The standard playbook for building credibility is straightforward. List your credentials. Name the institutions that trained you. Reference the leaders who endorsed you. Position yourself as someone worth listening to by establishing that you are qualified to speak. Every leadership conference, every book jacket, every LinkedIn profile operates on this logic. The more you have accomplished, the more authority you carry into the room.

Paul does the opposite. He introduces his credentials by naming the worst thing about himself.

“I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength to do his work. He considered me trustworthy and appointed me to serve him, even though I used to blaspheme the name of Christ. In my insolence, I persecuted his people. But God had mercy on me because I did it in ignorance and unbelief. Oh, how generous and gracious our Lord was! He filled me with the faith and love that come from Christ Jesus. This is a trustworthy saying, and everyone should accept it: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’—and I am the worst of them all. But God had mercy on me so that Christ Jesus could use me as a prime example of his great patience with even the worst sinners. Then others will realize that they, too, can believe in him and receive eternal life. All honor and glory to God forever and ever! He is the eternal King, the unseen one who never dies; he alone is God. Amen” (1 Timothy 1:12-17, NLT).

That is the passage for today, the fifth day of our walk through Paul’s mentorship of Timothy. It contains the most counterintuitive credibility strategy in all of Scripture.

Paul is writing to Timothy from a position of enormous authority. He is the apostle to the Gentiles. He has planted churches across the Roman Empire. He has written letters that will be read for millennia. If anyone in the early church had earned the right to introduce themselves by their accomplishments, it was Paul. Instead he introduces himself by his darkest history. He was a blasphemer. He was insolent. He persecuted the church. He stood by and approved while Stephen was stoned to death. He went from house to house dragging believers to prison. Acts describes him as “uttering threats with every breath and was eager to kill the Lord’s followers” (Acts 9:1, NLT). That is not the resume you lead with.

The word Paul uses for himself, “the worst,” is not rhetorical modesty. He is not fishing for reassurance. The Greek word is protos, meaning first or foremost. Paul is not saying he made some mistakes. He is saying if you line up every sinner who has ever lived and rank them from least to worst, he takes the top spot. This is the same man who later writes to the Corinthians, “For I am the least of all the apostles. In fact, I’m not even worthy to be called an apostle after the way I persecuted God’s church” (1 Corinthians 15:9, NLT). To the Ephesians, “Though I am the least deserving of all God’s people, he graciously gave me the privilege of telling the Gentiles about the endless treasures available to them in Christ” (Ephesians 3:8, NLT). The pattern is consistent. As Paul gets older and his resume gets longer, his self-assessment gets lower. The most accomplished apostle in church history calls himself the worst sinner, the least apostle, the least deserving of all God’s people.

This is not false humility. False humility says “I am nothing” while hoping you disagree. Paul’s words move in the opposite direction. He says “I am the worst” and then immediately erupts into doxology: “All honor and glory to God forever and ever! He is the eternal King, the unseen one who never dies; he alone is God.” The self-assessment and the worship belong together. Paul cannot talk about how bad he was without also talking about how good God is. The one drives him into the other.

The leadership principle here is uncomfortable because it cuts against everything our culture teaches about establishing influence. We are trained to manage perception. To put our best foot forward. To curate a version of ourselves that projects competence and minimizes failure. Paul’s approach is the opposite: the thing that qualifies him to speak is not that he got everything right. It is that he got the most important thing catastrophically wrong and was forgiven anyway. His credibility is not built on his accomplishments. It is built on the size of what he was forgiven.

That is scary for a leader to internalize. It means the parts of your history you are most tempted to hide are the parts that might actually give you the most authority to speak. Not because the sin itself is impressive. The mercy that covered it is what makes the story worth telling. When you lead from a posture of “I have been forgiven much,” you create space for the people you lead to be honest about their own failure. When you lead from a posture of “I have always done things right,” you create pressure for everyone around you to perform a version of themselves that matches yours.

Paul names the reason God chose this method in verse 16: “But God had mercy on me so that Christ Jesus could use me as a prime example of his great patience with even the worst sinners. Then others will realize that they, too, can believe in him and receive eternal life.” Paul’s story is not about Paul. It is a display case for God’s patience. The worst sinner becomes the clearest evidence that no one is beyond reach. If the worst of them all can be trusted with apostleship, then the leader on your team who made a serious mistake last quarter is not disqualified. The employee who has a hard history is not defined by it. The person you are most tempted to write off might be the person God is most eager to display his patience through.

The practical application lands in two directions. First, for your own credibility: what are you leading with? If you find yourself reaching for your resume, your title, your track record every time you need to establish authority in a conversation, you are building on sand. Accomplishments can be outperformed. Resumes can be one-upped. Credentials can be matched. The one thing no one can compete with is the specific mercy you have received. Your worst moment, honestly acknowledged, builds a kind of trust that your best moment never will.

Second, for the people you lead: are you giving them a reason to pretend? When you only ever talk about your wins, you teach your team to only ever bring you their wins. The failures go underground. The struggles become secrets. The mistakes get hidden until they are too large to hide. A leader who has admitted they were the worst of sinners has no need to keep up appearances. That freedom is contagious. The person who reports to you deserves a leader whose credibility is built on something that cannot be taken away.

This is not permission to lead with your sins as if they were a badge of honor. Paul does not linger on the details of his persecution of the church. He names it clearly, briefly, and then moves immediately to the mercy that covered it. The focus is never on the darkness. It is always on the light that broke through. The leader who talks about their failure constantly and dwells on it has not understood Paul. The leader who never mentions it at all has not understood Paul either. The balance is this: enough honesty to be credible, enough restraint to keep the spotlight on grace.

Paul’s doxology in verse 17 is not a polite way to end a paragraph. It is the destination the whole passage has been driving toward. He begins by naming the worst thing about himself. He ends by worshiping the King who is eternal, unseen, immortal, the only God. The movement is always toward God, never toward self-display or self-loathing. The leader who can make that same movement, the one whose credibility is built on “look what God did with someone like me,” has the most durable platform in the room.

The connection forward is direct. Tomorrow we move to verses 18 and 19, where Paul hands Timothy a charge based on the prophetic words spoken over him. The credibility Paul just established is not just theology. It is the ground Timothy will stand on when the fight gets hard. You cannot hand a young leader a commission and expect them to hold it under pressure unless they have first watched you model what it means to be trusted despite your past. Paul’s worst moment becomes Timothy’s strongest anchor. That is how mentorship works. The mentor does not pass on perfection. They pass on the pattern: honest about failure, overwhelmed by mercy, pointed toward the King.

Leadership Challenge: What is the one thing in your history you are most reluctant to talk about with the people you lead? Not because you should broadcast it, but because your silence about it might be teaching your team that only the polished version of themselves is welcome in the room. What would change if you admitted that the thing you are most ashamed of is the thing God has shown the most mercy toward?

I write about leadership at the intersection of timeless principles and modern workplaces. Follow for weekly insights on building teams that actually work. For more articles like this consider subscribing to my Substack at: https://christianleadership.now