Paul left a wide path of destruction as he went city to city persecuting God’s people, and yet in 1 Timothy 1:15, even as he names himself the foremost of sinners Jesus came to save, he can say that last part: Jesus came to save him. And He came to save us, too.
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We’ve been on a journey over the past few months, going through the sneaky snakes of sin that sneak up on us and bite us. And boy, if speaking when we shouldn’t and acting when we shouldn’t isn’t right up there, right in the midst of that—I mean, there’s a lot of that snake going around, certainly for me. But there are all these snakes. And then over the weeks after Easter, we’ve thought about some of those things that creep in where we are the snake. We are the one who’s not doing what God’s called us to do, and we’ve seen that in a number of lives of people touched by Jesus.
Tonight we’re going to talk about Paul. And as we do, we talk about someone who left a great deal of wreckage. I think about that in the context of this weekend and the wreckage that we’ve seen in our city. We can understand that sort of wreckage, right? We can understand when we see buildings crumble. And you think about how we feel horror when we hear about the people injured and killed, or the story that Tom was sharing on our prayer group about the building that collapsed on a woman serving the needy. David shared a video—David, right there, couldn’t spot you for a second, which is silly since I just talked to you on the slides—but David shared the video of someone just horrified and scared as the storm hit.
And when we look at that damage and we think of the fear, we think of the destruction, we understand that. Some of us know Greg Johnson at Memorial Prez, and I saw some of the pictures he shared over the weekend, both damaging the church, which has stood there for, I think, like 120 years, something like that, a very long time, faithful testimony to the gospel. I haven’t heard exactly how much how extensive the damage is, but I’ve heard it’s bad. I saw then pictures of his apartment, and the hole in the roof, and the blown out windows, and I thought about him as he was preparing for this weekend’s service. I don’t know exactly what their arrangements even were, but I thought about him. If something isn’t going right at the church, you think, well, at least I’ll go retreat to my home and I can work and think, and the church and the home being hit by the tornado.
We need to keep our brothers and sisters at Memorial, certainly, in prayer, and the other churches, of course, that were hit as well. I thought about that, and it took me back then to our story of the Apostle Paul. He wasn’t a literal tornado. He didn’t swirl down from the sky and knock over bricks, but he might as well have.
So what did he do? He went from city to city persecuting God’s people. And just as I imagined Greg trying to sort out his life and his church’s life this weekend, I imagine those doing ministry in the early church who knew if they went home and Paul got wind of where they were, he would seek them down. If they gathered together as the body of Christ, he would seek them down, and the path of destruction was wide.
We’re used to the Paul that we read about later on, the Paul who writes the books of the Bible that we read. But to understand that Paul, we need to understand the Paul who went and killed people. He left a very wide path of destruction. Here’s the thing that I know hasn’t changed in the last 2,000 years: when we’re faced with destruction and wreckage, we struggle to see redemption in the middle of it.
If we think about our neighbors that were in the path of the storm this weekend, we know that they’re not looking at a toppled house, they’re not mourning over injured or lost relatives and thinking, I wonder what’s redemptive about this? They’re grieving. Paul left people grieving, and it’d be really hard to see past that. It’d be really hard to see any opportunity for him to actually demonstrate God’s redemptive power. Yet that’s exactly what we’re called to confront in God’s Word.
As we come to that, let’s just pray that God would help us to see the wreckage in our own lives, both inflicted upon us and that we inflict, and think about how God’s redemption speaks to it. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, we do come before you as both the ones hit by the tornadoes of life and the ones who are. Lord, would you help us to understand just how powerful your redemption is? Would you help us to rejoice in it? Lord, sometimes it’s hard for us to get our heads around it, but would you help us to understand it more clearly and be empowered by it? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Let’s go ahead and turn to 1 Timothy 1, verse 15. Paul says this: “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”
Paul, by this point, is the mature apostle. This is towards the end of his life. He has ministered all around the known world. He’s traveled Rome, so for all intents and purposes in the way they spoke at the time, he has traveled the world. He has established churches. He has discipled those both in the churches he established and those who were in other churches. He’s done all this, but Paul hasn’t forgotten where he’s come from. As he instructs Timothy and he refers to this phrase—and it’s thought if they used quote marks back in the day that Paul is quoting something here—he says, “The saying is trustworthy,” so he’s saying, “You’ve heard this, Timothy, and I want you to hold on to this in ministry. I want you to know this. This is the truth that we preach: God came to save sinners, and I know because I was the worst.”
We might, for a moment, want to say, “Oh, there’s Paul. He’s doing an aw shucks kind of thing. You know, ah, you know, I’m terrible.” No, you’re not, Paul, but that’s not what Paul’s looking for here. When Paul writes those words, what’s he thinking? “I actually killed the people who knew Jesus. I’m the worst of sinners.”
Paul’s whole life is the exploration of how do we take this in theory, this idea that God’s love is—as the song sometimes makes us uncomfortable even in the wording of it—the reckless love of God. People sometimes say, “Well, should we even say that? Bringing in the person who’s murdering the church and making him an apostle, that’s reckless love.”
You can find a lot of people, and I’d imagine many of the people, as they first encounter Paul, they thought, “God, there are thousands, there are millions of people. Why him? I could do better than that.”
Acts 8:1. Stephen’s just given one of the best sermons ever preached, and then a preacher’s worst nightmare happens. They stone him to death. They literally kill him.
And who’s there in verse one? Saul approved of his execution. Not just Stephen’s. “And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria except the apostles.”
A tornado comes through. The other little churches, they’ve all been going through their lives, and not only is the rubble scattered, they’re not going to come back to it. And who did it? Well, not Paul alone, but Paul in leadership. Paul is actively doing this. He’s known as Saul at this point, but the same man. He’s out there, and he hears Stephen preach a message that shows God’s incredible redemptive work, how He’s taken throughout the whole story of history all these pieces and put them together that those that believe in Jesus can be saved. And Paul says, “Here’s a man who should die.”
He doesn’t just do it once. It wasn’t just a momentary fit of anger or insanity. No, this is Paul’s life. This is the way he’s dedicated himself to.
Acts 9:1, but Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest 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.
Now, as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him. And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” And he said, “Who are you, Lord?” And he said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”
Paul’s ready for an encore. Paul’s ready to go persecute some more. He says, “That worked so well, I’m going to do more of it.”
And Paul, we know enough about Paul, and we know enough about how he writes. I don’t think Paul was a spur of the moment kind of guy. I don’t think he thought, “Well, you know, we’ll try another persecution, and if that works pretty well, we’ll see where we go.”
I think Paul already had persecutions mapped out. He knew where the hotbeds of this Way, as they called it at the time—it didn’t yet have the name Christianity—but he knew where the hotbeds were. These heretics who were messing with the faith, he was going to find them, he was going to kill them. And he felt justified in that, because why? Because they were messing with his God and God’s word. He thought he was protecting the people of God from falsehood.
There were these false teachers who were out there preaching about this man who claimed to be God incarnate, who was put to death and yet rose from the grave, and they were messing with the true faith, and he had to stop it. Until on that road to Damascus, he actually runs into the one they’ve been preaching about. It’s not really exactly the way that we probably would like to run into Jesus. And I think in that moment, that person narrating that video of the hailstorm, or any of the footage you’ve seen of these storms, and you hear the terror, I think Paul is feeling that, because if you get knocked off your horse and all you can see is a bright light and there’s a booming voice coming down from heaven, you know that this is probably not good. And when that booming voice says, “You’re persecuting him,” you know it’s really not good.
I kind of think that Paul was thinking in this moment, “I wonder if this is the last thing I’ll ever hear.” But it wasn’t.
1 Corinthians 15:9 says, “For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.”
You remember what Jesus said to Saul, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” But you remember what Jesus said next, “Go into the city, I have plans for you, Paul. I’m going to prepare you.” And here’s the key thing: Paul realizes in that moment, it takes a literal voice from heaven for him to realize it, but he realizes in that moment that he is against God’s purposes. He’s been couching everything he does in the language of serving God, and I think at least to some degree he believed it. I think he also saw how it would bring him up to a higher and higher status. It was good for him in the circles of the Pharisees to be this zealous one for God’s word. He was thinking about his future career, but I think he thought he was serving God’s purposes.
I don’t think he was insincere in that, but he was so, so incredibly wrong. And we know a lot of people who are sincere about things and incredibly, incredibly wrong. The last thing we want to do is then empower them to go do more. But Jesus says, “Paul, I have a job for you. Let me get you off of your plan and how you think things are and get you onto my plan, and then you’re going to go and you’re going to do my work.”
Proverbs 16:1 reminds me of this: “The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord. All the ways of man are pure in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the spirit.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if Paul spent some time blind there as he’s waiting his instruction. He’s a Pharisee. He would have known God’s word very well. I would not be surprised if that proverb ran through his head, and he’s contemplating, “I thought I had it all down. It seemed good to my eyes, seemed good to my heart what I was doing, and I was wrong.” And why is God allowing me to live now? Is He just letting me linger for a while so I can feel the agony of those that I was going after? Is He going to string me along for a time and then one day I’ll be brought out, the blind man, and they’ll stone me to death like I’ve stoned so many of them? Is that what’s going to happen? And maybe they won’t stone me all the way, they’ll just break a lot of bones and let me die slowly. Maybe that’s what will happen.
That’s not what, of course, God intended for him. A key thing was how Paul responded to this information. And it’s a key thing that we need to pray that we do when God confronts us. He usually doesn’t do it the way that it happened to Paul, so don’t spend your life waiting for that. I’m good as long as God doesn’t knock me off a horse with a light and a booming voice from heaven, so I’m never going to ride a horse; that way I don’t have to worry about that.
As often as we read His word, we study it together here, we study it in Bible study, we read it by ourselves, and as we do that, that’s often where He does it. We don’t need a voice from heaven because we have the voice from heaven recorded in His word. And the question is, are we going to be willing to respond when it speaks, when He speaks to us through it?
What happens when our plans don’t align with God? Because a lot of times they don’t. Paul isn’t unique in that. Paul is us. How many times have we done what’s displeasing to God and gotten in the way of the mission? It’s uncomfortable to talk about, right? Because if I say, “Well, I don’t know, I haven’t been that bad,” well, that’s what Paul would have said. I mean, he knew, he was theologically astute enough; he knew he had sinned in his life, but he thought he was in the balance, he had it pretty good.
Where is it that I don’t even realize yet that I’m actually running in the opposite direction of where God wants me? Where is it that I’m just so stubborn that over and over again I am confronted with what God’s doing and I just say, eh, no, I think I have it figured out, I don’t want to hear it? So you can say, “Well, but Paul hadn’t heard the gospel.” Yes, he had. He’d heard Stephen preach the gospel. He’d actually heard—you’re not going to hear a sermon as good as the sermon that Stephen was preaching that day—and Paul heard one of the best sermons ever preached. Maybe the best sermon ever preached that wasn’t from Jesus himself, and his response is murder.
So we can’t just say, “Well, as long as, if I hear God’s word, I’ll have it down.” Here’s the first thing we need to do: we need to be willing to check what my plans are, what your plans are. We need to check our plans against God’s and say, “God, where my plan doesn’t match yours, tear it down. I don’t want that plan. I want your plan.”
And I have to say, I don’t like praying that. Now, the fact that I resist doesn’t mean that God’s going to let me do what I want instead. It’s not like, “Oh, well, okay, as long as I don’t…” He’s going to have His way. But the opportunity here is to actually experience working in step with the Spirit rather than against the Spirit.
And here’s a second thing I think that’s really important in that: when I realize my plans don’t match, do I realize what God can redeem? Because whatever side I am out of line there on, it can be really hard.
If I’m the one that’s been doing evil to others, the temptation, Satan, once he realizes that we’ve been convicted of something and we realize it’s wrong, the next thing he’s going to want to do is convince us we have nothing left to give. “Oh, well, if you did that, Jesus wouldn’t want you. Why don’t you just sit down quietly?”
Because, “Ooh, wow, you did that?” And the other side is, when we see that happening in other people, our temptation is to say, “Wait, you did that? Let me back away. I don’t want anything to do with you. Because if you’re that kind of person…”
Notice what Paul says here in 1 Corinthians 15:9-10. We looked at the one verse: “For I am the least of the apostles and worthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”
Paul says, “Well, it’s not that I had everything together, and once I was confronted with that pretty strong argument from God on the way to Damascus, I put it all together and I was great after that. God had a purpose for me, and He’s the one that enabled me to do it.” And the key shift there is, “I want to do what God wants me to do. I want to be with Jesus. I want to be following Him. And because I’m following Him and it’s not about me, then it’s not about the fact that I’m a failure in the past that decides whether I can actually do something for God’s kingdom in the future.”
That’s not how we think as human beings. I was reading the other day about how they make sure that the astronauts in the International Space Station stay hydrated. Have you ever thought about that? Kind of interesting. You can’t store that much water up there. It’s not that big. It’s big, but it’s not that big. And so when they’ve been trying to make it so they can do long-term missions up there, they concluded they needed to reuse 98% of the water that they put up there.
Think about that for a second. They need to reuse 98% of the water. Now, some of it is water that the astronauts sweat off, right? They’re just losing moisture. So if you’re thirsty tonight, I’m afraid we don’t have any bottles of sweat in the refrigerator. I’ll try to have that for next week. But would you take one if it were there? No, you wouldn’t, right? And then the rest comes exactly how you’re thinking: they have a briner that they put it in, and it’s supposed to—here, have a glass of water. 98%.
I have to say, that doesn’t make me eager to be up on the International Space Station. Just that thought. It’s sort of like, oh. And I know, I know that water has been circulating the Earth since God created the Earth. And so let’s just not think too much about where our water is coming from, period, right? Just give it to me. Tell me it’s clean. I don’t want to think about it. Because why? If I know where it’s been, I probably don’t want it.
Ananias, who’s the next man we encounter in our story, well, he knows where the water has been. He knows all about Paul. And he’s the next person that gets to talk to Jesus. There’s the voice, and he’s told to go and help out this man named Saul.
But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints at Jerusalem. And here he has the authority from the chief priest to bind all who call on your name.”
But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.”
And Ananias says, you know, “I don’t really need to go to the International Space Station. I don’t want the 98% reclamated water. I want the spring water that at least has gone through the rocks for a really long time. And I just don’t want to think that much about it.”
Or, “I’ll tell you what, just don’t tell me where it’s from, but God, you don’t really want me to go to that man, do you? Don’t you know he kills us?” And God says to Ananias, “No, I want you to go because I’m going to use him. He’s going to go preach my gospel.”
I’m sure Ananias, he goes and he does. He’s faithful to the Lord, but I imagine there’s a lot running through his head as he does, thinking, “What in the world is it that God’s doing?” It’s no wonder he hesitates.
We don’t invite the tornado to come and wreck everything in our lives, but it seems like that’s what God wants here, right? No one in the path of that storm this weekend tried to somehow control the weather and say, “Please blow down my house. Please wreck my car, my church, my business. Please rip out the hundred-year-old trees that generations have enjoyed. Please do that.” No, we don’t do that.
Ananias says, “Lord, you’ve established your church here. You have us on mission. We believe in the gospel and what you’re doing. And what you’re telling me to do here seems like you’re just saying, bring the tornado right on in so he can wreck it from the inside. He’ll know all about us and who we are and where we are.”
Just as Paul’s plan seemed wise in his own eyes, I think as Ananias objects, he’s just using human wisdom. It doesn’t look wise. It is reckless to bring Paul in. But he goes and he does. Why? Because he wants to be in step. He understands that it doesn’t seem wise to him, but God is wiser than he is. So he’s going to go do it.
Now I’d imagine for Paul, as he’s being discipled and starting to learn and he believes in Jesus, there would have also been a temptation, which would be, “Okay, I’m not killing Christians any longer, but why don’t I change my name and never talk about what happened then? Not change it so I can tell everyone how I’m the guy that did that, but change my name. I’ll just be Phil the Apostle and no one will have to ever know that I persecuted. I’ll go to the far part of the land and no one will have to know.”
That wasn’t God’s plan. I think a place where we’re challenged in Paul’s testimony is to be challenged in how we view the power of redemption.
Ananias has challenged, “I’ve been hurt. My friends have been hurt. My family has been hurt. We’ve suffered because of Paul.” Can redemption actually reclaim him? And for Paul, the temptation would be, “Can anyone actually believe that I am reclaimed? Do I have to? I don’t want people to know this, Lord, not after I know how wrong I am.”
Imagine being known for history. That’s what we’ve seen in all of these stories we’ve looked at the past few weeks. They’re known for all eternity now as the people who did these sins. Imagine if your sins followed you like that—the lowest of the apostles because you killed the church, the doubter, the denier, the man who crept in at night even though he was a teacher of the law.
God doesn’t call them so they can assume a new identity and shine it all up and say, “You know, just have everything together like I do.” He chose these imperfect people because God works through imperfect people like us. He didn’t want Paul to pretend it didn’t happen. He wanted the people to see what can happen with people who have done bad things. We aren’t irredeemable tornadoes to God.
We can see that in verse 16 as Paul goes on in 1 Timothy. He says, “But I received mercy for this reason: that in me, as the foremost of all sinners, that is, Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in Him for eternal life.”
“To the King of all ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.”
Paul says, “I know why God called me. Called me so that the people who would hear my story, whatever they said, ‘Well, I can’t come to Jesus because I’ve done this.’ If you had done this,” and Paul says, “Wait a second, let me tell you what I’ve done. I’ve killed the people who were trained under Jesus. You’re not going to top my sin. You want to race and talk about what I’ve done better than you? I’ll tell you, I’ve done bad things better than you have. And Jesus still called me.”
Jesus calls all of us. And there’d be something lost in the power of the redemption that God does if Paul had pretended that hadn’t happened, if he had just started over incognito in the witness protection program. Paul realized that there was a purpose to his past. God was going to use it.
And it sounds kind of like a shaky plan, just as shaky, actually, as the plan that Paul had to begin with to go and kill the people that were proclaiming the Messiah. That was a bad idea obviously, but telling everyone you’re the guy that killed the people that were preaching the Messiah sounds like a bad idea too.
Look at the next verse in that proverb we were looking at: “Commit your work to the Lord and your plans will be established.”
Paul’s plans weren’t going to work. They aren’t going to last. He wasn’t going to defeat the Messiah, and he shouldn’t, right? Once you actually understand whom it is he was persecuting, this is really, really bad. But if you actually trusted in Jesus, you get to be a part of a plan that would last. So too it was with Peter, so too it was with Thomas, so too it was with Nicodemus, so too it was over and over and over again, and so too it has been through the ages all the way until the day that we’re here.
Whenever we list out, “If people knew this, they wouldn’t ever listen to me. However you serve God’s people, if they knew this, they would never let me serve.” God says those things aren’t irredeemable. Yes, you should turn from your sin, absolutely. Paul turns from his sin. He doesn’t keep persecuting the church. But he does take his past sin and say, “Let me tell you how great the grace of our Savior is.”
I was reading about the latest issue of Christianity Today the other day, and I was reading the story of Caleb Campbell. I wasn’t familiar with him until this issue, but he’s writing a book, and they include an excerpt from his book. He’s telling his story because he’s a pastor of a non-denominational megachurch out west that’s not really all that notable in itself, but he happens to be a pastor of a non-denominational megachurch out west who earlier in his life was a neo-Nazi.
He tells a story that when he was in his teens, he went to a party, and he was the kid that was never very popular and always was on the outs. He goes to this party with all kinds of people from all over town, and he sees this group of guys over in the corner. And this group of guys, he knew who they were because they dressed the same way. They had their heads shaved. He knew who they were. They were the local neo-Nazis, and they saw him standing there awkwardly, and they waved him over. And in that moment, he thought, “Maybe there’s some place I can belong.”
He goes on to tell the story. He’d had some experiences that had led him to doubt that there was a God. He’d been raised in a Christian home, but he didn’t really feel like he belonged in church. And here was a group that promised him something, an identity and strength, because he could join this group and they could go around town and beat up other people, and no one was going to mess with them because they were the strong ones.
He thought that’s what he was looking for. After a few years, it turned out that all that strength wasn’t really all that strong because what did he find? He found that his friends weren’t ever able to go anywhere in life. This was supposed to allow them to rise up and have power, but they couldn’t get jobs. Their family and friend relationships were all fractured, and some of them resorted to dealing drugs, and now they were being arrested by the police.
He thought, “Well, I can’t have anything to do with that anymore,” but he didn’t really know what he was going to do. But he had learned to play drums as a teenager, and he happened to put an ad in the paper that he was a drummer available, and a church called him up and asked if he’d like to be the drummer that weekend. So he thought, “Well, that’ll be interesting,” and he went to church, and then it happened again and again until one day one of the staff members invited him over to dinner, and then again and again, and the staff member invited him, not to tell me all your dark secrets so I can tell you how bad you are, but tell me why you’re angry at the church, why you aren’t a part of it.
He started to share his story, and over time, God led him to go to seminary to repent of his past evil and to become the pastor who’s actually led that church to become a multicultural church. It took a neo-Nazi to build a church that brings together God’s people from different countries and ethnicities so they can all praise God together.
I thought about his story in relation to Paul’s, and it struck me because I thought, “Here is a man who probably was deeply tempted, as he was convicted by the gospel, to move to a different state and try to pretend that none of that ever happened.” Instead, he’s realized that it’s right in the center of his calling, because he can speak to what he was and what God can do, and because of that, God’s actually using him to help other people caught in that, and that’s become his mission: to reach people that get intertwined into that and to call them out of it lovingly, not just telling them how stupid they are, but instead to speak about what they’re really looking for.
That’s what God did with Paul. He took a man who had opposed God in his pride, in his achievements, in everything he thought was the way it should be, and took him and led him to be the apostle who says, “I am the worst of the apostles, I am the least of the apostles, because I actually killed the church.” And He used him to build the church.
Whatever you carry in here tonight—and we all do—you’re thinking, “Well, maybe not everyone else does; I know I do,” but we all do. We need to understand that God doesn’t let that past stop us from being what He intends to use us for.
Sometimes we have to reckon with it. I’m not saying there aren’t sometimes consequences. Paul goes through a painful transition there, right? There are people who have committed crimes and they end up in jail, but what do they do? Then they minister in jail.
We’re not talking about that there aren’t earthly consequences, but what we need to understand when we’re talking about eternity and salvation is that whatever you’ve done, whatever I’ve done, God can and will overcome it.
I want to forget my storms. I want to pretend I wasn’t ever a tornado. I certainly don’t want people to know that I was a tornado, because my human perspective, and our human perspectives in general, is to view whatever destruction, whatever sin we’ve done, whatever bad things that leave us ashamed, that they’re destructive, they’re irredeemable, and they’re best forgotten.
But God’s view is that the wreckage testifies to His faithfulness, because when we live faithfully as those who are redeemed—not those who are pretty well already okay and now we just love Jesus too, but those who really actually need redemption—God uses that to tell other people, “I’m here for you too.”
We are all snakes. We’ve hidden, we’ve doubted, we’ve denied, we’ve persecuted, we’ve done these things, but here’s the challenge: are we ready to be redeemed snakes? Are we ready to say, “This is who I am, but God has overcome it,” because God can rebuild,
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