The Worst One He Saved First

Paul had written many letters since the one to his grieving friends in Thessalonica. He was older now, and this letter was for someone he loved like a son.

"To Timothy," he began, "my true son in the faith."

Timothy was young, and Paul had left him in the city of Ephesus with a hard job. Some teachers there had stopped talking about Jesus and argued about made-up stories and long lists of who was whose great-great-great-grandfather. (A whole church meeting could go by that way without anyone getting as far as Jesus.)

"Tell them to stop," Paul wrote. "The goal of everything we teach is love, from a clean heart."

Then his pen slowed.

He remembered the man he used to be, back when everyone called him Saul. He had hated the name of Jesus. When a crowd in Jerusalem killed Stephen with stones, Saul stood by and said it was right. After that he burst into homes and hauled believers off to jail. He was sure he was doing God a favor.

Then, on the road to Damascus, a light brighter than noon knocked him flat in the dirt.

"Saul, Saul," said a voice, "why are you hunting me?"

"Who are you, Lord?"

"I am Jesus, the one you are hunting."

(Saul had been carrying letters that let him arrest people in Damascus. He never got to use them.)

Jesus could have finished him right there. Instead he called him by name and gave him work to do.

"I thank Christ Jesus our Lord," Paul wrote now, "who made me strong and trusted me to serve him. I used to speak against him. I hurt his people. I was a bully. But God was merciful to me, because I did not know what I was doing, and the kindness of our Lord poured over me like a river over its banks."

Then he wrote down a true saying that everyone should believe: "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners."

And Paul added, "I am the worst of them."

He did not write "I was." He wrote "I am."

Think of a doctor who wants a whole town to trust him. He might go first to the sickest man in town, the one everyone had given up on, and make him well. After that, who would be afraid to knock on the doctor's door?

"That is why I was shown mercy," Paul wrote. "In me, the worst one, Jesus could show first how patient he is, so that everyone who believes in him after me can see it and live with him forever."

Paul had barely started his letter, and already he broke out praising:

"To the King of all the ages,
who never dies, whom no eye can see,
the only God,
be honor and glory forever and ever! Amen!"

(Paul did this a lot, the way a boy walking home suddenly breaks into a run.)

But Paul could not undo what he had done. Stephen was still dead, and the families he had jailed still remembered his fist on their doors. Paul could never pay for that. Jesus already had, on the cross, and on the third day he was alive enough to stop a man on a road.

Back in Galilee, when people grumbled that Jesus ate with cheats, he answered, "Healthy people don't need a doctor. Sick people do. I came to call sinners." Paul had been the sickest man in town, and Jesus came down the road looking for him.

The line at that door has grown every year since: liars and bullies, thieves and grumblers, people sure they had gone too far. Jesus is patient with every one of them. He came into the world for sinners, and he is still finding them.