Jim Somerville, pastor of Richmond’s First Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, and co-founder of A Sermon for Every Sunday, preaches a sermon called “The Acts of an Easter People,” based on Saul’s conversion story in Acts 9:1-20. Somerville says, when Saul was blinded by the light and Jesus spoke to him, perhaps, “All he [Saul] could think was that he had been wrong about this whole thing. Dead wrong. The irony of it was that nobody had ever tried harder to be right. Following the letter of the law, scrupulously obeying the scriptures, passionately committed to his cause, ready to die for his beliefs. Saul had been struck down by the revelation that he was wrong, wrong, wrong about all of it.” Somerville reminds us that what we learn from Saul’s story “is that one of the ‘acts’ of an Easter people is humble repentance.” We all get it wrong. If Saul, who later became the great apostle Paul, and Peter, the rock upon which the church would be built, was wrong, then you or I could be wrong too. How do we handle being wrong?
Manuscript available: click HERE