2 Timothy 1

You and I who have faith in God's solution to our deepest needs have been given the promise of life, and that life is safe for us in Christ Jesus who is ruling over His kingdom from on high.  In that kingdom we have an opportunity even now to learn and to grow, and perhaps even to teach others,  It is through the relationship of a Paul to a Timothy, and then of a Timothy to many others, that our knowledge of the Lord's sure promises is received and believed, all of this happening by the grace, mercy, and peace that comes to us from God.

If we have a life of faith, it should be clear that the God who has granted us this faith (Ephesians 2:8) used other people to bring us the news of Christ, directing us in the Word, and helping us to grow in our trust of the Lord.  In the case of Paul's disciple Timothy, now serving as a pastoral leader in Ephesus, it was his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice that God used in a formative way in his early years.  Timothy is not alone in having this kind of testimony.  For so many of the Lord's servants, their earliest motions of belief came at the encouragement of close family members. 

This kind of heritage of true spiritual life is such a blessed gift of God.  As Paul considers Timothy's story of faith passed lovingly from generation to generation, he is moved to thank the Lord.  What is especially noteworthy in the case of Timothy is that these generations mentioned by Paul span the divide between the Old and New Covenants.  The faith of our Jewish ancestors in the promises of God secured for His people through the work of a Messiah yet to be revealed was precisely the same as the faith of those who now lived after the coming of Jesus Christ.  The New Covenant believer may know more of the details of the Lord's good work because of the coming of Christ and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, but the nature of his faith is identical with that of our brothers and sisters who longed for the coming of a Redeemer and trusted that the Lord would provide.  We look to be united with the entire family of faith in the presence of God, so that we might be filled with joy in His presence forever.

Not only was Timothy taught by his mother and grandmother, Paul played a crucial role in his spiritual life.  He writes here about a gift that the Lord has bestowed upon this younger man through the laying on of his hands.  This gift seems to be associated with Timothy's role as a servant of the Lord's Word and a pastor of His flock.  Paul instructs him to fan into flame this gift of God.  If it started as a small spark, it does not need to stay that way.  As the gift is used, and as the blessing of God is sought, we should expect that the work of God in this man's life will grow.  God does not give His ministers this kind of gift so that they can cower in fear in some corner of the world.  God is in the gift.  Christ is expressing His glorious reign through His ambassadors.  Christ is the man of power, love, and self-control.  As the ministerial gift grows in the Lord's servants we expect to see it exercised in a way that bears some resemblance to the One who is at work within His servants.

It is Christ who keeps the true servant of the Lord persevering through a difficult calling.  There were many throughout the 1^st century Mediterranean world who had Saul of Tarsus (Paul) on their most wanted list, and not in a good way.  To be on Christ's team was to be on Paul's team, and to be on Paul's team was to face suffering and shame.  Timothy needed to face this struggle with the confidence that it was God in Christ who had saved him, God in Christ who had called him to be a disciple of Paul, and God in Christ who had landed him in this challenging ministerial position in the city of Ephesus.  To suffer for Jesus Christ and the good news of His cross and resurrection has always been a privilege.  We can trust Him with our ministerial life.  He has His own eternal purpose and His own powerful grace.  His determination to use Timothy or any of His ministers throughout the centuries is not a new decision, but part of His settled plan.

Our Savior Jesus has abolished death for us in His death, and has brought life and immortality to light, first through his own resurrection, and then through the preaching of these truths which are of first importance.  To be entrusted with this message to pass on to fathers and mothers, that they might teach it to the next generation, this is such a blessed privilege and such a significant responsibility.  Lest we be overwhelmed with the task, we need to do what our ancestors in the faith have done for thousands of years.  We need to trust the God who we have come to know.

Until the day that the Lord returns or the day when we go to be with Him in heaven, we need to labor, not to come up with new and different spiritual answers, but to take the one solid answer of Jesus Christ as our only viable message.  We have been entrusted with the best of all deposits in Jesus Christ.  Though, like Paul, we may feel as if we are all alone in the faith we have embraced, we are never really alone.  Christ is with us, and with him are many mothers and grandmothers, many ancestors from among the Jews and Gentiles who have heard His Word from faithful ministers and have believed the sound teaching that they received.  Those who have been called to teach that good word to others, have been blessed with a good calling, and we who have believed their words have been blessed by our life-giving Savior.

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2 Timothy 2

It is easy to imagine how Timothy might have felt overwhelmed at the task before him.  It is a tremendous duty to be an ambassador for Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  Where does our help come from in the performance of this great work, a responsibility that is so far beyond us?  Paul tells his younger associate in the ministry, his child in the faith, that he needs to be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. 

Why would the message of grace, the word of God's favor toward those who deserve His wrath, the doctrine that seems so weak to so many, be a source of great power to those who are called to communicate it to others?  As we remember the grace of God for us, we are captivated again with the news that any good standing that we have with God has never, at root, been about our worthiness or ability, but about the excellence of Jesus.  This is a secure foundation, for our lives and our ministries.  Iit is in this message that we both hear and preach, that we might find the courage for life and for all kinds of sacrificial service.

This ministry, this message, and the strength that comes from the grace that is in Christ Jesus, must not only be believed by Timothy.  He must pass all of this on to others, to faithful men, who will in turn be able to teach others.  This is not an easy task, but Christ is powerful to carry us through all kinds of trials.  He is our General, and we are privileged to be foot-soldiers who serve at His command.

Timothy is part of a chain of word-servants of Jesus who have passed on this message of the cross down to the present hour. They are soldiers who have to be careful not to get entangled in civilian pursuits.  They are athletes who must be fully devoted to their sport if they wish to have any opportunity to win the prize, aware of the rules of the contest and diligent to attend to them.  They are farmers who understand what it is to prepare the soil, plant, the seed, and to do what it takes to see that a harvest will come from their efforts.  This requires a dedication to the task, and a great diligence to avoid entangling distractions that may even seem to be good for the cause, but which only take us away from the purpose of our charge.

Our message of good news continually moves us away from strange and distracting teachings, calling us back again to the Lord Jesus Christ, the great Son of David who died and rose again.  If we suffer or face imprisonment because of this word that we teach, we should not think that all is lost.  The account of the death of Christ, and that teaching which speaks clearly about the purpose and power of that singular death, may seem to be very weak, but God has made it invincible.  Therefore we believe, and therefore we preach.  The end result of this kind of teaching is not a head swelled with pride, but a full heavenly salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.  This salvation is secured for us not by our own goodness, or it would not be by grace.  We are called to die for him, to endure to the end, never denying the one who gave His all for us, but if we are faithless (and who has not sunk into a life that God could rightly judge to be inconsistent with what we have professed when we called upon the name of the Lord), God still remains faithful  He will not deny himself.  His death accomplished something.  This is our hope.

It is for this reason that we must never move away from the message of the death of Jesus for the unworthy, and this compels us to seek to live and teach as those who desire to walk worthy of such a great love.  But when the church becomes entangled in useless myths and fruitless speculations, she should not expect that those kinds of teachings will yield anything good.  Irreverent babble does not lead to godliness, but spreads throughout the church, distracting people from the truth that will be of most use to them and to others.

Some had taken the bait of wrong-headed distractions, and Paul mentions two men by name who were confused about the resurrection.  They thought it had already come, and their false ideas were spreading around and were upsetting the faith of some.  Not that they were overturning God's decree of election.  No one could ever do that.  “The Lord knows those who are His.”  And if we are His, we should depart from iniquity.  Not everything in the church is necessarily worthy of imitation, but today is a very good day to give yourself over to the Master, and to those things that can be rightly called “good works.”

There is a day coming when all the nonsense of false “gospel” labors and all the supposed brilliance of “deep” and “sophisticated” spiritual mysteries will be swept aside like cobwebs in an old house that finally must face demolition.  On that day it will be plain for all to see that our true labor in the Lord was not in vain, and that our work together for righteousness, faith, love, and peace has endured in Christ, who gave us strength to continue in His service.  Until that day, we are called to patiently instruct the coming generation, and gently correct others who have  waded into deep and stagnant pools of error.  It is our sincere hope that God might even at this hour grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth.

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2 Timothy 3

To speak on behalf of the Lord has always been challenging.  The accounts of the Old Testament prophets confirm this.  Certainly the lives of the apostles were also full of challenges.  What about those, like Timothy, who would be ambassadors for Jesus in later years beyond the apostles of the New Testament age?  Should we expect something better, something easier, for them?

Paul warns Timothy that the entire era of the New Covenant, called here “the last days,” will be a time of difficulty.  Some people have taken these words “last days” to refer to a briefer period immediately prior to the return of the Lord or the culmination of the resurrection era, but this interpretation will not withstand careful biblical scrutiny.  The same expression is used by Peter in Acts 2, quoting from Joel 2, and Peter clearly indicates on that occasion that the last days have already begun at the time of Pentecost.  We should all expect that the entire New Testament era will include many periods of great trial for the church.  Sometimes church leaders will face prison and even death, sometimes they will merely suffer through years of being marginalized and ignored. Either way, times of difficulty should not surprise us.

The world will remain the world, with some notable high points and low points, until the time when Christ returns with the holy angels to renew all things.  People will be people, with all their sin.  What is particularly infuriating is that the evil of sin will sometimes be in the church and in her leaders, perhaps cloaked in a robe of godliness.  There will be leading men who may appear holy, but they will not display true holiness of life, which can only come by the power of God.  But hypocrites may appear to be God's gift to the church right up to the day that they are exposed as those who are caught breaking up homes.

It would appear that genuinely hell-bound people will be not only among the baptized, but even among those who have entrusted with the special duty of preaching and teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.  This is a sad fact, but it is good for us to be warned ahead of time, lest we think that evil has caught God by surprise.  Eventually the truth will come out, not because we are so good at knowing and judging character among church leaders.  It is God who will make it all plain to the church at just the right time.

The pathway of pride, contention, and immorality does not have to be the majority report concerning the character of ministers and elders.  There is another way for us to follow.  Paul has taken this good pathway.  He gives us a picture of the better pattern and habit of sacrificial and faithful living that fits in with the example and teaching of Jesus Christ.  As readers of the Bible, we follow the adventures of the Apostle Paul through the book of Acts with great interest.  He recounts some of the places where he suffered for the cause in a brief summary in this chapter.  He does not present his experience as unique on this point, but says that “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”  But Paul adds one other important fact beyond his own endurance of persecution: “The Lord rescued me from all of them.”

The Lord is the author of our salvation, and He knows how to rescue His people from the hand of disaster.  Our way of life in a world of danger where we know that our God is sovereign must be characterized in both our teaching and conduct by faith, patience, love, and steadfastness.  Throughout the centuries of ministerial history, the church has seen many examples from two very different groups of church leaders.  There are some who Paul calls “evil people and imposters,” and they will go from bad to worse, living in a web of deceit and often deceiving themselves as much as others.  But there is the pathway of Christ, of Paul, and of so many others who have faithfully represented the dying love of the Savior both in the church and throughout the world.  That good way, Paul says, is the way of the Scriptures.  It is the way that we have been taught in the sacred writings preserved for us for both our faith and our life.

This Word of the Bible has the imprimatur of the King who died on the cross, the One who alone is the eternal Word of God.  We are blessed if we are able to learn of Him and to honor Him from our earliest years by attending to that written Word of Scripture.  This Word teaches us the way of salvation through faith in Christ, and it trains us in the way that we can serve the Lord as ministers in the church.  It is able to expose our errors when we need correction and reproof, but it is most certainly able by the power of the Holy Spirit to building us up in Christ and in the way of righteousness.

For anyone who would be a man of God in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, for any such man who would be an ambassador of Jesus Christ, for him to decide that he can do this today without the Scriptures is like a blind man going into battle without any weapon.  Christ is the ultimate man of God and the final Word of God.  He fulfilled His own glorious mission in accord with the Old Testament Scriptures.  He calls His spokesmen and leaders to be appropriately and competently equipped for every good work by using both the Old and New Testament, and by living a life that fits well with the facts of the gospel.

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