2 Timothy 1:1-5

Friends, welcome back as we start again.
Moving into a new book today,
2 Timothy, a continuation of what we’ve been doing as we
looked at the first what we call pastoral letter.
Today moving into the second,
we’ll move fairly quickly through this introduction.
It’s not too dissimilar to what you’ve seen,
but this is a follow-up letter.
We don’t really know in terms of
the time in between these two letters,
how much time might have elapsed since Timothy received the first letter,
but some of the same kind
of stuff.
Again, I hear some things that if you were with us in the first letter are going to sound
a little familiar.
But,
you know, in some ways,
I don’t know, Michael,
push back on this if you disagree.
I think there is perhaps a touch more devotional writing in this second letter.
I think maybe one could read this and find more in it that maybe they would
hold on to and take as a personal word versus the first letter.
But that may just be in my own mind.
I won’t argue either way.
We’ll let you decide for yourself.
Yeah, so let’s get started.
We’ll jump in, verse 1, chapter 1,
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus,
by the will of
God for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus,
to Timothy,
my beloved child, grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and
Christ Jesus our Lord.”
So we saw all of this in the first letter.
Very typical.
We’ll start with who’s writing the letter in this culture rather than who’s receiving
the letter,
an expression of affection,
my beloved child,
and then a kind of benediction
or a kind of blessing of sorts,
grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus
our Lord.
So nothing real unusual in this,
although it is worth noting,
as we said in the first letter,
Paul is aware that this letter will be read in the context of the churches.
And so he does include in this first verse an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of
God.
And that does give a nod,
I think, to his authority to say some of the things that he’s
going to say and to expect that the church should listen and, you know,
fulfill what he gives as instruction.
We may be tempted,
Clint, to read pretty quickly through these introductions.
They are in some ways formulaic,
and I don’t mean that in a negative way,
but there is a pattern.
There’s a purpose, much like we have in our own letter writing.
So I’ll point out here the end of verse two.
These are really powerful words,
and I think we maybe miss the importance of them because of the repetition.
But Paul repeats things that matter,
grace,
mercy,
peace.
These are things that we always want to pray over others.
These are things that we would wish for them to have.
And I think that it’s important to see that the positive gets played so quickly in the
address because oftentimes when Paul is going to have some hard words,
he mixes the hard
words in with that introduction.
And here,
as he’s writing to his beloved child,
as he says,
he wishes grace, mercy, and peace.
And I think that’s a beautiful summary of the tone of every Christian’s wish for another
is that they’ll also have grace, mercy, and peace.
Yeah, those are fairly typical words from Paul’s vocabulary,
and it’s interesting.
When he reaches for a blessing for either individual or church,
he is almost always
going to include two of those three.
Almost exclusively,
grace is going to be one of them.
Mercy and peace are often interchanged.
And so,
yeah, I think that’s a good word, Michael.
Yeah, because not to belabor it,
Clint, but like wouldn’t we say much happiness and meaning?
And I mean, we would wish good things in another person,
but to pick spiritual gifts,
I think very much.
You got to remember these are letters.
It’s not as if Paul is sitting down at his desk because he wants to write a New Testament
book.
The church later decided to add this to scripture.
So he’s sitting down to write a personal letter to address some church family business,
and this is where he turns out.
I think it wouldn’t be great if all of our speech was peppered with that same kind of imagination.
That’s what I mean.
Yeah, and this is not generic for Paul.
I mean, the next phrase is from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.
So again, we don’t want to overdo this,
but grace, mercy, and peace for Paul are not things
that exist on their own.
They’re not just good wishes for people.
They are always connected to the faith.
They are always received from our relationship with God and from the hand of God
through Jesus Christ.
So yeah,
maybe a little bit more in that phrase than you might think when you stop and begin unpacking it.
Then we move on right into the heart of the letter.
So not much messing around.
We saw this in the first letter as well.
Paul dives in.
And here, I think a little bit more in a more positive note,
the first letter, he kind of got right into some of the mess.
Here we hang with Timothy for a moment.
Verse 3,
“I’m grateful to God,
whom I worship with a clear conscience,
as my ancestors did,
when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day,
recalling your tears.
I long to see you,
that I might be filled with joy.”
Stop there, I think, Michael.
So again, an encouraging word to Timothy.
I pray for you.
I’m grateful to God for you.
I worship God with a clear conscience, again,
sort of an affirmation of who it is that’s writing this letter.
We don’t know much about what Paul has in mind here when he says,
“Recalling your tears.” This may be the last time that they saw one another and they parted company.
Perhaps there was a tearful goodbye involved because they clearly are people who care about one another.
We just had some family with us this weekend,
and though we had seen them recently,
my wife’s family,
whenever they say goodbye to one another,
whether it’s only been a week or whether it’s
been a few months,
there’s always some tears involved in that.
And maybe that’s kind of what’s happening here,
recalling your tears.
“I long to see you,
that I might be filled with joy.”
And so, you know,
Michael,
sometimes Paul gets a reputation maybe for being a little
not callous, maybe a little hard because sometimes he’s dealing with
difficult issues, and sometimes he does say difficult things.
But I do think we want to stop and recognize these moments where Paul has—I mean,
this is a man writing to another man,
and Paul is very able to say in his own way,
“I miss you.
I love you.
I pray for you.
I can’t wait to see you again because it’s going to bring me joy.”
I think that softens Paul a little bit if we listen to it.
Yeah, and it’s not performative in a really real sense.
I think that when we see here this idea that I recall your tears,
you know, that’s not even like a brotherhood kind of comment,
you know, two pastors writing one another and
ribbing one another or expressing gratitude for the other.
That is personal.
That’s relational in its most deep and meaningful way.
And I agree with you,
Clint. I think that we often find ourselves crossways with Paul because Paul finds himself crossways
with lots of the church and our propensities as humans.
We like to think that there’s thousands of years separating us from the original recipients
of this letter, and that’s chronologically true.
But spiritually, that’s false.
I mean, we share the same humanity as all of those that Paul’s writing to.
And so I think we find in many of those critiques
a kind of lash on our own souls.
I mean, it’s convicting often when we discover the ways in which Paul’s trying to show us
Christ and in doing so he points us away from our own brokenness.
Here we see that Paul was human.
He had real meaningful relationships,
that he cared deeply about Timothy.
And we’re about to see as we get into the next verse that that is a connection because
of the thing that unifies them,
that fundamentally they’re both believers in the fundamental
gospel of Jesus Christ.
And so their relationship is not just administrative.
This is not a manager writing to a employee or a leader of a branch of some kind of the
church.
This is Paul writing someone who he considers to be family.
And he considers that to be at the most deep, beautiful theological level.
And that too, Clint, I think it intimates what this letter doesn’t have.
We need to be careful when we read things that are not in the text.
But it doesn’t have a location.
The first letter, remember, it said who was in Ephesus.
So it doesn’t say where Timothy was,
where the first one did.
And then interestingly,
here he does linger with the relationship at the beginning.
So I think my commentary makes point that that may be evidence that Paul is indeed coming
to a more serious place in his imprisonment,
and there may be some concern coming there.
We’ll address that as we get further into the book.
But what we obviously see is Paul is slowing down at the very outset of the book.
He’s not just offering a greeting.
He’s offering personal words,
and that matters.
Yeah,
and to your point,
Michael, he’s going to, by the end of the week, we’ll see this.
He’s going to spend a significant amount of time,
given the length of this letter,
communicating his own condition,
how he is doing,
and where he is,
what’s happening to him.
Because again, he knows that the people who are reading it,
for the most part,
care deeply about him.
I want to go on to this last verse that we’ll look at today, verse 5,
“I am reminded of your sincere faith,
a faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice,
and now I am sure lives in you.”
This is really interesting.
This is easily the kind of verse that you would read over,
but when you stop and think about this verse,
it is remarkable.
We are not that far,
probably a couple of decades,
give or take, maybe we’ll call it
three decades or so,
past the resurrection.
So we’re 20, 30 years down the road in Christianity,
and Timothy here,
we learn, is a third generation Christian.
Now, that doesn’t mean,
you know, they were probably all alive at the time.
So it happens simultaneously,
or at least in short order,
but to have one family represented
in the church this early,
in which there are three generations of believer,
is very interesting.
And this reference,
first in your grandmother Lois,
and then your mother Eunice.
So last letter, we looked at Paul,
Paul had some very difficult things to say about women
in the church, and they shouldn’t, you know, have authority, and maybe they shouldn’t teach.
And we talked through that,
and if you haven’t seen that,
you might want to go back and watch,
because we’re not sure exactly what that means in the larger context of what Paul writes.
But it is fascinating that here,
right away, what we see is a celebration and an affirmation
of the faith of Timothy’s two matriarchal descendants,
right?
Your grandmother Lois,
faith first lived in here,
sincere faith, and your mother Lois,
and now they have handed and passed that faith down to you.
That is, I think, in some ways remarkable,
Michael.
It’s the kind of verse that gets missed.
You know, when Paul says women have to be silent,
everybody’s going to read that.
You’re never going to miss that.
But here,
when he says, “You have these two remarkable women of faith in your family,
and I see what I saw in them growing in you,
and I celebrate it,” I do think,
I do think that’s a beautiful picture of the way that faith…
Most of us look to one of our aunts,
you know, a grandmother, a mother, father, uncle,
somebody in our family,
and we think they were one of the people who taught me the faith, and
that is built in right away from the beginning here. Yeah, Clint, I was going to say,
thanks be to God for grandmothers.
Thanks be to God for mothers.
Thanks be to God for those who show us the faith of Jesus Christ.
Sometimes,
Clint,
we in the church get fixated on a particular passage like we did in 1 Timothy.
We tried to talk about that when we talked about the women in passage and say,
“We have to read the Bible in its entirety.
We have to interpret the text with wisdom.
We have to be people who live in this moment and trust the Spirit of God
to bless us with understanding as we come to a text.”
When we come to a word like this,
it is important to be reminded
that there are so many different words in the New Testament,
so many different affirmations of what faith looks like,
and here we see the faith of these two women as being passed down from one generation to the next
and then carried by Timothy into his particular vocation of church leadership.
And every single one of us who has had that person,
male or female, who showed us the faith,
knows the kind of gratitude,
Clint, that lives in the heart of an honest reflection that says,
“I first saw the faith in the hands and the feet and the words and the deep thoughts of
this person.” And if you have that person in your mind,
I think we can all recognize
that when God gives us that blessing,
it’s something worth celebrating.
And clearly,
there’s a lot happening in a community where on one hand,
Paul talks about order and how a community needs to be living its faith orderly,
and also a kind of community where women have the freedom and the blessing to share their faith
so that it is compelling and evangelistic and it passes on from one generation to the next.
Surely, whatever that church is doing is effectively passing down the faith,
and that’s the kind of thing worth stopping and pausing and celebrating.
Yeah, and I think we have to give Paul credit for that,
to stop in this letter and
to recognize and celebrate a family this early into the story of the church that can show three
generations of what he calls a sincere faith,
ultimately
resulting in a person who is moving into leadership
in the church.
I think that’s a good moment.
A church would be proud of that,
and a family would be proud of that,
and I think that we want to make sure that we pause and linger for a few
moments on verses like that.
I would only say we’re going to come tomorrow and we’ll build a bridge
as we enter into the conversation.
The only question mark that lives if we’re going to pause
at the end of verse five is faith is never just the old ratty Bible that we inherited from a loved
one who read it or the faith of a loved one who embodied the faith in their time.
That’s a beautiful gift and it’s a starting point.
It’s a seed planted,
but Clint,
you’ve had far more
years than I.
I’ve had the privilege of now working for some years with students as they come up.
It’s one thing to plant a seed,
but it is a great gift when you see that seed nurtured and cared for,
and a student comes back to a congregation,
they go to college,
and they come back and you have a conversation,
and you can tell this is a faith that continues to grow.
In those moments,
it’s not just an affirmation of Lois and Eunice,
it’s also an affirmation God has been faithful
to the work that they were the,
maybe even the instigators of,
or they were the beginning of
that planting, but God has been at work in the reaping of it.
So it’s worth noting,
Timothy’s been active in this as well.
He’s been making choices and it is something,
of course, for him to be proud of,
but for these women, I’m sure,
something to be very proud of.
You know, we would be tempted,
Michael, and I don’t know if this is intentional on Paul’s part,
but I think it’s significant.
You could say, “And the faith that you now have.”
But I think fascinating and better,
Paul says, “The faith that I am sure lives in you.” And that word
lives is the right word for faith because it’s not something you possess.
It’s not something that
you just simply have.
It is something that lives in us and that we live out of.
And I think, you know, to your point,
I think Paul, in the way that he even speaks here,
encapsulates that.
You know, “I am sure that faith that I saw in them now lives in you.” Not just is in you somewhere,
but it lives in you.
And I think, you know, that’s a great challenge,
a great encouragement, and a great way to talk about what it means to be a person of faith.
I don’t want to elongate this too long,
Clint, but one last word there is when the faith grows.
Look at the word that precedes verse 5.
“I long to see you so that I may be filled with,” what?
Joy.
Joy is an essential component of the Christian life,
not because we are forced
to be happy all the time,
though that’s sometimes, I think, the reputation that joy gets.
No, it’s because joy is an unescapable outcome when we find ourselves in the midst of faith.
Because when we recognize that relationship that happens between God and ourselves,
when we find the faith passed
down, there is no other possible outcome than experiencing joy.
That’s the good news of Jesus
Christ at work, and it’s the fruit of that living that you describe.
So, you know, whatever rap Christians get, may it be a reputation for joy in the face of God,
and that comes in that engagement with the faith.
Yeah.
Hey, thanks for joining us as we get into this book,
and we look forward to
being with you again tomorrow.
Hope you can make it.