Paul’s Job Description

PAUL’S JOB DESCRIPTION 

Acts 9 :1. Saul continued to terrorize the disciples of the Lord with murderous threats. One day he went to the high priest, saying he wanted letters of authorization he could give to those in the synagogues of Damascus, that if he found any followers of Jesus, men or women, he might arrest them and bring them bound as prisoners, to Jerusalem.
3. He set off on his journey, and when he was almost at Damascus, a great light from Heaven shone all around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’
5. Saul said ‘Who are you Lord?’ And the Lord said ‘ I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting. And it has been hard for you to fight against the prodding of your own conscience. 
6. Astonished and shaken up by what had happened to him he said ‘Lord what do you want me to do?’ The Lord said ‘Get up and go into the city and I will tell you what you have to do.’
7. The men who had been travelling with him stood by, speechless, because they heard a voice but did not see anyone.
8. Saul then picked himself up off the ground and when he opened his eyes he found he could not see a thing, so his companions had to lead him by the hand into Damascus.
9. He stayed blind for three days, and neither ate nor drank anything the whole time.
10. The Lord then spoke to a man called Ananias in a vision, and said ‘Ananias, Get up and go to Straight Street, to the house of Judas, and ask for a man called Saul, whom you will find praying. I’ve given Saul a vision of a man called Ananias coming in to lay hands on him, so that he might get his sight back again. Ananias answered,’ Lord I have heard about this man from many people, and how much evil and destruction he has brought upon the saints in Jerusalem. And he has obtained authority here in Damascus from the chief priests to imprison anyone who calls upon your name. But the Lord answered him ‘Do what you are told, because he is a chosen vessel of mine, to bear my name before the nations, and before kings, and the children of Israel.
16. I want to show him how many things he must suffer for my name’s sake.
17. Ananias did as he was told and went into the house and laid hands upon Saul and said ‘Brother Saul the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on your journey here has sent me to you for you to receive your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. Straightaway it was as though scales fell from his eyes and he could see. He stood up and became baptized. Saul’s strength returned after he ate some food. He then stayed on for some days in Damascus with some of the disciples. Soon after that Saul began preaching in the synagogues about Christ being the Son of God. He confounded the Jews in Damascus as he debated with them, proving that Jesus was indeed the Christ Messiah.

At the time of this spectacular conversion account Saul would have been a man in his thirties and regarded as one of the most promising of the young Jews in Judaism, commissioned as the enforcer against Christians – and for him to ‘switch sides’ was unthinkable for all parties. He was convinced that Jesus was dead, and now all that remained for him was to wipe out as many followers as he could. 
Saul had a purpose in life – he had power over people, to judge, condemn and to punish.
But meeting the living Jesus on the road to Damascus changed that purpose and the entire course of his life, as it does to all who meet the living Jesus. Paul would have power to love and transform and heal the souls of man ‘for the love of Christ compels me’ (2Corinthians 5:14.)
These two powers contend for the hearts of mankind in this day.

Saul was led, blinded, into Damascus, and didn’t eat or drink for three days. When he regains his sight the first thing he sees is a man whose name is Ananias which means ‘The grace of God’, and the grace of God becomes his banner of life from that moment on.

It is interesting to note that a major part of his job description as Paul is to suffer for Jesus’ names sake. There are many Scriptures describing these sufferings in Paul’s letters but he sums it up comprehensively in the following verses;

2Corinthians 11:13 Concerning those who boast that they are doing God’s work in just the same way we are. God never sent those men at all; they are “phonies” who have fooled you into thinking they are Christ’s apostles… They say they serve Christ? 
But I have served him far more! (Have I gone mad to boast like this?) I have worked harder than them, been put in jail more often, been whipped times without number, and faced death again and again and again. Five different times the Jews gave me their terrible thirty-nine lashes. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was severely pelted with rocks. Three times I was shipwrecked. Once I was in the open sea all night and the whole next day. I have traveled many weary miles and have been often in great danger from flooded rivers and from robbers and from my own people, the Jews, as well as from the hands of the Gentiles. I have faced grave dangers from mobs in the cities and from death in the deserts and in the stormy seas and from men who claim to be brothers in Christ but are not. I have lived with weariness and pain and sleepless nights. Often I have been hungry and thirsty and have gone without food; often I have shivered with cold, without enough clothing to keep me warm. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I don’t feel his weakness? Who is made to fall, and I am not consumed with grief?

Every experience of suffering that Paul went through became the preface to the revealing of his ministry of life - the life-giving Spirit of Jesus worked in him and through him. For Paul this process is the only valid ‘work of the ministry’ that God has ordained for us who live as being ‘in Christ’. Paul was not interested in the ‘dead works’ of religion but in the ‘faith that works by love’. (Galatians 5:5). He knew that faith was dead without being energised by the work of the love of God. Paul knew that that love was the energy (energeo-working) that releases God’s creative power and God’s transformative power into the hearts of mankind. Paul saw suffering as an opportunity to release that energy and saw it as being able to overpower the worldly power of unloving energies that opposed the power of that divine power of ‘faith that works by love’ in the world. 

The laws of physics describe power as a function of the flow of energy. 
The world sees the self-determining of purpose and status and meaningful influence in life as a power struggle between competing ambitions and ideologies.  This power is always at work in Politics and financial corporate identity, and cultural relevance, and religion. These entities compete for moral high ground and virtue status against each other, and the power struggle is ruthless.
But the energy of the power in those ideological power struggles is the same that Saul the Pharisee once lived in. It is to judge and condemn and to punish. This is the power that drives today’s identity politics and saving the planet ideologies. People are recruited into joining a noble moral army to fight the evils of what their ideology claims is evil. By joining this army a recruit is entitled to use whatever means is available to destroy the enemies of their cause. 
The recruits can praise themselves for being virtuous saviours of today’s culture, and their virtue and self-aggrandisement does not even mean ever having to do anything productive or sacrificial (unless you call destroying statues, desecrating valuable artwork in museums or disrupting peak hour traffic as being productive, or sacrificial – no, all one has to do is judge and condemn and punish the deniers of the virtuous moral code (and turn up for protest marches).  The power brokers and leaders of these power structures embolden the efforts of the deluded recruits, whose lives end up producing confusion and disillusionment. 

The world elevates the power of judgment above the power of love, but with Christians it must not be so (but so often is). We are energised by the power of God’s love. God loves, and God judges (we don’t) and he holds everyone to account for what they purposed as against what he purposed for their lives. I came not to condemn he world but to save the world The best way for a Christian to overcome sin in the world as best they can is to overcome it in themselves as best they can.

Paul saw that the power of sacrificial love was worth dying for, as it was for Jesus. In Paul’s fellowship of the suffering of Christ he was able to count everything else as loss, because for him, suffering had meaning and purpose.
We may not be invited into such a dangerous and life-threatening journey of suffering as Paul’s, with its adventure and misadventure, but we can certainly relate to the other inner sufferings that he went through in his soul. As he writes later on.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; ‘For we who live are always being yielded up to death (thanatos – loss of life) for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal body. So death is at work in us, but life in you (2Corinthians 4:7).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
When we enter into the life of becoming a life-giving Spirit with Jesus that life is imparted by our faith, not just thought about or talked about. That life gets ministered into the spiritual atmosphere around us and is able to touch the spirit of other people. There is a spiritual atmosphere that exists as an unseen reality everywhere on earth, and Paul desired above all things to ‘know him, and the fellowship of his sufferings that he might also know the power of his resurrection’. (Philippians 3:10)
Paul also said ‘be imitators of me as I am of Christ’ (1Corinthians 11)

The life-giving Spirit operates through the yielding of our own self purposed life in order to find our God purposed life. ‘For whoever would save (protect) his (self-purposed) life will lose it, but whoever loses his self-purposed life for my sake will find his God purposed life. (Matthew 16:25)

We continue to live with a realistic awareness of our limited outer life and facing life’s ongoing difficulties while at the same time resting in faith that our God purposed life energised by sacrificial love is continually bringing forth its promise of transformation of our own and of other peoples’ lives beyond our imagination and overpowering all other powers of darkness and sin.
We can become the embodiment of the life-giving Spirit of Jesus and impart God’s life into the spiritual atmosphere around us. This does not mean that we look like we are wearing a halo with our feet not quite touching the ground. It simply means going about life managing our everyday activities but coming from a place of faith deep down inside of us that something powerful of the risen life of Jesus in the world of the unseen, is bringing his will upon the earth according to his will in Heaven and transforming our personal world around us.