Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Why He Came (1 Timothy 1:12-17)
Date: December 3, 2023
I want you to think for a second about a time when you heard a dramatic conversion story. Those can be really powerful. I once knew a chainsaw artist who specialized in making eagle’s nests. He carved some pieces for a prayer garden one of the Boy Scouts at our former church made as his Eagle Scout project. They were pretty amazing. In talking to him a few times, I learned that he had never done any art of any kind, let alone chainsaw art, before he became a follower of Jesus. He was mostly just interested in doing drugs. Almost as soon as he accepted Jesus, though, he felt a calling to art, and had been making it ever since. Maybe you’ve seen the movie, The Jesus Revolution. It tells the story of the rise of Chuck Smith who would go on to pastor the Crystal Cathedral church in Orange County, CA. The movie also features the conversion story of Greg Laurie, the pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship, and a prominent speaker and author. Like my chainsaw artist friend, Greg was into all kinds of drugs before becoming a follower of Jesus. The experience that pushed him over the edge in the direction of the Gospel was when he was driving down the road with some buddies who were all high on LSD, and they saw a glowing vision of heaven in the distance on the side of the road. It wound up being a sign for a funeral home. The experience literally scared him back to the straight and narrow path from the broad path leading to destruction he had been sliding down. Do you know who else had a pretty dramatic conversion? The apostle Paul. And his story is one that I’d like to give a bit of our attention this morning.
This morning, we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series for the season of Advent. Can I give you a bit of a peek behind the curtain this morning as we get started? One of the hardest parts about being a preacher is what is usually called the Christmas season, but which is really the season of Advent. The challenge is not that the stories of Jesus’ birth are particularly hard to tell. They are wonderful stories. They carry great meaning and rich nostalgia for many of us. But there’s just one set of stories. That we come back to every year. Year after year. After year. And after a while, it gets tough coming up with fresh things to say about the same stories you’ve told time and time again. So, every now and then, we strive to change things up just a bit so that familiarity doesn’t start to breed contempt. This year is going to be one of those years. We’re going to land on the stories many of you know so well, but the journey is going to matter. And the question that is going to be driving our journey is a fairly simple one: Why did Jesus come? Let me give you one answer here out of the gate, and then we’ll talk about why that is such good news for us. Jesus came to save people like Paul.
Paul’s story is pretty amazing. It’s a good enough story that we actually get three versions of it in Acts. One is in Acts 9 when it actually takes place. The other two are both when Paul delivers his testimony to an audience which in one case was King Agrippa of Judea, the grandson of Herod the Great who tried to have Jesus murdered when He was a baby. We also get snippets of his story when he includes little biographical sections in his various letters.
Paul, who was originally called Saul, started out his life as a committed Jew. He was a radically committed Jew. He was among the best and brightest students of the Law in his day. In fact, he tended to stand out as a star even among that group. He was incredibly intelligent. He was an able intellectual defender of the goodness and wisdom of the Law. More than that, he didn’t just want you to recognize its inherent goodness, he wanted you to actually keep it in your own life like he did. He was so convinced in the rightness of his beliefs that he was willing to use force to help encourage others to join him in them.
Because of all of this, when he learned about this new, wildly heretical movement called, “The Way,” that was sweeping Jerusalem, he was incensed. Who did these freaks think they were talking about God’s raising the blasphemous rabbi, Jesus, from the dead as proof of His divine identity? He made it his personal mission to stamp this movement entirely out of existence. It could not be allowed to tempt his people into sin any longer. So, with permission from the chief priests, he began going house by house through the city, dragging off anyone accused of being associated with the movement of Jesus to jail where they would be…encouraged…to renounce their association or face the true and just penalty of their blasphemies. At the point he had pretty thoroughly canvassed Jerusalem, he got permission to expand his campaign of terror to the nearby city of Damascus, where the members of The Way had established another stronghold.
It was while Paul and his companions were on the way to Damascus that Jesus appeared to him and revealed that he was fighting for the wrong team. He appeared to Paul and invited him to accept Him as God’s Messiah and to follow Him as Lord. Paul almost immediately did just that, changing the entire course of history, and especially the history of the western world, in the process.
Now, as much as stories like that are powerful for us to hear second- or third-hand long after they have happened, they are even more powerful to the people who actually experienced them. If you have had a powerful experience with Jesus, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe you’ve told the story and it was an encouragement to another person, but that encouragement pales in comparison with what it does for your own flagging spirit when you are struggling. You probably can’t fully put into words just what your own story means to you. After all, it is your story. You experienced the power of God in that moment and it left you forever changed. I can point to two or three such experiences in my own life that in all likelihood have a great deal to do with why I am here doing this so many years later.
Well, the same was true for Paul. When he was near the end of his life, his mind still went back to that powerful experience with Jesus on the Damascus road and the reality of just what God did for him in Christ. We know this is the case because we have some of these reflections preserved for us in writing. In Paul’s first letter to his protege, Timothy, we find him doing a bit of holy navel gazing right near the beginning. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way to 1 Timothy 1 and let’s take a look at this together starting in v. 12.
“I give thanks to Christ Jesus our Lord who has strengthened me, because he considered me faithful, appointing me to the ministry—even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an arrogant man. But I received mercy because I acted out of ignorance in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.”
Are you with him so far there? Paul wasn’t a nobody who Jesus made into a somebody. Paul was a somebody in his day. The trouble was, he was a somebody who was wholly committed to a lie and was allowing his commitment to that lie to lead him down a path that was bringing nothing but death and destruction in the world around him. He justified all of that by his false beliefs, but it was some ugly stuff he was unleashing on the world. But God knew that he was doing all of this because he had been taken in by not merely bad ideas, but wrong ideas, and no one had shown him what was true. So, God in Christ did just that. Out of His abundant love and grace, He invited Paul to accept the truth and adjust his life to it. He invited him to give up the lies he was so beholden to following, and to walk in the light of life.
Rather than allowing these musings to be merely personal, though, Paul goes on to formalize them a bit using an idea that was already common in the early church. Come back to the text with me now at v. 15: “This saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’—and I am the worst of them. But I received mercy for this reason, so that in me, the worst of them, Christ Jesus might demonstrate his extraordinary patience as an example to those who would believe in him for eternal life.” And then at this point, Paul breaks out into a spontaneous expression of praise: “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.”
Now, when we hear Paul talking about being the worst of sinners, we’re inclined to scoff just a bit. I mean, this is Paul we’re talking about here. He is pretty much singularly responsible for taking the Gospel into Europe. The apostle Peter may be the traditional first head of the Roman Catholic Church, but without Paul, that church would have never existed in the first place. When Paul was working with the apostles to split up the evangelism duties before them, he basically told them to stick with their work of trying to convert the Jews, and he would focus his attention on everyone else. Paul wrote just about half the documents that are collected in the New Testament. He penned some of the most complete and inspiring explanations of the Gospel that have ever been written. God used him to advance the church in the first century further than anyone else came anywhere close to doing. How is he going to call himself the worst of sinners? I’m way worse than Paul. I mean, I haven’t killed anybody or unleashed vigorous campaigns of persecution against God’s people, but I also haven’t done anything like the good that Paul accomplished.
Paul wasn’t stating this as some kind of an indisputable fact. He was simply owning his own sinfulness. We’re all the worst sinners in the world in our own eyes. And in fact, if you aren’t so convinced of your own sinfulness, embracing the Gospel is going to be difficult for you. Perhaps you need to go back and spend a bit more time with last week’s sermon on the reality of Hell. The fuller your grasp of the depths of your sinfulness gets, the more you will be able to echo Paul’s awestruck gratitude at the salvation by grace through faith that God extended to him through Jesus.
Focus with me for just a second longer, though, on the statement Paul insisted is “trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance.” Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. If you were to go into a seminary setting, gather up a whole bunch of New Testament professors from all over the place, and ask them why Jesus came, you’re probably going to get a whole bunch of different answers. Some of them will be more thorough and nuanced because that’s what academic-types like to do. Others will be simpler and more to the point. What Paul says here may be the best answer you’ll ever find. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Jesus came to save sinners. As we enter together into the season for preparing for Jesus’ arrival, this is worth keeping at the front of our minds as the reason for His coming. Jesus came to save sinners. Before and above everything else, the baby born at Christmastime left His throne on high and came to earth to bring the rescue of salvation to a people utterly enslaved to sin and death. Jesus came to save sinners.
And this isn’t just something Paul made up either. When Joseph was struggling with whether or not Mary was telling the truth about her mysterious pregnancy and God had to send an angel to him in a dream to shore up his confidence, what the angel told Joseph in Matthew 1:20 was this: “Joseph, son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus…” Why? “…because he will save his people from their sins.”
When Jesus Himself was presented with the opportunity to explain His mission after some Pharisees questioned His rather dubious association with a tax collector named Matthew, He said to them in Matthew 9:12 that “it is not those who are well who need a doctor, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I didn’t come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Jesus came to save sinners.
I’m not sure that there’s a better invitation into the season of Advent than that. Jesus came to save sinners. And while Paul may have claimed to be the worst of them, I know better. I suspect you do too. I suspect that sitting where you are right now, you can pretty quickly think of some sins you have shining like a beacon from out of the dark places that still exist in your heart even if perhaps you have been following Jesus for quite some time. You have places where you still doubt God’s goodness in spite of having experienced it over and over again. You have places where you are all eaten up by jealousy and envy. You secretly can’t stand that people around you have things or get to experience things you never will. Maybe those feelings come from feeling like you missed out while others didn’t as a child and have never left your heart since. You have places where you don’t believe God’s assessment of your worth. You are insecure and riddled with self-doubt. You’ve heard the things He has said about you, and have even received His love expressed in Jesus, but you still go back to not believing it. The chorus of Linda Rondstadt’s 1970s hit echoes in your heart and mind on a constant loop: “You’re no good, you’re no good, you’re no good. Baby, you’re no good.” Because of that, you either hate others for being better than you all the time, or you try to find ways to subtly tear them down—even if only in your own heart and mind—so that you can feel better about yourself by comparison.
Perhaps for you, the hard truth is that you’re just a gossip. You disguise and sanitize it in all sorts of different ways—expressions of concern, sharing vital information, prayer requests—but you’re really just a gossip. You talk to other people about other people when they aren’t around and when it doesn’t concern you, and in ways that are designed to make them look worse in general, or maybe just worse than you. Maybe you are caught in the grip of hatred of some kind. Another person did something to hurt you or someone you love and you hate them for it. You are committed to unforgiveness in spite of what Jesus said about that particular road, and bitterness is slowly consuming your heart. It could be that you are addicted to something. It could be a particular substance, maybe an experience, internet pornography, your phone. Whatever it is, you have given over control of your thoughts and actions to this other thing. The addiction could be obviously severe, or it could seem fairly mild and mostly manageable. Either way, you can’t stop turning to it in spite of your best efforts. Or maybe you’re just selfish. You want what you want, and you really don’t care whether or how that affects anyone else around you. Oh, you make a show of selflessness because that’s what you’re supposed to do, but you don’t really. It’s all just that: a show.
Do you know what all of this is? It’s sin. It’s the kind of subtle sin that hides in our hearts and wreaks havoc on our lives even after we’ve confessed Jesus as Lord and started following Him. It’s the kind of sin Paul confessed to struggling mightily with in Romans 7. It’s the kind of nagging sin that can if we’re not careful leave us starting to doubt our standing with God in Christ. It can leave us wondering if we’ll ever be good enough for God. It makes us question if this whole thing is just a farce, and we’re really just stuck in this trap that never seems to release. In short: we need saving.
Well, guess what? Jesus came to save sinners. Sinners like Paul. Sinners like you. Sinners like me. He came because in spite of how broken and sinful we really are—which, by the way, is far more than we actually realize in comparison with God’s perfect holiness—He loves us. He loves us so much that He was willing to leave His throne in heaven and come to Earth as a helpless infant with none of the trappings of His perfect divinity at His immediate disposal, and to ultimately lay down His life so that we might live. Jesus came to save sinners.
If you’ve got sin in your life—the kind of sin that might have you on the broad, straight road that leads to destruction—Jesus came to save you from that. Jesus came to save sinners. The path out of your sin may not be as instant or pain-free as you would like it to be, but if you will follow Him faithfully, He will indeed lead you out of it. Jesus came to save sinners. All you need to do is to trust Him and follow Him. There is no sin from which He did not come to save you. You haven’t done anything that His grace won’t cover. You haven’t run so far that His arms won’t reach you. You can’t dig a hole so deep that He won’t swoop down and lift you out of it. Jesus came to save sinners. If you are a sinner, He came for you. That saying really is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. Jesus came to save sinners. If you’ll let Him, He’ll save you.