Sometimes I'm asked why I became a follower of Christ in 1992, and the most honest answer to that would be, I have no idea.

If a film crew had been following me in the years leading up to 1992, with full access to my thoughts and my behaviour, that documentary would show a young man running away from God and fast.

I wasn't interested in church and I did not want to obey the Bible.

During my teens, I had a religious education teacher who clearly didn't believe any of it,

and then at university I had a professor who claimed

to be a Christian, but whose life, as far as I could see, was the living definition of hypocrisy.

My other professor was an atheist, and he seemed absolutely delightful. But God likes those kinds of

odds, because when a person in that kind of situation becomes a believer,

it's another demonstration of what theologians call God's irresistible grace or effectual grace.

It's the idea that whoever they are and whatever they've been doing, when God calls someone, they come.

His saving grace is always effective.

It cannot be finally stopped or resisted, not even by someone running hard in the opposite direction.

Slightly more dramatic than my own story is the story of the Apostle Paul. He was, in his own words,

a blasphemer, a persecutor and a violent man full of what he described as raging fury.

Paul drove Christian men and women from their homes, had them incarcerated, voted to have them

killed, and approved the stoning to death of Stephen, one of the early church's most beloved

and powerful leaders. Scripture goes so far as to say that Paul began to destroy the church.

And then, at midday, while returning to Damascus from Jerusalem with a letter

from the high priest, giving him authority to arrest Christians, something happened.

Paul describes a light from heaven, so bright that it causes he and his traveling companions

to fall to the ground.

Then Christ himself speaks directly to him in Hebrew, calling Paul to be a servant and witness to him.

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