Thankfulness as a Result of Mercy

And I'm going to read verses 12 through 13, but just to give you a tiny snapshot of what just took place.

Basically, between verses 8 through 10, after Paul starts to kind of get into the epistle a good bit.

He's talking about false teachers, and he's talking about a specific type of false teacher that has a misunderstanding of the law of God, which in and of itself is a good thing, but we run into a problem when anyone starts to believe that the law is even though it's intrinsically good and by law i'm literally referring to that which was delivered by god not all of the junk that the pharisees were into the time of jesus and we're still in that paul was into himself But we know that the law is intrinsically good and yet it's not the gospel.

And people run into a lot of trouble when they forget that, when they begin to kind of synthesize the two and start making claims that would be false claims that mislead people into understanding what the gospel actually is.

And there are some more innocent manifestations of this, where it's literally more just a misunderstanding of that dynamic throughout the New Testament, but then there are also the nefarious types.

And that's more of what Paul was dealing with here.

He's going into this reality that these false teachers... were teaching that essentially the law was the gospel, that it had to be kept in a particular form in order for salvation to occur, and Paul is setting that straight.

Now, he goes on, he reminds Timothy, and he equips Timothy with what one of the proper uses of the law is, And in the context of this passage, the proper use that Paul brings into view for Timothy to remember is that the law is, even in the New Testament, still used with at least this regard.

It is the great revealer of man's sin and a reminder of their need for a Savior.

Now, there's more uses than that, but that is the one that's in view today.

in this context so he tells he tells uh timothy um in verse eight he says we know that the law is good if a man uses it lawfully and then he goes into his teaching on the false teachers and what they were getting wrong and so he says all that that sets the tone and then he gets into verse 12. and beginning in verse 12 and all the way through about verse 17, what he does is he begins to lay out what the actual gospel looks like.

And this goes back to what I started with.

What he does is he uses himself as the prime example of what it should look like as it penetrates a person's life.

And so he's giving a vast contrast between false teachers and their abuse of scripture.

And he then contrasts that by showing what the actual gospel looks like and why it is so magnificent.

And once more, he uses himself as the chief of sinners, as the preeminent example of how magnificent it really is.

So with all that being said, that's again the context for these two quick verses we're going to read, just so you know exactly where Paul is coming from.

And in verse 12 is where you see the thing I'd like to hone in on today.

He says, And I thank Christ Jesus, our Lord, who hath enabled me, for that he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry, who was before a blasphemer and a persecutor and injurious.

Or another way you could say that is I was an insolent man.

But I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.