Lost Causes

Immediately [Saul] began preaching about Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is indeed the Son of God!”

All who heard him were amazed. “Isn’t this the same man who caused such devastation among Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem?” they asked. “And didn’t he come here to arrest them and take them in chains to the leading priests?”

Acts 9:20-21

As a potential convert to Christianity, Saul—later Paul—was about as lost a cause as you could imagine. He was a zealous persecutor of believers in Jesus as Christ, even going door to door to root them out. His religious zeal made him merciless in carrying out his mission. He believed with all his heart that what he was doing was righteous and that he was following God’s commands.

If you had said to a believer of that day, “Who is the least likely person on the planet to believe in Jesus as Messiah?” the resounding answer would have been “Saul of Tarsus!”

Saul’s testimony stands as a promise that with God there are no lost causes. God can so radically transform a life that the new person is almost unrecognizable.

Sam seemed to be a lost cause. Everybody knew it. When I suggested to his wife that we begin to pray for Sam’s salvation, she agreed just to appease me. “We can try,” she said, and then explained why it would never work. Sam was of Asian descent and came from generations of Buddhists. He was highly intelligent and successful. He lived a life of integrity and goodness. He was completely at peace with his life and felt no lack or need.

Sam was very advanced in the martial arts, and unknown to his wife, his marital-arts instructor was a devoted Christian who encouraged the men to stay after class for Bible study. To compress a long story, Sam’s life was radically changed when he accepted Jesus as his Savior.

Do you know a lost cause? Let the conversion account of Saul give you hope.

Father, I bring my lost cause to you. Pursue this one I love as only you know how to do.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness—my life was without past or future—but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

Helen Keller(1880–1968), American author