The Road Is Longer Than You Think. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Road Is Longer Than You Think

Spend enough time in Paul’s letters and you end up wishing the same thing everyone else does — that you could have met him. This is the life behind the letters.

We know what Paul thought about grace, about the Law, about marriage and money and death. What we do not know is what he was like. This is thirty years of the man himself — beginning on the road outside Damascus, where a light he never asked for ended the man he had been and handed him a life he had not chosen. He did not decide for God on that road. He was stopped by Him. He spent the rest of his life learning what had been done to him.

What follows is not a triumphal march. It is the life of a man who rarely knew what was coming next. Years of silence in Arabia, and longer years back home in Tarsus when it must have seemed nothing was happening at all. Doors that closed without explanation — the Spirit forbidding Asia, and then Bithynia, and no reason given for either. Two years in a cell at Caesarea, waiting. A winter sea that took the ship apart underneath him. He went where he was sent, usually without being told why, and often without being told what for.

And at every turn, God had already moved somebody into place ahead of him. A frightened man named Ananias, sent to lay hands on the one person in Damascus he had every reason to run from. Hands in the dark lowering a hunted man over a city wall in a basket. Barnabas, who crossed a room nobody else would cross and vouched for a man the whole church remembered as a murderer. A businesswoman who opened her house. A jailer who washed his wounds at midnight. A tentmaking couple who took him in and worked beside him. A physician who stayed to the end. Islanders who built a fire in the rain for a shipload of soaked strangers. Paul accomplished nothing alone, and he arranged almost none of it himself.

That is the argument of the book. The road was prepared in front of him, one person at a time, by a God who was working on other people long before Paul ever needed them — and who was working on Paul, just as patiently, the whole way down it.

This is a novel about grace: not as a word in a sermon, but as something that happens to a hard man against his preference, and goes on happening long after he is sure it has finished with him. Written in the historic Christian confession that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone, as revealed in Scripture alone.

Thirty-four chapters, each opening with Scripture. Where the biblical record is silent, the conversations and circumstances have been imagined — and imagined only in the direction the Scriptures already point.

He thought he knew how far the road went. It went further than that. And he never once walked it by himself.