if indeed you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you,

Paul is not a minister to himself. He is a minister to the Gentiles. He has something to give them: a download of spiritual revelation, a download of the grace of God that enables him to be an effective minister of the gospel.

He did not call himself. God called him. He did not choose himself. God chose him; he did not decide the kind of unique, never-before-seen minister that God called him to be. He did not choose his own path.

It was conceived in the mind of God, and the pressure was much, the pressure for him to stop preaching the gospel to the Gentiles. He did not only face pressure from the Jewish non-believers but also from those who were fellow believers who had a problem with the preaching of freedom, with the preaching of Christ alone, and not Christ plus a sprinkling of Moses. They cannot understand why he does not elevate Moses, but his vision of Christ brings Moses to the background. So they persecuted him.

He did not persist because it was pleasurable; he persisted because he was called. He felt privileged to do the work, as God birthed the insight into his spirit.

Not something he learned in any school, but he was a walking download of divine revelation and unique grace, so much so that when he wrote to the church in Rome, he said he longed to see them because he had a special deposit of the spirit that he had from God for the Gentiles (Romans 1:11–12, 15:15-16).

Paul was a conduit of grace, of revelation.

But that did not exclude him from suffering affliction, as he said in the previous verse that he was in prison; he was a prisoner of Jesus Christ.

The external negative circumstances did not belie the call one iota. He even boasts of them as being evidence of his apostleship (2 Corinthians 11–12).

And even when he could not travel, he wrote, and that writing has reached us hundreds of years later by the sovereign act of God.

Paul has now left the theologically dense portion of the book, which ended in 2:20, and he is now writing about who he is. He is not talking about who he is for the sake of it. It is to tell them that God has them in mind when he called Paul into his service, which he did for their sake.

Paul said somewhere else that he had been called to be a light to the Gentiles (Acts 13:47). And who can deny that Paul was a massive light? He was lit by the presence of God in his salvation and his calling to minister, and the domino effect is still being felt to this day.

Paul said that the mystery of the Gentiles becoming part of the church was revealed to him.

Other people may decide it is okay for the Gentiles to be part of the church, as Peter was forced to embrace that reality after his experience in the house of Cornelius (Acts 10), but Paul's experience was different.

It was like the mind of Christ was copied and pasted into him, so he was not just called; he was fueled by an unquantifiable depth of conviction and could go on and on in his explanation of the inclusion of the Gentiles into the family of faith on equal footing with Jews like himself.

Now the church is mostly Gentile, and that is thanks for the most part to the pioneering work of Paul, especially with his letters to the gentile churches, which all Gentiles should see as divine love letters to us, saying that God was thinking of us, and had a plan for us before we even knew anything about Him. Even down the ages, He thought about us and sent someone like Paul with indefatigable zeal to communicate that truth and ensure his words are preserved as scriptures, so that we can embrace our new spiritual reality.

Paul spoke of his revelation, the special revelation that God gave him, the grace that he had received to build the church (2 Corinthians 10:8).

And whatever he wrote in this letter, he said it was brief, and God gave him the opportunity to flesh it out over more than a dozen letters, so much so that the New Testament scriptures are dominated by his writing.

Paul spilled a lot of ink emphasizing identity, who we are in Christ, then that we should grow up into Christ, and then to fend off the attacks against that identity and things that would compromise that growth.

His aim?