The Road to Damascus: Paul meets Jesus

The Man Sent to Destroy the Church Became Its Greatest Champion

Imagine being so convinced you are doing the right thing that you carry official papers, assemble a team, and set off on a mission to hunt people down. That was Saul of Tarsus. Highly trained, highly motivated, and utterly certain that stamping out this new movement of Jesus-followers was his God-given duty.

John Harding opened his talk at Crowd Church by painting a vivid picture of this zealous young man riding out of Jerusalem towards Damascus, armed with authority and resources to crush what he saw as dangerous blasphemy. What happened next has been talked about for two thousand years — and we still use the phrase "Damascus road conversion" to describe a complete life turnaround.

Blinded by the Light

The story is dramatic by any measure. Saul is struck blind. He is thrown from his horse. A voice calls his name: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" It is the voice of Jesus — the very person whose followers Saul was hunting.

For three days, Saul could not see. And then, as John pointed out, everything changed. His name became Paul. The persecutor became a pastor. The church destroyer became a church planter. The man who had been on a fast track to religious and political power found himself redirected entirely.

"He went on to write most of the New Testament," John said. "He went on to lead countless people into relationship with Jesus. He went on to plant churches right across the ancient Near East through into Europe, probably second only to Jesus in his influence in shaping the way."

Privileged, Impressive — and Completely Redirected

It would be easy to look at Paul and feel intimidated. The man was brilliant. He trained under Gamaliel, the leading rabbi of his day. He came from a distinguished family, could trace his Hebrew ancestry back generations, and held Roman citizenship by birth. In modern terms, we might call him privileged — someone who had made it to the top of an elite system.

But Jesus disrupted all of that. As John put it: "Jesus reached out to Saul and rescued him." Not converted him to some new religion, but showed him that the Messiah his people had been waiting for had actually arrived. In Saul's own eyes, he was becoming a true Jew by recognising the promised one.

And then came something surprising. After this dramatic encounter, Paul spent roughly fourteen years in obscurity before setting off on his first missionary journey. Fourteen years of serving, preparation, and training. No spotlight. No platform. Just faithful, hidden work.

Your Story Matters Too

One of the most powerful points in the talk was John's insistence that Paul's story is not fundamentally different from any Christian's story. "You might not have been blinded by the light, or you might not have heard the audible voice of Jesus calling you," he said. "But all of us were lost without Jesus. All of us were going our own way before Jesus reached out to us."

John shared his own story — growing up in a Christian home, losing his father at eighteen months old, being the poorest kids in school. Not dramatic in the way Paul's was, but real and significant. "At the age of six, someone invited me at Sunday school to give my life to Jesus. It made such sense to me. And from that moment I've always known God is with me."

The encouragement is straightforward: we all have a story. We all have a before Christ, a moment of encounter, and an after. And those stories matter because nobody can argue with your personal experience.

God Loves to Use Unqualified People

Here is where the talk took a turn that might surprise you. God sent Peter — the rough, uneducated fisherman — to lead the movement among the Jews. And he sent Paul — the rabbinically trained scholar — to the Gentiles. That is the opposite of what any sensible strategist would have done.

"God arranged it that way so that only he would get the glory," John explained. "God loves to use unqualified people. He specialises in using the unqualified because then all the glory and honour goes to him."

John even shared a detail from a second-century document that described Paul as small, with crooked legs, a crooked nose, a unibrow, and bad eyesight. "He would have never made it on the stage of a megachurch or onto Insta," John said with a smile.

The point is not that qualifications are bad. The point is that God does not need them to do extraordinary things through ordinary people. Your education, your background, your appearance — none of it disqualifies you from being used by God.

It Is Still Happening Today

John brought the talk right up to the present day with a remarkable story. A man had turned up at his church on crutches after a near-fatal motorcycle accident. During the accident, he had felt himself leaving his body, cried out to God, and promised to go to church if his life was spared. God spared him. The hospital chaplain led him to faith. And he found his way to the very building he had driven past for years.

"No church background, no Christian experience," John said. "Jesus reached out to him and rescued him."

He went further, sharing accounts of Muslims in Iran and elsewhere encountering Jesus in dreams and visions — often during Ramadan, visited by a figure in white who tells them he is "the way, the truth and the life." He even shared the story of an ISIS fighter so moved by how Christian martyrs died that he met Jesus in a dream and gave his life to him.

Nothing Can Stop This Message

The religious leaders two thousand years ago tried to crush the movement. They killed Jesus. They persecuted his followers. Saul himself was their most effective agent. And yet here we are, still talking about it.

"Communist China tried to ban Christianity," John observed, "but there are now probably more Christians in China than there are Christians in France or Germany."

Ruth, in the conversation afterwards, put it simply: "Jesus found me. He didn't just try once, he kept trying and trying until I could believe, until I said yes. It's not us that find him, it's him that finds us."

Dan reflected on the fourteen years Paul spent in preparation and found comfort in it: "That makes me feel happy that sometimes just think, oh man, God, I didn't have an experience like that, but it was a long time. He still was being transformed."

The Invitation

The talk ended with a challenge that Ruth articulated perfectly: "You don't have to be intelligent like Paul. I can't argue with people about doctrine and stuff, but I can say what God's done in me and my story, and you can't argue with that."

Your story is powerful. It does not need to involve being knocked off a horse or blinded by a light. It just needs to be true. And the same Jesus who revealed himself to Saul on that dusty road to Damascus is still revealing himself to people today — in hospitals, in dreams, in quiet moments of desperation, and yes, in ordinary Sunday services.

The question is not whether he is still at work. The question is whether you are willing to share what he has done in you.