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Before we dive in, a bit of scholarship. This letter belongs to what’s called the Pastoral Epistles, and the majority of scholars have concluded Paul didn’t actually write it — we call the author Pseudo-Paul.
That wasn’t unusual for the time; writing in the name of someone renowned and already trusted was a common practice. This letter was likely written a generation or two after Paul’s death around the year 60, probably by someone — or a community — working out what Paul might have said to them in the middle of their own struggles. Think of it as an early “What Would Paul Do?”
We’re going to move through the letter fairly quickly over the next few weeks, skipping the parts we’re less fond of. If the person who wrote this had known it would become scripture, they might have chosen their words more carefully. For simplicity, I’ll just call the author “Paul.”
There’s a recent movie, “The Drama,” where two couples play a confession game in the final days before one of their weddings. When Emma, the bride-to-be, names the worst thing she’s ever done, what follows isn’t tenderness or compassion — it’s judgment and anger.
Her friends turn on her. Someone tells her fiancé to walk away. The confession itself doesn’t destroy anything. It’s what everyone else does with it afterward that does the damage.
I won’t tell you what she did — or rather, what she planned to do and didn’t, while one of her friends actually did something worse. What matters is that the response wasn’t just, wasn’t kind, didn’t honor her vulnerability.
What do you think happens if your worst chapter gets out? I’d guess most of us don’t expect compassion. We expect judgment. Shame. Rejection from the very people who say they love us.
“Paul” writes, right up front in this letter, that he was the worst — and then names exactly what he means: blasphemer, persecutor, a violent man. This isn’t a youthful indiscretion or a season of doubt.
He’s describing years spent hunting down the earliest followers of Jesus, consenting to real violence against real people, certain the whole time he was doing God’s work. And then, on the road to Damascus, something knocked him flat in the dirt — and at first, he had no idea what it was.
What follows is a quieter line, the kind you could read right past. He says he was shown mercy because he acted “in ignorance and unbelief.” Not because he was innocent — but because, at the time, he had no idea what he was actually doing.
And here’s the thing: none of this is in the past tense. “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” — and then, instead of saying he was the worst of them, he says he is. Present tense. Years into ministry, after churches planted and letters written, “Paul” still calls himself, right now, the foremost of sinners.
Does that strike you as strange? If grace really transformed him, shouldn’t he get to stop? Shouldn’t the confession expire at some point?
I think most of us live somewhere between forgetting the worst thing — or wanting to — and living inside it permanently.
Some of us bury the worst chapter so completely we lose the ability to be honest about it at all. We move on so hard we go a little numb in the process — not healed, just hidden. Others of us stay so fused to the worst chapter that we can’t imagine a version of ourselves not defined by it. The failure becomes the whole story, and forgiveness starts to feel like something that happens to other people.
“Paul” is doing neither. He names his violence in the plainest terms possible, and he does it from a place that isn’t shame — as someone who has already received mercy and is still standing inside it. So what lets him hold both: the truth of what he did, and the truth of what he’s become, without collapsing into denial or despair?
I have two ideas, though I’m sure there are multitudes and I would love to hear your thoughts.
My first one: grace got to “Paul” before “Paul” got to grace.
Right after naming himself the worst of the worst, “Paul” slips in that phrase again: “ignorance and unbelief.” He wasn’t cooperating with God on the road to Damascus.
He wasn’t seeking, wasn’t halfway convinced, wasn’t leaving the door cracked open just in case.
He was actively working against everything God was doing — and mercy found him anyway, before he understood what was happening, before he asked for it, before he had any capacity to turn toward it himself.
Centuries later, John Wesley gave this a name: prevenient grace — grace that goes before. Grace already at work in a person’s life before they’re aware of it, before they’ve repented of anything, before they’ve done a single thing to deserve or invite it.
Wesley pictured this with a house. Prevenient grace is the porch — you’re not inside yet, but you’re already under the roof, out of the storm. While “Paul” was hunting Christians in God’s name, grace was already surrounding him like that porch roof: keeping him alive, keeping him from going further than he did, preparing him for a door he didn’t know was there yet.
Grace doesn’t wait politely for us to get ready. It goes ahead of us, into places we haven’t arrived at yet, doing work we can’t take credit for and didn’t request.
And just beyond that door, there’s so much more grace has been preparing — not just a roof to keep us alive in the storm, but a hearth, a table, a feast, a warm bed, waiting for us to walk through and accept what’s already been prepared.
This matters more than it might sound.
If grace only shows up after we clean ourselves up, it’s just a reward — something we qualify for. But that’s not “Paul’s” story.
Mercy met him mid-violence, while he was still convinced he was right. It wasn’t a response to his goodness. It was already present in his worst moment, waiting to be noticed.
That’s the ground everything else stands on: mercy precedes awareness, always. Whatever you’re ashamed of, whatever chapter you’d rather not tell anyone about — grace may already have been there before you knew to look for it.
But if that’s true, how do you keep living inside that kind of mercy without either forgetting you needed it, or being crushed by the memory of why?
For an answer, I want to move to church basements and back rooms — where people practice the Twelve Steps.
If you’ve ever been in one of those rooms, or known someone who has, you know the pattern. A person stands up, sometimes after decades of sobriety, and says, “I am an alcoholic.” Not “I was.” Not “I used to struggle with.” I am. Spoken in the present tense, every time, no matter how much time and healing sits behind them.
At first that can sound like the trap I described a minute ago — staying fused to the worst chapter forever. But that’s not what’s happening. That sentence isn’t self-punishment; it’s what keeps the healing honest.
Spoken out loud, in community, it keeps the mercy from calcifying into denial — I don’t need this anymore — or collapsing into shame — I’ll always just be this.
This happened, and I am still here — and that honesty is what makes the whole thing usable for the next person walking through the door.
That’s “Paul’s” “I am the foremost of sinners.” It’s not despair. It’s not false modesty either. It’s the same discipline — the ongoing honesty that keeps mercy real instead of theoretical, and that turns his own worst story into something someone else, later, can hold onto as a pattern for their own hope.
He says as much himself: he was shown mercy so that others might see, in him, what patience and mercy actually look like when they land on a real person.
Grace goes before you. It was present in “Paul’s” worst violence before he turned around, and if Wesley is right, it has been present in whatever you carry, too, long before you noticed it. Staying honest — plainly, without shame, without hiding — is what keeps that grace from becoming an abstraction. It’s what lets your story become useful to somebody else, the way “Paul’s” became useful to every person who has read this letter for two thousand years since.
I’d invite you to actually try this, not just hear it. Where might grace already have been at work in your life, before you turned to notice it? You don’t have to answer that this morning.
In your bulletin this week you’ll find a simple nightly practice — five minutes, that’s all — for doing exactly that kind of noticing each night. It borrows from an old prayer tradition and from the same plain honesty we just talked about. Take it home. Use it once, even if only once, and see what you notice.
Because here’s how “Paul” ends this passage, and it’s the last thing I want to leave you with.
There’s an old poem that circles this same question — what’s really waiting for us when we’re finally caught. Francis Thompson called it “The Hound of Heaven,” written at the end of the nineteenth century.
From the very beginning, the poem’s speaker describes fleeing something down every night and day, down every hallway of his own mind — and he never names what’s chasing him.
He only calls it “Him,” capitalized, relentless, unhurried, matching his pace no matter how far he runs.
He’s certain, almost to the very end, that it means him harm. And then, finally, it catches him:
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
“Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.”
You drove love away from yourself, the voice says, in driving Me away. The very thing the soul spent the whole poem running from turns out to have been love, chasing it, the entire time.
That’s “Paul’s” story too. He spent years running the other direction as hard as he could — not fleeing God exactly, but doing violence in God’s name, certain he was in the right.
And what finally caught up to him on the road to Damascus wasn’t punishment. It was mercy, revealed as having been there, patiently, the whole time.
After all of that — after blasphemer, persecutor, violent man, after foremost of sinners — “Paul” doesn’t end in shame. He doesn’t even end with a resolution to try harder. He ends in worship: To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
That’s where both of these traditions land, too. The Twelve Steps end not in guilt but in service — in carrying what you’ve received to somebody else who needs it.
Wesley’s whole theology moves toward sanctification and joy, not endless self-examination. And “Paul,” having just told us the worst thing about himself, moves straight into praise.
That’s the invitation this week. Not to dwell in what you did. Not to pretend it didn’t happen. But to notice, honestly, where grace has already been ahead of you, chasing you, patient as that footfall — and to let that noticing turn, the way it did for “Paul,” into something closer to praise.