This is Living Waters of Grace, the teaching ministry of Clark
Wofford, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel of Westmoreland,
County of Greensburg, PA. Now here's Pastor Clark as he
continues teaching through God's Word.
He's there now and and boy, I can imagine when he walked in,
the people that knew why he was up in Damascus were anticipating
chaos and brutality and anger and fear.
He's going in calm, full of the Holy Spirit, and the first thing
he begins to say and tell them this is Jesus is a Messiah.
Paul had a reputation of being heartless in persecuting
Christians. He sought out Christians to have
them sent to prison or killed. He was on fire against the Lord.
In today's message, Pastor Clark wants you to see how God
completely changed his life. He would become on fire for God,
spreading the good news of salvation to everyone.
Never underestimate what God can accomplish through one person's
life. Surrender to His will and see
what He can do when you fully commit to going where He calls
now. Here's Pastor Clark in Acts
Chapter 9 with today's edition of Living Waters of Grace.
God is never absent from any of our lives.
God is omnipresent. He's able to be present
everywhere at the same time in every human being's life.
That in, in and of itself should blow our minds of how great our
God is. He's always there, present.
He sees what we're up to. He knows our thoughts, He knows
our fears. He knows our anxieties.
He knows our dreams, our hopes, our vision, our purpose, our
desires. He sees it all.
And He sees specifically right now this man he's dealing with
named Saul, that he's praying and he's hearing the prayer.
And in a vision, he has seen a man named Ananias coming and
putting his hand on him so that he might receive his sight.
So this is really something. Not only is God like giving
Ananias the details, but he's saying, I already told Paul that
you're on your way and you're going to lay hands on him and
he's going to be able to see again physically.
So Ananias answers, Lord, I've heard from many about this man,
how much harm he's done to your Saints in Jerusalem, and here he
has authority from the chief priest to bind all who call upon
your name. So Ananias, man, he's having
this encounter with God, but he's like us, like a Lord.
You sure is this like you really like want me to?
This guy is a problem and everybody knows that he's up
here to get a hold of us to put us in jail because we follow you
and you want me to go and meet him and hang out with him.
I mean, that's an honest calling in regard to his own concern is
just a normal human being that he's a little bit freaked out
and and shook up about this adventure that God has him on.
But the Lord said to him, go for he is a chosen vessel of mine.
In other words, no negotiation here, Ananias, you're going to
go because God calls Saul a chosen vessel of mine to bear my
name before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel, For I
will show him how many things he must suffer for my name's sake.
This is crazy, isn't it? Like, you think if you were God,
you would be looking around somewhere for people who are
committed to you and following you, right?
There's a lot of people out there over the earth at the
time, you know, and there's a lot of people coming to know the
Lord that are have ability to be dynamic leaders for God's
Kingdom. Why is he picking this guy?
That's the mystery, how God chooses us, how he calls us.
Paul later on in his book in Corinthians he says not many
wise, not many mighty, not many noble are called, but God has
chosen the weak and foolish things of this world to confound
the wise so that no flesh should glory in his presence.
Boy, he knew that Don, didn't he?
I mean in spite of everybody thinking, man, this guy is
bright, he was a Pharisee, he was Sanhedrin, he had it all
together. He knew in and of himself he was
nothing. He was a foolish man until
Christ saved him. So God works things after the
counsel of his own will. So Ananias in verse 17 went his
way, did what God was tell him to do.
He entered the House of this man called Judas, and he went in and
he laid his hands on him, and he said, brother Saul, now how
beautiful is this? The Lord got him.
Calm down. Hey, Saul's a believer now.
He's part of our team, he loves, he's learning, he's going to
learn to love me and follow me and he's he's OK now.
So he goes in and and this endearing term and had to
encourage Saul where he's being called a brother in the Lord to
Ananias. What a beautiful thing.
Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road as
you came, has sent me that you may receive your sight and be
filled with the Holy Spirit. So the miracle physical healing
is a big issue in this section of Scripture.
God knew that Paul needed to be able to see because he was going
to travel all the regions around and plant churches and many of
the communities that surrounded these biblical lands.
He had to be able to see, to be able to write the epistles that
eventually he would write. He had to be able to look at the
crowds and the masses and look at people in the eye and tell
them that Jesus is Christ, the Son of the living God.
But not any was he going to have his physical sight restored, But
he was going to be filled with the Holy Spirit now, filled with
the Holy Spirit. Without the filling of the Holy
Spirit, there is no power to proclaim the truth of God.
You and I need the power of the Holy Spirit on a daily basis, a
moment by moment basis, because we leak and we need to
continually be filled with the Spirit.
And we can simply ask God to fill us with His Holy Spirit and
He will fill us to do what it is He's called us to do that we
know we can't do. Apart from God filling us with
His Spirit, we can lay hands on one another and pray to be
filled with the Holy Spirit. God uses the hands of believers
to touch people many times, to bring encouragement to them, to
touch them physically, that they might touch and sense the
presence of God. Even if it's only a momentary
experience, it's something that will encourage people, encourage
people. You can pray for your children.
You can lay hands on your wife or your husband when they're
struggling. And brothers and sisters who are
discouraged, pray and pray and pray for one another, that we
might be filled with the Holy Spirit.
And what happened when Ananias did exactly what the Lord told
him to do? Verse 18.
Immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and
he received his sight at once, and he rose, and he was
baptized. So not only did he receive his
sight, he was healed physically. Not only was he baptized by the
power of the Holy Spirit and filled, but he was now baptized
because he's a believer in Jesus Christ.
I'm sure that Paul knew immediately when this guy was
there that it doesn't give a lot of details in between the lines
here, but what happens whenever you become a believer is the
first thing you do is you want to be baptized because you're
now identifying with being a follower of Jesus Christ.
It's not a a right of church membership or it's not a right
of earning points with God, or well, if I do this and God might
love me more and I'll work and do that.
No, it has nothing to do with that.
It has to be identified. This is what Christ has
established in his plan for believers, that when they get
saved there to be baptized. And Paul didn't debate that he
was baptized. So everything is in order right
now for him to eventually be used by the Lord for the work of
the ministry. So Paul's has all this
experience now and what's fascinating here in verse 20, we
see that immediately he wants to tell people about Jesus.
He goes to the synagogues. He preached the Christ in the
synagogues that he's the Son of God.
So most of the people up there anticipating Paul at this time,
Saul, at this time, coming into the synagogues and dragging you,
you and me out as believers and taking us to Jerusalem to be put
in prison or to be martyred. He's there now.
And, and boy, I can imagine when he walked in, the people that
knew why he was up in Damascus were anticipating chaos and
brutality and anger and fear. He's going in calm, full of the
Holy Spirit. And the first thing he begins to
say and tell them, this is Jesus is a Messiah.
People got to be sitting there thinking what happened to him.
This is like totally unexpected. How did this happen?
He's, he's emboldened to do this.
I don't know if you remember when you first got saved, but
the first thing that happened to me after I got saved, I didn't
get baptized for about a year. I didn't understand.
I wasn't in a church at the time being taught about, you know,
how do I begin to be discipled and follow Jesus?
But one thing I knew I wanted to tell everyone else about Jesus
and what he did for me. First people I wanted to tell
was my family. Then I wanted to tell my friends
and people I hung out with. Then I wanted to tell strangers.
Cindy and I would spend hours on the Atlantic City boardwalk.
We lived in New Jersey on at the ocean.
And we would this strike up conversations with a lot of
people our age at the time. And we would just tell them
about Jesus. And it was fun.
Some people look at you like you're crazy, whatever.
But boy, a lot of people were intrigued because there was a
revival happening at that time called the Jesus movement and
the Holy Spirit was falling all over the world.
And it was a lot of young people in the ages of probably 16 to 24
that were being drawn by the Spirit of God to get saved.
And we got to pray with a lot of people and, and see people come
to faith in Jesus Christ. We had Bible studies.
There was just a lot of wonderful energy occurring at
that time in our lives as new believers.
And this is what is normal and should be happening after you
become a believer. You want others to know about
it. You bring someone to church you,
you give them a Bible. You know, Pastor Lewis was out
in the streets around the area taking the Bibles that you guys
can have access to now. The Promise Book, which has the
gospel right in here and promises of God from his word
and then a really nice Bible, large print Bible.
We give these as a gift to people to plant the seed that
they might come to know Christ. The Bible says faith comes by
hearing and hearing by the word of God.
The way I got saved, my brother threw me a copy of the Bible and
said, hey, I'm getting some answers from this.
And I started reading it And by the time I got through the
Gospel of John, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, I was, I was born
again. That's what Paul was doing.
He was utilizing the Spirit of God that's in him now to talk to
people about what God did for him.
Verse 21 Then all who heard were amazed and said, is this not he
who destroyed those who called on his name in Jerusalem has
come here for that purpose that he might bring them bound to the
chief priest. They knew why he was initially
coming up there. And they're saying like this is
amazing, but Saul increased all the more in strength and
confounded the Jews who dwelt in Damascus, proving that this
Jesus is the Christ. Now, what's interesting here the
the time periods of what's happening in between verse 21
and 22 there, there's a gap period there.
And I want to go to Galatians chapter one for a moment.
This is a book he wrote many years later, but this is the
ministry of of the Apostle Paul. He had to be trained.
He had to be prepared. And we'll, we'll read here this
briefly what it is that occurred in his life whenever he was in
this situation of of training in, in in Galatians chapter 1
starts out in verse one. Paul, an apostle, not from men,
nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father
who raised him from the dead and all the brethren who are with
me. So he's, he opens the letter to
the church in Galatia that his apostleship wasn't given by man,
but it was given directly from the Lord Jesus.
And he's talking to these believers at the time that are
in the church that they're turning away from the truth of
the grace of God to a different gospel.
There's all kind of messengers out there on TV, radio, books,
all this kind of stuff. If you're not grounded in the
truth of the Scripture and you're not going by what the
Bible says, you can be drawn into all kind of weird stuff.
And Paul's confronting them at this time, like, who's troubling
you? Who's perverting the gospel of
Christ? He says even if we are an Angel
from heaven, preach any of their gospel to you than what we've
preached you. Let him be accursed.
Paul's warning them about false teachers, as we said before.
So now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you
than what you've received, let him be accursed.
And so he's beginning to tell them now about his apostleship
in verse 11. But I make known to you,
brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not
according to man other words, the, the, the people didn't make
this up. It wasn't the Protestant Church,
the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church that formulated
the gospel. The Gospel was given by Jesus
Christ and it's clearly delineated in the gospel and the
preaching of Christ in the apostles.
It's it's so clear and so evident for by grace we've been
saved through faith. And this is not of ourselves.
It's a gift of God, right? A gift of God, not of works,
lest anyone would boast so many in religion, and I was religious
for a while and many of you were too.
We want to boast at how good we were because we went to church,
we went to Mass or we took communion or we did this or we
did that. And, and, and somehow people
look at us. Oh yeah, you're a pretty good
person, I guess, if you do that. But we can't be saved by
anything we do. We're saved by the blood and the
grace of Jesus Christ alone, and that that goes against the pride
and the ego of us as human beings.
Paul was confronted with this gospel and there was no way he
was going to accept it because he wanted to give everybody his
resume of what a great religious man he was as a Pharisee in the
Sanhedrin. That kept him in bondage and
darkness for a long time until finally God got him down on his
face, right, and began to show him and tell him what the truth
was. And Paul said this is about his
life. This gospel came through the
revelation of Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my former
conduct in Judaism, how I persecuted the Church of God
beyond measure, and I tried to destroy it.
And I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries and my
own nation being more exceedingly jealous for the
traditions of my father's. He took pride in that at one
time, but when it pleased God, who separated me from my
mother's womb and called me through his grace to reveal his
Son and me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did
not immediately confer with flesh and blood.
Paul, didn't you know, there wasn't phones or Internet or
texts or emails. He did.
I got to run this by some people, some friends of mine, to
see like what it what do they think about all this stuff?
He didn't ask any other human being about what he had
encountered. Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to
those who were apostles. He didn't even go up at that to
those who were leading the church in the book of the Acts.
But I went to Arabia and then I returned again to Damascus.
So he went to Arabia, down by Sinai for approximately
somewhere between two and three years, where he just sought the
Lord, just sought the Lord. What God wanted, what the plan
was from God's perspective, not his ideas, not his plans.
And of course, Paul knew the Old Testament, so he had the the
scrolls he was studying. He was looking in there because
in the, in the beginning stages before the New Testament was
written, you, you brought people to Christ through the preaching
of the Old Testament because Christ is revealed throughout
the whole Bible. And so I'm going to wind down
here because there's so much more to talk about and I don't
want to try to jam it into 11 message a day.
So we'll sort of stop right there in this period of him
being in this training period, none of us get saved and we
start out right away in some kind of ministry that's not
really healthy. We need to be discipled, we need
to be trained, we need to be taught.
We got saved and we had a lot of ideas, Cindy and I, but we knew
we needed to be grounded. So we went to Bible college and
even after Bible college, I wasn't ready to serve the Lord
and and pastoral ministry. I didn't get called into the
pastoral ministry. I wanted to get involved in
something, but it, it took until I was like 44 until I heard the
call of God again that this was a time for me to, to avail
myself to yield my life to, to ministry.
And I'm still learning what ministry is.
I'm still growing, growing. I'm still being trained, I'm
still developing. I'm still dealing with sin
nature in my heart, just like you guys are.
You know, I, I got to fight that every day.
But I love what it tells us in the book of Isaiah 1 of the
things we need to do more than ever is waiting on the Lord.
Not this doing stuff, but waiting on the Lord in your own
life. You wait upon the Lord for his
call upon your life, His will for your life, the ministry that
He's perhaps directing you to do.
You're sensing Him leading you in some area.
Wait on the Lord. It tells us in the book of
Isaiah chapter 40, verse 31. But they that wait upon the Lord
shall renew their strength. I get weary and you do too.
I get weak. I get beaten down by life like
we all do. I get the scourge.
I get to spawn them. But the Lord tells me that if I
wait upon Him, my strength will be renewed.
I'm not real good at waiting. I don't know about you.
I'm go, go, go all the time. All they're saying no, no, you
got to wait, wait, wait. And I'm learning baby steps how
to wait to sit out in the back, my Bible open or whatever, just
sitting here. Lord, speak to me.
What is it that I'm not seeing? What is it that I need to hear?
What is it that I'm just not getting?
Give God time in your life as you wait upon him, because
there's a promise here. You wait upon the Lord.
Your strength will be renewed. You shall mount up with wings as
eagles. You ever see eagles fly in their
wingspan? There's nothing that's going to
take them down unless it's their time to die.
They soar and they float and they God, and they're
spectacular to watch. It says they shall run and not
be weary. In other words, I'm not running
as much as I used to. I walk like sort of fast once in
a while. I'm not jogging anymore.
I'm a swimmer. But run and not be weary.
Whatever it is that God's calling you to do, raise a
family, do marriage, build a business, grow your career,
whatever it might be, raising little kids.
And that makes you weary, does it?
God's promising you that you'll be able to have this stamina to
not get burnt out and not get weary and you'll be able to walk
in this life and not faint, not give up, not say I'm not going
to do this anymore. I'm not going to follow Jesus
anymore. I'm not going to.
It's too hard. There's too many challenges.
There's too much stuff that happens that I just don't like
or whatever. Too much conflict.
When we're when we belong to the Lord, we can't quit, even though
we might think about it once in a while, because he sustains us.
His Spirit lives in US, and he strengthens us to do what it is
that we're called to do. Just pray, Lord God.
We are thankful, Lord, and we learned today from you through
the testimony of Paul that Lord, you first have to apprehend our
heart and save us before we even understand the need to serve.
We can't serve without having a servant heart.
And so, Lord, we pray that all of us would have a heart to
serve. Lord, whatever that ministry is
that you call us to there, there would be a reason in our lives
for life that goes beyond what is just about us.
We pray for these precious kids. Most of us have kids that are in
the class or grandkids or whatever.
Lord, we pray your blessing upon them and nothing we desire more
than to see these little kids get saved and to walk with you
and and live for you. Lord, we pray you bless the
teachers who are now working and serving and helping and, and
Lord raise up more people to help father in this ministry.
Lord, we pray for the Bible giveaway ministry.
Lord, this would be something we'll do until you come back,
that people have the opportunity to have encounters with people
that might come to know Jesus Christ.
But this is simple gift of the Bible and the promised book.
We ask your favor and your blessing on that as well.
And Lord, I pray most of all, and I pray for myself as well,
that Lord, I would learn to wait upon you more to sit before you
be in your presence, to listen so that Lord, you can strengthen
us and give us encouragement and let us hear your voice.
Lord, your voice would be louder.
And all the voices of media in the world and the Internet and
YouTube and TikTok and all these other things that people watch
or listen to. Lord, may we all as a church
Lord, be able to hear your voice.
Thanks for joining us on today's edition of Living Waters of
Grace, a ministry of Calvary Chapel, Westmoreland.
Today, Pastor Clark is teaching about the Book of Acts.
As we learn more about Acts, it becomes clear that the early
church didn't miss a single opportunity to share the gospel.
In nearly every chapter, you see apostles like Peter and Paul
stepping into conversations, crowds, and crises with
boldness, ready to proclaim the name of Jesus.
Their example challenges us to consider how we might step into
gospel moments in our own lives. What doors might God open this
week for you to speak truth, offer hope, or live out your
faith in a way that points others to Him?
The story of Acts reminds us we are part of the same mission.
Today, let's live with eyes open and hearts ready to respond.
We hope you are challenged by today's message.
If you're in the Greensburg, PA area, we'd love to see you in
person this Sunday at 10:30 AM at 400 E Pittsburgh St.
Unit 6B. For more information, visit
calvarychapelonline.com. You could also join our e-mail
list, give online or submit a prayer request right from the
site. If you can't make it in person,
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Once again, we're so grateful you joined us today to be
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Living Waters of Grace.