“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” These words sound as though theey came out of the mouths of a good ol’fashioned tent revival preacher. You can almost see the sweating brow, clenched fist slamming upon the pulpit, and the worn Bible being raised with a trembling hand. Though this is not necessarily the situation in which these words were first uttered, they did come from the greatest evangelist (a person who preaches the Good News of Jesus Christ) of all time, the Apostle Paul.
We will come back to Paul in a minute, but first, I have a question for you. How is your new year going so far? How are those resolutions you made turning out? Are you already disappointed with 2026, or have you already backslidden on your resolutions? If you have, you’re not alone; most of us will face similar situations as we venture through this coming year. It’s almost as if we expect the mere marking of a new calendar or yearly cycle to be the point at which all things will come into order. Just the arrival of a new year is enough to cultivate the most significant changes in our lives or bring about the utter restoration of our souls. If this is your hope (as it has so often been mine), then disappointment is sure to follow those expectations. The mere passage of time can in no way reshape our ventures, as it has nothing to do with inner change, but merely the motion of the yearly cycle. Many of us have embarked on efforts to change or reform ourselves this year, or to establish new goals, without truly setting ourselves up for success, merely because we are stepping out on these journeys alone, which brings me back to the Apostle Paul.
Paul did not start as the greatest Christian evangelist of the first century. In fact, he began as a persecutor of the early church. His initial venture was to destroy this movement in which Jesus was being proclaimed as the Son of God. He thought that he was on righteous footing; he set off on this resolution with vigor and determination. He was initially very successful in his undertaking, becoming feared throughout the Christian community and an infamous force to be reckoned with. But all that changed when he set off one day to destroy the church being established in the town of Damascus. On that road, the risen Christ appeared to Paul and accused him of persecuting the true church. Paul was literally struck blind by this encounter (which would eventually be restored), and this forced him to rethink his strategy. By the time Paul had regained his eyesight and been ministered to by some early Christian leaders, he would go on to become one of the greatest spreaders of Christ’s message in human history. He would also go on to write over thirteen books of the New Testament. And this is someone who started literally trying to kill the Christian movement!
