Making Us More Relevant

Scripture: But their suspicions didn’t slow Saul down for even a minute. His momentum was up now and he plowed straight into the opposition, disarming the Damascus Jews and trying to show them that this Jesus was the Messiah. Acts 9:22

Observation: Immediately after Saul is confronted by Jesus, and upon healing his vision receives the Holy Spirit as a believer - within a matter of days at the most - Saul is engaged in debate with Jews about the Messiahship of Jesus. We know Saul is very educated, one of the most brilliant pharisees, and knows the scriptures flawlessly. We also know that, when engaged with Jews, his typical tactic is to show them the nature of Messiah in the scriptures and thus how Jesus fulfilled those prophesies. For days in Damascus, he isn't just saying, "I was blinded on the way here by Jesus therefore he must be Messiah," but rather he is engaged in an educated discussion about the Messiah and Jesus.

In other words ... Saul always knew the truth of this argument. He had learned the history of Jesus, the facts surrounding his life, ministry, death, and resurrection, and he was very much an expert in how the scriptures foretold the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of the promised Messiah as the man of woes, the suffering servant, the heir of David's eternal throne. He knew it, he just refused to accept it because it would force him to change his life.

When Jesus confronted Saul on the road, he didn't present him with new information. Instead, he just forced the life-change issue.

Application: I was reminded recently of a conversation I had with a non-believer; someone who, to my knowledge, is still a non-believer. "Jesus" was their most-used explicative. This person seemed to know about faith and Christianity, and their biggest objection was that a) believing required life-change, and b) one could decide not to believe their entire their life, until on their deathbed, then accept Jesus and suddenly be saved anyway. To this day, I'm not certain why either of those issues are negative, especially given how poorly this person's life was going at the time we had this conversation (it was absolutely in need of change).

I think there are many non-believers who actually know with near certainty that ... Jesus is the Messiah. They therefore are not believers because "Messiah" doesn't have relevance in their lives, likely because Yahweh - the one Lord God of the Universe - doesn't have relevance to them, either. I may have been categized like this at one time, thinking that even if God existed he didn't matter to me.

We spend so much energy thinking about how to make Jesus "relevant" to people, but then we define relevance in terms of modern cultural topics and norms and issues. Jesus isn't about being relevant to modern culture, he's about changing lives to make us relevant to his ways. Jesus didn't re-educate Saul, he changed his life and freed him up to properly use his existing education.

Jesus already is relevant to everything in the universe. The goal is to make us relevant by aligning to his love and will and purposes.

Prayer: Lord, may we, all your believers, and especially myself, become more relevant to you and your kingdom today and every day. Amen.