“The Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he its to chosen vessel unto Me, to bear My name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel: for I will show him how great things he must suffer for My name’s sake”— Acts 9:15, 16.
THE importance of the story of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus and his selection by the risen Lord to be His special ambassador to the Gentiles may be gathered from the fact that it is related, more or less fully, five times in the New Testament. Here in Acts 9 we have Luke’s account. In chapters 22 we have Paul’s story of his conversion as he related it to the Jews in Jerusalem. In chapters 26 he tells it again before Festus and Agrippa. Then in Philippians 3:4-11 he refers to it when writing to a Christian church. To his son in the faith, Timothy, he again tells the story of his one-time enmity to the gospel and the grace of God that transformed the persecutor into an evangelist (1 Tim. 1:12-16). These five recitals of the great change that came to this man are most suggestive, emphasizing, as they do, the incorrigible evil of the heart of man—even religious man—and the sovereign, electing grace of God.
“Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail thy bright ascendant star,
Hast thou no scar?
No wound? no scar?
Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follows Me;
But thine are whole: can he have followed far
Who has no wound nor scar?”
—Amy Carmichael.