From a Wolf, Into a Sheep

He held the coats while they stoned Stephen to death.
Then he went house to house, hauling men and women out of their homes and into prison. He tortured believers until they cursed the name of Christ to make the pain stop. And he did every bit of it convinced he was doing God a service.
Three days after a light knocked him flat on the road to Damascus, God called him a chosen vessel - while the arrest warrants were still in his bag.
The wolf became a sheep. Then he became a shepherd. Then he wrote nearly half the New Testament from prison cells, waiting to be executed for the faith he had tried to exterminate.
If God could use Saul of Tarsus, the question is no longer whether He can use you.
From a Wolf into a Sheep is a book for anyone who suspects the door closed a long time ago - that your history is too stained, your work too common, your education too thin, your temper too quick, your record too public. Across five parts and twenty-eight chapters, it walks through Scripture's long record of people who should never have been usable:
But this book does not stop at encouragement. An entire section is given to the part most books skip: why God so often lets the people He has chosen fail publicly and humiliatingly before He uses them widely. The boast that collapses into a denial. The vessel marred in the potter's hand. Jacob's permanent limp. Joseph forgotten in a dungeon for two extra years because a butler's memory failed. Paul asking three times for a thorn to be taken away, and being told no.
Every scripture is quoted from the Authorized King James Version, and the book is dense with them - not decoration, but the argument itself.
God is not looking for talent. He makes talent. He is looking for the available.
You are not too far gone. You are the raw material.
A prostitute in a condemned city who became an ancestor of Christ
A fig-pruner with no credentials who became a prophet kings feared
A swindler up a tree who gave away half his estate before dinner
A woman with five failed marriages who brought her whole town to Christ before sundown
A runaway slave and thief who carried an apostle's letter home in his own hands
A fisherman who denied Christ with curses - and was handed the sheep three weeks later