Now if you would take your Bibles in hand once again and turn with me to 2 Timothy chapter 3. We are working our way through the pastoral epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, here at First Presbyterian Church on Sunday mornings. We’ve come this morning to 2 Timothy chapter 3. Last Lord’s Day, we looked at the opening nine verses of this chapter where the apostle Paul warns Timothy about the realities and the difficulties he is likely to face engaging in ministry in these last days in which both he and all of us are living and serving.
But beginning now in chapter 3 verse 10, and really running through chapter 4 verse 8, the apostle Paul turns from the difficulties posed by the false teachers to offer some concluding, positive instruction for Timothy in the conduct of his own Christian life and public ministry in the city of Ephesus where he is serving. The whole passage – so 3:10 through 4:8 – is divided into three subsections, each of which is demarcated in the text by the same two Greek words – su de, which appear at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of this section, variously translated in our English version as “you, however,” in verse 10 and as “but for you,” in verse 14 and again, “but as for you,” in chapter 4 verse 5.
In the first subsection, in 3:10-13, Paul looks back, he reminisces in order to remind Timothy of his own example. In the central section, in 3:14 through 4:4, he reminds Timothy of the necessity and sufficiency and urgency of the holy Scriptures which he is to preach and proclaim. And then in the final section, in chapter 4 verse 5 through verse 8, Paul once again exhorts Timothy in light of his own example, this time not his example of past faithfulness but his example of present, costly service in the cause of Jesus Christ.
This morning, we are going to focus our attention on the first of those three subsections found in chapter 3 verse 10 through verse 13 where Paul reminisces with Timothy about his example of past faithfulness. And as he does that, he reminds Timothy and he teaches us how God makes faithful servants of Jesus Christ. First, if you’ll look at the passage, verses 10 and 11, God makes Gospel servants by means of imitation. That is, by following the example of a mentor and a discipler. Then secondly, verses 11 through 13, God makes Gospel servants by means of affliction. He deploys suffering and hardship and difficulty into the lives of His servants that He might grow them and make them useful and useable. What will it take for God to make you useful in His service? What instruments will He deploy in our lives to train you and train me that we might be fit for His purposes? It will take imitation and it will take affliction. And so before we look at those two themes together, would you bow your heads with me and let’s ask the Lord to help us to receive His holy and authoritative Word. Let us pray.
Lord our God, open now by the work of Your Spirit the eyes of our hearts that we might behold wondrous things out of Your Law, for the glory of the name of Jesus. Amen.
Second Timothy chapter 3 at verse 10. This is the Word of God:
“You, however, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions and sufferings that happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra—which persecutions I endured; yet from them all the Lord rescued me. Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.”
Amen.
When I was starting out as a preacher in the ministry, I was paranoid that I would unconsciously imitate the man who had had the greatest influence upon me and shaped how I thought and still think to this day about preaching. I was worried that people would listen to me and think I was trying to emulate this great man’s mannerisms and inflection. I certainly aspired to be like him, I still aspire to be like him, but I never wanted to slavishly copy him. And then one day, a friend made me a copy of a recording of an old minister in Glasgow, a man called William Fitch. I’d never heard of him before, but he was the man who mentored the pastor who’d had such a formative influence upon me. And when I played Mr. Fitch’s sermon, for the first minute or so, I could have sworn I was listening to my own mentor! He had the same inflection, the same pace and cadence and rhythm and the same way of modulating his voice. It was uncanny, actually, an enormously freeing. The man whose preaching I was so worried about not copying was himself a carbon copy of the speech patterns and preaching style of his own mentor.
And it struck me that far from something to be worried about, this is the natural order of things. The people that have had the most profound influence upon us leave their mark on us. The way they did things shapes and informs the way we do things. Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. We should want to be like the people who’ve had the most lasting impact upon us for good.
As Paul turns from his warnings in the first part of chapter 3 about the times of difficulty that will come because of the false teachers like Jannes and Jambres who opposed Moses so long ago, as Paul turns from those warnings, he wants to help Timothy with some constructive teaching that will enable him to last and endure, no matter what. And he starts in verses 10 and 11 with a reminder of his own formative example that had so shaped his younger colleague. And the point is, God makes Gospel servants like Timothy, like us, first of all, by means of imitation.
“You, however, have followed me,” Paul says. We want to see a new generation of godly, faithful leaders and Gospel servants emerging from among the ranks of our own membership here at First Presbyterian Church, Paul is showing us the ordinary way that God typically accomplishes that. He raises up faithful and fruitful Gospel servants through the mentoring and discipleship and investment of men and women of God.
Pastors, elders and deacons, Sunday school teachers, small group leaders, women’s ministry leaders, Bible study teachers, mature Christians of every stripe, we need to, I need to be reminded that for all the programming and event planning and all the group teaching that we can and should and must do as a church, next to the preaching of the Word of God on the Lord’s Day, the first step in any effective program of Christian nurture and spiritual growth is one-to-one, life-on-life discipleship. Who are you regularly meeting with to pray and read the Bible and encourage and invest in? A faithful disciple makes disciples. Are you seeking to make disciples? With whom are you regularly engaged in the ministry of mentorship? That is Paul’s great example to us here, isn’t it. This is what he did with Timothy and what we are to do as we seek to raise up a new generation of Gospel servants.
You’ll notice Paul specifically highlights a list of nine characteristics that marked his life and his work that Timothy has already been following and Paul wants him to continue to follow as he seeks to grow and mature and persevere through thick and thin. We can group them into three groups of three. The first group deals with the practical disciplines of Paul’s ministry. They address what Paul does. Look at verse 10 please. Timothy followed Paul’s teaching, his conduct, and his aim in life. Timothy was shaped first by Paul’s teaching. That is, not so much by the style of communication but by the content of it, by his doctrine, by the teaching he was providing. Apostolic truth is the baseline for all Christian growth and for any Christian service. Do you love the truth, the teaching that is the Word of God? Do you care about doctrine? You can no more grow in godliness without it than you can build a secure, stable house without a firm foundation.
Next, Paul says Timothy was shaped by Paul’s conduct. That is to say, Timothy saw in Paul’s behavior and lifestyle, his words and works and ways, that the truth he was teaching, the doctrine he was proclaiming, was a lived reality day by day. He saw up close and personal, firsthand, over the course of years working together that Paul was the real thing. Paul’s example for Timothy was a great proof that the apostolic teaching really worked. Paul wanted Timothy to have confidence in the message, and Paul is saying to him, “You remember how that message showed up and bore fruit in my own life as you studied me and you observed my conduct” to reassure Timothy to hold on and keep being faithful to the message. The same will happen in his own life and in the lives of those who receive the ministry from him.
And then thirdly, Timothy followed Paul’s aim in life. That is, Timothy set his own sights on the same target as the apostle Paul. He took aim at the same priorities and had the same great purpose. The same ambition that beat in Paul’s heart began to beat in Timothy’s. You remember how Paul articulated his ambition in Philippians 3:8-14. Let me read it to you. Paul said:
“I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
What was the grand aim and ambition of Paul’s heart and life? What is it at which he constantly took aim? More to the point, let me ask you, “What is your great ambition in life? At what are you really taking aim day by day? In all honesty now before God as you assess your heart, what is your real ambition? What are you longing for the most?” Is it perhaps a certain standard of living? Are your honest drivers and deepest ambitions focused on family or finances or on comfort? The great mark of a faithful disciple is that he or she comes to share the ambition of the apostle Paul who longed above everything to know Christ and to become like Him. “This is what I want you most to want for yourself, Timothy – apostolic doctrine, a lifestyle that aligns with the truth that you preach, and a heart that yearns to know Jesus Christ more and more deeply.” I wonder if that describes you – a love for the truth, a life that demonstrates that that truth is the real thing, and a heart that beats with an ambition to know and be like Jesus Christ.
Then look again at verse 10 and notice the second group of characteristics that mark Paul’s life and example. These deal now with the cardinal virtues that describe Paul’s heart as he serves the Lord. The first group were about what Paul does, but these three address how he does it. Verse 10, Timothy followed Paul’s faith and patience and love. Faith looks up to God in Christ by the help of the Holy Spirit for all the supplies of strength and grace that we need every day. Patience looks in at self; it engages in necessary self-talk. Patience tells the self to “hold on” and “keep going” and “persevere.” And love looks out to others and resolves to care and serve and give and spend and be spent, to be a blessing to our neighbors in Jesus’ name. Faith takes hold of Christ, patience takes hold of self, love takes hold of others, all for the advancement of the Gospel cause.
Of these three, I wonder if the cardinal virtue of faith might need some further explanation here. You see, the faith in view in this text is not the initial, entirely passive faith that simply receives and rests upon Christ when we first come to know the Lord. Initial faith, justifying faith, is an empty beggar’s bowl, isn’t it, and it is the grace of God that fills it. It’s not an active thing; it is a passive thing, receptive. It is not a work that we perform; it is a reception of the work of Christ performed for us. It rests on Jesus.
That’s not the faith that Paul is talking about here. Here, Paul is reminding Timothy, he’s reminding us, that now that we have received Christ, our faith gets to work. It becomes active. Some versions even translate it as “faithfulness.” There is a daily, muscular, courageous taking hold of the promises of God when everything seems dark and grim and difficult. One of the big obsessions – if you ever go to a gym and get a trainer – one of their big obsessions of a good trainer is that you should develop and strengthen your core. Your core is so important, they’ll say, because these are the muscles that ensure physical stability and promote longevity. Living faith in verse 10 is like the core muscles of the Christian life that must be worked and developed and strengthened to ensure stability and longevity no matter what. “Every day, Timothy, work the muscles of faith on the promises of God. Trust the Lord and do the next right thing. It’s the only way to make it through.”
So the first set of three characteristics are about the practical disciplines of Paul’s life – what he did. The second set are about the cardinal virtues of Paul’s heart – how he did what he did. And now the last set of three deal with the contextual realities in which Paul was serving and ministering. Here, we might say, is where Paul did what he did. Look at verses 10 and 11. Timothy followed Paul’s steadfastness, his persecutions, and his sufferings. Steadfastness means stickability, dogged immovability, an almost stubborn determination to stay the course. And persecution and suffering describe the context in which that kind of steadfastness was so very necessary. The word for “persecution” here originally carried the sense of being chased or hounded or harried by enemies. And along with the persecutions that Paul endured came all sorts of more generalized suffering as you might imagine. Paul’s body bore the marks of his various beatings and stonings and being whipped. The constant depravations, the hardships of his itinerant ministry, doubtless took their toll upon Paul. He was a physically broken down man, prematurely aged by the privations that he endured. There was a relational cost, no doubt. A physiological cost. A physical cost, certainly, to be paid by the apostle as he served his Savior.
This is the context, Paul is reminding Timothy, reminding us, in which we are to live the Christian life. It is one of steadfastness exercised amidst opposition and affliction and suffering. Are you ready for that? Are you a follower of Jesus because you think that to follow Him will ensure that you pass through this life on flowery beds of ease? No, the New Testament tells us our Savior walked the path to Calvary, to the cross, and all who follow Him must walk the same road too.
And that’s why the rest of this passage largely focuses on the reality of Christian suffering. Do you see that? So here now is the second thing that God typically brings into our lives as He works to bring us to maturity and usefulness in His service. The first was imitation – “Be like Paul.” The second is affliction. And in verses 11 through 13, Paul tells us three things we need if we are to benefit from, not be derailed by affliction when God sends it into our lives. We need realism, we need resolve, and we need the resources of heaven. Realism, resolve and the resources of heaven.
We need realism first of all. Paul is concrete here, isn’t he, about the afflictions that he has faced. Verse 11, he reminds Timothy of the three cities they had visited during their missionary work – Antioch, Iconium and Lystra. Lystra was Timothy’s hometown. In each, the apostle endured persecution and suffering. But just in case Timothy was or we are tempted to think that the hostility of the world is only an occasional problem faced typically by unusually zealous Christians like Paul, and not by the looks of you and me, take a look at verse 12. “ Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” Here’s the realism we need. Do you see it? To follow Jesus sets you on a collision course with the world. To the degree that you live a godly life in Christ Jesus, to the degree that you are being conformed to His likeness day by day, to that same degree will those who resist and reject Him, resist and reject you.
Jesus told us this was how it would be, didn’t He? John 18 at the eighteenth verse. “If the world hates you,” He told His disciples, “know it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own, but because you are not of the world but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you. A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted Me, they will persecute you.” That is Paul’s point here precisely, isn’t it? But in our relative comfort and security, when the worse that we typically face by the way of opposition for our faith in Jesus is perhaps a big of mockery behind people’s hands, some social stigma, it’s easy to imagine that suffering for Jesus is something we will never really be called upon to endure, isn’t it?
But don’t overlook verse 13. Do you see how Paul characterizes those who reject Jesus Christ? “Evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” In other words, the opposition of the rebel human heart to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not static. Like a virus, the infection spreads and grows and consumes the soil. And as Christians, therefore, grow in godliness, so too wickedness grows in rebel hearts. And if you put those two together, growing in godliness and growing in rebellion and wickedness, you have an explosion waiting to happen. If we are going to stay the course and endure and grow in grace and usefulness in the service of Jesus Christ, we mustn’t be naive about that. Christianity is not a fantasy. It is not an exercise in escapism. It doesn’t isolate us from the real world; it calls us to face the real world honestly – that’s what Paul is doing here – opposition and persecution and affliction of all kings ought to be ordinary expectations for everyone who desires to live godly lives in Christ Jesus.
But then secondly, Paul says, not only do we need realism, we also need resolve. Of course we do, if this is the context in which we live out our Christian lives. We need both realism – that means it doesn’t come as a surprise – and resolve to help us endure. In Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, Paul faced hostility “which persecutions,” he says in verse 11, “I endured.” The word “endured” means “to bear up under, to put up with, to suffer through.” And combined with patience and steadfastness from verse 10, endurance here is meant to communicate courage and resolve. “I will not quit. I will not back down. I will not give in. The master has called me into His service; I will not desert my post.” Paul wants Timothy to remember how Paul had set his jaw and to remember his determined frame, his unwavering commitment to go on whatever happened. If Timothy was going to make it, if we are going to make it in a world of affliction and opposition and suffering, we need to cultivate godly resolve.
And in this, doesn’t the apostle Paul here remind you of the Lord Jesus? Luke chapter 9 verse 51 we read, “When the days grew near for Him to be taken up, He set His face to go to Jerusalem.” Betrayal and arrest lay ahead of Him. Condemnation, unjust and brutal torture were set before Him. The horror of the cross loomed over Him in Jerusalem, but Jesus set His face to go to Jerusalem. This was the path laid at His feet by the will of His Father. This the price of your redemption and salvation at a terrible cost. And so He set His face to go unflinchingly into whatever God in His providence had ordained for Him.
Brothers and sisters, don’t we need to pray, I certainly need to pray that something of the resolve of Jesus Christ echoed and mirrored in the life of the apostle Paul might be communicated to me and to you by the work of the Holy Spirit whose ministry it is to make us like Christ. “Father, make me like Christ in this and grant me something of His resolve, as He set His face to march into terrible suffering, help me, help me to stay the course and walk in my Savior’s steps wherever they might lead.” Realism. Resolve.
And finally, if we are going to do all of this, endure all of this, don’t we need the resources of heaven to help us, to sustain us? Look again at verse 11. Speaking of the opposition that he experienced in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, Paul says “I endured, yet from them all the Lord rescued me.” He endured by the help of heaven. Now just linger over Paul’s statement for a moment. Read it again. “Which persecutions I endured, yet from them all the Lord rescued me.” Do you hear the tension in that statement? Did Paul endure persecution or was he rescued from persecution? Actually, far from being a contradiction, that tension in Paul’s statement is one of the keys to enduring suffering as a Christian. It’s not that the Lord stopped the persecution from happening, nor is it that he enabled Paul to evade persecution when he saw it coming. It is, rather, that the Lord sustained Paul in the persecution and brought him through the persecution when it came.
It reminds me very much of the words of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Daniel chapter 3. Do you remember them? They told Nebuchadnezzar, who was threatening to throw them into the fiery furnace, “Unless you bow down and worship the great golden statue that I have set up, this is what’s going to happen.” And they said, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If this be so, our God, whom we serve, is able to deliver us from the burning, fiery furnace, and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king, but if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image you have set up. Our God can deliver us from the flames, no matter what you do, Nebuchadnezzar. Whether we die or live, we are not going to worship a false god. Our live, our death is not in our hands. It’s not even in your hands. It is in the hand of God alone.” And so into the fire they went. And in the fire, remember, the angel of the Lord met them and protected them and kept them from all arm. They were not spared from the furnace; they were preserved in it and brought through it.
And isn’t that what Paul says here too? “Which persecutions I endured, yet the Lord rescued me from them all.” We find the same note sounding in the thirty-fourth psalm. “When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the broken-hearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers them out of them all. He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken. Affliction will slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned. The Lord redeems the life of His servants. None of those who take refuge in Him will be condemned.”
Interestingly, John 19:36 says these words are actually speaking about Jesus Christ. At the cross, do you remember when the soldiers came to the three men hanging there, Jesus and the two thieves? They were preparing to break their legs. They broke the legs of the first thief and then the second thief in order to hasten their demise. But when they came to Jesus, they found that He was already dead. And John says, “This was to fulfill the Scripture that says, ‘Not one of His bones were broken,’” quoting Psalm 34. Psalm 34 – these promises are about Jesus.
But that’s curious, isn’t it? How did God fulfill the promises of Psalm 34 in Jesus’ case? After all, Jesus wasn’t spared, was He? He wasn’t delivered. He wasn’t saved, was He? No, He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. He descended into hell at the cross. But the Lord did for Jesus what He will do for you as you trust in Him, just as He did for Paul, just as Paul is implying He will do for Timothy, just as He did for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. In the fiery trial, He will keep you. In the crucible of suffering, He will uphold you. You need not fear the valley of the shadow of death even when your path takes you down that long, dark road because He is with you and His rod and His staff will comfort you.
Psalm 34 isn’t a promise that you will avoid suffering. It’s a promise that you will be saved in and led through suffering in the same way your Savior was, of whom this psalm primarily speaks and in whose steps you are called to walk. Or think about the promise of Isaiah 43 verse 2. “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned and the flame shall not consume you.” There it is again. Do you see it? The floods will come. The flames will one day dance around you. All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, Paul says. But you can endure. Brothers and sisters in Christ, you can endure, not because you are strong or smart or gifted, but because the Lord will rescue you from them all. He will be with you. He will keep you. His great design in it all, hard as it is, is the same as His grand design in Paul’s life and in Timothy’s. He is working to make us like His Son who endured such great opposition from sinful men for us and for our salvation.
Do you see how God makes useful Gospel servants of His people? First, He calls us to imitation. That is, He wants us to learn from mentors and faithful disciplers who train us by their example. And then He deploys in every single Christian life the instrument of affliction to strengthen the deep, core muscles of true faith so that we do endure and we press on over the long haul, even when the flood and the fire come our way. The Lord will deliver you, in His time and in His way. Exercise the muscle of faith on the promises of God, brothers and sisters, and press on. Let us pray.
Our Father, we trust You. We trust You not only to bless but we trust You with affliction and suffering. We confess we do not always understand Your timing or Your purposes, especially when hardship and difficulty and suffering comes our way. But meekly now, as we bow before You as Your children, we remember the pattern set by our Savior and that the servants are not greater than their master. If the course of His life was marked by suffering, we can expect no less for our own. And so we pray, O God, bless to us whatever affliction in Your providence You send us, that by it we might become like Him who through His sufferings saved us. For we ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.