Letting go, and letting God
A Sermon for the Commemoration of the Conversion of St Paul.
Sunday, 25 January 2026
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Galatians 1:11-24
Matthew 10:16-22
The conversion of St Paul is one of the great turning points of the Christian story. It is dramatic, unsettling, and – if we are honest – a little bit uncomfortable: a man convinced he was right is stopped in his tracks; a man certain of his mission is thrown to the ground. A man who thought he saw clearly is blinded and must be led by the hand.
And that is perhaps our first clue as to what religious conversion really involves. It is not simply a change of ideas, nor even a change of loyalties. It is about losing control. It is about letting go – and letting God take ever deeper possession of our lives.
Paul himself, writing to the Galatians, insists that his gospel “is not of human origin”. It did not come from clever reasoning or gradual moral improvement. It came through revelation – through an encounter that shattered his certainties and re-made him from the inside out. Conversion, for Paul, was not self-improvement. It was surrender.
We often soften the language of conversion because it can feel threatening. We prefer to think of faith as something we manage: beliefs we hold, practices we maintain, values we endorse. But the readings today will not allow us to keep conversion at a safe distance. Again and again they push us toward a deeper truth: that to be called by God is to be claimed by God.
Jeremiah’s story begins before Jeremiah has done anything at all. “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born, I consecrated you.” God’s call comes prior to Jeremiah’s plans, his ambitions, his sense of adequacy. Jeremiah responds as most of us would: with resistance. “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.”
That protest should sound familiar. We too are quick to point out our limitations – our lack of confidence, our age, our past, our temperament. But notice what God does not do. God does not argue. God does not reassure Jeremiah that this will be easy. Instead, God overrides Jeremiah’s objections with a promise of presence: “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’… Do not be afraid… for I am with you.”
Then comes the most intimate and unsettling moment: God touches Jeremiah’s mouth. This is not a metaphorical encouragement. It is an act of divine claim. Jeremiah’s words, his voice, his very capacity to speak are no longer his own. He is being asked to let go of ownership over himself and to trust that God knows what God is doing.
Paul’s experience is the same truth, intensified. He tells the Galatians that his former life was marked by zeal, certainty, and success within the system he knew – Pharisaic Judaism. He was not half-hearted; he was all in. And that, perhaps, is what made his conversion so costly. God did not simply redirect Paul’s energy; God dismantled his framework for understanding God altogether.
When Paul says that God “set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace,” he deliberately echoes the language of Jeremiah. His life, he realises, was never truly his own. Even his misguided zeal had been living under a deeper, hidden purpose. But discovering that purpose required Paul to relinquish control – to be led into Arabia, into obscurity, into years of waiting and re-formation.
This is an aspect of conversion we often underestimate. Letting God have deeper control of our lives does not always mean immediate clarity or visible success. Sometimes it means being unmade before we are remade. Sometimes it means silence before speech, weakness before strength, anonymity before fruitfulness.
The Gospel reading brings a sharper edge to this truth. Jesus does not speak in abstract spiritual terms. He speaks about vulnerability, danger, and loss of control. “I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves.” Sheep do not survive by strategy or force. They survive by trust.
Jesus tells his disciples that they will be handed over, betrayed, and hated. He does not promise protection from suffering. What he promises instead is that, when the moment comes, “it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” Once again, the heart of discipleship is surrender – allowing God’s Spirit to act where our own resources fail.
Put these readings together and a pattern emerges.
God calls before we are ready.
God sends us where we would not choose to go. God speaks through us when we have nothing left to say.
Conversion is not a one-off event locked in the past. It is an ongoing movement of letting go, again and again, as God asks for more trust, more openness, more availability.
This is where the conversion of St Paul becomes uncomfortably personal. Most of us have not been knocked off a horse on the road to Damascus. But many of us have experienced moments when God has unsettled our certainties, challenged our assumptions, or disrupted our carefully managed faith. We may resist those moments, interpreting them as failure or confusion, when they are actually invitations to deeper conversion.
To let God have deeper control of our lives is not to become passive or erased. Paul did not become less himself; he became more truly himself. Jeremiah did not lose his voice; his voice gained authority.
The disciples did not lose their agency; they discovered a courage not their own.
God does not crush our humanity; God completes it.
But completion comes through surrender: through trusting that the God who knew us before we were born knows what is being asked of us now. Through believing that the Spirit will speak when our own words run out. Through daring to release the illusion that we are in charge.
The feast of the Conversion of St Paul reminds us that the Christian life is not about mastering faith, but about being mastered by grace. It is about letting go – of fear, of control, of self-protection – and letting God have ever deeper access to who we are.
The question this feast places before us is not whether we have been converted once, but whether we are still willing
to be converted now.
To that end, here are three questions we might reflect on over the coming week.
What might God be asking us to release?
Where might God be asking us to trust more deeply?
What part of our lives are we still holding back?
Tony Surman