Acts 22:15
KJV
“For thou shalt be his witness unto all men of that which thou hast seen and heard.”
NASB95
“For you will be a witness for Him to all men of what you have seen and heard.”
ESV
“for you will be a witness for him to everyone of what you have seen and heard.”
Saul was on the road to Damascus with warrants in his hand and murder in his heart. That is the man Christ stopped. And when the Lord later described him, He did not say in spite of what he was. He said, “he is a chosen vessel unto me” (Acts 9:15, KJV). The persecutor became the apostle. The worst of his history became the credential of his witness.
I have my own road behind me. Bankruptcy. Divorces. Drug addiction. Prison sentences. For years I believed that record disqualified me from anything holy. I was wrong. When I sit with the men in prison through Crossroads, it is precisely that record that allows me to say, I know. When a Restarter walks into The Gateway carrying his shame, my past is the door he can walk through. I do not thank God for the sin. I thank Him that none of it was wasted — that He redeemed the wreckage and handed it back to me as a tool.
• • •
But knowing that does not make today lighter. The Academy is in front of me — the registration, the fit-out, the funding, the curriculum, the men and women waiting for somewhere to begin again — and I am frozen. What if I cannot carry what He has entrusted to me? I strain to see ahead, and there is nothing there. Blinded.
Then I notice what I had rushed past for years. Paul could not see either. For three days he sat in the dark, eating nothing, knowing only that he had been stopped and told to wait. He did not enter Damascus with a strategy; men led him by the hand. His sight returned only when Ananias came — help he had not even known to ask for.
So I stop demanding the whole road. He has never given me the whole road. He has given me the next step, and an Ananias each time I needed one. My commission is not to guarantee the outcome. It is to witness to what I have seen and heard — and to pray, and to be led.
Father, I thank You for a past I once hated, because in Your hands it has become useful. Now I bring You my fear. I do not know the way. I cannot see. I am not able. Lead me by the hand as You led Paul, send the help I do not know how to ask for, and let me be faithful for today only. Not my name, but Yours. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria
“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
2 Corinthians 5:17 (KJV)
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