Romans 9:2

He would be willing to undergo the greatest misery to do them good. Love is apt to be thus bold, and venturous, and self-denying. Because the glory of God's grace in the salvation of many is to be preferred before the welfare and happiness of a single person, Paul, if they were put in competition, would be content to forego all his own happiness to purchase theirs.

That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. This is the thing he appeals to Christ for the truth of, and calls in his conscience and the Holy Ghost to bear witness to.

Great heaviness - Great grief. Continual sorrow - The word rendered “continual” here must be taken in a popular sense. Not that he was literally all the time pressed down with this sorrow, but that whenever he thought on this subject, he had great grief; as we say of a painful subject, it is a source of constant pain. The cause of this grief, Paul does not expressly mention, though it is implied in what he immediately says. It was the fact that so large a part of the nation would be rejected, and cast off.

That I have, &c.--"That I have great grief (or, sorrow) and unceasing anguish in my heart"--the bitter hostility of his nation to the glorious Gospel, and the awful consequences of their unbelief, weighing heavily and incessantly upon his spirit.

WHAT an intense man Paul was! Once convince him and his whole nature moved in the direction which he judged to be right. He was whole-hearted when he persecuted the Church of God and he was equally whole-hearted when, afterwards, he labored with all his might to build up the Church which he had sought to destroy! I would to God we were all as thorough-going in the service of our Lord!

WHAT an intense man Paul was! Once convince him and his whole nature moved in the direction which he judged to be right. He was whole-hearted when he persecuted the Church of God and he was equally whole-hearted when, afterwards, he labored with all his might to build up the Church which he had sought to destroy! I would to God we were all as thorough-going in the service of our Lord! The pity is that so many professing Christians appear to have no heart, while others borrow a heart for some occasions but do not seem to keep one permanently beating in their own bosoms. O for a warm, engine-like heart all consecrated and forever pulsing mightily! What a change was worked in Saul of Tarsus, that he who was so ardent a persecutor should become so fervent a preacher! His conversion is one of the proofs of the Divinity of Christianity. The study of the story of Paul was the means of the conversion of Lord Lyttleton who read it with the design of exposing it as a hoax. His friend, Gilbert West, was, at the same time, considering the resurrection of our Lord in a similar spirit and, happily, with the same result—the friends met to unite in the joint conviction that the Bible is the Word of God! Dr. Johnson says of Lyttleton's, "Observations upon the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul," "it is a treatise to which infidelity has never been able to fabricate a specious answer." Consider for a moment the renowned conversion of Paul. It was singularly Providential that just at that period when the Church needed such a man, the Apostle with his remarkable education, his noble purpose and his acquaintance with Jewish and Greek literature, should have been called out from the world and placed in the very forefront of the battle for Christ! Truly might he say that he was not a whit behind the very chief of the Apostles, though in his humility, he felt himself to be nothing.