Why Are You Persecuting Me?
There are names in my life I cannot hear from a distance. Say something to me about a stranger and I hear information… say the same thing about my wife and you are now doing something to me. This is what love does, it makes their injury yours too. Somebody once told my parents to get me through school and find me a menial job, because I would never amount to anything. Say that about a stranger’s boy and it is a sad sentence. It was said about me… to the two people who loved me. The words were about me, but they landed in them.
Three weeks ago we saw Paul in the middle of a riot. The outcry against him was so bad soldiers had to hoist him above the violent mob shouting, “Get rid of him!” (Acts 21:36). And the man they carried up those steps is the man who used to hand out verdicts like that (Acts 22:4).
How did that man become family? On a road outside Damascus he was knocked to the ground and heard a voice ask why he was persecuting “me.” Every arrest he ever made had landed in Jesus (Acts 22:7-8).
The risen Jesus does not watch his church from a distance… what is done to his people is done to him.
Paul stood on the steps and spoke the way Stephen opened: “Brothers and fathers, listen now to my defense before you” (Acts 22:1; compare Acts 7:2). Paul had watched Stephen die for a speech that started that way. He knows how it ends, and he opens with it anyway.
Then he tells the mob who he was: “I was zealous for God, just as all of you are today” (Acts 22:3). He does not put an inch of daylight between himself and them. He says, I was you. Then he takes them to the Damascus road, where he met Jesus.
As I was traveling and approaching Damascus, about noon an intense light from heaven suddenly flashed around me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” I answered, “Who are you, Lord?” He said to me, “I am Jesus of Nazareth, the one you are persecuting.” (Acts 22:6-8)
Listen to what the voice does not say. It does not say, why are you persecuting them. It says… me.
Hear it the way Saul heard it. Flat on your back at noon. Blinded. And the man you were certain was dead is talking to you… and the first thing the living Christ tells you is that you have been fighting him the whole time.
Somebody is thinking, I have never persecuted anybody. Neither did Saul, in his own mind. He was zealous for God. God said the same thing to Samuel when Israel asked for a king: “They have not rejected you; they have rejected me as their king” (1 Samuel 8:7). You can turn your back on his people and never once think you were turning it on him.
You can be zealous for God and be fighting against Jesus the whole time.
Blind for three days, led by the hand into Damascus, God sends a man named Ananias.
“Brother Saul, regain your sight.” And in that very hour I looked up and saw him. And he said, “The God of our ancestors has appointed you to know his will, to see the Righteous One, and to hear the words from his mouth, since you will be a witness for him to all people of what you have seen and heard. And now, why are you delaying? Get up and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on his name.” (Acts 22:13-16)
“Brother,” the first word out of his mouth. A man from the church that Saul was hurting calls him brother. It is not a casual word or a nickname, it is a claim: Jesus died and walked out of the grave and built a family out of people who were not one. Hebrews 2:11, “Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.” Not because the harm did not matter. Because Jesus was already changing the man who did it.
This means that whoever you were before he said your name, he does not only forgive that person, he puts that person to work. Christ did not merely forgive the man who stood at Stephen’s execution. He put Stephen’s words in his mouth.
Read the order in verse 16 again. Get up, be baptized, wash away your sins… calling on his name. The washing does not come from the water. It comes from the name. Saul came to Damascus to arrest people who called on that name, and now the only way out of what he had done was to call on it himself. The man he was hunting is the one who washes him.
Ananias says to Saul, “Why are you delaying?” This is a question not just for Saul but aimed right at us today. If you have believed and never been baptized, the text is asking you that question. And if you have been baptized, you are still invited to “call on his name.” When is the last time you called on him… not prayed a nice prayer, but called on the Lord?
Paul tells them one more thing, what the Lord told him: “Go, because I will send you far away to the Gentiles” (Acts 22:21). They listened to him up to this point. Then they raised their voices. They did not riot over a resurrection. They rioted over who else God was sending for. One word moved them… “Gentiles.”
We do the same thing. We listen up to a point. Then the sermon goes one name too far, and something in us goes quiet… not that person. Every one of us has a name we have already decided is too far gone.
I have a list. People I would just as soon God not send anybody to.
Paul was on that list. When he names the people the risen Jesus appeared to, he puts himself last, “as to one born at the wrong time… because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:8-10). Born at the wrong time… flat on his back with warrants in his bag. And the same Jesus who says “me” about a church dragged out of houses in Damascus is the one who walked out of the grave.
And it runs both directions. He does not only say “me” about what happens to you. He says it about what you do. “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me” (Matthew 25:45). The brother or sister you are punishing with your silence… whatever you do to them, you do to him. And the One you are dealing with when you freeze out his people is the One who forgave Saul. Call them. Text them. Send them a card. This week.
Saul was on somebody’s list too… and Jesus went to him.
Saul had paperwork in his bag. Warrants. A mission he was sure about. He was going the other direction as fast as a man can travel… and Jesus stopped him in the road and said his name.
Then a man from the church he came to arrest called him brother and asked him one question. Why are you delaying?
Some of you have already met him. You are delaying the next obedient thing… baptism, a reconciliation, the call you keep putting off until you feel ready. Saul did not feel ready. He called on the name.
Some of you have never called on that name. You are still carrying your own paperwork… your own version of “I was zealous for God.” Augustine confessed that as a young man he prayed for self-control and then added two words: “but not yet.” He wanted the cure. He wanted it after one more delay. That is most of us. We are not refusing Jesus… we are scheduling him. Ananias would not let Saul keep “not yet,” and the living Christ is not handing you one either.
You do not have to clean anything up first. Saul did not.
The risen Jesus does not watch his church from a distance… what is done to his people is done to him.
Get up.
Call on his name.
Source: the sermon “Why Are You Persecuting Me?” (Acts 21:37-22:29) preached at Red River Baptist Church on September 13, 2026.