Article April 3, 1989 Issue

Turnarounds

Doing right begins with turning away from self-righteousness and turning to follow the light of Christ.

John K. Daniels

When Saul "saw the light" on the road to Damascus,^{See Acts 9:1-20 .} he experienced what today we might call a turnaround. Within a very short time his overriding aim changed from attempting to suppress Christianity to promoting its sturdy growth. Up to that time he'd been doing what he thought was right—with a sense of righteousness based on the religious instruction he'd received as a highly educated Jew, a Pharisee. Now, filled with an overwhelmingly higher sense of right, he surrendered his own educated opinions to the Mind of Christ.

But Saul wasn't the only one who got turned around. The light that temporarily blinded him was the sudden illumination of his consciousness by Christ—the impartial Truth which, as Christ Jesus exemplified, destroys sickness and sin and works to overturn any form of bondage that a material sense of existence would impose on mankind. And Christ, Truth, causing Saul to submit humbly to a rebirth of purpose, must also have acted powerfully on his Christian contemporaries, turning around their persecution-educated views of him.

Ananias, divinely impelled to go to Saul, at first expressed a reluctance that must have been shared by most of his fellow Christians. Here was a man who, three days before, had been a much-feared enemy of Christianity, bent on capturing and bringing to trial all who followed Jesus' teachings. When Saul had caused so much suffering to Christians, was Ananias now supposed to go to his rescue? Certainly it must have seemed that at any moment this man might start persecuting them again. But Ananias, turned around also by the impartial Christ he served, obediently went to Saul, and Saul was healed of his blindness. In time, even the breach between Saul and the Christian leadership was also healed. And the Christians accepted their former enemy, under his name of Paul, as a brother and a leader of the Gentile mission.

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