in the house of the Lord. And it's even better to be in the house where the water is friendly
and the word is expected to come forth and nourish. Before I begin, let us go to God in prayer as a
family of Christians. Amen. Gracious Heavenly Father, I thank you for this time. I thank you for
Seventh Street Baptist Church anniversary. You knew when they began you had already started a great
and wonderful thing. We thank you for the founding families. We thank you for the families that have
come forth. And we thank you for the fellowship of Christians. Father God, I ask you to move me behind
the cross. Let the words of my mouth simply be a meditation upon your heart. Let it be pleasing.
Let it be a worship with action. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Many of you may be familiar with the book of Acts. It is considered the history book
of the early church. It is equally controversial, challenging, and action-oriented.
So I bring to you the story that many of us are familiar with, Saul becoming Paul.
Paul. If the message had to have a title, I'd call it transformer more than meets the eye.
Transformer more than meets the eye. If you happen to have raised children in the 80s,
you know there was once a great cartoon and the tagline was we're transformers and we're
more than meets the eye. They start out one way and by the time your kids would break them down
and put them together, they were finally something else. And then they made the transformer doll,
and they made the transformer t-shirt, and the transformer pajamas, and all these other things
with the one slogan, transformer more than meets the eye. Some of my parishioners don't know that
I am a cartoon junkie. I came to Port Arthur and I haven't seen Jackie Chan much since I've been
here, but that used to be my Saturday get-along. I had my series of cartoons that I watched and
and I was, oh young people I need you. We don't have escapism in here. I still need you. You need
to come back. Amen. Wherever you're going, you need to transform right on back in here. Hallelujah.
I'm a ninja. Don't go far because I will hold the sermon up for you.
But I liked cartoons and I watched quite a few of them and it got to the point where if I hadn't
seen them, I would turn them on and I just would let them run. Well if you had cable, you could watch
cartoons a whole lot, but we didn't get cable until a year or so ago. You know your budget has to get
to a point where you can take one thing out and bring another thing in. Transformer is more than meets the eye.
So I actually got cable because I wanted to give my husband a gift.
Most families say don't give him cable, he'll never let it go, but I just wanted them to have
something and I found Cartoon Network. And all of a sudden I was watching Cartoon Network one day and
there it was, Transformer, more than meets the eye. They broke into a lot of different ways and I was like wow,
I haven't seen this in a while. And I found myself there was cartoon after cartoon about
being changed into other things. Well on the road to Damascus, Saul gets changed. And maybe some of
you only remember when he becomes Paul and when you hear of his letters, but maybe you don't remember
before he was transformed and more than meets the eye. For you see the story of transformation,
Paul was a weapon of mass destruction. And some of you may be saying, that's in the 21st century,
pastor, how could you say he was a weapon of mass destruction? Well I would say to you he was a
weapon of mass destruction because he had a purpose to kill. You may not like that about Saul because
you didn't know him in the bath. You only known him since he became Paul. You say, oh no, no, no,
pastor, how could you say he was a weapon of mass destruction? If you look at verses one and two,
it says, meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats. He was aiming to kill and
persecute those who believed in Jesus Christ. And though he had a job, though he was on his way to
Damascus, he had a job that he intended to do at the synagogue. Because you see he had a letter.
And he was going to inform them that whatever is going on at the synagogue needs to stop and I have
a tool that I can use. So right off the bat, starting in this passage, Paul was not yet Paul.
He was Saul and he was a weapon of mass destruction. You see this little can off? It says,
it says deep woods off. And it's unscented. And it has a purpose of killing. But for those of us who
carry it to keep the mosquitoes down and put off the taxes, we don't think this is a weapon of mass
destruction. But to the mosquito, it's floating around here. Some of these new mosquitoes, because
these old mosquitoes don't respond as I've learned them. I've only been able to put on a short period
of time, but deep woods off is not a weapon of mass destruction to some mosquitoes up in this community.
But if I were to use this with a simple purpose of destroying, I'd be acting with a weapon of mass
destruction. Not necessarily a human, not necessarily the dogs, cats, kids, or whatever.
But I would be using this to destroy some mosquitoes. And what I've learned since I've been here a short
period of time is the mosquitoes here have a special lifetime. They come, they go, they hide,
they slip to the side, they come back around, they get cool, they get warm, they go under the curve,
they say, hold tight, just give us a few more hours, it's going to get warm enough for me to come back.
And deep woods doesn't work.
Even though it's a weapon and it's designed to kill mosquitoes,
it's not working. But on the other hand, Saul worked to be a destructive individual.
But Jesus had another purpose. God had another plan for his life. And even though he was walking
down the road and had all intention on using his weapon of mass destruction, something happened.
Something happened. Something happened.
And it happened on the road. If you look at the verses that were suggested to be highlighted,
they go a little something like this. 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.
Who you are persecuting. He didn't say you have persecuted or you might have persecuted,
but who you are present tense. Persecuting. And he replied, now get up and go into the city.
You will be told what you must do. I need some students to come down for a second. About five
or ten. Now you either go and find your posse. I need you to come on down. Get your posse.
Who will be Paul? You'll be Paul? This is the man that's going to be transformed. So I need
you all to watch him. It's the one. But these are the crew that was traveling with Saul.
And you realize that they didn't know that he was a weapon of mass destruction. Do that little
dance move you do. Come on behind him. You just want to do one of those. Wave over.
Something comes over him and he doesn't know what hit him. This posse doesn't know what hit him.
He sees things and he hears things, but they don't see none of it. And then, something happens.
Saul goes blind. He can't see. And I'm not even sure he can still hear. But these people have to help him.
This is the one, the man's destruction. He's going to tear stuff when he gets to Damascus.
These folks have to get him, help his brother onto the back so he can get to Damascus.
He has to lean and depend on some of the very folks that he wanted to help. But they didn't know that.
And he realized that he was a weapon of mass destruction. And he realized he had another agenda.
Well, I need you to keep that on for the rest of the service. And I will be there for you.
And I'll be calling you and letting you know when we're going to take it off, okay?
You need to feel what Saul felt before he was transformed.
We have to watch out what we volunteer for. Because when God says, I'm going to use you, you never know how it's going to happen.
His posse continues to hang with him. Gets him to Damascus, but they don't see anything that he sees.
They don't even hear anything he heard. Because, well, you see, the visionary wanted to speak to Saul
because his life was going to be transformed more than meets the eye.
He continues on to Damascus, and he runs across a disciple that Jesus has spoken to.
Young man, you're my disciple that Jesus has spoken to.
I know you had another place to go and other things to do. But that's how Jesus works.
We be on one road going somewhere else. And he says, hold on. I told you something.
This is Anna Naez. Anybody know what Anna Naez knew?
She came and gave a vision to this young man. Let me tell you what your job is, Bruce.
Anna Naez gets a vision from Jesus. In verse 10, he says, the Lord says,
go to the house of Judas on Straight Street, not Crooked Street, on Straight Street,
and ask for the man from Tarsus. His name's Saul. Okay?
And he'll be back there praying. Because he don't know what's going on in his life right now.
He got blind. But, you know, I have a vision for you, for him that's coming through you.
I want you to lay hands on him and restore his sight.
Now, wait a minute. I don't want you to go on and quit. I want you to go, you prayed up.
You straight? You dead? Okay.
Now, you know, you can't just do this if you don't believe that the Lord can make a move.
Okay? I got you. Now, I'm not going to give you all my oil.
Just a little bit, because it don't take much to handle up on this situation.
I want you to visit the brother on Straight Street. He's blind. He don't know why he's blind.
But he's been back there praying because, see, as a weapon of mass destruction, he had another purpose.
And now he's blind and he's just like, Lord, Lord, Lord, help me!
And I don't know what's going on. I don't know how I got to be blind.
Everybody else can hear. I can't hear me. What is it?
Go pray for him. Go pray for him. And you had the power.
Because I gave you the vision. Restore that brother.
Go on back there. Now don't sway no off on him.
Handle up, man. Handle up.
He runs into Anna Mayer.
And he says, okay, I have heard many reports about this man, and he's a harmful kind of guy.
And he's done some really terrible things in Jerusalem.
And you want him to go back here and want me to pray for him?
He says, yeah. And here's the important part that we have to remember.
Our past lives are lives of sin, are lives that need to be transformed.
And Jesus doesn't hold it against Saul, and he's not interested in holding us against him.
But this visionary experience through Anna Mayer says these things.
The Lord says to Anna Mayer, go, this man is my chosen instrument,
to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel.
I will show him how much that he has suffered for my name.
And Anna Mayer went to the house and placed hands on Saul and said to him,
Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus has appeared to you on the road,
and now I've been set and filled with the Holy Spirit.
Immediately the scales fell off his eyes.
Saul, there's the scale. He ain't blind no more.
Come on up here, Saul. Let the people see you.
Let it be known that you can see again.
But it's not just his sight. He's a transformed man.
He has the same clothes on. You don't know his heart has been transformed,
but something else happened to him besides having his sight restored.
Thank you, young man. You were fantastic. Thank you so much.
The point of this is we've all been blinded by something.
We've all been challenged by something.
And we all have a need to be transformed, individually, collectively, and as a community.
Jesus chose the very person who was the weapon of mass destruction
as the instrument to our pole of salvation.
Paul became one of the strongest words and experiences of Jesus Christ.
He went on to save the souls of many a Gentile.
He planted more churches, wrote more Scripture, dealt with more issues than people want to admit.
But in his early days, he destroyed people's lives.
And there was something about him that Jesus said, that God said,
I have chosen him as my instrument.
Saul proceeds on, stays in Damascus a little while,
and he realizes that he is challenged by the whole process.
Because he says to himself, why me? Why me? Why did you choose me?
But if you go back up to verses 4, 5, and 6, there's a hint there.
The word from on high says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?
Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?
Transformers have to answer those questions to the most high God.
They have to respond to what their behavior and posture has been.
We serve a risen Savior. We serve a Savior that's ready to forgive everything we do.
But he says, come unto me. Seek me first.
It doesn't say seek your friends. It doesn't say seek the neighbors.
It doesn't say seek your posse. It says seek deeper.
Saul wasn't interested in Jesus. He didn't even have a clue that he was selected.
As a matter of fact, if it was up to Saul, he would have kept on with his weapons of mass destruction.
He would have kept on killing. He would have kept on destroying.
He would have kept on robbing people. He would have kept on in the posture that he was in.
But what changed his life was an experience on the road to the masquerade.
Have any of you ever been on your own personal road to this masquerade?
Have you ever stood before the Lord and you were going in one direction and something happened?
And lo and behold, you turn and you're going this way over here.
Maybe you weren't hurting anyone directly or maybe you weren't shooting anybody
or maybe you were trying to do your best to help the people up the street.
But you were on the wrong street. You hadn't got the straight street yet.
You had a secondary agenda. You were operating one way and talking like this,
back and forth, see-saw, ha-ha, go-go, whatever. Go-go, yo-yo. There you are.
The bottom line is we've all been on our personal road,
whether you've named them Damascus or whether you've kind of teared them under the couch in the living room
or whether you've put them in another box in the article.
Maybe you say, oh, if you only knew who I used to be. Well, we all have a past life.
We all have a road that somehow intersects somewhere on a road called Damascus.
Maybe yours was Houston Avenue. Maybe yours was Straight Street.
Or maybe yours was Seventh Avenue. Or maybe yours was on Stillwell.
Or maybe yours was on Savannah. But the bottom line is we've all crossed some streets.
And Jesus has stopped us in the middle of the street, made us blind for yet a moment,
and somewhere along the way, somebody laid hands on us and prayed for us, and we became sighted yet once again.
That's a blessing. That's something to shout about.
And I'm almost sure in 36 years of this here church, there's been some Damascus Road experience.
Maybe it's been in your Board of Deacons meeting. Or maybe it was in the building front committee.
Maybe it was with the people that said, we like children. And this one said, oh, no, we don't want them in there.
Oh, we like all of them. Oh, don't have them over here. Maybe it was somewhere.
But up the middle of the aisle came the Spirit of God and said, up in here you're going to be changed.
Or maybe it was the day that the pastor came and said, your new mission is to feed the homeless.
And the next mission was to educate the people on HIV AIDS.
The harsh reality is straight street is a street of truth.
Crooked street is a street of denial.
And if we look at our family situation, a young man said yesterday in a discussion at the Who's Who,
that part of our challenge today is that we don't choose to walk in unity.
So I would say to you, straight street brings us to a place where God calls us to be unified.
There's a lot of things relevant in this passage.
There's a lot of things I could say about this passage.
But when it gets personal, you have to say to yourself, self, I'm glad Jesus changed me.
Turn to your neighbor and say, neighbor, I'm glad Jesus changed you.
And then point back at yourself. I'm so glad that he changed me.
He made me blind, but now I can see.
That's a praise report. That's a praise report.
16 years almost to the date, I arrived in Houston, Texas with my own agenda.
It didn't include what I do now.
Because I had my own plan, I was on my own road, and challenging to say, I had my own weapons of mass destruction.
I worked in corporate America, and I was a salesperson.
And I didn't realize when I came to Texas that I was running up against something I had never experienced before.
The good old boy, super duper Texas Network.
I'm not saying they don't have any of that up east, but I'm telling you it was something way different down in here.
I don't even want to give it that much credit, but it was deeper than I had been before.
I immediately started calling Jesus. Fast and furious.
Okay, Jesus, you got me down here. What are we doing?
And he said to me, I got you.
I said, oh, okay.
I found a church home in Houston, and as my mother lovingly said,
was it an AME church, baby, that you were looking for when you started out on your adventure?
I said, no, no, no. I was just looking for anybody who was teaching Jesus.
Because when I got down and had my first experience down there in Texas, I immediately ran to the church.
I have now accepted the wrong position. I'm on the road to Damascus.
And help me, Holy Ghost.
I'm telling you, it shook me from my knees all the way down to my toes.
I was like, have mercy.
And I said, it's got to get better.
I can't say, God, that has just got different.
But I kept talking to Jesus.
And I had a transformation experience.
He took the scales off my eyes. He woke me up and said, boo, you're in the wrong job.
And just like Saul, I had all kinds of reasons that this was the thing I ought to do.
Lord, you know I've gone and got a very good education for what I'm doing.
And Lord, I have a three-year plan that really should allow me to come right out of this with a few scars
and go right on to whatever else is on my five-year plan.
I didn't expect to encounter the blindness.
I didn't expect to encounter my posse on the road.
I didn't expect to encounter people that said, the Lord's right, young lady, you're doing the wrong thing.
But I look at it and I say, around this room, there's thousands and dozens and quadruple numbers of Damascus experiences.
But the most powerful thing that they have in common is that we all woke up.
It's that we all woke up from our blindness, and God gave us His vision for our lives.
He gave us a vision for this church. He's given a vision for this community.
He's given vision individually.
And they all work together like pieces of a common puzzle.
But I say to you, the challenge now is to accept the vision.
We understand our past life.
We even quietly will say to somebody, yeah, child, my blindness lasted about 15 years.
How long did yours last?
Mine was 15 days, 2 months, and 32 hours.
We know how long it lasted.
But the encounter with Anna Neistat that had the vision that Jesus gave was the change agent moment.
Just say to your neighbor, there's a change agent moment going on.
And we are involved in it.
Don't say you sitting over there is involved, but I'm sitting right here on this pew, and I don't have to worry about it.
We're all involved in it.
We all.
Now, if I was truly all the way to Texas, I'd say, y'all involved, and I'm involved, and we all.
I'm moving on to that.
It takes a while to get that picture.
I don't have that special birth certificate, so I have to be reborn into this.
I'm preliminary.
All right, I'll take it. I'll take it.
After you encounter the change agent, there's a transformation.
And that truly is walking your spiritual journey.
That is truly listening unto God.
That is truly all the time periods where you submit.
That is truly the time where you get to learn how God sees you.
He sees your gifts.
He puts the gifts together and makes one big, caring, loving community family.
I think it's powerful to recognize transformation.
I encourage you not to think of it as simply a lucky meeting between Anna Naus and the man who soon would become Paul.
I've looked all through the Bible, and luck never appears once.
I often tell my students when I work with them one-on-one, lucky is the name of the dog that lives down the street.
But there is no luck in the Bible.
Everything has been ordered by the steps and guidance of Jesus Christ.
His will is bigger than you can even imagine.
So the long-term effect is if you want your transformation to stick, you've got to choose to surrender.
And what that means is every now and then, you may get temporary blindness again.
You know you've seen before. You know he's restored you.
But every now and then, you might get a little temporary blindness.
He might even go and tell you to sit on down and just meditate on it.
But when he takes the blindness and gives you clear sight again, you need to shout all away.
You need to shout in the blindness. You need to shout when your sight comes up.
You need to shout when he's taking you for it, because he knows what he wants from his people.
The transformation that he gave to Paul.
Look for the transformation in your spirit.
Because just as I said, there are no luckies in the Bible.
There's no luckies in your life.
I encourage you to change your language.
Embrace your blessing.
Expect the miracle.
Love the vision that God has set before you to trust him enough to take the faith of a muster seed and say,
I don't totally understand it, but I'm going to step out on faith.
I don't totally get the whole picture, but because I serve a loving God, I'm going to go with the wind.
And more importantly, remember that God's love and peace is for everyone.
It ain't just for special. The deacons, the leaders, the teachers, the preachers, it's for everyone.
He expects us to live in forgiveness.
He expects us to live in open communication.
He expects us to be able to say, yes, my child has an issue, but I won't live in darkness.
He expects us to believe in deliverance because he's shown us over and over and over again
that he wants to deliver us from out of our bondage, out of our hellacious situation.
We serve a loving and caring God.
And I say to you on this 36th anniversary, celebrate what has been.
Stuck together, put your feet on solid ground, link each other's arms and say, where we going from here?
Don't let the vision die in the past. Let it be renewed. Let it be restored.
Let it be pruned because where God has us going from here, let him map it out.
I thank all those who have been the founders and the ground breakers,
but I encourage you to be change agents for the students who sit on the back row.
I encourage you to be not dysfunctional, but become who God needs us to be as the elders in this community.
I encourage you to stop having this dialogue with your old self, going back and forth.
And say, look, Lord, I accept the transformation with all that it comes with.
I set my newness with glory. I accept that I'm going to walk this way.
I'm the bold woman of God. I expect God to make another move.
I expect him to keep changing, but I'm going to step out with what I know and understand
because I'm not going to miss what he has for me.
And when I hit that moment of blindness, I'm going to thank him for it because I know
even when he brings the depths of darkness down, there's a light of God that shines around us,
that lets us know he is the light, he is the way, he is the truth, he is all that we need this day.
May your vision go forward in the name of Jesus.
I hope you'll be transformed and you will be more than meets the eye. Have mercy.