Text:  Acts 9:1-22                                                      W The Conversion of St. Paul (3^rd Sunday of Epiphany)

The "Straight and Narrow" Is a One Way Street

            In the name of him who came to seek and to save the lost, dear brothers and sisters in Christ: We’ll start here this morning with a quick survey:  raise your hand if you’ve ever really been lost (and I mean that in a physical and literal sense).  I don’t mean momentarily disoriented while out driving and looking for a particular address – that’s not really lost; I mean out-in-the-deep-woods, no-signs-of civilization, it’s getting dark, I’m frightened, and I-have-no-idea-which-way-to-go lost.  Raise your hand if you’ve ever been lost like that.  Quite an experience, isn’t it?

            I can safely say that it’s never happened to me (though I’ll admit to coming close a few times); but I can say that I’ve been involved in helping to find people who were lost like that.  Way back when I was a high school kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I was an explorer scout; and one of the things we did was get called out to help search for people (usually hunters or backpackers) when they were reported missing.  Then too when I was in the Army I was involved in a few similar searches – but those had to do with lost soldiers, lost squads, and one time a whole platoon that couldn’t be found.

            So, while I may not be an expert on being lost, I do have some solid experience with the subject.  And so, I think I’m qualified to say that there are two kinds of really being lost.  The first is the situation I described before, when someone finds themselves hopelessly lost and not knowing which way to go.  This can be very dangerous, especially if the person panics.  The best thing to do if you find yourself lost in this way is to remain calm, sit tight, and build a fire if possible. This will ensure that you keep warm and that you don’t wander off too far from where you were last seen and where people are most likely to begin to look for you.  In addition, the smoke of the fire will help the searchers find you.  Now, that kind of lost is bad – but worse by far is the second kind of being lost; and that’s to be lost like I’ve already described and not know it.  The person who thinks he knows where he is and which way to go, and who is dead wrong about both is a disaster in the making.  That’s because he keeps going in the direction he mistakenly believes is the right way, thus wasting precious strength and supplies (like water), while moving farther from where people will be looking for him.  Now, there’s a chance that by dumb luck he’ll run into civilization; but at least in my limited experience, it usually happens the other way.  In the searches I was part of, when someone was the second kind of lost (usually hunters out in the fall when it was cold and wet), they walked until they wore out. And then, with hypothermia beginning to set in affecting their judgment and making them very sleepy, they sat down to rest, fell asleep, and never woke up again.  The second kind of lost is much more likely to be deadly than the first.

            And my military experience taught me that being the second kind of lost is even more of a problem when you’re in a position of responsibility and charged with leading others.  I recall one field maneuver I was part of in the rolling hills of southern Germany.  Bitterly cold.  As I recall, the highest temperature in the six-day exercise was 11 degrees.  Anyway, I was the leader of a mechanized combat engineer platoon, and I needed to meet with one of my squads to give them instructions and supplies.  I called them up on the radio, and told them to meet me on top of hill 385.  Sgt Forde [pronounced “FOR-day”], the squad leader responded, “Hill 385.  Roger.” (It might be helpful to add that his soldiers called him Sgt “All-Day” because … well, because he was kind of slow – and I don’t mean that in a physical sense.)   I had a lot of other things to do, so I thought it best to ask, “Second squad, what’s your ETA?”  “’Bout ten minutes.”  “Roger. Out.”   And so I waited for them to arrive in their armored personnel carrier. Ten minutes came and went … then twenty … thirty (hey, I figured that with Sgt Forde in charge … well, you understand).  After waiting for 45 minutes, I got back on the radio.  “Second squad, what’s your ETA?”  No response.  “Second squad, what’s your ETA to hill 385?”  “This is second squad … we’re on hill 385.  Got here a half hour ago.”  “Uh, second squad, wherever you are, you’re not on hill 385; because I’m on hill 385 and you’re nowhere in sight.”  Well, then Sgt Forde wanted to argue about it.  He was convinced that I was the one on the wrong hill – and from the chatter I heard in the background, it was clear that he and his squad were having a good laugh at the expense of their “lost lieutenant”.  For my part, I was certain of where I was; but I wasn’t having any luck convincing him.

            Now, I’m sure you see the problem:  Sgt Forde and I were both looking at the same map; but we weren’t reading it the same way.  And, as it turns out, because he was reading it wrong, I couldn’t simply say, “Okay, meet me at this other place instead”, because not knowing where he was to begin with, he couldn’t possibly use the map to get there.  And in the meantime, I’ve got not just one man, but a whole third of my platoon effectively taken out of action because they don’t know where they are – and neither do I.  In the end, I had them use a compass to shoot an azimuth at a tall radio tower that we could both see, and from that I determined that they were probably on one of three different hills about eight miles away.  I told them, “Don’t go anywhere.  I’ll come find you.”  An hour or so later, I did.  It’s funny, though:  usually the lost rejoice at being found; but when I asked Sgt Forde to step aside with me so that I could … oh, let’s say “share my heart with him” concerning his navigation skills, he didn’t look happy at all to see me.  He looked even less happy when I was through.

            Well, anyway, now that you understand what I mean about the two kinds of being lost, I think we’re ready to make some spiritual applications.  It turns out (and I’ll bet some of you are way ahead of me here) that there are also two kinds of lost that people can be with respect to God our Father and eternal life with him in heaven.  And as much as we hate to say it, we know that the vast majority of people in the world are lost.  Jesus said that the way to life is straight and narrow, and few are they that find it.  Everyone who isn’t on that straight and narrow way that Jesus described is lost. Now, it happens that a lot of these folks are lost in the first way.  They know very well that they’re not on the path that leads to life. Their lives are absolutely full of sin and vice, and for the most part they would readily admit it; but they just don’t care.  They are enjoying the short-term perks and pleasures of sin, and they mean to keep at it for as long as they can.

            Now, I don’t need to tell you what a dangerous situation such people are in.  Without help they would certainly be lost eternally.  But as bad as their situation is, it happens that these folks are, in a relative sense, the easiest to find – and that’s because they know that they are lost to begin with.  What they need to be shown is how awful being lost is.  Usually it takes some kind of experience that leads to a powerful confrontation with the Law and wrath of God:  an injury, a sickness, the death of a loved one, the break up of a relationship, a run in with police, whatever it happens to be, they find out that the life of pursuing sin’s pleasures isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Its promises are empty; and it inevitably leads to sorrow, disappointment, and death.  But it’s precisely when they feel the anger of God and tremble before his righteous judgments, at the same time despairing of their own ability to make amends and walk in what they believe to be the “straight and narrow way” by their own power and will, that they are ready to be shown the true way that leads to life. It’s not a path of trying to be holy and righteous by avoiding sin.  The true straight and narrow way is Jesus Christ and his righteousness.  It’s trusting in the sacrifice he made for the sins of the world – and it’s his word of forgiveness, comfort, and peace proclaimed to those who are lost in sin and terrified on account of it. This is why during his earthly ministry Jesus gathered the largest part of his following from among those whom “decent society” considered sinners and outcasts:  people like Matthew and Zachaeus who were tax collectors, the woman caught in adultery and the sinful woman who anointed Jesus’ feet, and so on. These people knew that they were lost and that they needed to be rescued – and so they could see Jesus as their Rescuer – their Savior.  And the same is true for people who are lost in sin like that today.

            But, you know, there are a lot more people in the world who are lost in the second way.  Oh, they are every bit as lost as those in the first category, but their situation is far more perilous because they don’t know it.  Quite the contrary, they are absolutely certain that they are walking the straight and narrow way that leads to life and salvation – and to look at them, you might think so too.  They are good people, religious people.  Their lives are dedicated to pleasing God and trying to get along with others as best they can.  In fact, some of them are super-scrupulous.  They want to go above and beyond the call of duty.  These people pour over whatever they consider to be sacred writings, be it the Bible of the Christians, the Jewish Torah, the Muslim Koran, the Hindu Vedas, or whatever, and they search and study them intently – like maps – to determine how best to follow the path that leads to light and life.  These sorts of people are perhaps the most lost of all – as well as the most dangerous, because they usually lead others astray with them.

But leaving aside those whose sacred writings we would all agree are false – whose maps we know to be forgeries – I’d like to focus on those people who look to the true divinely inspired Scriptures for finding their way and who are lost and don’t know it.  Saul of Tarsus was one such person – and he certainly would have qualified as one of the super-scrupulous.  He was a self-described Pharisee’s Pharisee.  Everything he did was carefully calculated to come as close as humanly possible to attaining perfect obedience to God.  He wanted to make sure that each and every step he took moved him just a little bit farther down the straight and narrow way that leads to life. And in a way, you might say that it did – but in the opposite direction.  With each task he thought he performed “correctly”, every “mission accomplished” and “job well done”, he became more and more reliant on himself and his own hard earned goodness.  And the more he thought he was pleasing God by his behavior and his earnest attempts to obey the Law, the farther he was getting from salvation.  He was holding the map of Scripture completely upside down believing that the Law of God, that should have been revealing his sin and desperately lost condition, was in fact showing him how much progress he was making.

And what was worse still, he felt that it his sacred obligation and duty to God to do everything in his power to stop those he saw who were quite correctly headed in the opposite direction.  He wanted to get these rebellious souls turned around to go the way he was going – what he thought was the “right way”:  the way of good, clean, God-pleasing living.  But it’s very telling that he went to the religious leaders for authorization to go to Damascus and bring the Christians who had fled there back in chains.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ had set them free of guilt and the unbearable burdens of the Law; Saul’s goal was to place them back in the Law’s bondage and curse.

And so he would have, perhaps, had he not been intercepted on the way.  And if you think that I came down a little hard on Sgt Forde when I showed him where he really was, well, it was nothing like the reorientation session that Saul received.  Because he thought he could stand before God, the Lord Jesus laid him in the dust. Because he thought he could see and understand what God wanted, the Lord took away his sight.  Because he thought he knew where he was going and how to lead others, the Lord had him led by the hand like a little child.  And then the Lord set Saul in the darkness for three days in a house located, aptly enough, on a street called “straight”, with nothing to disturb him but the repeated sound of the voice he heard on the road echoing in his mind:  “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.  Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”

Please notice that there was not a single word of grace or comfort in what Jesus told Saul on the road. For three long (and I’m sure sleepless) days and nights, he’s just left stewing in disoriented misery – and fear – because he has no idea at this point that the Lord Jesus, whom he’s been cursing and attacking, and who so easily took away his sight, isn’t about to really drop the hammer on him and give him his just desserts.  Yet, though it was three days of indescribable anguish for Saul, in this we see the amazing grace of Christ our Lord.  Saul had to be shown just how lost he was and how utterly hopeless was any possibility of earning his way into God’s favor by the efforts of his bloodstained hands.  Only when he knew how small, dirty, and guilty he was before the Lord could he, for the first time in his life, pray for the unmerited mercy of God.

And then, as we heard, he received it – in measure far above anything he could have imagined.  Freely forgiven in Christ, sight restored, and filled with the Holy Spirit so that he could finally know and understand the God he only thought he knew before, the Scriptures he had misread all these years as man’s required toil and duty suddenly burst open before him revealing breathtaking vistas of the Lord’s unbounded love and grace in Jesus Christ. Overflowing with joy, he wasted no time in going out and sharing the true straight and narrow way that leads to life with others who were lost like he had been.  In the years that followed, this one time persecutor of the cause of Christ became its greatest advocate and missionary.  Saul of Tarsus – or Paul, as he became known – was the Lord’s chosen instrument to carry the Gospel into the world.  It was a task he performed admirably.  But in all his travels and all his work and suffering for the kingdom of God, he never once gave himself the slightest bit of credit. No, on the contrary, toward the end of his life, a life completely dedicated to leading people to salvation in Jesus Christ, he called himself the least of the Lord’s servants and the worst sinner who ever lived.  And it was precisely that understanding of his own worth and merit that caused him to trust all the more in the work of Christ to save him – and that’s what enabled him to accomplish so much through Christ and his power.

All of which is important for us to understand as we too set out to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the people all around us who are lost – both the ones who know they’re lost, and the ones who don’t.  The first kind, as I said, are fairly easy to identify, and when the opportunity is right, they’re relatively open to hearing the truth.  The second kind, on the other hand, are a quite a bit tougher to deal with because they won’t acknowledge that they’re lost; and they’re even harder to spot.  As a matter of fact, I’d wager that everyone here has someone who is just as lost as Saul of Tarsus was living in his or her own home – and you may not even know it.

What makes me say that so confidently?  It’s because there is a Saul of Tarsus living in each of us.  Just observe how easy it is for us to turn the map around like he did. If I say, for example, that John or Judy is having trouble walking the Bible’s “straight and narrow way”, do you not immediately assume that it’s a comment about their moral behavior rather than their faith in Christ?  Likewise, which of us does not tend to measure our progress (or lack of it) in Christ’s kingdom in terms of the performance of “good deeds” and/or the avoidance of certain sins?  That’s the Saul in you that thinks that way.  The straight and narrow way that leads to life is trust in Christ and his work of atonement – nothing else.  As soon you start thinking that your own efforts get you any closer to the goal, you’re stepping off the path.  More than that, you’re persecuting Christ and despising his Gospel.  And yes, I know that those are hard words to hear – but they are words that the Saul in you needs to hear.  That part of you needs to know that it’s lost, blind, and opposed to God so that you have no recourse to but to call out to him for mercy.  It’s then that the Lord Jesus can raise you up, illumine your heart and eyes, turn you around, and plant you feet on the true path of trust in him alone.  And then, by his power, you too will accomplish great things for him.   In Jesus’ holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!