Now let me invite you to take your Bibles in hand and turn with me please, not to Ezra – that’s a typo! We are working our way through the pastoral epistles together and we’ve come to the opening section today of 2 Timothy chapter 1. Second Timothy chapter 1, verses 1 through 7. And you can find that on page 995 if you are using one of our church Bibles.
The book of Acts, you may recall, ends with the apostle Paul under house arrest in Rome. But in the letter to Titus, the third of the pastoral epistles, which was written actually between 1 and 2 Timothy, in Titus 3:12, Paul mentions spending the winter in Nicopolis and then asks Titus to come and join him there, which means that Paul has been released from his imprisonment at the end of the book of Acts and has resumed his ministry. But now, according to 2 Timothy chapter 1 verse 8, when he writes the letter we are beginning to study today, he is back again in a Roman prison.
And this time, it appears to be a much rougher ordeal. Second Timothy 4:21 indicates another winter is looming, so at least two years have passed since his first imprisonment. According to 4:11, everyone on his ministry team has left him for various reasons except Luke, and several other people have caused him a great deal of personal harm. His situation is so dire in fact, he doesn’t even have a cloak for warmth as the cold begins to set in. And to crown it all, chapter 4 verse 6, he tells Timothy that he expects to be martyred soon. “The time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race.” And indeed, tradition says that not long after penning those words to Timothy, Paul was beheaded for his faith in the city of Rome.
So that makes the letter we are considering today the last thing Paul wrote before his execution. They are among his very last words. And isn’t it salutary to note that as his own sufferings escalated, his own impending martyrdom looms, his thoughts are not occupied with the horror of what is happening to him or the ordeal that lies ahead of him. They are focused rather on the welfare of young pastor Timothy and the church that he serves in Ephesus. Timothy, remember, was a sensitive young man facing enormous pastoral and personal challenges in the service of the Gospel. And Paul writes this letter to him to encourage Timothy to keep the faith and to persevere and to press on to the end in the footsteps of his mentor, the apostle Paul.
This morning, as I said a moment ago, we are thinking about the first seven verses of the letter. And right away, if you cast your eye over it, you can see the remarkable love and care of the apostle for Timothy, can’t you. He wants you to continue on and grow and bear fruit in the service of Christ. And to help him to do that, he reminds Timothy of the way that God had previously worked in his life to save him and to disciple him and then to call him and deploy him in his service. And as we trace out those reminders in these opening verses, really we have what amounts to a virtual manual for making disciples. Here is how Timothy was discipled, how we must be discipled, how we may make disciples.
I want you to notice four things from these seven verses. First, if we are to be properly discipled and if we are to make disciples of others, first of all we need to embrace the promise of life. That’s in verse 1. Embrace the promise of life. Secondly, to be discipled and to make disciples, we should imitate the ministry of mentors, verses 1 through 4. Thirdly, to be discipled, to make disciples, verse 5 says we should remember the nurture of family. And finally, to be discipled and to make disciples, verses 6 and 7 remind us we are to fan into flame the gift of God. And so here is a four-fold discipleship program for our church, for your life and mine. Do you see it? Embrace the promise of life, imitate the ministry of mentors, remember the nurture of family, and fan into flame the gift of God.
Before we consider each of those, let’s pray and ask for the Lord to help us. Let us all pray.
Our God and Father, we cry out to You for Your help. Send us the Holy Spirit to give light and understanding and to work faith in our hearts and repentance wherever necessary and new obedience as we live for Jesus. Do this, we pray, by Your Word and Spirit for the glory of the name of Christ, in whose name we ask it, amen.
Second Timothy chapter 1 at verse 1. This is the Word of God:
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus,
To Timothy, my beloved child:
Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.
I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. As I remember your tears, I long to see you, that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well. For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.”
Amen.
Think with me about the first thing we need if we are to be or to make faithful disciples – we must embrace the promise of life. Look at verse 1 please. “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus.” That is the familiar apostolic greeting with some version of which Paul customarily begins all his letters. It is an assertion of the divine origin of his apostolic authority. What is unique about this opening greeting is the additional phrase, “An apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus.” Paul is an apostle, “according to the promise of life that is in Jesus Christ.” That phrase, “according to,” here is probably better translated something like, “with respect to” or “regarding” or “with reference to.” Maybe we could paraphrase verse 1 as, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God in service of the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus.”
Paul, remember, is in prison. He’s facing his own death, his own martyrdom, but he is there, he says, “in service of the promise of life.” The promise of life in Christ Jesus, he’s saying to us, is worth suffering for, it’s worth spending my life for, it’s worth dying to make known to the world. In the United Kingdom, bank notes all carry the phrase written on them, “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of” – whatever the denomination might be – 5 pounds or 10 pounds or 20 pounds. The idea originally, when bank notes came into circulation at first, was that the bearer of the note could exchange it at the bank for the promised value in solid gold sovereigns. The governor of the bank of England was saying each bank note was a kind of IOU, promising that amount of gold to anyone bearing the note. “I promise to pay the bearer on demand.” Now I checked – disappointingly, you can’t exchange the notes for gold anymore; you can only exchange them for other cash of the same value. That’s very disappointing, but originally it was a promise of gold.
The Christian Gospel, entrusted to Paul as an apostle of Christ Jesus, contains God’s promise. And unlike the promises on British bank notes, God’s promises never change. God Himself has made out to sinners an IOU, a promise to pay the bearer on demand the pure gold of new life in Jesus Christ. If you believe upon Christ – obedient, suffering, dying for sinners – if you will take God at His word to give you life by entrusting yourself to Christ alone for forgiveness and pardon, if you will take God’s IOU to Him today and say to Him, “Lord, You promised to give me life in Christ Jesus if I turn from my self and my sin and rested all my hope in Jesus’ blood and righteousness, and now here I am coming to you to cash in that IOU. Keep Your promise to me and give me life.” If you will do that today, God will deliver on His word. He’s never yet failed to give life to sinners who come to Him through faith in His Son.
That is a message worth sharing and suffering for. It’s glorious, isn’t it? God’s never-broken IOU to give life to everyone who comes to Him pleading the cross and the empty tomb of the Lord Jesus as their only hope, and He extends that promise to anyone and everyone, to you today and to me. If we are to become disciples and if we are to make disciples of others, we need to trust this promise for ourselves and then we need to offer it boldly and joyously to the world. The promise of life.
Then secondly, look at verses 1 through 4. If discipleship begins by embracing the promise of life, it is nurtured by imitating the ministry of mentors. So first, embrace the promise of life. Now, imitate the ministry of mentors. Christians are born. God gives them new life. They are born again, Jesus told Nicodemus, by the power of the Holy Spirit. “God, who is rich in mercy, makes us alive together with Christ.” “We are given the right,” John 1, “to become the children of God who are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but born of God.” Christians are born. Disciples are made. Christians are born. Disciples are made.
Years ago when I was training for the ministry in the mainline Church of Scotland, I was sent to serve in a congregation in Glasgow with a very liberal pastor who really didn’t believe much of anything at all. There was no Gospel preaching, no exposition of the Scriptures, no awareness of the authority of the Word of God ruling or directing the church, it’s ministry, or the lives of its people. And it was frankly heartbreaking to see the wreckage caused to a church by a false shepherd like that leading the flock astray. But after a few weeks there, I found to my surprise that despite years without any meaningful Bible teaching in that congregation, there nevertheless remained a small remnant of genuine Christians. They were sweet, prayerful people with a very simple, basic faith in Jesus; a basic, rudimentary love and submission to the Word of God. But they’d never been taught, never been nurtured, and so their faith was fragile and immature and simplistic, often confused. They were easy targets for the errors that they were being taught. They were Christians, but not really disciples, not mature followers of Christ, at least not in the fullest sense of the term.
Christians are born, but disciples are made. We need mentors, disciplers, teachers and role models who will nurture us in the truth and in a life that pleases God. And here’s the thing; this is important. No matter how far along in our journey toward Christian maturity we may go, we never stop needing discipleship and mentoring and help heavenward from those who are a few steps further down the road than we are. Isn’t that right? So think of Timothy. He is a pastor already, an ordained teaching elder in the church of Jesus Christ, an evangelist trained and sent to Ephesus by the mighty apostle Paul himself. And he needs continuing mentoring. He needs discipling. And so do I and so do you.
Now Paul’s in jail, remember, so he can’t go in person to continue to mentor and disciple Timothy, but he is writing this letter to do exactly that. He is mentoring Timothy from afar, and he begins verse 1, notice, with a reminder of his apostolic authority. And then in verse 2, he adds a reminder of his paternal love. You see those two notes in the text? “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to Timothy, my beloved child.” Paul is a father in the faith to Timothy and an apostle of Christ Jesus as well. There’s intimacy and tenderness and understanding and pathos and love between father and son. And there’s also authority and solemnity and gravity between apostle and pastor. And we need both. Timothy needed both – authority, not personal authority really but the authority of God in His Word, and intimacy – not mere sentiment, but the intimacy of Christian love. Authority and intimacy together make disciples.
And it’s not hard to see why. A moment’s reflection will make it clear. We welcome, don’t we, we welcome difficult, challenging instruction if we know the person who gives it to us really loves us. That’s one side of this. We revere those who love us well and we listen when they give us counsel. The other side of this is that we will never presume upon their love and their care for us if that love always comes to us constrained and directed by the authority of apostolic truth. So a good mentor will love us with the truth and will teach us with love. That’s how you make disciples.
And if you look in verses 3 and 4, you begin to see how Paul does some of that right here in his letter. Look at verse 3. First of all, Paul models a habit of thanksgiving. Do you see that? “I thank God,” he says, “night and day.” He has a deep, abiding sense of gratitude to God for Timothy. What we mustn’t miss, of course, is not just that he feels grateful but that he tells Timothy about his gratitude. So this isn’t a pious platitude, an empty compliment. Paul isn’t engaging in flattery. He wants to encourage Timothy in substantial, meaningful ways, letting Timothy see the depth of his gratitude to God for him is one of the ways he does that effectively.
I wonder if you are thankful – are you thankful for the people God has put in your life? If you are, does it ever actually show up in your private, secret prayers in heartfelt expressions of thanksgiving to God? I wonder if the degree to which we are privately pouring out our thanksgiving to God is the real index of how genuinely thankful we are for the people God has put in our lives. And if you are thankful and prayerfully thankful about the people God has place in your life, ask yourself this – “Am I in a position before God today to be able to do with those people what Paul does here with Timothy?” Look them in the eye and tell them not just that, “I feel thankful,” but, “I have given thanks for you to your God and to mine.” It might just be that doing that will be the sort of strong encouragement and comfort that they will need to hear from you to help them press on through some arduous season of their lives. A habit of thanksgiving is a strong encouragement as we make disciples.
Secondly, notice Paul models a life of Godward service. “I thank God whom I serve.” Now that word for “serve” there is not the usual word, the generic word for “service.” It’s actually a worship word, a Godward word. It has religious connotations. It’s used, for example, in Hebrews 9:1 to describe rules for worship in the temple according to the law of Moses in the old covenant. Now do you see what Paul is saying here? He says that he views his own painful service, languishing right now in a Roman prison cell, he sees it as an offering to God, an act of worship, a sacrifice of praise. That’s partly why he was able to be so very thankful, all his circumstances notwithstanding.
How might that idea change the way you handle your own heart, I wonder, when providence orders seasons of suffering for you? I dare say I would labor harder than I often do to avoid prideful complaint or morbid self-pity or petty jealously at the happier condition of others if I could only see myself as called, in that moment, in this or that hard circumstance, called to render to the Lord a sacrifice of worship by the way in which I respond to those trials. Paul is thankful, in chains, because he knows his chains are part of his service, his worship to God.
A habit of thanksgiving. A life of Godward service. Thirdly, Paul models a clear conscience. “I thank my God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience.” Now he’s incarcerated like a common criminal. He’s endured many setbacks and hard reversals in ministry. But before God, whatever others might say of him, his conscience, he says, is clear. He’s not claiming that he has no sin to repent of or no failures that he regrets, but he is saying that the course of his ministry has been characterized by fidelity to the call of God. He is saying that, God helping him, he has worked at growing in Christlikeness in such a way that none of the accusations of the Roman magistrates or the slanders of false teachers or rival leaders in the church can be made to stick. He is right with God, and in so far as it depends upon him, he is right with other people too.
Friends, haven’t you found that a conscience that is not clear is a terrible hindrance to your service of the Lord? It leaves us unsettled, restless, hesitant, unsure, ashamed. A guilty conscience is paralyzing, but a clear conscience, knowing you have done and are doing the right thing, a clean conscience is a powerful support to anyone, especially when they have to persevere in hard circumstances. Does your conscience accuse you today? Have you been ignoring the alarm of conscience blaring in your heart, calling you to turn back from your sin and your selfishness? Is yours a clear conscience? Conscience is the minister of God in your soul and it is never safe to ignore his sermons. Conscience is the minister of God in your soul; it is never safe to ignore his sermons.
A habit of thankfulness. A life of Godward service. A clean conscience. Fourthly, Paul morals a pattern of persistent prayer. Do you see that in the text? “I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day.” Now let’s be clear, you cannot grow personally as a disciple of Jesus Christ unless you make a habit of persistent, private prayer. And you can’t make disciples of others unless, like Paul, you understand that prayer is your mightiest instrument in promoting the spiritual welfare of those you seek to serve. Maybe you have worked and served and taught and cared for and led others, you’ve sought to sow the seed of God’s Word and water the seed and cultivate the seedlings as it begins to grow. Perhaps, however, you will also have to admit that you’ve done all of this without much of any consistent expression of heartfelt dependence upon the Lord who alone can give the growth. You need to know, however outwardly impressive all your busyness and activity can appear, in the end it will prove a desolate effort, a fruitless labor because you have forgotten that “Unless the Lord builds the house, they that build it labor in vain.”
Paul’s prayer for Timothy, you’ll notice, is constant night and day. Here is a man for whom prayer is habitual. It permeates his life. What are your prayer habits? Do you have prayer habits? Is prayer an afterthought, an extra, something merely incidental to your life and labors, fit into the margins whenever you may remember? Paul knows we need to learn that persistent prayer is the God-ordained means by which to express our dependence on Him and our only mechanism to call down His blessing and favor on all our work on His behalf.
A habit of thankfulness. A life of Godward service. A clear conscience. A pattern of persistent prayer. The last part of Paul’s example here has to do with his unvarnished affection for Timothy. Look at verse 4. “As I remember your tears, I long to see you, that I may be filled with joy.” We don’t really know exactly the occasion for Timothy’s tears. It’s a reasonable speculation to guess that Paul is recalling the moment of his arrest and incarceration and Timothy’s grief as he saw his mentor shackled and led away for the last time. “And those tears,” Paul says, “I can see they revealed the depth of your love for me, and I am longing to see you because even though I am here in jail, even though I am suffering, even though I am isolated and alone and cold and shivering and facing my own martyrdom any day now, if only I could see you again it would bring joy to my prison cell and lighten my heart.”
Sometimes we can fall into the trap of thinking that stoic invulnerability is our best response to suffering. Driven by a misguided instinct for self-preservation, perhaps we think we should never allow ourselves to need anyone, that relying on other people is a weakness that we cannot permit if we are going to cope with what is happening to us. But Paul knows that sensitive young Timothy has a hard road of challenging ministry ahead of him. It’s going to be stressful sometimes. He is going to suffer sometimes. And so Paul, the mentor, wants Timothy to see that even for one so mature in his faith, so godly and wise as the apostle himself, amidst all his afflictions in a Roman prison, even for him the bonds of affection and tenderness and trust that the Lord had forged between them, they’re not a weakness, not a liability. They are a great source of strength and encouragement to him.
Brothers and sisters, loveless isolation is a great tool of the devil. We are made for partnership, redeemed to serve together. We need each other. And in the bonds of deep Christian love, there is great strength.
How can we be, how can we make faithful disciples? First, we must embrace the promise of life. Secondly, we must learn to imitate the ministry of mentors. That’s why Paul is saying what he says here to Timothy. Now thirdly, look with me at verse 5. We must remember the nurture of family. Remember the nurture of family. Now of course not everyone has come from a Chrisitan home, and not every home is a happy one, nor is every parent a positive role model. More than a few of us in this room this morning are trophies of redeeming grace that has erupted into the middle of tragic family circumstances that were very far from the Biblical ideal. God has rescued some of us despite the terrible, damaging behaviors of parents or guardians who ought to have cared for us but who did not. And if we are honest, no small part of the process of sanctification in our own Christian lives involves for us unpicking the knots and the tangles of dysfunction that our own mixed up family backgrounds have left us with. That’s true for more than a few of us here today.
And so it might be helpful to you to see that in the case of Timothy, his family background was far from ideal as well. When Paul first met him in Lystra in Acts chapter 16, Luke tells us Timothy’s mother, named in our chapter as Eunice, Timothy’s mother was already a Jewish Christian, but his father was a Greek. And here you’ll notice in verse 5 that “a sincere faith” that now comes to occupy Timothy’s heart dwelt first in grandmother Lois and mother Eunice. But no mention is made here of his father. The implication is that while Lois and Eunice and eventually Timothy too have come to faith in Christ, Timothy’s Greek father has remained unconverted in his paganism, which perhaps explains why Paul himself has come to occupy such an important role as a spiritual surrogate father to Timothy. There was a fundamental division in Timothy’s childhood home, a heartbreaking disconnect between his grandmother and mother’s faith, on the one hand, a faith that Timothy comes to share, and his father’s enduring rejection of that faith.
And so please know that when Paul celebrates Timothy’s godly upbringing in this letter, he’s not celebrating a perfect Christian home. Timothy’s story is messy and sad. And yet despite the difficult situation, Lois and Eunice have remained faithful to raise Timothy in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Later in chapter 3 at verse 15, Paul reminds Timothy that he learned the sacred writings, which are able to make him wise for salvation through faith in Christ from his childhood, from his earliest days. Despite his father’s hostility or at least ambivalence to the Christian Gospel, Timothy was nevertheless faithfully catechised and trained in the truth of the Word of God by a believing mother and grandmother from his earliest memories.
Now not everyone can say that. Not everyone has had that sort of privilege of being exposed to the Word of God from early years. But if you today are a child of Christian parents, you need to remember you have an enormous spiritual advantage. Maybe you have been raised in a Christian home and you find yourself lamenting actually what you perceive to be the lack of a good testimony. “I never knew a day when I didn’t believe the Gospel,” doesn’t sound like the most sensational conversion story, does it? But Paul wants to equip Timothy to stay the course, weather the storm, keep the faith. So he reminds him that his own sincere faith was shaped in no small measure not just by the influence of the apostle Paul who came into his life as a young man, but by his faithful mother and grandmother who raised him from his earliest years to believe the Scriptures. Remember the great privilege of nurture in a Christian family.
If yours is a testimony, the testimony of a covenant child never knowing a day when they didn’t believe the Gospel, I want you to understand that is the most beautiful testimony of all. It is music, certainly, to a pastor’s ears. It is not a second class testimony for sure. It is actually the plan of God for the nurture of the children of believers. It is the way it is meant to be. And Paul is saying to fearful Timothy, uncertain Timothy whose assurance was no doubt easily shaken, “One evidence, you know, of the sincerity and authenticity of your faith, Timothy, is that God has worked it in you according to the covenantal pattern prescribed in holy Scripture just as He said He would.” Believing parents raising their children in the faith is ordinarily a principal means in the hands of God in the conversion of Christian children. And if that is your story, bless God for the great privileges He has lavished upon you that He has spared you years of wandering and brought you early to trust in Jesus and saturated your mind and shaped your life in an environment where the Word of God is revered and held in honor.
Embrace the promise of life. Imitate the ministry of mentors. Remember, rejoice in the nurture of family. And finally, if we want to be and make disciples, we must fan into flame the gift of God. Look at verses 6 and 7 please. “For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” There are really two types of spiritual gifts listed in the New Testament. There are various kinds of gifts that are given by God as He pleases to ordinary Christians of all types to equip us all for service in the church. That’s one type of spiritual gift. Then there’s another type. These are the gifts that you find listed in Ephesians 4:11. They are gifts given to the church in the ordination of individuals to sacred office – apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers are the officers listed in Ephesians 4. Since spiritual gifts are nowhere said to be given through the laying on of hands, the ordinary gifts for general service are nowhere said in the New Testament to be given through the laying on of hands, I think we have to conclude that here Paul is talking about the latter type of gift, that is the gift of office itself, rather than some kind of special, spiritual endowment of ability bestowed on Timothy as his ordination.
And Paul is exhorting Timothy to fan that gift, the gift of office, when he was set apart to be a pastor and preacher of the Word, to fan it into flame, to improve it, work at it until it burns brighter and brighter and brighter still in his Savior’s service. “I was there, Timothy, with the other elders. Do you remember? And with them, I laid my hands on your head, and there the gift of Gospel ministry was entrusted to you. You were consecrated to the service of God and the proclamation of His Word. And now I want you to be diligent in tending the fires of your ministry. Don’t let them burn low by neglect. Make the fire of zeal for the welfare of others and the glory of Jesus Christ burn as brightly as you can make it. And don’t forget, as you serve and struggle and suffer in that great work, don’t forget you are supported by more than a spiritual father in me, by more than the loving legacy of a Christian family in Lois and Eunice. You are supported by the Holy Spirit Himself, Timothy.”
The Spirit, verse 7, that God gave us, I believe should be capitalized. It is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to us, and He is not the author of fear, not cowardice, not spiritual insecurity. Paul says he is, rather, the author of power and love and self-control. In other words, among all the resources God has given you to make you a disciple and enable you in turn to make disciples, this is the greatest. This is the one indispensable gift and grace that you need – you have the Holy Spirit to give you power to persevere, to give you love so that you can care for the unlovely, and to give you self-control when everything in you says, “Just quit! Just give up! It’s too hard to keep putting one foot in front of the other in that long obedience in the same direction.”
Brothers and sisters, like Timothy, we all have our temperamental liabilities, don’t we? We have our weaknesses, our baggage, our burdens. But if you’ve come to embrace the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus, not only do you have spiritual fathers and mothers and grandmothers to encourage you and model for you what it means for you to be a disciple, you have the Spirit of God Himself residing in your heart to give you power and love and self-control. He will never leave you. He will never stop the supply of His grace to you. He will continue His work in you will you at last cross the finish line and finish your race as the apostle Paul finished his.
How shall we be, how shall we make faithful disciples? We must embrace the promise of life. We must imitate the ministry of our mentors. We must remember the nurture of Christian family. And we must fan into flame the gift of God. Labor with all the supply of His strength, the Spirit of Christ helping us, to pour out our lives in the service of the Savior who gave His life for us.
Let us pray.
Lord our God, as we bow before You, we bless You for the teaching of Your holy Word. We ask You to write it on all our hearts, incline our wills toward new obedience. Thank You, O God, for those who have mentored and shaped us, for fathers and mothers in the faith, for literal mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers who opened the Scriptures to us from an early age. Thank You especially for Your great gift of the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts, giving us not fear but power and love and self-control. Grant to us such faith to believe Your promise that we get up off the dirt and press back into the fight as Monday rolls around. For Jesus’ sake, amen.