2 Timothy 1:11-14

Hey, everybody, welcome back.
Thanks for joining us as we close out this Bible study
week on 2 Timothy,
still making our way through the first chapter yesterday.
Some really wonderful
verses, some deep
verses from Paul, some theologically diverse and helpful verses.
Hope you could join us.
If not,
really do think that’s one that might be worth going back and looking
at again because there’s some great stuff in there.
We continue to move on through that
first chapter.
We find ourselves in the eleventh verse today.
I’ll go ahead and read our section
today, then we can have some conversation about it.
“For this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher,
and for this reason I suffer as I do.
But I’m not ashamed,
for I know the one in whom I have put my trust,
and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what I have entrusted to him.
Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard from me
in the faith and the love
that are in Christ Jesus.
Guard the good treasure entrusted to you with the help of the Holy
Spirit living in us.”
So these are going to sound,
I think, familiar.
These are verses of encouragement to Timothy,
an appeal to Timothy to continue to grow,
a reminder of
Paul’s status.
Again,
remember that these are being read in the church.
There’s not,
as least as I read it,
Michael, there’s not really anything new in these words though
they are well stated,
particularly love this language.
“I’m not ashamed, I know the one
in whom I have put my trust,
and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what
I have entrusted to him.” And then we’ve seen this call before,
verse 13, “Hold to the standard of sound teaching.” This is kind of the backbone of really everything that
Paul has been saying to Timothy,
“Guard the good treasure.” We’ve heard that language
before too.
So I would say today,
Michael, as we look at these verses,
really not anything new in terms of the voice,
but things that are important,
things that are well said,
and I do think things that are encouraging.
Yeah, I agree.
I think that there’s some questions that maybe come out of the text
here today, Clint, like what is the standard of sound teaching?
I think the church has
come down on that question now for thousands of years.
It can be hard to keep in our mind
sort of that arc.
In the earliest generations of the church,
sound teaching resulted in
substantial conversations about things like the dual nature of Christ and the Trinity.
And I don’t want to jump into technical theology,
but I want to just make the case that there
were hundreds of years spent hammering out some really big sort of fundamentals of the
Christian faith.
And then since then,
the church has gone through periods where there’s
been moments of some great sort of struggle and turmoil over particular things.
And certainly, as Protestants, we look to the Reformation as one of those moments where the idea of
sound teaching came back to the forefront.
And some of those Reformation pastors and
theologians were insisting that we needed to return to some core fundamentals of the faith.
What I think is striking here,
Clint, as we look at this,
is how easy and tempting
it is for us to insert sound teaching with whatever we believe.
I mean, how many times have we either had someone come in very convinced that the only theological belief that could
possibly exist was fill in the blank.
And in the background,
you know, well, you know that there are thoughtful people who find themselves all over the spectrum.
I think as Paul writes here,
what strikes me about his letter to Timothy,
especially what we saw in First Timothy,
and I think what we’re going to see as we continue on into second,
is when Paul’s talking about teaching, it’s less about
sort of a hundred-point theology test.
And it’s more about the way that our belief in Jesus informs the actual lived practice in our church
community.
It is very practical.
It’s very connected to the words and actions that animate our lives together.
And so teaching here,
all of that’s a roundabout way of saying,
I’m sorry to make it such a long trip.
My point is simply that we might substitute the idea of
sound teaching as a mental thing to be assented to.
I think Paul means something deeper than that,
the teaching of Jesus Christ that animates who we are and what he means in our lives.
One of the ways that you can sometimes unpack verses is to track the prepositions.
And I really like what Paul has done here in that regard, Michael.
Hold to the standard of sound
teaching that you received
from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.
And so I think,
yeah, we can sometimes think that Paul has in mind here doctrine,
and it’s not that he doesn’t have doctrine,
it’s that for Paul,
sound teaching and the
standards of our faith are also connected to Jesus Christ,
that that’s where they come from.
That’s where they’re issued from.
They flow from Christ.
So his teaching,
he doesn’t understand to be the standard because he says it,
but yet because it is rooted in the faith and love that
are in Jesus Christ.
So it’s not even just the faith and love that make them the standard,
it’s that the faith and love comes from Christ Jesus through that teaching,
and that represents for him the standard.
And then he closes that with guard the,
or you could read that this,
guard this good treasure entrusted to you with the help of the
Holy Spirit living in us.
I think that that’s a really interesting devotional thought that part
of what we do in our faith is guard the holy treasure that we have been given.
What do we do?
We keep harm from coming to it.
We keep it from being misused,
mismanaged.
We guard it, we keep it holy.
We maintain that it’s sacred in the way that we live.
And because it doesn’t
belong to us, as the word suggests,
it is entrusted to us.
So maybe not new words,
but really good words.
I think there’s a contemporariness to this section here,
Clint, that I think is worth pointing out.
Look here back at verse 12.
For this reason, I suffer as I do,
but I’m not ashamed.
Those are difficult words to hear in a Western American context.
I think we tend to not exactly know,
even as people of faith,
I think we sometimes
don’t exactly know what to do with suffering.
When there’s someone in our midst who’s going through difficult work,
I think we often live in a culture in the world that wants to assign guilt
and blame.
What did that person do wrong or what consequences are catching up with you?
Just as a people who tend to be driven by a pursuit of best or maybe even
sort of a higher,
maybe in some of our thinking,
the idea here that Paul points to chains,
not as a demonstration of God’s weakness or not as a sort of moment to reflect on maybe God’s
unfaithfulness.
I think many of us are tempted to do that.
If I’m suffering now,
how could God be
faithful to be with me?
Instead, Paul points to this suffering as a thing that is actually,
know this.
Well, here, let’s pull this up.
Know this.
I’m not ashamed for I know the one in whom
I put my trust,
and I’m sure that he is able to guard until that day what I’ve entrusted to him.
Note the change there, right?
That though Paul suffers as he does,
he’s not ashamed because of
the one who he is entrusted and who is trustworthy to hold him.
That’s the fundamental shift of Paul’s theological,
spiritual understanding.
As a Christian,
he is compelled that God holds him even in the midst of his suffering.
So therefore,
his suffering is remade.
It’s not pointless.
It is not even a thing that he’s ashamed of because fundamentally,
God will hold him throughout the whole process and into the process beyond,
that there is no depth
to suffering lower than the height of God’s ability to resurrect and to carry us into new life.
And that’s what Paul trusts in.
So I think there is a countercultural word in this,
Clint.
I guess that’s my point, is that we can see in Paul someone,
a man of faith in this instance,
who finds in the
difficult moments of life opportunity to trust more,
as opposed to, I think, most of us find
ourselves in those circumstances tempted to trust less.
And I think, Michael, that we see again what
Paul envisions that we do is always connected to what God does first.
Whatever we trust is because
God is trustworthy.
So look at the language here.
It’s no accident.
When Paul repeats words within
a verse or two of each other,
I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what I’ve entrusted to him.
And then two verses later tells Timothy,
“Guard the good treasure entrusted to you.”
Because God is trustworthy,
we can know that he takes care of what we have placed in his care.
And then we are entrusted to guard the good treasure.
So he guards what we give him,
and then we guard what he gives us.
There’s a beautiful mutuality,
kind of a relational
thing in that.
And I think that, you know,
clearly when Paul uses those words like that,
one in reference to what God does,
and then the second in reference to what we do,
no surprise that what God does goes first,
and what we do comes second.
That’s the response.
I think it’s really well done.
And I think Paul intentionally doesn’t want us to miss it,
so he repeats the words. A word that jumps out to me in this text,
Clint, is the word guard in verse 14 here.
Guard the good treasure entrusted to you.
And it strikes me,
it may be subtle,
I admit that to you,
but there’s many different ways of conceiving of guarding.
There’s a kind of guarding that is
always threatened, that’s always sort of lashing out and trying to push others away.
There’s another kind of guarding, more like a loved one,
when maybe you have a watch from your father or a
family heirloom in your custody.
A thing that’s really important to you,
how you guard it with
more than just security.
You guard it in your own life.
It’s important to you.
It gives you meaning,
or it has meaning for you at the very least.
That’s the kind of guarding I have the
sense is at work here.
There’s this kind of treasure it.
Hold on to it.
Make sure that you’ve
done what you can to take care of it.
And that is in context of,
if you remember, just a few studies ago we were talking about the faith handed down,
one generation to the next.
That’s the kind of guarding,
Clint, I think that Christians are called to.
The kind of
treasuring,
I mean he uses that word,
guard the good treasure,
the holding onto the valuing
of the faith.
We live in a culture in a moment in the world right now,
Clint, where people are very reactive.
Guarding is in some ways a very kind of militant and in some cases even kind of violent word.
I’m not sure that’s the sense here.
I don’t think that Christians need to be called to that
kind of defense because fundamentally we live in the very few verses earlier,
the spirit of power,
love, and self-discipline in verse seven.
So the kind of guarding that Christians have of this
treasure we’ve been given is not one of being threatened.
I think it’s rather one of confidence
in God that the trust that God is at work is enough for the Christian to know that things
are going to be okay.
Yeah, just a quick check of that word,
to guard or protect,
but also to keep observance of,
to observe or to preserve.
And I think my sense is if you talk about the overall writings of Paul,
that second sense of preserve and maintain and keep connected to is going to
be more typical than the idea of protecting.
We don’t protect the truth.
Paul doesn’t believe that we need to protect the truth.
We need to observe the truth.
We need to stay connected
to the truth.
So I would agree 100%.
I don’t think if we read that word and we think it means
wall it off, hem it, attack people with it,
we misunderstand what Paul’s saying.
I completely agree.
And I want to actually intensify what you just said,
Clint, because look at the end of 14,
guard the good treasure entrusted to you with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.
If only we believe that, we read it and it makes sense to us.
But friends,
be reminded today of the good news, the guarding.
Yes, we treasure this good news,
but God is at work in us.
I mean, the Holy Spirit says literally,
Paul says, living in us.
So this very kind of guarding is animated by God already
at work.
And so not only do we not to be protective of truth,
it’s because the truth is already there.
The truth is living by God’s grace in us.
And so the task then is to be willing to trust
God to work in us.
And, man, those are, those are maybe inspiring words.
They’re easy words to say, certainly.
But Clint to live out that kind of lifelong discipleship,
the day by day,
reasserting the truth of who Jesus is and reminding ourselves of the promise that he
lives in us and that today’s grace is enough.
I mean, that is the kind of work that demands
everything of us, literally.
It demands every ounce of who we are.
And that, therefore,
it animates that word for me,
guard, right?
It’s the daily task of guarding our faith that is
reminding ourselves of the promise that the Spirit of God is there making this possible.
So we’re not alone.
We’re not doing it by ourselves.
Yeah.
A call to be attentive to our faith and to be,
you know, for Paul, truth is always revealed truth.
We don’t discover it.
We,
it is uncovered for us.
And once we live in that truth,
we are to abide by it.
So I think a good call for all of us,
maybe a good word to end the week.
That said, friends, we always appreciate our comments,
questions.
We’ve had a few of those recently,
and they’re fun to get to engage after the study.
So if you have any of
those, put those in the comments.
Click on the link in the description.
If you find this video
helpful, give it a link.
That said, friends, we look forward to seeing you next week as we continue this study.
Have a blessed weekend.
Thanks, everybody.