What if zeal aimed at God can still be working against Him? The future Apostle Paul had plenty of zeal as he persecuted the church, but he would soon learn that isn’t enough.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor distinguishes between zealousness and faithfulness, using Paul’s persecution of Christians as a striking example. Can you think of modern instances where someone might be intensely “zealous” yet not actually serving God’s purposes? How can we discern the difference in our own lives before God has to redirect us the hard way?
Paul applied Old Testament civil law and worldly intuition in a way that caused him to miss the Messiah entirely—until God intervened. What similar “intuitive” or culturally driven assumptions in our own faith might God want to correct? How do we stay open to that kind of correction without losing conviction altogether?
Both Paul and Peter openly highlighted their failures rather than hiding them—Paul calling himself “the foremost of sinners,” and Peter apparently letting Mark record his worst moments in detail. Why is it so tempting to downplay our brokenness, and how does honestly using it to point to Jesus make us more effective witnesses than polishing our image would?
The Mpemba effect and the concrete analogy both illustrate how God works in counterintuitive, sometimes painful ways—grinding, baking, reshaping—without discarding what came before. How have you seen God take seemingly jagged or useless parts of a life, yours or someone else’s, and form them into something useful for His kingdom?
The pastor contrasts trying to manufacture faithfulness through our own zealous actions versus receiving it as a gift through conversion and ongoing surrender. How should this distinction change the way we approach serving God, evaluating our ministries, and sharing our faith with people who aren’t yet believers?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Thank you.
Is anyone else a little tired after Faithtoberfest? Anyone just so energized you’re not the least bit tired after Faithtoberfest? Now here’s the amazing one, Jerry is both tired and not tired at the same time. But maybe that’s Jerome and then it’s Jerry on the other, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, you know, we’re exhausted, right? But are you glad we did Faithtoberfest? Yeah.
It’s always interesting when we decide we’re going to throw ourselves into something big like that, that one of the questions we have to ask is why are we doing it, right? And of course, why are we doing that? Well, we’re doing it for a number of reasons. One, to worship our God and to celebrate his goodness. Two, to encourage each other and the broader Christian community. And one that we’re still working on tuning, but really the goal is to create ministry events that we can invite people to. And so we’re working on that one still. But that’s why we’re doing it. And why do we want people to come? Well, we want people to come so they can know Jesus, right? That is, well, really everything we do, right? We want to have people here that are already here and we encourage them so we can keep serving Jesus and to draw more people in to know Jesus. That’s what we’re commissioned to do.
So after Faithtoberfest, every Faithtoberfest feels different. But afterwards, it’s always this joy to kind of relive it and think of all the great times. And I’ve gotten the habit, I go back and remaster a copy because we have all that wonderful music. And I did that once again. So if you haven’t checked that out yet, you can hear everybody in greater clarity and really soak it up now. And it’s a joy to relive it doing that, too, and really soak in the parts that maybe I was scrambling around, turning things on and off and what have you. And it’s sort of like, oh, that was so good. It’s just nice to live through it again.
I remember years back, though, I guess I was in, I might have been in seminary at the time, maybe before seminary. But I was involved in planning a series of fall events at a church. And they drew every bit of that much larger church’s energy, much like Faithtoberfest draws every bit of the energy here, right? We all, I mean, all of you were working so hard. And let me just say again, thank you. I mean, it’s such a joy to get to serve with you. But, I mean, you all deserve a round of applause for that.
Very much like that. But it was a church of 300, 400 people. And everyone, everyone had a job. And I remember it was over after all these events, and I didn’t find myself thinking back with joy and fondness over this thing that had consumed all of us, but a lot of questions. And the reason I had lots of questions wasn’t that the food was bad or the music was bad or the other events were bad. It was what were we trying to accomplish with? And the answer was all these things have been done in the service of a stewardship campaign. And the goal was, because research had indicated this, if you have everybody involved in the events around your stewardship campaign, guess what? They’re more likely to give to the stewardship campaign. And so everybody had a job, right? And some of these jobs were true make work jobs. We didn’t need to do it, but we were doing it because everybody has a job in this. And the whole church was busy for like six, eight weeks. And at the end, what do we have to show for it? We’d raised a lot of money. Well, it’s good to have money for a church, right? It costs money to operate a ministry. But we hadn’t done anything to reach the community and everyone was exhausted. And we’re going into Christmas completely exhausted. And the one thing we’d accomplished is we raised a lot of money. Say, well, we were all very zealous for the Lord. We raised all this money for the Lord. The only problem was we had no energy left to actually go and serve the Lord with that money. And it was sort of limping into Christmas that year, I remember, because it had been all about fundraising.
Now, if you were to say, should we make sure that the church has enough money to pay its bills? Yes. Do you sometimes even need to raise money because, say, you’re at the point where you can actually build a building, and building a building costs money, right? Or renovating an old building that you’re able to purchase costs money. There’s those sorts of things. I know this is not a stewardship sermon, so don’t worry. But the question is, can you keep in mind what we’re actually trying to do? Can we hold on to that? And we hadn’t.
But if you purely asked, was everyone zealous? Was everyone dedicated to serving? The answer was absolutely. People were dedicated to serving. People were determined to serve. People had been told their church needed them, and they were doing it. It was just everything was poured into one thing that’s useful to the ministry, but not actually what the ministry is for. And a lot of times we check, are we zealous? And we forget to ask, are we actually doing what we’re here for?
Tonight we’re going to look at the second of our unlikely fishermen, the Apostle Paul. And here is a man, if you’re ever looking for a man, who you will never have to condemn for lack of zeal. He was ready to serve the Lord, and he was doing things that might even sound like they fit serving the Lord until you think a little further, and you go a little further, and you say, but were you serving the Lord? And the answer is, well, not exactly. So let’s pray tonight as we think about Paul’s story, that we see how that happened in Paul’s life, and then also we go a step further, and we see how God is calling us to be those who are ready to serve. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. Lord, we pray that you would help us to be ready to serve you, to be zealous for you. But Lord, would you help us to do so in a way where we are serving you in the way that you’ve called us to serve, and not simply focusing all of our energy and just saying, well, I have energy focus, so I’m therefore serving you. Help us to have the right mindset, Lord, we pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
So here’s the key thing. Zealousness is not faithfulness. I think that’s something that we often confuse, but we really need to keep in mind. We see that in Acts chapter 7, verse 58. Stephen has just preached perhaps one of the best sermons ever preached, right? You have the sermon on the mount from Jesus, as far as recorded sermons, and then you might put Stephen’s sermon right after that, or maybe after the Pentecost sermon from Peter. I don’t know, somewhere in there. I mean, one of the best sermons ever preached, and people don’t like it at all. They’re angry. They cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man, a young man named Saul. And as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And falling to his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, Lord, do not hold this sin against them. And when he had said this, he fell asleep. And Saul approved of his execution. And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem. And they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles.
But Saul, we skip over just a little while later, we see him again. Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest. He hasn’t had enough of this. And asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.
So of course, Saul is Paul. It’s a man here. And we have this man here who is absolutely zealous. To the point, that’s an interesting question to ask ourselves. Are you so zealous for the Lord that you would kill for the Lord? Paul was. Paul would kill for God. He oversees this first execution and approves of it that we’re told of Stephen. And then what does he do? He doesn’t say, well, you know, I don’t know if we really want to do that. But no, he goes and asks for permission. He wants the letters from the Sanhedrin so he can go to these other synagogues outside of Jerusalem. And he can find people who follow Jesus. And he can drag them back to Jerusalem. Because Jerusalem is where the Jews have the authority to execute people. Paul is zealous.
And zealous for whom? For the Lord, right? He studied the Bible all his life. He knows the Bible. He believes in the Bible. He believes in the God of the Bible, that you should have no other gods before him. And he sees that from page to page of the Bible. And he says, these awful followers of the way, they’re getting in the way of that. And the only thing to do is find them and kill them. I will do whatever it takes to ensure purity in the church.
Now, if I told you there was a man who was a leader in the church. And he was so passionate about purity to theology. That he would travel anywhere to try to stop corruption of God’s word. Would we say, it’s wonderful? Well, rightly, we probably should, right? That’s a good thing. And if you ask Paul if that’s what he was doing, he would say, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing. But was it what he was doing?
If all we looked at is, is Paul willing to go to whatever extent necessary to protect his understanding of the integrity of God’s word? We’d say, you have it in spades, Paul. You’re amazing. He wasn’t amazing. Paul thought he could please God by killing people. Incidentally, that wasn’t the calling of the church, ever. And when you think about this man, he was willing to go to a far greater extent for the faith than most of us would ever consider doing. And yet, we would say he was being terribly, terribly unfaithful.
Why? Because he’d equated zealousness with faithfulness. I think that’s a danger for us today. Because we live in a society of hyped-up, social media-driven rage and virtue signaling and demonstrations of power. And we think maybe the way that we need to demonstrate something, well, hopefully, I pray, isn’t to kill someone. That’s not, not, not the right answer. But at least maybe we’ll kill them by words.
Paul was willing to act, and that’s laudable. Too often we sit back and we don’t act at all. But the key thing is, if we’re going to act, we need to make sure we’re actually acting in the way that God wants us to act. That we’re not just acting to act. That’s not enough. Having enough zeal is not enough. We need to actually be focused on what God wants us to do.
That’s where it gets interesting with Paul. Because here it was, Paul, he knew the Old Testament. He knew the punishment in the Old Testament, incidentally, for being unfaithful to the Lord. It was capital punishment. And so, seemingly, he was doing the right thing.
What happens on that road to Damascus? He sees a bright light. He falls to the ground and he hears a voice. Seems that his companions can hear something, but they can’t actually tell what it is. And what does Jesus say to him? Jesus says, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? Totally counterintuitive to everything that Saul thought he was doing, right? Saul was dedicating his life to serving the Lord, but then, and it’s obvious to him because it’s a voice coming down from heaven.
Paul, when he says, who are you, Lord? He’s not thinking, well, maybe someone has come from the future with a megaphone and can amplify his voice really impressively. And instantly, they’re going to invent the light bulb someday and have a really powerful light and it’s being subjected to me. Paul, when he says that, knows he’s encountering the divine.
So hearing Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? I’m supposed to think. So counterintuitive. But God’s way is counterintuitive. And the problem there is that Paul had bought into a worldly philosophy. He had taken what was given specifically to operate the nation of Israel, which now was scattered. There wasn’t this nation anymore, but he’d taken these civil laws and he decided that this is what he needed to turn against the Messiah. This was the part he needed to focus on, instantly ignoring all these promises about the Messiah.
Why? Well, because they weren’t all that different than we are today. And you know what? Paul would have felt very powerful. He would have felt very in command and he would have gotten praise for his bravery and his determination and people could see what he was doing. I’m not saying it was all an ego trip. I think there was genuine zeal here, but zeal that he’d never actually stopped to ask, am I actually doing what God wants me to do in this moment? Is this really what, in this moment, is the calling from the Lord?
And so because of that, he opted for what worldly wisdom would say is the intuitive thing to do, rather than asking, well, but does God have anything in his word that might say I should stop and listen first?
There was a man years ago, about 75 years ago, named Erasto M. Mambe from Tanzania. And Erasto was, at the time, a high school student who was interested in learning culinary skills. And so he was in a class that was being very precise. It was actually, I believe, in a laboratory, but they were making ice cream and trying to make it very precisely.
And he noticed something interesting. As they mixed together the ingredients, he had some of them that had been warmed and were still warm. And he had other cream mixtures for ice cream that were sitting there and had cooled off. And now, of course, ice cream, there’s ice in it, right? We know it’s supposed to be frozen, right? You don’t want melted ice cream. It doesn’t do any good when it’s just the liquid that’s going to go into it, so you go and freeze it. But he noticed something curious about what happened when he froze it. The hot mixture froze first.
I wouldn’t have guessed that, would you? Do you think maybe he made a mistake? Well, he happened to be invited. He heard that this famous scientist was coming to lecture in town from a college in a nearby nation. And after the lecture, he went to this lecture on physics. And after the lecture, he had a chance to talk to the man. And he said, I want to ask you a question. Maybe you can help me understand, because I don’t know what’s happening. And the man, the scientist said, OK, you can tell me.
And Erasto described that he had been in this lab for a while. And Erasto described that he had been in this laboratory making ice cream. And he noticed that the ice cream that was hot chilled faster, froze faster than the ice cream that was cold or cool. Well, the scientist assumed that he was mistaken. Because that shouldn’t happen. You have to cool it further, right? This is a more complicated process. But something of that must have stuck in that scientist’s mind. I don’t know if it was that Erasto was so earnest about it. It was just like, well, I should humor this kid. I don’t know what it was. But anyway, he went back to his own university and at some point decided to start experimenting with liquids of different temperatures and seeing when they would freeze. And what did he find out? Huh. If it’s hot, it actually freezes faster, at least in certain conditions. Well, even today, there’s apparently debate on exactly why this happens. It’s not fully understood. And there’s debates on what it is about the chemical compounds and so on.
But Erasto had discovered what’s now known in his honor as the Amambe effect. That a heated liquid can cool faster than a room temperature one. Totally counterintuitive. But it was right there in front of people. And this experiment has been repeated over and over again and seen.
A lot of what God calls us to do is sort of like the Amambe effect, because it doesn’t seem like it should be that way. What Paul’s doing seems like we should be talking, if anything, thousands of years later, of a hero of the faith who would persecute and shut down anyone who tried to corrupt God’s word. Because, well, that’s right. But we need to be like that scientist who is willing to hear out when maybe our intuitive sense is wrong. When there’s actually something else we ought to do. And that’s exactly what Paul ultimately is forced to do. But not willingly like that scientist.
I think it’s a question that we need to ask each of ourselves. I think it’s a question that we need to ask each of ourselves.
Are we doing harm to God in our zeal? Are we persecuting?
It’s not that we shouldn’t be zealous. I mean, we should be on fire. You hope that you go out to an event like Faithtoberfest and we’re on fire for the Lord, right? We’re going and we’re ready to proclaim and we’re excited to share. But we need to make sure as we do that we ask, am I full of zeal or zeal directed by God?
Because zeal says, no, no, a hot liquid can’t possibly, can’t possibly cool faster than a cool liquid. But zeal directed by the Lord realizes when the counterintuitive thing is the truth. Zeal alone is not faithfulness.
Paul, I think as he studied God’s word, he saw that God repeatedly called his faithful to act zealously and with discipline to his law. And so I think Paul had become convinced if I just can zeal up, if I just have more zeal, what will I do? I will prove that I’m faithful. I will actually make myself faithful. But ironically, the end of that particular phase of his zeal, the change where he rejects what he’d been doing, is where he actually becomes a faithful man.
Because it’s conversion, not our actions that give us faithfulness. Take a look at Acts 9, verse 4.
Saul, why are you persecuting me? Saul, why are you persecuting me? But Saul, later on, after he hears this, we’re just going to jump for a moment and then we’ll come back. But Saul increased all the more, this is amazing, same chapter, increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews, so that they would not be persecuted.
But Saul, later on, after he hears this, we’re just going to jump for a moment and then we’ll come back. Same chapter, increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ. He goes from verse 4, why are you persecuting me, Jesus says, to now he’s proving people wrong if they don’t believe in Jesus.
That’s quite a change, isn’t it? And we take it for granted because we know Saul’s story. This is the story of Saul. But the key thing, the key thing is that we hear the word of the Lord and we can be wrong. We allow ourselves to be wrong. We need to respond when God corrects us. And that’s the thing, thankfully, that Paul does.
Because was Paul a zealous man for the Lord? Ultimately, yes. But he needed to actually be redirected so that he didn’t keep insisting on something that wasn’t true. He kept insisting that those who follow Jesus should be persecuted until finally God almost literally smacks him over the head and says, wait a second here, Paul. This isn’t right.
And so to complete confounding of everybody around him, Saul goes from, I’m going to kill, I’m going to kill people who follow Jesus. To let me prove you wrong if you don’t think Jesus is the Messiah. It’s okay to admit we’re wrong and correct.
Some of us, if we were that wrong, would have decided to just go and hide, right? Okay, I was wrong, but I’m just not going to say anything because I don’t want anyone to know that I know that I was wrong. I’d rather them just forget about me. That’s not what Paul does. And here’s the key thing. If we’re going to become fishers of men and women, you know what we need to do? We need to admit that we’re fishy.
And this is one of the most profound things I think we see in the life of Paul. Paul not only changes, does a 360 on this. Well, a 180, I should say. He didn’t do a 360. He did a 180 on this. But Paul is willing to keep bringing it up.
Paul doesn’t say, yeah, let’s forget what I was before. I kind of wish you didn’t know. And if you didn’t know, I’m not going to help you find out. No, Paul says, this is who I was. 1 Corinthians 15:8. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me, for I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God.
Paul writes people he’s been ministering to who actually have doubts about him. They’re saying, Paul, I don’t know. These other teachers, they have all kinds of great things they can say. And Paul gives the most unlikely pitch for why they should listen to him. Let me tell you about how I am unworthy of the role that I have. Let me tell you about how I persecuted the church.
Because Paul knows it’s not about him. It’s about speaking of what Jesus can do. And so when he’s dealing with people who have doubts about him, he doesn’t go and think, ah, I’m going to somehow make them think I’ve always been perfect. You know, I have this great education. I’m going to make them think I’m perfect. I’m going to make them think I’m perfect. I’m going to make them think I’m perfect. I’m going to make them think I’m perfect. You know, I have this great education. And then, yeah, I had a few years of interest. I had a gap year or two. Don’t ask about it. You don’t have to. No, you don’t. No, he says, let me tell you about it. Let me tell you. I was horrible. I was a monster. I actually thought maybe it’d be good if I killed people. And I did. Persecuted.
Because his mission isn’t to convince people that he is above the fish. His mission is to convince the people that Jesus is one who comes for the fish.
God took Paul’s worst failings and his learning, his good and his bad, and used them both to God’s glory. That’s the key thing. Paul, again, reflecting at the end of his life to Timothy, 1 Timothy 1:15. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.
What does Paul realize? As a young man, he’d been one who tried to convert his zeal into faithfulness. Look how great I am. Follow me because I am great. As the years go on, he realizes what he needs to do is say, follow the one I follow because I am not great.
Faithfulness is a gift from God, not what we stir up in ourselves. The conversion is an important part because when we become his, he works faithfulness, and he works faithfulness through all of our broken and weird and seemingly out-of-place parts.
It’s not that he says, Paul, you should be proud of murdering people. Maybe keep murdering a few people every year so you can talk about how bad it is that you murder people. No, he doesn’t say that, right? He doesn’t tell us to go on sinning and keep doing the things. But he says, take whatever has been in your life and use it to testify to me. Help people to understand me.
Because it would have been really tempting, so incredibly tempting at the end of Paul’s life to say, look at me. I’m the perfect apostle. I’ve traveled more miles than all the other apostles. Someday people will recognize that I’ll have written more letters than all the other apostles. And they’ll quote me probably more than all the other apostles. And I’m kind of like an apostle of the apostles. And aren’t I great?
Unless anyone thinks that, he says, let me remind you. You know, there’s one thing I’m really great at. I’m really great at being the worst sinner.
And God took that and did something with that in my life. I think that’s something key that we see both in Paul’s life and Peter’s life, incidentally. One of the things that now isn’t stated directly in scripture, but tradition suggests that Peter was discipling the Mark who wrote the Gospel of Mark. And I think there’s every reason to believe that’s true.
And I think one of the telling things that both points to that and also speaks to Peter’s growth as a disciple is if you read the Gospels back to back to back, which Gospel makes Peter look like the most of the fool? The Gospel of Mark. It’s not that it says something different. It just goes into more detail about just how stupid Peter often was. That Peter, essentially, he didn’t just put his foot in his mouth. His mouth had basically moved, his foot had basically moved into his mouth. It was just there.
And I think about that. What does that tell us about how Peter discipled Mark? He didn’t disciple Mark by trying to impress him by how wise he was. Look, you young whippersnapper, let me tell you about how great I am. Now, back in my day, we listened to Jesus.
Let me tell you about how I didn’t. Let me tell you about how I messed up. Let me tell you about how I always made it about myself. And so we see in these two apostles, very different apostles, very different lives, one key thing, which is that God’s grace was flowing in them and then back out of them, right? That God’s grace was being focused by them where they said, let me show you how stupid I am so you see that the only reason this is working at all is because of Jesus.
I can’t say I fully understand how it works, but every once in a while, I try to understand how cement works. Kind of an interesting thing when you really think about it. Rocks your world a bit. But when you think about cement, that we can take this powdery stuff, right? And you add water to it and you pour it and you get this sidewalk outside or a road to drive on, or maybe you build a parking garage and you actually can stack concrete upon concrete. Isn’t that pretty amazing when you think about it?
But what is concrete? Well, the Portland cement that we often use is limestone ground up. And they grind up that limestone and then break it up into little pieces. So now it’s not only just a rock that isn’t the right shape, it’s little bitty rocks that aren’t the right shape. What are you going to do with that? Well, they stick it in an oven and they bake those little bits. And they go through a whole process until they become something called clinker. And then they take that and they grind it up again. Seems kind of counterintuitive, doesn’t it?
But by then you have all these minerals that are ready to do something. All these minerals that were already there, but now have been reshaped, converted into something that’s ready to do something. And you pour the water on it. And now it’s not broken up, misshapen rock. It’s something that can be shaped into exactly what it needs to be. You might pour it and form a ramp so you can go fishing, right? You want to go fishing. We’ve been talking about it. You say, I’m going to go fishing. You’re going to drive up to the water and there’s going to be more than likely a concrete slab that’s been shaped. It goes into the water, right? You back your boat down into it.
That water poured on it turns into something that can actually accomplish the things that need to be done. And that’s what Jesus does with us. You think about what happens in the baptismal waters as Jesus applies his truth to us. He takes all those minerals as we come to faith. He takes all those minerals that seem, some of them are jagged and can cut you and some of them just seem useless and he grinds them up and sometimes it’s a painful process and it feels like we’re going through the oven. But he takes all that and he pours his spirit upon us and he starts to shape us into something. And sometimes it’s a smoothing process. Sometimes it takes a while to cure. But we can become the platform then that can allow fishing to happen.
Because of his shaping of us and his water being poured upon us that allows that shaping. We can become hardened into something that does something. It’s not by purging out all the things that had come before, right? The minerals are in some sense a testimony to what came before in that rock’s life as it were. But rather allowing God to shape them into something beautiful, something necessary, something useful.
Paul didn’t go on and keep persecuting. And you can see even as he corrected people later on he learned that his approach to zeal wasn’t really the right approach. I think part of it was that he came to realize that he was trying to somehow prove his faithfulness by going over the top. And instead what he realized is that what he needed to do was actually walk with people and help them to come to know the truth.
And that’s what God had always called him to do. He was meant to be a teacher of the law. He was meant to be someone who did teach people and draw them to the truth. But what had he done instead? Well, he’d just thought maybe it’d be better just to kill them. You don’t convert people by killing them.
So he didn’t do that anymore but he continued to use his gifts, the training that he’d been provided. You can see that throughout his letters. And he used his brokenness throughout his letters. Because he realized what real faithfulness looked like and it wasn’t going to come from him.
The very fact that he could admit that he was wrong was pointing to what really mattered. And that conversion isn’t a failure. It can feel like a failure. I’m saying I’m wrong. I’m saying I’m broken.
Maybe you jumped on tonight and you think, every time I ever encounter a church it’s always about being wrong. I don’t want to convert. That’s admitting failure. But it’s not admitting failure. It’s admitting being loved.
Yeah, it is a failure on our part. But the failure is not converting. The failure is not believing.
When we get away from that failure is when we say, God, transform me, use me, put me in the oven, spread me out and cure me. Just make me actually what I’m meant to be.
And when we see Paul’s life, we see that conversion itself is the success point, the point where faithfulness actually appears because that point is no longer about Paul and testifying to who Paul is, but it’s testimony of him who offers us salvation.
And that is the success we can have. Wherever we’re on direct zeal, wherever we’re on direct energy, that is the thing that we’re aiming for, that we can say, yes, this thing that I’m pouring energy into, it doesn’t just prove I’m right. It doesn’t just prove other people are wrong. Yes, this thing points to him so that more people, including the people that are just like I’ve been, can have hope, can be restored, can also be cured in the right shape.
Would you pray with me, please?
Father, would you help us? We so often think that we have everything down and it turns out we don’t. And a lot of times we don’t want to admit that because it feels like it’s a failure. And yet, Lord, you say over and over again that it isn’t. Yes, we have failed. Yes, we are broken. But success comes in admitting that because at that point, it’s not about our failed faithfulness, but about your always steadfast and constant faithfulness.
Lord, would you help us to be people who are willing to do that? And once we have to proceed, continuing to recognize how you take our brokenness and you use it to your glory. Would you help us, Lord, not to try to build up our own pride, not to try to look perfect, but rather to point to the one who is perfect? Lord, we pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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