Paul Called Himself the Worst, and Meant It

Brother, you keep a ledger. Most men do. It sits somewhere behind your ribs, and every so often it opens on its own and reads you the list. The thing you did that nobody knows. The thing you did that everybody knows. The version of you that shows up when you are tired and cornered and out of patience. You have read that list so many times you have it memorized, and you have decided what it means. It means you are past the point where grace was for men like you.

I want to hand you a man who thought the same thing, and had a better case for it than you do.

It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all. Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life. (1 Timothy 1:15-16)

Foremost. Chief. The worst of them. Paul is not being humble here in the way we are humble, where we run ourselves down a little so someone will jump in and correct us. He is stating a fact he had lived. Before Jesus knocked him flat on that road, Paul hunted Christians. He held coats while men were stoned. He dragged people out of their homes and threw them in prison for the name your whole hope hangs on. He says it plainly a few lines up: "even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor" (1 Timothy 1:13).

That is not a man who fudged his taxes and felt bad about it. That is blood on the record.

And here is the turn you did not see coming. Paul does not say he barely got in. He does not say God held His nose and let him through the back door. He says he was made the pattern. Read it again. "so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example." God took the worst case He could find and put it on display, on purpose, so that every man after Paul who is sure he is too far gone would have somewhere to look.

You are afraid your record disqualifies you. Paul's record is the exhibit God chose to prove the opposite.

Think about what that does to your math. You have been running the numbers where your sin is the biggest thing in the room, bigger than the cross, heavier than the mercy. That is not repentance. Repentance says my sin is real and God is bigger. What you are doing is the sin still winning, just wearing the clothes of humility. A man who says "I am too bad to be forgiven" is not being modest about himself. He is being small about Christ.

Look at what Paul leans on. Not a clean past. He had none. He leans on this: "and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant" (1 Timothy 1:14). More than abundant. More than the persecuting. More than the blasphemy. More than the coats he held and the doors he broke down. The grace did not just cover the debt. It flooded past it.

Picture a man standing at the back of a church he does not think he is allowed in. Everyone else came in the front. He came in the alley door, and he is standing against the wall in his coat because he plans to leave before anyone recognizes him. He has done that math a hundred times. If they knew what I did. If they knew what I still do. He has decided the mercy in that room is for the men in the good pews, and he will just watch from the dark for a minute and go.

That man has never read the sentence Paul wrote. Because that sentence was written for him. Foremost of all. The alley door was the front door the whole time.

I am not going to pretend I have never kept the ledger. I have. It is a hard book to burn. But I will tell you what finally started pulling it out of my hands, and it was not getting better. It was this: the finished work of Christ does not wait for you to improve enough to deserve it. If it waited for that, Paul never gets in, and neither do I, and neither do you. It came into the world to save sinners. Present tense sinners. The ones still limping. Not the reformed, the recovering, the cleaned up. Sinners.

Your record is not too much for this. That is the whole point of Paul putting his own record in the letter. He is not confessing to make you feel better about being a little bad. He is confessing to close off your last excuse. If the man who jailed the church received perfect patience, on what grounds do you think your name is the one that finally breaks the pattern?

It does not. You are not the exception. You never were.

So here is the one thing to go do, and it is small, and I mean it. Open the ledger one more time. Read the worst line on it, the one you would not say out loud. Now say this over it, out loud, alone if you have to: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost. Say it until the sentence stops feeling like a verdict and starts sounding like a door.

Then walk through it, brother. The front way. He has been holding it open for you the entire time.