Acts (9): The Damascus Road (2) - Acts 9:10-19
1. Mount Pleasant Baptist (16 Jul 2017). 2. GIBC (26 Oct 2025).
1. Intro: What Happens After the Encounter?
Last week, we spoke of call. Jesus calls Saul just as God called Abraham on that night in Ur and established relationship with him. God did the same and called Moses out in the Moab wilderness. Please note that the call is not to do something, the call is to establish relationship. What we can do for God is secondary. He has many others who can do a better job but what he wants to do first of all is establish relationship. We are not mechanical units but people created in his image, which means we have many things that are patterned after God himself and of all creation, we are the ones he wants relationship with. What we can do vocationally comes after knowing God as Father and Jesus as savior and priest. We then become a sent people. As my Father has sent me, I send you! Being sent means we serve and then discover the potential that’s inside of us to bless our fellow humans.
2. The Role of Ananias
2.1. Go to Straight Street: Jesus could have brought back Saul’s sight right away but no, Jesus chooses Ananias for a task and instructs Saul to go to Damascus to meet with him. Ananias is told to go to Straight Street to meet Saul.
Straight Street | Tourist Attractions in Damascus Old City
2.2. Ananias is Scared: Imagine Ananias’s shock when he’s told to go meet with the one who has been persecuting Christians. However, Jesus sets him right about what’s going to happen. Ananias doesn’t know it yet but he’s going to play an important role in enabling the Gospel to be propagated far and wide “before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel.” There are some very important spiritual principles at play here.
2.2.1. Body Principle: It is the Lord’s will to involve others when something is going to happen. Here, Ananias was going to be used. We never know if Yahweh is going to use us for the start of a great work. Or when the scripture says
“Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it. we have met angels unaware” (Heb 13:2).
This will be seen in fuller measure when Saul who becomes Paul writes about the body principle. Jesus could have chosen others but he chose Ananias. I hope one day, Jesus will tell me that I played a role in the establishment of his kingdom in those areas that I was in.
2.2.2. Obedience: we are told that Ananias trusted what Jesus said and he departed and went to Short Street entered the house where Saul was at. We will see more of this in Acts when the Spirit guides and leads them often without giving reason. What’s required is the discipline of obedience for God’s will to be fulfilled even when I can’t see it at the time. Yes, the culture tells us to do only when we know what the consequences are.
2.2.3. Visions and Dreams: Will it surprise you to know what God still communicates with his people today? Please don’t buy into the teaching that God stopped speaking to his people and if he does it is only via the Scriptures. I’d say that God speaks with his people and we shouldn’t be restrictive here. The disciples quoted the prophet Joel about God communicating in the last days and young and old people will have visons and dreams. Here, we need discernment to sort out the wheat and the chaff. Satan also has his visions and dreams. Today, I have heard of many Persian and Middle Eastern people who have seen Jesus in their dreams and this has caused them to sought out Christian communities in these Muslim countries at great risk to themselves.
2.2.4. God’s Servants have to Suffer: “For I will show him how much he has to suffer for the sake of my name” (9:16). Later, Paul wrote ****
"Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us". (Rom 5: 3-5)
"Now if we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory". (Rom 8:17)
The church through the ages has been persecuted. For the first 300 years it was oppressed by the Romans. What happened when that stopped? It got rich, it got complacent, and it got political. Being made to suffer made Saul learn dependency. He became like Elijah who lived and depended totally on God. Think of suffering as childbirth, all mothers go through pain during childbirth. I am told the pain is pretty painful but all that is forgotten when the mother holds the newly born baby in her arms.
It is an established principle that all of God’s servants have to suffer while serving. The apostles have little with no money or place to lay their head but they keep going on!
4. Being Filled With the Holy Spirit (9:17)