1 Timothy 1:12-17
Unlikely Qualifications

I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners--of whom I am the foremost. But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life. To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

New Revised Standard Version

We hold Paul in high esteem for his phenomenal contribution to the spread of the first Century church and for his prolific letter writing that became such a large part of the New Testament. Here, as he writes to his protege, Timothy, he gives us his "secret" to becoming such a giant in Christian history:

          He was unfit for the job.

Before we dismiss his claims of inadequacy as an exaggeration or as false modesty, we need to look more closely at the facts. We have accounts in Acts that verify that Paul accurately described his past sins as Saul, a leader in condemning and persecuting the early Christians. Given that Saul had been recognized in Jewish circles as a scholar, we also sense a poignancy in his confession of his ignorance. The redeemed Paul goes on to explain it was from these failures and inadequacies that God's Grace came into his life, to transform and use him in the Kingdom's work. God's mercy overcame Saul's sin, and Saul had to acknowledge and accept this sin in order to be able to accept God's mercy and move beyond his ignorant rebellion.

It is hard to dispute his claim to be "the foremost" of sinners when we read in Acts 8:3 that Saul was imprisoning Christians and seeking "to destroy the church". At the same time, we cannot deny that we, too, are sinners, and our only hope is God's mercy through Christ Jesus. We may not have rejected God with the violence and determination of Saul before his life-transforming event on the road to Damascus, but there are no relative degrees of failure in achieving holiness. We have all failed.

Our natural reaction to failure is to push it out of our conscious thought as quickly as we can. If we deny the failure, we don't have to talk about it, and we might even convince ourselves it wasn't so bad after all. If we explain away the failure, we can manufacture a reasonable argument that it wasn't really our fault. If we separate ourselves from it by time and by lifestyle changes, we can safely dismiss the failure as belonging to a past era. Certainly, Paul had experienced a dramatic change in his life that was underscored by changing his name from Saul to Paul. Still, Paul would not forget that he once violently attacked the same beliefs he was teaching in this letter to Timothy. To forget his past sins would have meant to forget the forgiveness and mercy that God poured over him to power his ministry.

We can do our best work for God only because of our weakness and failures. It isn't just that Grace has overcome our failures, for we are still thinking of ourselves when we talk about compensating for our shortcomings. It isn't that we can brag about how bad we once were, for Paul's tone in this passage is that of an apology, and we know Paul bragged only of God's mercy and love. Paul is teaching us to embrace the fact of our sinful nature so that we will fervently embrace the amazing power of Grace.

Paul was no longer concerned about what he would do, only what Jesus Christ was doing in him. The goal for Paul was to keep his "self" out of God's way, so that Grace would flow freely through him wherever God sent him. This is the "living sacrifice" to which we are all called.