1 Timothy 1 Part 6: From Chief Sinner to Chief Apostle

This is unbelievable. The most well educated, highly respected, and publicly beloved man, radically disavows everything that ever brought him the honor of that former society, and then casts his lot with the most reviled and despised subgroup of heretics that he himself led the charge against.
My friends, this is our heritage. The Lord Jesus Christ takes whomsoever He will, Whenever He will. God says I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. Even the church was afraid to touch Paul with a ten foot pole for several years after he was converted. Which was fine, because in The Lord's sovereignty Paul needed training and equipping before he went forth. But this was Christ's doing, not man's and not even the Church's ultimately.
And Paul thinks upon all of this. He thinks of the love he now has for The Lord and for The Lord's people And how long and how much he has loved them so dearly, and in that, he remembers, for he cannot forget, the painful memory of how he once hunted down his beloved saints like dogs. He once rejoiced at the horror of their murder. And Paul will make no attempt to hide or conceal that awful reality from view, that the Gospel of God may stand, not in Paul's well doing, but in God's great mercy and grace.