Ambushed by Grace - Darren Rowse
Have you ever written someone off? Not in a dramatic way, just quietly. The relative who mocks your faith at every family gathering. The colleague whose opinions make your skin crawl. The person who hurt you, or hurt someone you love. Somewhere along the way you stopped praying for them, because honestly, what would be the point?
The Bible tells the story of a man everyone had written off, and what happened when grace refused to write him off too.
This week at One Church, Darren Rowse continued our series in the book of Acts with a message from Acts 9:1-22, the most famous conversion story of them all: Saul on the road to Damascus. Darren called the message "Ambushed by Grace", and traced four movements of grace through the story: grace sees you, grace finds you, grace transforms you, and grace sends you. You can watch the full message in the video above, or listen to the audio version below.
Two stories, one grace
The service began with a testimony from another Darren in our church family, who grew up with no Bible in the house and had never set foot in a church. In his mid-30s, trying to help a mate wrestle with big questions about God, he picked up a Bible for the first time, flicked it open at random, and started reading. The more he read, the more he found he couldn't dismiss it. As he put it, it was like the scales fell from his eyes.
Darren Rowse pointed out that Acts is full of conversion stories, three in a row in chapters 8, 9 and 10, and no two are alike. Our Darren went searching for answers and found Jesus. Saul was the opposite. He wasn't searching at all. He was certain he already had the answers, and he was sprinting in the exact opposite direction, hunting down the followers of Jesus. And Jesus ran him down anyway. Two stories that start in completely different places, and both end with scales falling from someone's eyes.
The man everyone was sure about
Before the Damascus road, Luke gives us a chilling introduction to Saul. He's there at the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, minding the coats and approving of the killing. Then he begins to destroy the church, going house to house, dragging off men and women to prison. By chapter 9 he's still "breathing out murderous threats" and heading to Damascus with arrest warrants in his bag.
On the surface, Saul looks like a thug. But Darren peeled back the layers. To his contemporaries, Saul was the best of the best: a Hebrew of Hebrews, trained under the most respected teacher of his day, a Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee, a model student who could say "as for righteousness based on the law, faultless". He was sincere. He was devout. He genuinely believed he was serving God.
He was sincere, devout, and catastrophically wrong.
That's worth sitting with, because our society tells us that if you're sincere, if you stay true to yourself, you're on the right path. Saul shows us how untrue that can be. He was true to himself and walking in exactly the wrong direction.
So which was the real Saul? The righteous man his community admired, or the nightmare his victims taught their children to fear? Darren suggested both views are human and both are partial. There's a third way of seeing Saul: the way God saw him. God wasn't impressed by Saul's CV, and he wasn't fooled by his zeal. But he also refused to write Saul off the way his victims understandably did.
"God sees the worst about us more clearly than anyone else in the room, but he still leans in with grace."
God doesn't flatter us the way our admirers do, and he doesn't dismiss us the way our critics do, or the way our own inner voice sometimes does. Grace sees you, the real you, and moves towards you anyway.
Ambushed on the road
How do you reach a man like Saul? You can't argue him down; he's certain he's right, and he's smarter than you. You can't shame him; he's kept all the rules. There's no door you can knock on and gently open.
So God doesn't knock. God ambushes him. A light from heaven, Saul flat on the ground, and a voice: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"
Darren drew out two things from that moment. First, the question itself. Jesus doesn't say "why do you persecute my followers" or "my church". He says me. Every believer Saul had dragged from their home, every person he had terrified, Jesus had felt it all. The people Saul wrote off as enemies were so joined to Jesus that to touch them was to touch him. Darren wondered aloud whether Paul's later teaching about the church as the living body of Christ, where when one part suffers the whole body suffers, was born right there with his face in the dust.
Second, the timing. Saul doesn't meet Jesus after a crisis of conscience, a sleepless night of doubt, or a persuasive gospel presentation. It happens mid-mission, with the arrest letters still in his bag.
"Saul was found by Jesus before he went looking. He was pursued by Jesus when he was not worthy. He was met by Jesus when he was still the enemy."
That's the scandal of grace, right there in the timing. This is not how religion works. Religion says clean yourself up, follow the rules, prove you're serious, and then God will meet you. Even those of us who have known the grace of Jesus for years fall back into that instinct. Paul spent the rest of his life writing against it, because of what happened on that road. When he later wrote "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" and "while we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him", he knew exactly what that meant. He'd literally been God's enemy on the road to Damascus. Grace finds you.
Three days in the dark
The great reversal continues. Saul left Jerusalem as a man with all the answers, so sure he could see clearly. Now he's blind, and someone has to take this powerful man by the hand like a child and lead him into the city he'd imagined riding into like a conqueror. Three days. No food, no sight, no control.
Darren suggested the blindness wasn't punishment but mercy, because it was a picture of something deeper. Saul had been blind for years without knowing it. It was never his eyesight that was the problem; it was his confidence that he could see and operate just fine on his own. Now everything is stripped away, and the man who had all the answers sits in the dark with nothing to do but face the truth he met on the road.
And it's not hard to hear the echo of another three days in the dark: the three days Jesus lay in the tomb. Saul goes down into the dark, and three days later he comes out alive. The old Saul doesn't get patched up and improved. He's buried. Paul would spend the rest of his life saying this is exactly what it means to meet Christ: we die with him and we rise with him. He knew it from the inside out.
Grace with skin on it
Then the story shifts to an ordinary, frightened disciple in Damascus named Ananias. God tells him in a vision to go and lay hands on Saul, and Ananias does something deeply human: he argues with God. Lord, do you know who this is? He's come here to arrest people like me. But he goes. And the line Darren said he couldn't get past is the first thing out of Ananias's mouth as he places his hands on the man who came to town to drag him away in chains: "Brother Saul."
Brother. Before Saul has proven anything, before there's a shred of evidence this isn't a trap, the would-be victim looks at the persecutor and calls him family.
"That's the gospel in two words: grace with skin on it."
Notice how God brings grace to Saul this time. Not another bolt of light, but a person. And this, Darren said, is where the story lands for most of us, because most of us won't be a Saul. We won't write half the New Testament or plant churches across an empire. But every one of us can be an Ananias. Every one of us knows someone we've quietly written off. William Barclay calls Ananias one of the forgotten heroes of the Christian church. Imagine if he hadn't gone to Saul that day. The world would be a very different place.
So the question the story puts to us is simple and uncomfortable: who is the person God might be sending you towards? The one you'd rather avoid? Who might God have a radically grace-laden story for, that he's calling you to be part of? Grace sends you.
From predator to shepherd
When Ananias lays hands on Saul, something like scales falls from his eyes, the same picture our own Darren reached for in his testimony. Scales that had been there for years, and he didn't even know it.
If the story stopped there it would be remarkable: the enemy welcomed, the persecutor forgiven. But grace doesn't just forgive a man like Saul, or you, or me. It remakes him. God calls Saul "my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel". Grace doesn't just wipe the slate clean; it hands him a purpose. And notice, God doesn't take away Saul's fire, his drive, his relentless zeal. He redirects them. That's the pattern of grace. It doesn't erase who you are; it redeems it.
Don't rush past the order of what happens next, either. Before Saul preaches anything, he spends several days with the disciples in Damascus, the very people he'd come to arrest. He eats with them and learns from them. Grace doesn't fire him out as a lone ranger; it plants him among God's people. Then, at once, he begins preaching in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God.
The irony is delicious. The man who breathed out murderous threats spends the rest of his life writing letters soaked in love, some of them from prison. The man who set out to destroy the church travels the known world planting churches. The man who approved of Stephen's stoning is himself stoned, beaten, shipwrecked and finally executed for proclaiming that Jesus is Lord.
"Grace didn't just tame a predator. It made him the shepherd of the flock he'd been hunting."
Near the end of his life, Paul told Timothy that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, "of whom I am the worst". This is the man who once looked in the mirror and saw someone right with God. He doesn't call himself the worst of sinners because he became worse, but because he could finally see. And God made him an exhibit, living proof that if grace could reach him, there's hope for anyone.
Darren closed with a line from Tim Keller that captures the whole gospel in a sentence: we are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the same time more loved and accepted in Jesus than we ever dared hope. That's what Saul discovered on the road, and it's what God offers each of us. If you feel you've gone too far, that you've done things you can't undo, hear this: you are not beyond God's reach. He is pursuing you.
One way to live it out this week
Think of one person you've quietly written off, someone you've stopped praying for because it felt pointless. This week, start praying for them again, every day, by name. Ask God to let you see them the way he sees them rather than the way their worst moments suggest. Then look for one small, concrete way to move towards them: a message, a coffee, a kind word. You don't need to fix anything or preach anything. Ananias only had to show up and say "brother". Grace with skin on it might be the thing God uses.
A short prayer
Father, thank you that your grace sees us as we really are and still leans in.
Thank you that you found us before we went looking,
and that no one we love is beyond your reach.
Forgive us for the people we have quietly written off.
Give us the courage of Ananias to move towards them,
and keep transforming us into the likeness of Jesus,
until your grace flows through us and out into the world.
Amen.
Personal Reflection
Saul was sincere and devout, yet catastrophically wrong. Where in your life might you be relying on sincerity or rule-keeping rather than honestly asking God to show you your blind spots?
Grace found Saul while he was still an enemy, not after he'd cleaned himself up. Is there a part of your life where you're still trying to get things in order before you let God near it?
Who is the person you have quietly written off? What would it look like to be an Ananias to them this week?
Small Group Discussion
Read Acts 9:1-22 together. What details in the story stand out to you that you hadn't noticed before?
Before his conversion, Saul was admired by his community, feared by his victims, and seen truly only by God. Why do you think both human views of him were partial? What does it mean that God's view of us neither flatters us nor writes us off?
Darren said Saul was "sincere, devout, and catastrophically wrong". How does this challenge the popular idea that being true to yourself is enough? How can we stay open to correction?
Jesus asked, "Why do you persecute me?" rather than "my followers". What does this tell us about how closely Jesus identifies with his people? How does that comfort or challenge you?
Saul was found by Jesus while still an enemy, with the arrest letters in his bag. Where do you see the instinct to "clean yourself up before God will meet you" showing up in your own life or in how the church presents faith to outsiders?
Saul's three days of blindness stripped away his confidence and control. Can you share a time when God used a season of darkness or loss of control to help you see more clearly?
Ananias overcame real fear to call his enemy "brother". What fears hold us back from moving towards the people God might be sending us to? What helped Ananias obey anyway?
Grace redirected Saul's zeal rather than erasing it. What natural drives or passions might God want to redeem and redirect in each of you? Spend some time praying for one another, especially for courage to be an Ananias to someone this week.