The reign of God in Christ compels us to pray for all in authority, while at the same time our praying for them calls into the question all the idolatries that arise from the exercise of this authority.
This is why Paul is still an “example” for us. If this is what God in Christ can do with “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence," imagine what God in Christ can do with you and me.
What pressures or dangers are these particular people, in this particular place, facing right now which keep them from being “rooted and built up” in Christ? What is keeping them from “abounding in thanksgiving”?
What might be a unique challenge of this text is how our preaching of it might itself resonate with its mystery. It goes to a broader question: How can we retain a sense of the “mysterious” in our preaching of mysterious texts?