Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

So good to see so many of you fresh off of my summer sabbatical.  I want to thank the church and so many individuals who have been gracious to Michelle and me and my family, praying for us.  It’s truly a restful time to go out west to Wyoming.  A beard attached itself to my face and I’ve been unable to remove it since then.  But I just want to express thank you for your investment in the spiritual and family life of your pastors.

We are continuing our series in the book of 1 Timothy.  We just started.  We’re in chapter 1, verses 12 through 17.  1 Timothy, chapter 1, verses 12 through 17.

Let me read the Word and then pray.  Hear the Word of the Lord.

“I thank Him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because He judged me faithful, appointing me to His service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent.  But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.  The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am 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.  To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.”

Let’s pray.  So Lord Jesus, we pray now that You would glorify Yourself through Your Word and the preaching of the Gospel.  For it’s in Your name that we pray.  Amen.   

Well, I’m probably not in the minority of many in this room in saying that one of the things that I love to do in my downtime is to read Christian biographies.  Christian biographies or autobiographies.  I love to read about the lives of the saints, both past and present.  I love to read about their beginnings.  Where were they born?  What was their family life like?  I love to read about their upbringing.  I love to read about their early impressions of God.  I love to read about their conversion experiences.  I love to read about their struggles, their challenges, their victories in their life.

I think one reason is that there is something very compelling about seeing the truths of the Gospel on display in the life of another person.  It seems to make it more real to us, brings it closer to us, and perhaps no one’s life has a more compelling testimony of the truth and grace of the Gospel than that of the Apostle Paul.

In this text before us, Paul gives us an autobiography of sorts.  It’s a short but a profound reflection on God’s grace in his conversion and in his ministry.  This evening I want to take his reflection and let it serve as a testimony to us, something of a meditation on God’s grace, in hopes that perhaps we might see the Gospel maybe in new ways or fresh ways, or perhaps even more personal ways.  That’s the goal of this sermon.

So three simple truths, we might call them Gospel reminders about God’s grace, displayed in Paul’s life and ministry.

Truth number one.  God’s grace is for the undeserving.

Truth number two.  God’s grace is overflowing.

Truth number three.  God’s grace is for others.

In conclusion, we’ll help that make a little bit more sense.  God’s grace is for the undeserving, God’s grace if overflowing, and then God’s grace is for others.

God’s grace is for the undeserving.  We see this in verses 12 and 13.  Paul begins in verse 12.  He says I thank Christ Jesus, who has given me strength because He judged me faithful, appointing me to His service.  Paul is an older man.  Now he’s reflecting on his life and his ministry.  He says Christ has judged him faithful.  He’s been faithful but he’s never forgotten about God’s grace for him and how remarkable it is that Paul is a minister of the Gospel.

In verse 13 he lets us know why.  Paul tells us a little bit about himself.  He says he was a blasphemer.  He spoke against the name of Jesus.  He was a persecutor.  He persecuted Christ and His Church.  You’ll recall that Paul is first mentioned in the New Testament the end of Acts 7 at the stoning of Stephen, who was the first Christian martyr.  Acts 7:58 captures Paul, then Saul, looking on with approval, and here’s what it says:  They cast him, that is Stephen, out of the city and stoned him and the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.

You ever watch a movie where they introduce a character and you immediately know, okay, this guy’s a bad guy?  This is an evil character.  You know, the ominous music D‑minor is playing.  It’s in the background and you immediately know something’s wrong.  If you’re reading the end of Acts 7 and the beginning of Acts 8, you hear that ominous sort of D-minor music in the background as this character Saul is introduced.

Not only was he present at the stoning of Stephen, he persecuted Christians.  He hunted them down and he murdered them.  He was a violent man.  He says he was an insolent opponent of the Gospel and just the name of Saul struck fear in the hearts of Christians, sent them running.  Paul hunted them down.

As I was thinking about this, one comparison you might think Paul was on the level of an officer in the Gestapo in late 1930s in Germany.  He was right there with them, hunting Christians down, murdering them, blaspheming the name of God.

The point is you can’t get any worse than Paul.

We often get offended.  You ever been around someone and you kind of get the sense that they think they’re better than you.  Maybe you might, you might be so bold as to go up to them and say, “What?  Do you think you’re better than me?”

Well, Paul’s logic, it actually works in reverse.  If Paul were to come up to one of us today, he would say, “What?  Do you think you’re worse than me?  Okay, well, let’s compare rap sheets.  All right?  Here’s yours right here and then here’s mine right here.  I don’t care what you’ve done, here’s mine.  Let’s just compare for one second.  Let’s see.  Blasphemer.  Persecutor.  Murderer.”  Okay, Paul, game up, you win.  Right?  You’ve got the worse rap sheet.

The simple message is if there was ever a person who was undeserving of the love and mercy of Jesus, it was Paul.  And yet he said God had mercy on him.

It tells us something about God’s grace and that is simply this – it extends to even the worse of sinners.  It might speak to you tonight because this is a message to those who somehow think they are beyond God’s grace and God’s mercy.  But no matter what you’ve done, no matter where you’ve been, you are not beyond God’s mercy and grace.  You may feel that way, but I give you Paul.  Set him in front of you.

So Paul’s life teaches us, it speaks to those who think they are beyond God’s mercy.

But there’s another way that Paul’s life testifies to us, probably more of us in here.  It testifies to those who forget their need of mercy.  There was a point in time were Paul would not have described himself the way that he described himself in verse 13.  Paul was a Pharisee of Pharisees.  In his mind he upheld the law.  He was not an unrighteousness pagan, he was a righteous Jew and he thought that he served a righteous cause.  But Paul had yet to see himself for who he really was.

As I was thinking and preparing over this Scripture, it made me think of the story of Chuck Colson.  Some of you know this story.  For the younger crowd here, there was a decade called the 1970s, a President name Richard Nixon, and a scandal Watergate.  All right?  So just Google it.  You can learn all kinds of good things about it.  But Chuck Colson worked as a top aide in the Nixon administration.  He was known as the hatchet man.  It wasn’t because he killed people, but it was because he knew how to remove all the political enemies of the President, all the political opponents.  He knew how to destroy them not only politically, but also their careers, how to ruin their lives.  He was a master at it.  He was one of the most powerful men in Washington and he thought that he served a righteous cause, that of the President.   

But ultimately Colson was arrested as a result of the Watergate scandal on charges of obstructing justice.  As all of this began to come to a head in his life, in the midst of the trial, he had a Christian friend that he did business with some years ago and this Christian friend began to witness to Chuck Colson.  Initially, Chuck Colson was dismissive of his friend, but his friend kept at it and eventually he gave him a copy of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  He asked him, he said, “Would you read this?”  And Colson agreed to read it and they began to meet on his friend’s back brick patio at night.  They would sip sweet tea together and they would read chapters of Mere Christianity and discuss it.

Colson would raise his objections to the Christian faith and his friend would do his best to answer those objections.  It didn’t seem like it was going anywhere, but eventually they got to C.S. Lewis’s chapter on pride.  In that chapter C.S. Lewis peels back the layers of how pride operates in our hearts.  How pride is insidious.  We can’t see it.  How it is the capital sin, the chief of sins, and Colson would not have thought of himself at that time as the chief of sinners until that night. 

He began to see how pride was the motivating force in his heart and his life.  He saw how determined he was to get to the top no matter what.  He saw how arrogant and self-righteous he had become.  He saw how little he loved others, measuring his own success by his ability to dominate others or perhaps remove them if they were in his way.  He saw the insidious nature of his own self-righteousness. 

Colson, after discussing that, he got in his car and it was raining that night.  He was driving down the road and the Spirit was working in his heart.  Tears began to flow down his eyes.  He couldn’t even make it home.  He pulled over, this is a hardened man, he pulled over to the side of the road and he began to weep.  Why?  Because for the first time he began to see himself for who he really was – an undeserving sinner.

He turned to Christ and he confessed his sin and his need of a Savior and he wrote an autobiography entitled Born Again a couple of years later.  Many of you know he launched a great prison ministry called Prison Fellowship.  He died in 2012, lived an incredibly fruitful life for the Lord.

But what happed with Colson?  What happened with him?  What happened with Colson is the same thing that happened with the Apostle Paul, and the same thing that happens with all of us who come to Christ and that is we begin to see ourselves for who we really are.

Zach talked last week about the second use of the law, that it is to show us our sin.  That’s the Spirit’s work in our lives, showing us the things that maybe you and I do not want to see, perhaps things that are hidden to our eyes, we’re blind to them.  It could be our pride, it could be our selfishness, it could be our conceit, it could be our vanity, our envy, our lust, our anger.  The Spirit begins to work.  These things become apparent to us.

The Spirit shows these things not to bring us to despair, but so that we might see our need for a Savior. 

The point is Paul came to see himself as an undeserving sinner and it’s clear in verse 13, and it’s clear that he never lost that sense of things either.  Not only did he see his need of Christ but he saw God’s grace poured out for him in Christ. 

That takes us to point two.  God’s grace is overflowing.

Having seen his past, Paul puts the spotlight on how remarkable the grace of God is.  In the latter part of verse 13, he says but God had mercy on me because I acted ignorantly in unbelief.  In other words, God had pity on his ignorance and his unbelief.  In verse 14, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

Now notice here as you see that word “overflow.”  The focus is on abundance.  The abundance of God’s grace, the overflow.  The literal Greek means super-abounding.  So Paul is saying God’s grace for me was super-abounding.  But in what sense?  He says with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. 

You might look at that as a little bit confusing.  Does Paul mean the faith and love of Jesus or the faith and love in Jesus?  Or his own faith and love because of Jesus?  The answer is yes.  Paul means for us to make a connection between faith and love and Jesus.

We might be tempted to think of faith and love in this way, as though God just sort of backed up a cement truck of faith and love and just sort of dumped it into Paul’s life.  So we might read a passage like this and think, Lord, I need faith and love.  That’s a good prayer but just looking up at the sky, just waiting for the Lord to just give me some faith and love, when’s it coming?  Is it going to fall out of the sky?

Or we might go searching down into our hearts, trying to conjure up, trying to work up some faith and love and we often, we fall into despair at the lack of fruit in our lives, or the seeming lack of outpouring in our lives.  So we might wonder how does this work.  How does it work?  How did faith and love overflow into Paul’s life and how does it come to overflow into ours?  The answer is not to see faith and love as some kind of self-generating virtue, but as coming from somewhere or someone as having a source.  What we must see, dear Christians, is that faith and love overflow into our lives, not apart from Christ but because of Christ.

He is the original, originating, life-giving source of faith and love.  So this overflow happens in seeing Jesus and encountering him and being united to Him, seeing God’s grace for us in the crucified and risen Christ.  That’s how I come to experience this overflow of faith and love that Paul is talking about.  It was through his encounter with Christ and coming to faith in Christ, and knowing Him and meditating upon Him.

I like what William Hendriksen says about this verse of Scripture.  He says grace kindles faith and love and floods the soul with these divine gifts.

So Paul means to aim our focus not on the divine gifts but on the divine source of these gifts.  That’s where the overflow happens.

I mentioned that we went out to Wyoming.  We had this big decision to make.  Do we do the 30-hour family car ride out there or do we fly?  We decided we’re not sanctified enough to do the 30-hour car ride out there, right?  Smart enough to do that.  But we thought to ourselves, you know, we really would like to see that country and not just see it from 30,000 feet.  We’d actually like to see the West.

So we made a smart decision.  We flew into Denver, and it’s about a 9-hour drive from Denver to near Jackson, Wyoming where we were staying.  We rented a car.  As we started down the highway, you could just see these snow-capped mountains.  It was as if you just drove all day toward the same mountain.  You’d think, are we ever going to get to this mountain?  It’s just out there.  Just beautiful view.

When we go to our place where we were staying, there were these snow-melt streams beside where we were staying.  You know, you go in the backyard and you would just hear the streams flowing, water just flowing as cool as it could be and you’d stick your hand in there.  You’d look up at those snow-capped mountains and you’d think that is the source of all of this that’s flowing down here and it just keeps coming, it just keeps coming, it just keeps coming, and you marvel at that stream that just keeps flowing from that snow-capped mountain.

So it is with Christ and faith and love.  So for Paul, faith and love are an outflow of the super-abounding grace seen and received in Christ Jesus.

That’s how Paul’s life is a testimony of the overflowing grace of God and Christ.  God’s grace is overflowing.  When we look to Christ, we see it.  We respond with faith and love.

This brings us to our third point.  God’s grace is for others.

God’s grace is for others.  Paul makes this famous proclamation in verse 15.  He says this saying is trustworthy, deserving full acceptance.  Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am foremost.  Here we see Paul’s testimony was for others.  We might think this is great for Paul.  Okay.  Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus, right?  Okay, good.  God flooded Paul’s soul with faith and love.  Good for him, but what about me?  But no, Paul makes it explicit here.  He says God’s grace is not just for Paul, it’s for sinners.  Regardless of past or status or merit, Jesus came into this world to save sinners.  Don’t you love the breadth of that?  That’s the free offer of the Gospel.

It’s this remarkable truth, Paul says, it’s trustworthy.  Deserving of full acceptance.  Paul does in several places in his epistle when he wants to call particular attention to the truth of a statement, he’ll say this is a trustworthy saying.  Hear ye, hear ye.  It’s kind of like Jesus saying “truly, truly I say to you, hear what is about to fellow, because you can bet your life on it.”

So Paul says this is a trustworthy saying, Christ came into this world to save sinners, deserving of full acceptance.

So it’s not like accepting a fact about someone, but it’s more like something you welcome, something you receive, something that you act upon, something that you bet your whole life on.  Paul’s saying you can stake your whole life on the truth of this statement, Christ came into this world to save sinners.

This is Paul’s urging to others – accept it, receive it for yourself.  Trust in Christ.  In fact, this is why Paul said he received mercy.  He says in verse 16, “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.” 

So think about this.  Paul reasons that he received mercy so you and I can receive mercy.  That we might see the mercy of God on display in forgiving Paul’s egregious sins, that we might see the grace of God overflowing in Christ and the patience of God for sinners through Paul’s testimony and seeing that by the work of the Spirit that faith and love would begin to overflow into our lives as we believe, as we accept, as we trust Christ for ourselves as the sinner for whom Christ came to save.  That’s you and that’s me.  We are the others, and as that happens, that we might be a testimony to others.      

So my encouragement to you this evening, Christ Covenant, is essentially this.  Just do this.  Adopt 1 Timothy 1:16 as your life verse.  You say, Derek, I already have a life verse.  Well, add this.  You can have two.  Okay?  Just add on to it.  Just put your name in there – For this reason, I was shown mercy…  For Mark, for Matt, for Theresa, for everyone else I could name in here, who believe in Christ, for this reason, I was shown mercy so that in me, the foremost, Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as an example to those who would believe on Him for eternal life. 

If you’re laboring trying to write your own autobiography, I’ve got good news for you.  Paul has already written it for you.  Because 1 Timothy 1:16 is every Christian’s autobiography.

We know the ripple effects of 1 Timothy 1:16 in Paul’s life rocked the first century Church and generations after that as many were converted as a result of Paul’s life and ministry, but what about the ripple effects of 1 Timothy 1:16 in our story?  How might God use that as a display to others if that’s our testimony?  That we might look at our lives and say to others, God’s grace.  You know what?  God’s grace is for the undeserving.  Because I am the undeserving.  That we might point to Christ and say to others, God’s grace is overflowing.  And finally, that others might look at us and see the overflow of faith and love that are in Christ Jesus and give glory to God.

That’s how Paul concludes this portion of the text.  The King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, the honor and glory, forever and ever.  Amen.  May that be our testimony and our story, brothers and sisters.   

Let’s pray.  So Lord, we do thank You that we can sing marvelous grace of our loving Lord, that Your grace is for the undeserving and that we can number ourselves as those who are sinners but yet those who have been forgiven of our sins and reconciled to You and can live a new life in Christ of faith and love.  Lord, we pray that these things would not escape our attention but that You would draw us closer to Yourself, bring us to meditate more truly and fully on Your Word for us, and to praise You forevermore.  In Christ’s name.  Amen.