From Bondage to Freedom in Christ
We were sat around their campsite a bit later on, catching up, and some of them were sharing a story about an incredible testimony they’d heard earlier that day. It was about a man who’d struggled with addictions for a long part of his life. Somebody invited him to church, he decided to go, he met with God, and his life was changed forever. He’s been free of addiction ever since – I think it’s about 20 years now. Praise God. What an amazing story to be able to hear.
We love an amazing transformation story, don’t we? “My life looked like this. Then I met Jesus. And then everything changed.” The dramatic before and after. The moment when somebody can say, “My life was never the same again.” It’s really powerful, it’s really inspirational.
We touched on this kind of story briefly last week. This one is one of the best-known stories in the Bible: Saul – or Paul, as he became known – and his conversion. It’s probably a story many of us know well, but let’s dive into Acts 9 for a moment as a reminder.
“Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. He went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ ‘Who are you, Lord?’ Saul asked. ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ he replied. ‘Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.’”
Saul then finds himself blind. He’s reliant on the men he’s with to get him to Damascus, where, three days later, he meets Ananias, whom God has instructed to meet with him. Ananias was probably pretty anxious about doing this, given Saul’s reputation.
We’ll skip on a few verses to verse 17:
“Then Ananias went to the house and entered it. Placing his hands on Saul, he said, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here, has sent me, so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’ Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes and he could see again. He got up and was baptised, and after taking some food, he regained his strength.”
Saul’s testimony is about as dramatic as it gets. He hated the followers of Jesus. He was actively persecuting the Church. And then Jesus dramatically meets with him on the road to Damascus and his life is radically changed. If we had been part of that early church, this is the story we would have really loved to have heard in a testimony slot when people were gathering together.
Perhaps some of you have got a bit of a Hollywood blockbuster of a testimony, and I would really love to hear it if you do. But I have to hold my hands up at this point and say that, while I think these stories are incredible, they’ve made me wonder at times, over my own life, why my testimony of knowing God sometimes feels a bit like a story I don’t think any publisher would ever be interested in buying.
I was brought up in a Christian family. My dad – who some of you might remember if you’ve been around Newark a long time – was vicar at St Leonard’s before I was born, so that’s going back quite a long time now. Then he was vicar at St Giles in Balderton while I was growing up. My mum has a strong faith as well. All my grandparents and aunties and uncles were committed to their faith; they were involved with church where they lived too.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think God was in my life. I don’t remember a moment where I actively chose to follow Jesus. I’ve just always had this deep feeling of knowing God loves me, and that I want my life to be whatever he wants it to be.
This way of thinking doesn’t mean it’s always been easy – far from it. When the harder times have come, I’ve not always understood what God was doing or what I was meant to learn from that situation. But I’ve always had this deep sense of being able to trust his plan and his purpose.
I often wished I had an exciting “lightning bolt” testimony, where I could pinpoint that moment when my life was changed forever. I’d almost be a little bit annoyed with God that my story felt a bit boring, I have to admit.
Until, going back to my early twenties, the life group I was part of at the time – a whole bunch of young adults – was having an evening where everyone was sharing their testimonies. A friend of mine shared this amazing testimony of being at Unique, having one of those lightbulb moments when he just knew that he had to commit his life to Jesus. It was such an amazing story. But again, I had that real annoyance with God: “God, we’ve just heard this incredible story, and now you’re asking me to share my really boring one right now. How are these two stories going to compare?”
But then I got my lightning bolt – that moment – that very evening. I shared my testimony, and then my friend, who had shared what I considered to be the amazing one, said to me afterwards that he wished he had my testimony.
I was really confused at that point, so I had to ask him, “Why? Why do you wish you had my story?” And he said to me – and this has stuck with me for a long time now – “Because I feel like I’ve missed out on twenty years of knowing Jesus. You’ve never had to live without knowing God.”
God certainly taught me a lesson that day. He challenged me about looking at my testimony through the wrong lens. I had been looking at how much drama a story had, instead of looking for the incredible grace of God in every story.
The Grace of an Ordinary Testimony
While we tend to hear and remember the more dramatic stories, we also see examples in the Bible of quiet, steady, but really strong journeys of faith.
A great person to compare with Saul’s testimony is Timothy, whom Paul mentored. He was like a spiritual father to Timothy, and Timothy eventually became a leader in the early church. Timothy was the son of a Greek father and a Jewish mother, and there’s a good chance his mum and his grandma became Christians when Paul first visited Lystra, where they lived.
We don’t read about a “Damascus Road” moment in Timothy’s journey, but if we turn to one of Paul’s letters to him, we learn a bit more about his story. In 2 Timothy 1:5, Paul writes:
“I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice, and I am persuaded, now lives in you also.”
Then, a couple of chapters later, in 2 Timothy 3:14–15, Paul adds:
“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”
Timothy’s story is one of steady formation. It’s built on firm foundations rather than a sudden transformation. There’s no dramatic, life‑changing moment that brings Timothy to know Jesus. It was his mum and his grandma teaching him the Scriptures through his childhood, sharing their faith and nurturing his.
But this doesn’t make Paul think Timothy will be any less of an evangelist or leader because his story isn’t a thriller. In fact, it’s quite the opposite when we see how much Paul invests in teaching, encouraging, and trusting Timothy.
I don’t want us to hear this and think Timothy’s testimony is somehow better than Paul’s. Paul’s story is incredible. The fact that Jesus could take someone who was actively persecuting Christians and completely turn his life around is a remarkable demonstration of the grace and power of God.
But Timothy’s story is also incredible, and Paul celebrates it. He doesn’t measure Timothy’s testimony by how dramatic it is. Paul looks for the fruit of Timothy’s faith.
I think that’s something we can get wrong. We sometimes think a testimony is amazing if the “before” is really bad and the “after” is really good—the bigger the difference, the better the testimony. And I do love hearing those stories. I love hearing about people who have encountered Jesus and had their lives completely transformed. If that’s your story, please share it far and wide. There is something extraordinary about the grace of God that can reach someone who is far from him, meet them where they are, and completely change their life. Paul’s story is proof of that.
But there is another kind of miracle we can overlook, and that’s the miracle of God keeping someone close to him—the miracle of someone who has walked with God for 10, 20, 50, even 80 years and can look back and say, “He has been faithful.” That’s not boring. Speaking to myself here—that’s extraordinary.
That’s what my friend helped me see all those years ago. I had been looking at my story and focusing on what I thought was missing. I didn’t have the dramatic moment. I didn’t have the incredible transformation story. I can’t tell you the exact moment when I went from not knowing Jesus to knowing him. But my friend looked at the same story and saw something completely different. He recognised the gift of God’s faithfulness in my life.
And I think we can all be a bit guilty of this at times—looking at something God has done in somebody else’s life and thinking, “I wish my story was like that.” We compare our testimonies, we compare our gifts, we compare our lives. We can look at someone else’s story and have those moments where we think God has done bigger and better things in their life than he has in ours.
But what if, instead of comparing stories, we started looking a little bit more for God’s faithfulness in every story? Because the extraordinary thing isn’t actually the story. The extraordinary thing is the God behind the story.
There’s another person we can briefly dip into as well. We’ve looked at Paul, whose life was dramatically changed when he encountered Jesus, and we’ve looked at Timothy, whose faith was nurtured through childhood. Then there’s Samuel.
Samuel’s story isn’t a Damascus Road moment either. It’s not a moment where Samuel is living apart from God and then suddenly encounters him. Samuel grows up in the presence of God. His mum, Hannah, had a strong faith—like Timothy’s mum—and she was so thankful to God when he blessed her with a child that she dedicated Samuel’s life to the Lord.
But Samuel still needed to learn to recognise God’s voice. In 1 Samuel 3, when a young Samuel is serving in the temple with Eli, the first verse tells us, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; there were not many visions.” God calls to Samuel, and Samuel doesn’t immediately recognise that it’s God speaking—which, given what we’ve just been told, isn’t too surprising. Samuel thinks Eli is calling him, and three times he gets up and goes to Eli, before Eli finally realises what is happening and tells Samuel, “If he calls you, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’”
So the next time God speaks, Samuel is finally able to recognise that it’s God’s voice. There’s something really lovely about that. Samuel’s relationship with God is something that grows. He has to learn to recognise God’s voice. He has to learn what it means to listen. And Samuel later becomes someone who is known as a prophet of God. It’s not a lightning‑bolt conversion story. It’s a story of learning to hear God and learning to follow him.
Later in Samuel’s life, in 1 Samuel 7, we get this great moment where the Israelites have seen God rescue them from their enemies. In verse 12, Samuel takes a stone and sets it up as a memorial. He names it Ebenezer and says, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.”
“Thus far the Lord has helped us.” I love that phrase because Samuel is looking back over the story—not necessarily at one moment, but at all the ways God has been faithful. “Look at where we’ve come from. Look at where God has carried us. Look at how he has helped us.”
And that’s something we can all do. We can look back over our lives and recognise the ways God has been faithful. For some of us, we might say, “Jesus rescued me.” For others, we might say, “Jesus has kept me.” Some of us will be able to point to that moment when everything changed. Others of us will look back and see lots of little moments where God was gently shaping us, teaching us, encouraging us, and drawing us closer to him.
Celebrating God’s Faithful Guidance
If your story is like Paul’s, celebrate it. Celebrate the God who rescued you. Celebrate the God who met you when you were far away. Celebrate the God who can transform a life in an instant.
And if your story is like Timothy’s, celebrate it too. Celebrate the God who has been with you from childhood. Celebrate the people who taught you about him. Celebrate the years of learning and growing and walking with him. Celebrate the God who has kept you.
If your story is like Samuel’s, celebrate the God who has taught you to recognize his voice over time—the God who has patiently walked with you, taught you, spoken to you, and helped you learn what it means to listen to him.
And if your story is a bit messy and doesn’t sit neatly with any of those stories, celebrate that story as well. It is special and wonderful.
The Bible is full of different stories of people encountering God in different ways, but they all point to the same thing: that God is faithful. Perhaps we need to stop asking, “How extraordinary is my story?” and start asking, “How extraordinary is the God that my story points to?”
Remembering God’s Faithfulness in Our Story
As I said a few minutes ago, rather than me talking much longer, I wanted to create a little bit of time and space this morning for some stories to be shared.
So just take a moment now to think about your story. Not somebody else’s story, not the story you wish you had—your story. Where can you see God? Where has he been faithful? Where has he rescued you? Where has he kept you? Who has he placed in your life to help you know him?
Hopefully we can all say, like Samuel did, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.” Because whether our testimony is a dramatic Damascus Road story, a quiet Timothy story, a story like Samuel’s of learning to recognise God’s voice over time, or something somewhere in between all of those, the Saviour is always the same. The Saviour is always Jesus.
So let’s just pray for a moment before we move on.
Father God, thank you that you give us all these stories of how you meet with people, how you are faithful, how you can change lives in a moment, and how you can walk gently and steadily with people for years and years. Thank you that all these stories are extraordinary. Thank you that all these stories point to you. And I pray now, in our conversations and our sharing and listening, that your Holy Spirit will prompt us to know you more through it all.
Amen.
