Lucy Stuttle - "The Life of Paul the Apostle" - 31 May 2026

If you haven't listened to them, I highly recommend going back and listening to them And I've realised through listening to Rick's messages that this is actually how I really like to learn is like honing in on someone's life and really understanding who they are and sort of deep diving into their life.

And so when I knew that I was preaching sort of a while ago, that I was preaching today, I felt stirred in me to start to deep dive in more into the life of the Apostle Paul, which if you've heard me preach before, I seem to always end up coming back to the Apostle Paul.

I've always been just intrigued by him.

Since I was a little girl, I've just been intrigued by this man who, as we know, You know, a lot of us know his achievements and hardships in life.

He became one of the most influential leaders in the history of the church.

He took the gospel from the Jews to the Gentiles.

He planted many churches, discipled many people.

He wrote a large portion of the New Testament through the letters that we read today, which has shaped our Christian theology.

He's had such a large impact on how we live as Christians and we read through his teaching and we preach through his teaching and it's always given me this curiosity of actually who is this man? And sort of how did he become the man that he was? I think sometimes it's easy for us to...

look at great leaders in history and or even just leaders now who lead our churches and things and we maybe look at the the great things they've done or we you know we pull little little snippets of their letter you know Paul's letters and we're like wow this man's he did amazing things but we sort of neglect to look at the whole journey and how did he actually become the man that he was and I think it's important to, and like we were singing today, we were singing Waymaker, that even when we don't see it or even when we don't know it, he is working.

And when we look at the life of Paul and when I've been looking at his life, you start to realise, wow, God was working the whole way through.

And I think it's important for us to know because in our own lives, sometimes we can really get stunted with shame because of our pasts.

And we can really feel like, you know, we can look at, you know, let's say Paul or some other leaders and just be like, that's not me.

You don't know the past that I've been through and the things that I've done.

You know, you don't know who I am or what I was brought up in or you don't know the things that I've done, how I've treated people.

You know, you don't know the thoughts that I have even right now and the experiences that I'm walking out in and things that are happening.

And we sort of let it bring us fear and sort of keep us crippled and stunted But I love, I love to look at people like Paul and realise that, yeah, he has this whole life and this whole experience that's formed him to who he is and who he became.

And Paul, you know, he never glorifies his past.

But what he did do was he allowed his past to remind him that God's grace was unearned and undeserved.

And I believe that's such a key revelation for us to be constantly reminded that God's grace is unearned and undeserved.

And he allowed it, instead of stopping him and just crippling him, he allowed it to push him into a place of dependency on the Lord and humility.

And he was able to work out of that place.

And so I want to kind of take a bit of a magnifying glass to his life and to mostly his, kind of mostly his life before he encountered Christ.

Because a lot of us know, yeah, all the great things that he did and even all the hardships he endured, the persecution and the beatings and violence, imprisonment, shipwrecks, constant danger, poverty, exhaustion, anxiety, all this stuff that Paul went through, all for the name of Jesus.

But I want us to look at a bit more of what was his upbringing and what brought him to the man that he was.