. He had had thousands of, several thousands of his Bibles printed and smuggled into England. But he was caught and the Bibles were confiscated and destroyed. His life work and his ministry, his Bibles were, his life work was apparently ended and he seemed to have failed in his mission. But as he died, For his good deeds, he cried out in a loud voice, God, open the eyes of the King of England." Pretty foreign-lorn prayer. Within a few years, however, that same King Henry VIII ordered the Bible be made available in the churches. Tyndale's version became the basis for all English translations. following pretty much up until modern times with all the modern translations but the Geneva Bible which was the Bible of the pilgrims and the founders and then later the King James Version were really the Tyndale Bible pretty much of his ninety percent of Tyndale's work the subsequent translators just barred his material but he never got credit they were not allowed to say that it was Tyndale but it was but today he's on the list as among the 100 most important people in the history of England. But he seemed to have died a failure. There's a prayer for you. Now the second point we want to look at is the power of the gospel itself to save. Romans 1, 16, and 17. This is a classic text of the Reformation of which Luther apparently read and was an instrument of the text of the Bible verses that were the instruments of his conversion. He was into works. He was going to save himself by his good deeds and his good works. But this was a text that God used to grip his heart and mind in the tower of his study in Wittenberg, Germany. And I'll read it. We know it well. We've studied it so many times in the text. But Paul said here, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation. to everyone who believes, but the Jew first and also the Greek. For in it, that is the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, the just shall live by faith. And this word, power, is one of the words that we're looking at today. Actually, it's in the Greek words, the word dunamis, which means where we get our word dynamite. Now, I don't think we want to make a transliteral translation and say the gospel is dynamite, but it shows that there's power here in this message that we have. This real got really living power and it can convert. And so this is the way God works. And this was what was happening to Paul, excuse me, Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. He was confronted with a power. a saving power and he met the saving Lord himself. He had a actual vision, I mean a literal vision of Christ himself. I want to tell a few stories today. I'm going to mix in some stories of real situations and I've got a friend in Greenville named Brian McCandless and we've been friends since the 80s and for some reason I never had sat down with him and asked the story of his conversion until maybe a couple weeks ago. I'm surprised that we had never discussed it. But boy does he have a story to tell. At age 21 in 1969 he described himself to me as utterly incorrigible. If you know what that means, that's a pretty low person. And he said, I was only interested in wine, women, and dance. And he was so rebellious that his parents, it kicked him out of the house. He couldn't live at home. And he went to live with his Christian grandmother who constantly testified to him. But he was also in the South Carolina National Guard in 1969. Now he's my age today so he's a pretty old fellow. And one day the unit nerd, he called him the nerd, witnessed to him. He didn't like the guy but he listened. And so the man, his fellow soldier, took him to the chaplain, who apparently was not able to help him, but the chaplain's assistant named Galden, who happened to be a graduate of CIU, in those days it was called Columbia Bible College, and so he tried to direct my friend Brian to his own preacher in Rock Hill, South Carolina. So Reverend Schultz called Brian up on the phone. There was a sense that God was drawing him and trying to win him over. He called him up on the phone at home and asked Brian on the phone, are you interested in accepting Christ and could you come by the church? And Brian answered very quickly, no, I'm not interested and I will not come by the church. He said, then inexplicably, Ray, I do not know why I did it. Inexplicably, I got in my car immediately and went over to the church. And this shows that when God's drawing you in, you know, you really are trapped. And so he got in his car and went over to visit the pastor. Where after a long three-hour session, He repented and accepted Christ as his Savior. He said, I also remember that the pastor was very nervous with me that day, but he carried through and he became saved. Later, when this incorrigible son told his dad a few days later, I found God, his dad was shocked. And Brian told me just a few weeks ago, he said, after 52 years, I can still remember and see the expression on his face. His dad later got saved and so did his mom. He was newly married and his wife got saved as well and it healed their marriage. He has now since, 52 years later, won most of his family to Christ, but a few are holding out, and he's working on them still. He testifies everywhere he goes of the grace-saving power of the gospel. So this gospel we have has got power, and it will convert. But you've got to use it. You've got to express it. You've got to speak it. Now the third thing we're looking at is the power of personal witness and conversion. First, you need to tell your own story. You have a story if you're saved today and you need to tell it often. How you came to Christ and what he means to you. This makes a difference to people and it's a changed life. If you're living a good life in a Christian life, faithful Christian, and people will see that and your words match your story. But if you're not living a good life, keep silent until you can get your life straight. Saul did later become known as Paul the Apostle. He was the great systematic theologian of the New Testament era. Wrote 13 books and probably the most important Christian of the New Testament era. And we see him yet through his life and we look at his life chronicled through the book of Acts in Acts 22 and 25 whenever he had a chance. He testified about his experience. He was always telling people what had happened to him and what a bad man he had been and how God had saved him. While he was a theologian and wrote Romans and Galatians and Ephesians, these are the great doctrinal books of the New Testament without which we would not have our theology straight, yet he always told the story. My wife Gail, at 15 years of age, was witnessed to by a neighbor woman in Charleston, South Carolina, herself only been saved for three months. She was a young Christian herself, and she had a concern for my wife Gail, who was best friends with her daughter in the neighborhood. And she would drop in and see the family just unannounced all the time. And so she prayed and was hoping to have an opportunity to talk to her about Jesus Christ as Savior. She was a young Christian herself, only three months old in the faith. She was so new in the faith that her pastor had to mark the Bible for the relevant text on salvation so she could show them to my wife, Gail. Gail, when she was talking to her that day, that she later was saved, Gail respectfully challenged her with a question, a dangerous question for a new Christian. And she said, Miss Fitzhenry, you don't really believe the Bible is literally true, do you? She had been raised up in a denomination that was not evangelical and didn't teach that the Bible was the literal Word of God. Ms. Fitzhenry answered boldly, and under Holy Spirit anointing, she said, Gail, don't ever let anyone tell you every word in the Bible is not the Word of God. No apologetics books for Miss Fitzhenry. She had not read any books. She was such a new believer, she probably didn't even know what the word apologetics meant. Well, my wife has not doubted the Bible since that day. Gail accepted Christ as her Savior that day after going through the Roman road marked carefully in her Bible by her pastor. So this is what the power of testimony and witness can do. Now let's take a look at the power of forgiveness. When we are saved, we are washed completely clean. And our sins are forgiven because of the propitiation of Christ. Our sins are laid on Christ, Jesus, at the cross. And He then is able and free and willing to forgive us based on what He did for us on the cross. There are many texts for this. One would be Isaiah 53, 6. All we like sheep have gone astray and turned everyone to his own way. But the Lord laid on him, that is Jesus, the iniquity of us all. Another text is 2 Corinthians 5 21. He who knew no sin, that is Jesus, he was sinless, perfect, was made to be sin for us. that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. There was a transfer here. He was sinless and holy and righteous and we were sinful. But at that moment of the cross and when we accepted Christ, there was a transfer and we get His righteousness and our sin and guilt was laid on Him. And that's how God saves. There's a great transaction that takes place. But if you don't receive it and believe and accept it, it's not yours. You must appropriate it by faith. A most unusual story of the power of forgiveness comes from post-World War II. I'm going to share this, but it's going to stretch every one of you's imagination to believe and strain your faith that forgiveness of God could extend to such a degree. It is chronicled in a book entitled Mission to Nuremberg by Tim Townsend. He was a religion writer I think at the time for the New York Times. Unusual that a book would come out of that culture. But it was not published until 2014. It's a little-known story of something that happened right after World War II and it was lost, kind of from history. It was chronicled in the journals and letters of certain people and say, but maybe 40-50 years later, Townsend discovered the story and wrote the book. And I tell you it's a remarkable story. It is a story of the trial of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg in 1945 and 46, after World War II. 21 of them, having committed some of the most horrible crimes, were tried by the Allies, the Americans, I guess, and the British, and all but two were hanged for war crimes. The U.S. Army assigned a chaplain, Henry Geerke, a Missouri-centered Lutheran, who was also a second-generation German and a fluent German speaker, to be the pastor to the thirteen Lutheran prisoners. The other eight prisoners were Catholic, and they had a Catholic chaplain assigned by the U.S. Army. Now, I don't think the Army picked this chaplain because he was a Missouri Lutheran or because he was an Evangelical, but he happened to be. He was a good German speaker, and so he was able to speak to these prisoners. All of them awaited trial and were subsequently hung, but two. Chaplain Gericke visited them in their cells daily, prayed with them, witnessed to them, gave them tracts in Christian literature, comforted them, and their wives and children who would visit them. Yes, the book reports most of the thirteen Lutherans, I don't know what happened with the Catholics, repented of their sins and accepted Christ as Lord and Savior. He later served communion to them. I think some were given communion on the day they were hung. It's quite a story. and I will tell you it taxes and strains your belief in the power of forgiveness that God would forgive such heinous crimes. General Keitel who had been Hitler's chief of general staff at the end of the war was among the converts and apparently one of the most clear ones. As he mounted the gallows to be hung for his crimes He was asked, do you have any last words? And I guess that was a procedure they had been doing it for centuries. If a person's getting ready to die, they give them last words. Instead of last words, he prayed a prayer of a man recently converted to Christ. And he said, I call on Almighty God to have mercy on the German people. Over two million German soldiers died in World War II. I go to be with my sons. Amazing story. Some years ago, when the book first came out, I was friendly with the commandant of the chaplain school at Fort Jackson, and I had actually served there in my reserve capacity for a time as a chaplain. He happened to be a very dedicated Christian in the PCA and was the top chaplain there and had his children enrolled at Ben Lippin when he was stationed in Columbia. And I brought this book to his attention. I said, have you seen this book or heard about this book? He said, oh yeah, Ray. I'm requiring every chaplain in the chaplain school to read it. So that was good news. It's a great book on pastoral care. It just shows what a man can do. Well, after the war, with this story unknown to the West, I mean, what had happened, what he had done, he kept journals and wrote letters and his family were aware of it but it was not reported on until 2014. He returned to Southern Illinois. uh... after the war he was also fifty years old when he went into the army and he was too old to be taken in at that time during the war but they accepted him because they needed chaplains and uh... so he came back to illinois he was actually originally from missouri he was a missouri lutheran and a graduate of concordia seminary which is very good school at that time He became, instead of going to a plush downtown Chicago church in the suburbs where he could live the good life, and I'm not saying that they all do that, but he chose to be assistant pastor of a Missouri-centered Lutheran church in a rural area in southern Illinois in the home of a large federal prison. for the most incorrigible prisoners. This prison housed murderers and people had done more serious crimes. Just as he did for the Germans during World War II, he visited them, he prayed with them, he witnessed to them about the forgiveness that's in Jesus. He gave them tracts, Bibles and Christian literature. We don't know all the details but many were saved. He died in 1961 and when he died the prisoners in the prison requested that his body come and lie in state in the prison. so they could walk by and pay respects. Over 800 prisoners did so. I don't know how many were in the prison. Never been done before and never done since. So this is the power of testimony. Alright, let's look at one more. The power of overcoming faith. Well first let me give you a couple of illustrations more. I've got a couple of stories. We're trying to make the point that God can save the worst of people, which he does often. But sometimes he can turn these sinners harmful people like Saul of Tarsus into very productive servants and often he does that. I've got a friend named Herb Titus, most of you would not have heard of him, but he is probably the most eminent Christian constitutional scholar in the country today. He was an ACLU laureate one time and an atheist. very hostile to Christianity. I don't know all the details of his conversion. He's a graduate of Harvard Law School, Breit Scholar. And he was saved somewhere along the way and has just become a total, wonderful, complete Christian. But not only that, he's a great scholar and writer and researcher for the application of Christianity to constitutionalism. And he was the founding dean of the first evangelical Christian law school in the modern era, which is today Regent University Law School. Now we have two or three. One is also Liberty University Law School. Now Herb is getting up in years. He's struggling now. He's in his mid-eighties, but he's still with us. But he became very, very productive for the Christian church in the modern era. But he was an enemy at one time. A lot of the people that teach at Liberty or leading there, and that's a great law school too, are his disciples. But two more I want to mention real quickly and some of you might have heard of Star Parker. She's an African-American Christian woman, amazingly influential today. in America and she's so influential that creators of nationally syndicated firm have given her a column and she's in the newspapers a lot. And she was a, she had had several abortions, had had children out of wedlock, and she was not a christian but she might have professed to be but she was working and i don't know all the details on that which is working at a christian law firm in california somewhere and most of the attorneys were believers and they would witness to her and she's all i'm a christian she they said well you can't be live in the way you are and they said that to her and it provoked her and she later was saved and uh... today is just a marvelous spokesman for christianity she was an enemy And there's another one that I know personally and it's a wonderful story even though he was not a aggressive enemy of Christianity. He was a Reverend or Dr. Votie Bauckham, another prominent African-American Christian leader and a theologian. And he had no Christian background at all. He was raised by a Buddhist mother in Los Angeles but he was a very good football player and he went to Rice University where he was on the football team as a It was a blocker, I guess, or a lineman, a very big guy, and didn't know anything about Jesus. I mean, he didn't even have a nominal Christian background. And the Campus Crusade staffer at Rice University would come into the locker room and testify and talk to the players after practice. That was his practice. That was his witness. He would go and talk to them about being saved and finding Christ And he found a ready, interested person in Votie Bauckham, and Votie was saved. Well, what did he do? He dropped out of football at Rice University, and I think enrolled in Houston Baptist University, if I've got the details right, and then later went to Southeastern Baptist Seminary. He's very accomplished, written a number of books, and is one of the leading spokesmen in the world today for Christian-based homeschooling. He was not a aggressive enemy like Paul the Apostle, but he was lost and everybody's lost until they get saved. So we see that there are many examples like Paul of people who become very useful in the kingdom of God as a result of their conversion. And the final point is, and I'm not going to mention this very long, is 1 John is the power of an overcoming faith. If you're saved And I assume a lot of you are here today. You should have an overcoming faith. A faith that wins. It's victorious. And this is seen in 1 John 5, 4 and 5. Describes the person who has been born again, who has been saved, like the Apostle Paul or Saul of Tarsus. This is the way you are described if you're real. For whoever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is a victory that has overcome the world, our faith. And I think there he's not speaking of the body of Christianity, but it's the personal faith that you have in Christ, that you walk with Him, that you know Him, that He is a living Savior to you. You know Him personally. You've met Him, if not on the road to Damascus, you've met Him along the way. Who is he who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? There's power in this, and if you're a Christian today and have experienced the salvation and the grace that is in Christ Jesus, you will and should be an overcomer. You're a winner. You're winning. Things may be falling apart around you. We may be living in a bad culture, but we still have a weapon, a tool that will overcome, and that's the gospel. Yes, we live in a dark time. But the instruments of our warfare, the tools of our warfare, the gospel, the powerful gospel, intercessory prayer, personal witness, use of the Bible in Christian literature are the same for us as they were for the New Testament in the time of Saul of Tarsus. God may have his eyes on some terrible sinner that you know. Some person you would call him a bad person. We ourselves would not select that person or choose him or her for ourselves to be saved. You know Jesus said I've come to call the unrighteous or sinners to repentance not the righteous. It says he died when we were sinners he died for us. Like my friend Brian who described himself as incorrigible. You know that word means beyond hope. We should hate the attitude of Paul the Apostle. Now we're looking at Paul the Apostle not Saul of Tarsus. In Galatians 6 14 and I guess I can read that. He said God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ by whom the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything but a new creation which is what you are if you're in Christ. Near the end of his life Remember I mentioned that Paul or Saul would talk about in the book of Acts and that was written by his aid Luke and so it's pretty accurate to describe you know what Paul was doing and what he was like that he was always quick to testify in two chapters Acts 22 and 25 about his conversion on the road to Damascus and he would remind people what kind of man he had been before his conversion He wasn't trying to cover it up. He wasn't trying to hide. He let us know what he was like. Near the end of his life he reminds us one final time, 1 Timothy chapter 1 verses 12 through 16, that he was a sinner. And he said, I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man. Pretty strong words for what he was like before his experience on the road to Damascus. And then he said further that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief. I don't know that he was saying I'm the number one sinner that ever lived, but he said I'm a chief category He was a religious man, but not the kind of religion that would save you. He says, I was a chief sinner. I was in the category of the chief sinner. Later, because of his conversion, he became the model for pastoral ministry. Really, when we want to see what pastoral ministry should be like, we study Paul. And some of the others, but he was a preeminent one. We want to find out he became the preeminent model for missions. I mean, we study the book of Acts, and we study Paul's missionary travels. So what should missionaries do, and what should they be like? Well, we study the life and the ministry of Paul the Apostle. And he was a primary systematic theologian for the New Testament era. Primarily we'd be looking at the book of Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, I'm sure there's some others, but they lay out the great theology that we all live by. But he says this, but importantly he says, that in me first Christ Jesus might show all long-suffering as a pattern to those who are going to believe on him for everlasting life. He says I'm the pattern for how great and powerful the forgiveness of God can be. He can save me. He can save anybody. He can save you. And that's what he's done. If he can save a man like Saul, who we now know as the Apostle Paul and use him. He can do the same for you and me and many others. So I say to you, be looking for them. They're out there. You can find them. Don't write anybody off. Pray for them. God will use you. Paul is the pattern of God making friends out of his enemies. Let's close in prayer. Father God, we thank you for saving Saul of Tarsus. We often think of him only as Paul the Apostle, but we know he had a life before the road on Damascus when he, when he opened his eyes and helped him see the living Christ. We pray for each one present today that we would all have a sense that you have saved us, if indeed you have, and that we can know and experience the living Christ. We ask you to help us as we reach out that we'd find the Bryans and the Votibockums and the Star Parkers and the Herb Tituses that are all around us. And we know that you can bring them into your church, your kingdom, and we thank you that you will indeed do it. We ask you for these favors in Jesus' name. Amen.