Eph 3:7-9

Ephesians 3:7-8
I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace given me through the working of His power. Although I am less than the least of all the Lord’s people, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ,

Paul’s self-awareness is fascinating. In other passages, Paul describes himself as “the least of the apostles” and “the worst of sinners”. Paul wasn’t struggling with self-confidence, he had all the external qualifications you could want. But Paul got a bigger and bigger revelation of who He really was on the inside.

We live in a world that promotes the idea that deep down in all of us, we are good, so in essence we can save ourselves. But Paul shows us that the closer we walk to Jesus, the more we truly get to know our natures and realise that we are sinners saved by grace.

We may have started walking with Jesus because we had “tasted & seen God is good” (Psalm 34:8). Paul says elsewhere that the “kindness of God leads us to repentance” (Rom 2:4). But our gratitude grows as we discover our true state.

It’s like someone saving us from a situation, and then afterward we discover how dangerous the situation really was. Our gratitude would grow in correspondence to the realisation.

With Jesus, we weren’t bad people He made good. We were dead and He made us alive.