Meet Paul

Focus Statement

Meeting Paul means meeting a man whose encounter with Christ did not erase who he was,

but radically reoriented who he understood himself—and God’s grace—to be.

Point of Relation

There are few places less likely to give birth to joy than a prison cell.

And there Paul sits.

We don’t know exactly where.

Perhaps Rome.

Perhaps Ephesus.

Perhaps Caesarea.

Wherever it is,

the door is locked,

the guards are real,

and Paul does not know with certainty

what will happen to him.

But he isn’t alone.

Someone is there with him,

taking down his words

as Paul dictates a letter to friends

hundreds of miles away in Philippi.

He misses them.

The Philippians have heard about his imprisonment,

and they’ve sent one of their own,

Epaphroditus,

carrying a gift to help him.

Now Paul wants to send word back.

He wants them to know how he is doing.

He wants to thank them.

He wants to encourage them through struggles of their own.

There are things happening within their community that concern him,

people he wants them to care for,

disagreements he wants them to overcome.

And remarkably,

from a prison cell,

Paul keeps returning to joy.

He talks.

His scribe writes.

And gradually a deeply personal letter takes shape—

a letter between a pastor

and a congregation

who have come to love one another.

Nearly two thousand years later, we open that letter.

And through it, this morning, we meet Paul.

Things to Consider

As we hear Paul’s words, consider two questions:

Who is Paul before we decide what we think about Paul?

And what happens when Christ forces us to reconsider

what we thought we knew about God, faithfulness, and ourselves?

Yes. There’s quite a bit we can cut without sacrificing the substance. The biggest repetition is that we establish Paul’s Jewish faithfulness, explain the persecution, list the résumé, and then establish his Jewish faithfulness again. We can make those do double duty.

I’d condense it to this:

What Scripture Says

In today’s reading,

Paul begins to tell us who he is.

But to understand what he says,

we need to understand something about who Paul had been.

Paul was deeply and faithfully Jewish—

a Pharisee who took his faith and the Law extraordinarily seriously.

When the early followers of Jesus began proclaiming

that this crucified man was Israel’s Messiah,

Paul saw the movement as extremely dangerous.

And he did more than disagree with them. 

He persecuted them,

believing that in doing so he was being faithful to God.

People like Stephen died under his watch.

That is the man who lists the credentials in which he had once placed his confidence:

circumcised on the eighth day,

an Israelite,

from the tribe of Benjamin,

a Hebrew of Hebrews,

a Pharisee—

zealous enough to persecute the church and,

according to the Law, blameless.

Paul is not describing a bad Jew who became a Christian.

Christianity did not yet exist as a separate religion;

the Jesus movement emerged within Judaism. Paul remained Jewish.

What changed was his understanding of what faithfulness meant.

His pedigree, religious achievement, zeal, and certainty

no longer held the same power over him.

Even the zeal that once drove him to persecute others

had to be transformed into a life shaped by grace.

Everything Paul once counted as gain he now counts as loss compared with knowing Christ.

And he doesn't speak as someone who has finished that journey.

He still wants to know Christ more deeply and become more fully

what Christ is calling him to be.

Paul hasn't stopped being Paul.

But grace has changed what being Paul means.

What This Means for You

Friends, Paul believed he was being faithful—

and still had to let Christ challenge what faithfulness meant.

The same can be true for us.

Following Jesus sometimes means loosening our grip on certainty,

reconsidering what we thought we knew,

and allowing grace to change us.

We are not finished.

Christ is still shaping who we are becoming.

What This Means For Us

If Paul could mistake certainty for faithfulness, so can the Church.

Together, we must remain open to Christ

challenging what we have always believed,

how we have always done things,

and being open to whom we may have harmed along the way.

A faithful church is not a church that never changes.

It is a church that never stops following Christ.

Amen? Amen.

Written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).