FRIDAY November 17th
Acts 9:15-17
‘But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.”’
The second point we are going to consider from these verses continuing from our previous devotion is this ‘. . . to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel.’
Saul was a chosen instrument of the Lord Jesus Christ to carry out a specific task. Saul who up until now was serving Satan – seeking to destroy the Church that Jesus had commenced building on the Day of Pentecost was now being chosen to serve the one he had hated and to carry the name of the one he had hated, the name of Jesus. Again as I mentioned previously, what an amazing outworking of the grace of God.
Over the last few months I have been sharing on a Friday evening from the book of Acts, and we have discovered how the early disciples kept getting into trouble for speaking out in the name of Jesus and from teaching in the name of Jesus.
This was one of the reasons why Saul was on a rampage, to destroy those who were in the Way, that is those who loved the name of Jesus. But now, he was going to be a carrier of that name, not just where he was found at the time of his conversion, but he was to carry the name to Gentiles and Kings and to the children of Israel.
And what a revelation of the name of Jesus he had, for later he would write to the Church at Philippi those verses we know so very well ‘Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’, Philippians 2:9–11.
I end this devotion by asking the question: What does the name of Jesus mean to you? One day every knee will have to bow and every tongue will have to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
You can either make this confession now, willingly by coming to accept Jesus as Saviour and Lord or the other option is to make this confession under compulsion as you stand before Almighty God, but then it will be too late, you will see that Jesus Christ IS Lord, and yet because you failed to acknowledge it in the here and now, he will turn to you and say, ‘Depart from me I never knew you.’