Saul Had an Extraordinary, Supernatural Conversion—and So Did You

Molly Worthen’s Salvation

Recently I listened to a fascinating interview on Collin Hansen’s podcast, Gospelbound.¹ It was a ninety-minute conversation with Molly Worthen, a journalist and tenured history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over many years, Molly has written as an outsider about evangelical Christians and, when doing so, has sometimes been accused of being “snarky” and having little sympathy for her subjects.²Then recently she was asked to write an article on J. D. Greear and the Summit Church.³She began talking to people at the church, visiting the church, and sat down to interview J. D. Over time she felt herself increasingly drawn into the church and began an email correspondence with Greear to get her more personal questions about faith answered. She asked him for recommendations of books to read and began reading the books he recommended:

I found myself more than 51 percent persuaded that the Christian account of the resurrection is the best account we have. But I couldn’t believe that a person could be converted by reading a lot of books. . . . I was praying for some sort of warm and fuzzy mystical intervention, and it didn’t happen. I just got to the point as a consistent pragmatist that I had to admit I had gotten over that line of the resurrection being the best explanation for the historical evidence, which meant I had to change my working hypothesis of the universe. That weekend I switched from praying, “God show yourself to me,” to “Jesus, you are my Lord and Savior.”⁴

“Is my conversion real?” she asks. “You don’t hear about a lot of people saved through reading a lot of footnotes. . . . But I have this longing to read Scripture—especially the Gospels—that I never had before, and I think, ‘That is not me. That is new.’ ”⁵

Isn’t it interesting how God saves people? And whom God saves? And how he changes them? It’s often the people we least expect and in a way we would never expect. Some people hear the gospel and immediately take hold of it, while others spend a lot of time considering the claims of Christ and gradually come to faith. Some people have a profoundly emotional experience, while others feel very little. Some experience immediate deliverance from sinful impulses and patterns, while others spend a lifetime seeking to put certain sins to death. But there is one thing that is always the same. No matter who it happens to or how it comes about, salvation is always a supernatural work of God in which blind eyes are opened, giving a person the ability to see who Jesus is and the faith to trust him.

Saul’s Salvation

We see our first glimpse of Saul in Scripture as he stands and watches the men of Jerusalem hurl huge stones at Stephen that broke his bones, bloodied his body, and eventually took his life. We read in Acts 8:1 that “Saul approved of his execution.” But perhaps that is an understatement. Evidently, it whetted Saul’s appetite for more. We read that “Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison” (Acts 8:3).

Perhaps you’ve seen a movie in which Nazi soldiers break into a home, drag away young and old alike, and load them onto a train to be herded into a prison camp or gas chamber. Saul seems to fit right in with the coldest, cruelest characters we’ve ever seen in movies as we read the opening verses of Acts 9.

God chose you and saved you to carry his name into places and to people whose eyes have not yet been opened.

But by the end of the chapter, Saul has gone from hunter to hunted. The Christians in Jerusalem have gone from being persecuted by Saul to protecting Saul from persecution. Saul is sent off to his hometown of Tarsus, not with intentions to capture Christ followers and bring them back to Jerusalem in chains, but to proclaim Christ where he is not known and invite people to become a part of Christ’s kingdom.

As we take in this amazing story, we realize that God saves all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. He saved Saul by blinding him with the light of the face of the glorified Jesus so that Saul would believe that he really did rise from the dead. Molly Worthen would say that she was saved as she slowly became convinced that Jesus rose from the dead. I would say that I was saved as the Spirit worked through the preached word at my church so that when I was eight years old, I understood my need for Christ and took hold of him by faith. How about you? How did God save you?

Your Salvation

The truth is, anyone who is saved is saved the same way. It is always supernatural, though it might appear to be quite ordinary. It doesn’t have to be sensational to be supernatural. It doesn’t have to be emotional to be supernatural. Some people can tell you the moment when everything changed, and they became convinced and clear on who Jesus is. Others can’t tell you exactly when it happened. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t. Whether or not a person knows exactly when it happened, there is always a moment in the secret place of the soul when a person who is saved went from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive, separated from Christ to joined to Christ (Eph. 2:1–7).

Indeed, if you have experienced the salvation made available through faith in Christ, I can tell you that your salvation was like Saul’s salvation in a number of ways.

• Like Saul, God saved you in spite of past defiance, past apathy, past unbelief, past rejection of Christ, past sin against Christ.

• Like Saul, you were saved through a supernatural experience of having your eyes opened to who Jesus is and why you must become united to him by faith. Maybe your eyes were opened suddenly like Saul, or maybe it was more slowly. However it happened, and however long it took, it was equally as supernatural.

• Like Saul, your salvation may lead to persecution. You may face opposition from your family, your coworkers, and your community. That opposition may hurt you, it may discourage you, it may frighten you. But don’t let it silence you. You will never regret anything you might lose because of your public devotion to Jesus Christ. He will see to that.

• Like Saul, you have been saved for the purpose of enjoying Jesus and proclaiming that joy found in him wherever he places you, whether that is in a toddler play group, a neighborhood association, a teachers’ lounge, a business office, a family gathering, an exercise class, a bridge club, a retirement home, or a nursing home.

God chose you and saved you to carry his name into places and to people whose eyes have not yet been opened. Perhaps the Spirit will use your words to heal the blindness of people you know so that they can see the beauty, sufficiency, and necessity of Jesus. Wouldn’t that be thrilling?

This article is adapted from Saved: Experiencing the Promise of the Book of Acts by Nancy Guthrie.

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