<p>1:15 <i>Faithful is the saying and worthy of all acceptance</i>- This could refer to inspired prophetic sayings being judged by other inspired prophets to be &quot;worthy of acceptance&quot;, and coming to form a corpus of Holy Spirit inspired material which was accepted as authoritative in the early church. Perhaps this corpus of material is referred to as the &quot;form of sound words&quot; or &quot;form of Godliness&quot; (2 Tim. 1:13; 3:5). The idea that Paul was the parade example of the Lord's operations and grace to all believers was therefore accepted and distributed in the early community.</p><p><i>That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners</i><i>, of whom I am chief</i>- Clearly perception of sinfulness grew in Paul after his conversion. He considered himself blameless in keeping the law (Phil. 3:6); and yet chief of sinners. He realized that sin is to do with attitudes rather than committed or omitted actions. I'd paraphrase Paul's personal reminiscence in Rom. 7:7-10 like this: &quot;As a youngster, I had no real idea of sin. I did what I wanted, thought whatever I liked. But then in my early teens, the concept of God's commandments hit me. The command not to covet really came home to me. I struggled through my teens and twenties with a mad desire for women forbidden to me (AV, conveniently archaic, has &quot;all manner of concupiscence&quot;). And slowly I found in an ongoing sense (Gk.), I grew to see, that the laws I had to keep were killing me, they would be my death in the end&quot;. Paul&rsquo;s progressive realization of the nature of sin is reflected in Romans 7:18,21,23. He speaks there of how he came to <i>know</i> that nothing good was in him; he <i>found</i> a law of sinful tendency at work in him; he came to <i>see</i> another law apart from God&rsquo;s law at work in his life. This process of knowing, finding and seeing his own sinfulness continued throughout his life. His way of escape from this moral and intellectual dilemma was through accepting the grace of the Lord Jesus at his conversion. In one of his earliest letters, Paul stresses that he felt like the least of the apostles, he honestly felt they were all better than he was (1 Cor. 15:9). However, he reminisces that in his earlier self-assurance, he had once considered himself as not inferior to &quot;the very chiefest apostles&quot; (2 Cor. 11:5). Some years later, he wrote to the Ephesians that he felt &quot;less than the least of all saints&quot; (Eph. 3:8). This was no Uriah Heep, fawning humility. He really felt that he was the worst, the weakest, of all the thousands of believers scattered around the shores of the Mediterranean at that time. As he now faced his death, he wrote to Timothy here that he was &quot;chief of sinners&quot;, the worst sinner in the world, and that Christ's grace to him should therefore serve as an inspiration to every other believer, <i>in that</i> none had sinned as grievously as he had done. It could well be that this is one of Paul&rsquo;s many allusions back to the Gospels- for surely he had in mid the way the publican smote upon his breast, asking God to be merciful &ldquo;to me <i>the</i> sinner&rdquo; (Lk. 18:13 RVmg.). Note that &quot;Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners&quot; is rooted in the Lord's words that He came to call sinners and to seek and save the lost (Mt. 9:13; 18:11).</p>