2 Timothy 1:1-2 The Promise of the Life

Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches with his series of 2 Timothy, Faithful to the End. Let's listen in.

Good morning.

The Final Letter of Paul to Timothy

Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here, and I'm really glad to be back together again with you guys. I was out last week. The week before that, I was at a conference over in Cleveland at a church packed full of pastors and church leaders, and super good time for me and the elders to get away.

Hear God's word and just see what's going on around the world, around the nation regarding pastoring, and that was super fun. But it's also always good to be back here. I miss you guys when I'm gone, and always look forward to being back here.

We've wrapped up the book of Hosea, and now we're starting a new series in the New Testament book of 2 Timothy. So we're going to be carrying that forward over the summer, and I'm going to be introducing this letter this morning by tackling only the first two verses, but you'll see that there's enough there for our attention, and it's worthwhile for us to study even these introductory things here.

But my goal in our gathering is to introduce Timothy in a way that sets the stage for our entire summer in this book on Sunday mornings. And so taking these first two verses and then giving some of the context and all of that for Timothy's life would be beneficial for us in the long run.

Second Timothy is the last inspired writing of the Apostle Paul. And as we read this short introduction, keep in mind that we're observing a man who knows his days are coming to an end. He actually declares that in this letter.

He knows that he's about to be poured out as a drink offering, he says. But I would just ask you, what would you lead out with in your final letter? Think about that. Like, you know that the end is coming.

I mean, it's quite likely that he might already have been sentenced to death and just be awaiting the execution. And so we're not quite sure how that all looks in his life, but he knows, and it implies that he knows that this is his final letter.

And so what would you write in that final letter? And then further, a more fundamental question, who would it be addressed to? Who would you be writing to? I think it's beautiful that here on graduation and Senior Sunday, we're actually starting and launching out into a book, and I didn't plan that, but we're launching out into a book where it's an older man speaking to a younger man.

The older generation speaking to the younger generation. And passing that torch, passing that baton on to Timothy and saying, hey, here's the kinds of things that I've learned in ministry, and here's the kinds of things I would love to see carried forward in this next generation of people who are going to carry on the church.

Paul is writing to the next generation, a young minister. He's writing to the next generation, a young minister, Timothy, who is going to be carrying the gospel onward. And he begins this letter with an affectionate reminder that he has been sent by Jesus to further the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus.

And by the time we get to 2 Timothy, Paul is reflective on his life. We get the impression of an older guy who knows that the end is coming, and he's reflective, he's a little more thoughtful, he's a little bit more personal, and his goal is to encourage Timothy to carry on the work in the next generation.

And even in these two short verses, we can see that Paul doesn't waste words. Even his introductions are packed with the power of God's truth, and even the introductory portions that our minds might be tempted to skip over, you're going to see that there's a lot here that we would miss if we just skim over this to get to the heart of the matter.

So let's open up your Bibles or your scripture journals or your devices to 2 Timothy, chapter 1, verses 1 and 2. Again, 2 Timothy, chapter 1, verses 1 and 2. Probably take you longer to turn there than it will for me to read it.

But I want to remind you, like I do always, this is God's holy word. This is Him speaking to us, and a little bit later, after we sing some songs, I'm going to be speaking and trying to make this make sense to us and what we ought to do with it.

But this is where we hear from God, right here, 2 Timothy, chapter 1, verses 1 and 2. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus, to Timothy, my beloved child, grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Let's pray.

Father, I thank you for the way that you have...the way that you saw fit to reveal to Paul and encourage him in the inspiration of your Spirit to sit down and write this letter to a young man under his charge, a young man that he was mentoring, for the benefit and the blessing of the church at large, that this apostle both invested in churches but also invested in individuals, invested in people.

Father, I just thank you that you have loved us and cared for us enough to bring us into community where the older men can teach the younger men and the older women can teach the younger women, and we learn from each other.

It's not just a one-way street of the older people trying to dump information on the younger people, but we learn and we gain so much by being around the energy, by being around those who are just casting off the vibes of enthusiasm and excitement.

I thank you that you are moving in this next generation. I just see it, and it's awesome to behold the way that a generation is being raised up to ask the questions why, but when they're convinced of the why, they go for it, and I'm excited about that, Father.

It's encouraging to see, yeah, they don't respond exactly like my generation and older, but it's exciting to see the enthusiasm with which they adopt things and grasp them and carry them forward when they can be convinced of it.

And so, Father, I pray for your work in this next generation, just even as you worked through Paul to pass along the message to Timothy, and I ask for your work in our hearts, wherever we're at in that.

I recognize that there are people older than me, there are people my age, and people younger than me here in this room, but all of us, all of us come to hope and grace and mercy through the promise of Jesus Christ, and I pray that that would be in the forefront of our minds even now as we sing the promise of eternal life that has been granted us in Jesus that lights our hearts up with enthusiasm to sing these songs.

Father, I pray that the worries and the cares and the concerns of this past week would fade into the background as we have an opportunity to reflect on the eternal purposes, and most importantly, the eternal hope that we have through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and it's in His name that I pray, amen.

Go ahead and be seated and re-find your way to 2 Timothy chapter 1, verses 1 and 2, reopen your device there or your Bibles or your scripture journals, and we'll just kind of be introducing this here for a moment, and then we'll get into an outline later, but just kind of introducing this, when we read the second letter of the Apostle Paul to Timothy, we are reading the final writing of the Apostle Paul, as I mentioned in my introduction, and in this book, we're going to find a man's final ministry words that the Spirit revealed to him.

His ending words are an investment in a younger man, and his final letter encourages guarding the ministry of the word. That's going to be thematic throughout 2 Timothy is guarding the word. It's likely that Paul first met Timothy when Timothy was just little Timmy.

I don't know what they called him in Greek, if they used that kind of prefix or not, or like little, you know, kiddify the word. I've got an aunt that still calls me Donny. Don't try it. I don't like that.

But any of you have an aunt like that, that calls you something that you don't like, like from your childhood? A couple of you? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. But Paul traveled through Timmy's hometown of Lystra, which is in modern-day Turkey, kind of in the south of modern-day Turkey, up against the Mediterranean Sea there.

And he traveled there during all of his, well, two of his missionary journeys, but the city of Lystra, and on that first missionary journey that Paul went on, he stopped by Lystra. Paul's ministry in Timothy's hometown can be read in Acts chapter 14, so if you like kind of making these connections through these letters and through the book of Acts, the book of Acts gives us the history of that early church and those travels, and then some of these letters go out to people from those places.

And the ministry in that community could hardly seem like a success from a human standpoint. Lystra was hard, hard ground to till. If you had been there with Paul, you would have left with a reasonable conclusion that ministry in the city of Lystra was a train wreck.

It was a train wreck. And I'm not exaggerating, I'll explain here in just a moment, I'll kind of give you a synopsis of chapter 14 of the book of Acts. They roll into Lystra, and some of the features of the time there included immediately the healing of a man who was lame.

Now, how many of you are going, success so far, like that's a good start to a ministry, a guy that's never walked, and in Jesus' name, you heal. Miracles do not walk. Does that sound good? So far, so good, right?

But how many of you know that miracles do not produce faith? Miracles don't produce faith. And so, the people of the city immediately jump to a logical conclusion, what they're thinking from their standpoint and their perspective, this man has been lame among them for his entire life, and all of a sudden he's up walking, and they immediately say, Paul must be the Greek god Hermes, and his traveling companion Barnabas must be the Greek god Zeus.

Now, the reason, it's kind of humorous, the reason they came to that conclusion, Hermes was the talker, and Zeus would come down and be the stoic one, and so we get a little view of what Paul was like based on their, well, this is Hermes, he's the talker, and Barnabas is probably standing back stoically, letting Paul take the lead, so they assume he's Zeus.

So they saw the miracle, and they misinterpreted it. How often is that the case for us, right? See the thing that God is doing and misunderstand the whole thing, and so the priests of Zeus and Hermes begin to, begin a parade from their stables down into the city square with the goal of sacrificing, they're pushing some oxen and whipping them down into the city so that they can make sacrifices because Zeus is here, and Hermes is here, and they're getting ready to make sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas, how many of you know Paul and Barnabas did not want to be sacrificed to?

This is not a ministry, this is going sideways quickly, but it even gets more off the rails in what happens next. They're literally saying, this is Zeus and this is Hermes, in the convincing them that they are not deities, the Jews begin to speak up in the crowd.

There was a synagogue there, and the Jews begin to stir up the crowds, all the way to the point where eventually they go, they're not gods, they're imposters, and they begin to pelt Paul with stones, until they were confident he was dead, and then they dragged his body out of the city.

That's how Paul's ministry goes in Lystra. Like a successful start, right? Like how many of you are going like, rah, rah, rah, sign me up for that mission? Not at all, right? They drag him out, and now, I'm telling you this for your edification this morning because you need to understand where Timothy comes from.

He's from this town. He's from this city. Was Lystra a successful ministry church? Was it successful? Well, I mean, you might go like, it doesn't sound super successful to my ears, right? I mean, Paul was stoned and left for dead, and by the way, to close the loop on that, he didn't die there.

That's not how he died. He goes on to write this letter, and he actually, I believe, was miraculously either raised or healed because the people who believe come and stand around him, and he gets up and dusts himself off, and then it says he took a 15-mile trip the next day.

Now, if everybody thinks you're dead one day by stones, like being crushed by stones, and then the next day you take a 15-mile journey and then minister in that next town, how many of you know that God did something miraculous there?

Like there's a little something that happened for him to be able to take that trip the next.

Day.

But was it successful? We're told that some people believed and became disciples, so on that stand alone, you might go, yeah, success. But the vast majority rejected Paul and even tried to kill him in Lystra.

And out of that context, we find that Timmy's grandmother and mother became followers of Jesus Christ. We don't know the order or the details. Did they come to faith together? Did Grandma come to faith and then passed it on to Mom, then passed it on to Timothy?

The details are not explicitly clear, even though you can look down at verse 5 of the same chapter. We'll talk about that next week. We don't know what the order was, but the detail of that matters very little because Timothy, a powerful minister for the gospel in the next generation, came out of what likely would have appeared to us to be a run-for-your-lives kind of ministry.

That's what's going on there in Lystra. But Paul was fortunate to get out of Lystra with his life, and in Acts 16, after several years have passed, Paul comes back to Lystra. How many of you are never going back to Lystra?

If they pelt you with stones, drag your body out, and then you're like, you know what? Let's go back there and just see what's going on. That's Paul. That's the apostle Paul. And so he goes back there, and he comes to Lystra, and he finds a small but flourishing community of Christians who introduce him to one of the fruits of his ministry, a young man maturing in Christ and eager for ministry named Timothy.

Isn't that awesome? I mean, I don't know that Paul did not have an opportunity to disciple them. He didn't have an opportunity to walk with them. He didn't have an opportunity. And here's this young man eager for ministry, eager for the gospel, and ready and charged.

To go.

And it's all written in Acts 16 that Paul takes Timothy under his wing, and he begins to travel with Paul as a minister of the gospel. And right here, we can just take a moment to remind ourselves that God brings successes out of our weaknesses.

Amen?

I am so thankful that the resources of my life and you can personalize this to you but the resources of my life are not limited to what I have in my bank account. My power is not limited to my muscles.

My ability to win others is not limited to my ability to muster charisma or my rhetoric or my intellectual argumentation. There is more to ministry than what you can see on the outside.

Amen?

There is more power available. You cannot look in this room and determine who has the most spiritual power on the outside. It might be the smallest and frailest person in the room that has the greatest power in the kingdom of God, and we just don't know.

Because we cannot measure with the way that God measures. Because church, we serve the living God who raises up Timothys from Lystras, raises up Timothys from the most unlikely of places. What we're tempted to consider a lost cause, God might very well be working for his own glorious fruit.

If I was Paul, I would have avoided Lystra like the plague. He returns and finds faith flourishing in a place where all he had experienced was violence and pagan worship. Violence and pagan worship is his experience, and what he finds is a flourishing small church.

Our work in the faith is not our work in the faith. It is God's, or it's not working at all. It's God's, or it's not working at all. By the time we get to verse 1, Paul has been investing in Timothy for about 16 years as of the writing of 2 Timothy.

It spans the years, if you're trying to look at a time frame, and some of you like history, some of you don't. About 50 A .D., and that's a precise, that's not like kind of like 50 sounds so round that you're kind of going like, oh, is he going like maybe it was 30?

No, it's 50. About 50 A .D. to 66 A .D., we have pretty good documentation. History of this time frame is there's a lot of writings available in about 66 A .D. 67 A .D. is under Nero's persecution, which most people think that that's when Paul died.

So he dies in 67 A .D. This is likely written about 66 A .D., give or take some months there before he's martyred. Paul and Timothy traveled together. So after the account of chapter 16, we see Timothy woven all throughout the ministry.

Of Paul.

He's mentioned in Romans as being together with Corinth at the writing of that. Paul and Timothy traveled the Roman world together. Eventually, Paul even trusted Timothy and entrusted him to go to Ephesus and set things right.

And we see that in 1 Timothy. So he initially traveled with Paul and then began to be sent out by Paul as his emissary.

To other places.

And so there's a big trusting relationship between Paul and Timothy. The second letter, this second letter demonstrates a softer and more personal Paul than any of his other writings. If you want to see Paul's, like, the height of his, like, the most aggressive letter he writes is Galatians.

Oh, you wicked, foolish Galatians. Who's bewitched you?

You know, he like levels the club at the Galatians. And here, this is the most personal and heartfelt and tame. Not that that's not heartfelt either, but this is the one that's kind of like a softer and gentler Paul.

By word usage and tenor, most scholars identify 2 Timothy as the most personal of all of the letters. And I can't help but wonder if this isn't a case of an older man who knows that his life is drawing to an end, reflecting a bit more on relationships.

I believe that most men in this room can relate to the common course of life that I've identified for myself. Dudes, I don't know if you think about this, some of the ladies might actually identify this to some degree as well.

But I would say that guys run this kind of course in their life. I don't know if you can confirm it or not. Selfish at the start, driven in the middle, wishing we had been more relational by the.

End.

Go ahead and raise your hand, guys, if that's starting to kind of reflect a little bit of what you're experiencing, okay? Selfish at the start, driven in the middle, wishing I had been more relational by the.

End.

I heard something mentioned today in a podcast that I was listening to about virtue. And there are virtues of resume and there are virtues of eulogy. That's what the guy was identifying. Think about that.

Virtues that you want spoken of on your resume and virtues that you want spoken at your funeral and the two don't overlap much. But that driven in the middle, trying to build a resume, trying to get all of your ducks in a row and everything lined up and where are the people on your resume?

They're not. They're in your eulogy. Do you know what I'm talking about? What are you investing in? What are you working toward? What are you hoping to produce? Those of you that are in the middle, that driven middle, I'm speaking to you.

What are you shooting for in this thing? Paul's in prison. He's got some time on his hands. He's in Rome. Historians and scholars who do better than me at piecing this history together in a timeline, they believe that Paul was imprisoned in Rome twice.

I see that. When people kind of identify that and draw out a timeline, then you can begin to see it as well in his writings. But it's a little hard to piece together if all you have is the Bible, like exactly what the timeline is.

The Bible is not made to be a timeline, but when you supplement that with other historical documents, you get a lot more history of Paul's life. He was imprisoned twice. How many of you have ever heard of his house arrest, that Paul was under house arrest?

Any of you ever heard that? That was a little bit of a gentler imprisonment that occurred in Rome. That was the first one. This is not that. This one is in a dungeon. He is not likely under house arrest at this time, but instead, as the persecution is ramped up under the Roman emperors, culminating in his death under the emperor Nero, tradition says that he was held at the famous Mamertine dungeon under the streets of Rome, a terrible place where people went to die or went to be executed.

And whether or not that is the case, what we do know for certain from the writing of 2 Timothy is that Paul is feeling lonely, he's feeling abandoned, and the writing is on the wall that he is going to be poured out as a drink offering for his Lord.

He's going to be martyred for his faith, and he says as much. So some categories that we ought to look for and think about in this text as we think about this entire summer in 2 Timothy is three words that ought to ring in our ears as we're going through this week after week is personal, vital, and final.

Personal, vital, and final. Paul is writing to his friend. It's a very personal writing. There's heart in the verses. There's heart in the way that he's trying to communicate, but also vital because he's writing, Paul is writing because what he has to share is of vital importance for the future of the church, meaning even us.

It's inspired by the Holy Spirit, not just merely reading somebody else's mail going that was good for them, but it's vital information about passing the truth on generation to generation to generation.

And then Paul is writing what appears to understand as final. He had a strong sense that the end of the line was soon for him, and so that he writes with that kind of sense and feeling and vibe of this is the end of the road for me, but it's not the end of the road for the church.

Right? And you can kind of understand how that would flavor the things that he says and flavor the way that we ought to think about what he's saying here in this text, in this letter. So after a long introduction, let me provide some structure for the rest of the sermon.

These points will go fast. Paul's authority, Paul's mission, Paul's investment, and Paul's hope. Again, that's authority, mission, that's all in verse 1, and then investment and Paul's hope in verse 2.

Again, we have a short text, but all of that is packed in here, and you're going to see it as I...hopefully you see it as I go here. I'm not doing any damage to the text to get to these four main points in this small text, but first we see Paul's authority.

Every letter needed to say who was writing it, and he begins with the word Paul. I love...why in the world are the Greeks so much smarter than us? Like in English, where do you find the name of the person who's writing to you?

Why?

Like why? Why would we do that? Like you write a five-page letter to somebody, and they've got to go to the end. Oh, that's who's writing. Now page forward and read it. Why would we do that? The Greeks did it differently, and I think smarter, and they would up front say who it is that's writing, and Paul is the clear author.

We don't need to argue about that. I love it how scholars...I get to read commentaries, and sometimes they just skip that part where they're arguing about who wrote it when it says Paul. Okay, good enough for me.

Let's move on, right? Like the revealed holy word of God says Paul wrote it. I don't need to hear people with like all kinds of letters behind their names who think that they're smarter than the Bible try to explain why Paul wrote it when it already.

Says Paul wrote it.

Paul's the author. He identifies himself not just a random Paul, but the one who was commissioned and sent out by Jesus Christ himself as an apostle, and the word apostle had likely assumed...well, had assumed a technical designation.

It's a title by the time that 2 Timothy was written. Now, it generally means one who is sent out, but by this time of writing, it was a technical title of one in the church, and a person who used this title for themselves was saying a couple of serious things about themselves.

So when somebody called themselves an apostle, if it was true of them, then these things.

Were true as well.

They had met Jesus. They were witnesses to his resurrection, and third, they were commissioned by him, sent out intentionally by him to specifically testify to his life, death, and resurrection. Now, where am I getting that?

Am I making this stuff up? Am I just kind of like, well, let me just tell you what an apostle is. I'll invent a definition. Acts chapter 1 verses 21 through 22, they're actually going to replace an apostle.

So they say, here's what we've got to find. Here's the kind of guy and where he needs to be in life in order for him to replace.

Judas.

So how many of you know what I'm talking about? You remember that? You remember that account? And they say that we need to replace him with another who has been an eyewitness to the resurrection who can testify that they saw him raised.

We can't have an apostle that hasn't seen Jesus Christ in the flesh raised from the.

Dead.

He needs to have been there with the ministry of Jesus. And so that's a requirement. Now, I'm saying this because I want to jump into a little bit of a side note here. That's, I think, pretty important.

I want to point out that there's a renewed interest in utilizing the title of apostle in the church today. How many of you are aware of that? Any of you aware of churches that would use the title apostle?

Some of you.

I've met men who take that title up for themselves. As a matter of fact, probably about 12 to 13 years ago, somebody walked into my office. It was a storefront. So this is way back at the start of the church.

And they came in the storefront. The door wasn't locked. I had a little office in there. And they walked in and they basically began to explain to me that they're an apostle and the Lord had told them that they are to be over my church and wanted to know when they.

Could start.

Now, I'm not even joking. I can't make this stuff up. And I still see the guy around in the community today. And he was literally like, yeah, the Lord has told me that he's given me the apostolic authority over southwest Michigan.

And I'm just coming around to say, I'm your apostle and I want to take over. Now, you can remain the pastor, but I'm your apostle.

I'm over you.

That conversation went very brief. It was not a long conversation. Like, what are you talking about, dude? Like, nope, not going to happen. There are people who will claim that for themselves. And I think you can imagine why.

You can probably imagine some invented things about why somebody might want to call themselves an apostle today. There's a growing movement in America that goes by the acronym NAR. It's the New Apostolic Reformation.

I am only telling you about it to inform you because you may encounter it. You may encounter it and not even know it. There are a couple of very large churches in the Kalamazoo area that are associated and affiliated with the NAR.

They won't advertise that. They won't tell you that. But they are big, big, big churches. And it tends to be a very big movement, a very upfront and flashy and glitzy kind of performance type of thing.

It has a strong charismatic basis. And it's a movement that claims apostolic renewal, that there are new apostles that God is raising up to claim that foundational authority. You must listen to them. You must heed their words.

And they speak on behalf of God. And it's kind of like, I thought we already had God's Word. I didn't think we needed you to add to it or anything like that. But my caution to all of us here is the reality that Scripture indicates a very unique ministry to the apostles.

It calls them the foundation of the church. And the church is built on the teachings of the prophets and apostles. Where do you find that church? Where do you find the teaching of the prophets and the apostles?

That is to be the foundation. Anybody got it in their hand? Go ahead and raise it up. You got it? The Word of God. Yes, you have access to the prophets and the apostles. The very teaching that God desired for us to know is all available there.

They are the foundation. Their teaching is authoritative through the inspiration of the Spirit. They were eyewitnesses to the resurrection. You can trust them. And they were commissioned and sent out, which is the Greek meaning of apostle.

Sent one by Jesus Christ Himself. That's what it means to be an apostle of Jesus Christ. Sent out by Him. So even here in our text, Paul is quick to identify that he became an apostle.

How?

By the will of God.

By the will of God.

He didn't apply. He didn't submit a resume. He didn't fill out a gifts assessment test and come up with, oh look, my test results.

Are apostle.

No, Jesus busted into his trip to Damascus to arrest him some Christians. And he broke in with a blinding light, appeared to him in the flesh as the risen Lord set Paul straight, saved his soul, and called him to witness to the resurrection as the apostle to the Gentiles, to the non-Jews.

Jesus appeared in the flesh to His apostles. But there's also another unique phenomenon surrounding the use of the title of apostle that informs me to a large degree as well and indicates how disrespectful it is that anyone would take up that mantle and that title for themselves today.

There's not a single man in the next generation, and they wrote. Church, you would, some of you don't like reading. Oh man, I tell you what, you would never, if you set out to read the early church fathers, I think you'd be hard-pressed to read everything that they produced in a lifetime.

There's a ton of writing from the next generation after the apostles. They're called the early church fathers, and they wrote a lot, and they used the word apostle a lot. And guess how they used the word apostle?

Only ever for that founding generation, only for those 12, and Paul, and a handful of others. They actually believe that there are about 15 or 16 apostles who carry that title, who actually observed the life of Christ.

He appeared to them, and he sent them out. And aside from that, no one in the next generation, not a single soul called themselves an apostle. No one took that title up for themselves. What does that tell you?

It tells you that nobody in the early church thought, this is just a title that we ought to just throw around. No, there was deep and great respect for that founding generation and those founding guys who were called and sent out to start the church.

And even further, this is astonishing to me, even when the church grew to obnoxious levels of pomposity in the Middle Ages. Talk about pompous. Talk about arrogance. The Middle Ages was a time where the church was full of itself, and leaders were scrambling for authority and trying to get literally like the church, and politics, and nations together so that they could reign over France and the church, right?

That kind of stuff is going on. And none of those popes called themselves apostles, not a single one. No pope has been willing to title himself an apostle. It's a big deal. No, it's a new thing. It's an arrogant thing.

It's a disrespectful thing that anybody would call themselves an apostle. If you're on a website and somebody declares themselves to be an apostle, if you're visiting a church and somebody says, I'm an apostle, run.

Run.

Like there is a motive behind that. It's a disrespectful thing, like me buying myself a stethoscope and telling you I'm a doctor, would you come to me? You better not. And unfortunately, in many contexts, it's a dangerous thing.

Why?

How is it dangerous, Don? It's just a title. Like some people get words mixed up and stuff, and it's dangerous because the higher the title I can claim for myself, the greater the authority I can wield.

You know what I'm talking about? Beware of places where the leaders take up titles that are not theirs. Wow, that was a lot on that. Paul was made an apostle through an encounter with and commission by our risen Lord.

And Paul is indeed declaring this title over himself to clarify the heights of his credential. God forbid that we would water that phrase down, take it to its furthest extent. When Paul says he's an apostle, that is a big deal.

Listen up. Listen up. Listen to the foundation of the church, the prophets and the apostles. By the way, I don't believe he identifies himself that way primarily. Again, remember this is a personal letter.