There are things in my past I have never told anyone. Is there a point where a person has done too much for God to want them?

“Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

Isaiah opens his book by laying out a nation's corruption in unsparing detail: violence, exploitation, religion used as cover for both. He softens none of it. Then, in the same breath, God invites them to come and talk it through rather than run. The offer arrives after the charge sheet rather than instead of it, and that order is the whole point for anyone convinced their record disqualifies them.

“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.”

Paul is writing to a younger colleague near the end of his own life, and he raises his history unprompted. He had hunted Christians down and stood watching while a man was stoned to death. Decades of ministry later he still calls himself the worst case, not as false modesty but as evidence. If the mercy reached him, the argument runs, then the category of too far gone is empty.