2 Timothy 1:8-10

All right, welcome back.
Thanks for being with us on this Wednesday.
Feels like it’s a Wednesday as we continue our way through the first chapter of 2 Timothy.
We did not make a lot of progress yesterday,
at least in terms of the number of verses,
but we did cover some really good stuff
in verses 6 and 7.
Today we push on with
verse 8.
A little bit of a change of pace.
We’ll talk about that in a moment,
but first let me read these for you.
“Do not be ashamed then of the testimony about our Lord or of me, his prisoner,
but join with me in suffering for the gospel,
relying on the power of God who saved us and
called us with a holy calling,
not according to our works,
but according to his own purpose
and grace.
This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began,
but it has now been revealed
through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus,
who abolished death and brought
life and immortality to light
through the gospel.”
The good news.
So the backdrop of this is Paul writes several letters from imprisonment of one kind or another,
and in those letters it is not uncommon for him to refer to his status.
He’ll talk about meaning chains for the gospel.
He’ll talk about being a prisoner of the Lord.
And here the implication is that he is writing this letter from such circumstances.
There could be some dispute,
some debate on that,
but typically when he makes that kind
of reference, the understanding has been that if indeed this is the work of Paul,
then it comes from a point at which Paul is being held captive for his work,
for proclaiming
the gospel.
And he often uses that as an example,
an encouragement to others.
In other words, he will often say,
“Don’t worry about me.
This is actually a good thing.
I’m doing well.
I’m okay.” And so here he does that again.
He says,
“Do not be ashamed.
Do not back down.”
And remember yesterday we said,
“God did not give us a spirit of cowardice,
so don’t be ashamed.
Don’t be little.
Don’t be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord Jesus Christ or of me, his prisoner.
Stand up, Timothy,
for Jesus and for what I’ve taught you,
and join with me in suffering
for the gospel.” Michael, I think it’s well established that when Paul references his own conditions and
when those are negative,
he always appeals to the opportunity to learn and to grow from
those hardships.
There’s never a moment in which Paul expresses sort of
self-sympathy or, “It kind of woe
is me.” It is always with an eye toward when we face difficulties.
We also find in the grace of Christ an opportunity to grow and deepen in our faith.
Yeah, that’s maybe the part of Paul that we may struggle with the most is because I think
a lot of times we practically come to the Scriptures,
we come to our faith with a lot
of questions in the midst of our adversity.
I think for many of us,
the shipwrecks of our life,
the moments where we experience
major setbacks or we experience major trauma,
those are moments where we step back and
ask, “God, where are you?
God, why aren’t you faithful?
Why have you allowed this to happen?”
Paul seems to have innately a different perspective.
He seems to see in those things an opportunity to reflect on God’s closeness,
the reality that God is actually animating and carrying us forward in this journey of faith when at
times it feels like all is said against us,
that is the moment where Paul sees the strength
of God to be so clear.
Of course, we see that
Clint worked out in the history of the church.
We know that when the church experienced adversity and martyrdom and persecution,
those were moments where the light of the gospel shone the brightest.
It was from that compelling testimony.
That’s what martyr means to witness to or to point to.
And
I see that here in these words,
this idea that there’s nothing to be ashamed of when
we experience being a prisoner,
when we experience even being contained because God is not contained.
God is able to work.
This is what he means by the power of God who saved us and called us.
It’s God who’s operative in Paul’s mind,
and that transforms his image of what suffering is.
I think that that’s the key to really understanding it,
Michael, because Paul is not saying he seeks
out those moments.
He’s not saying that he takes joy in them because he’s not a masochist.
He doesn’t like suffering.
But what he, I think, appreciates about suffering is,
look at the word here,
relying on the power of God.
Paul understands that when we come to those moments that are beyond our own strength,
we learn again that we can depend on God.
We are,
when God is all that we have,
we then understand how important that moment is and how deep
our trust in God can be,
that it is God,
that kind of growth is found at the
end of our rope.
Not when things are comfortable,
but when things are difficult.
And so he says here,
we turn to him relying on the power of God.
And why do we do that?
Because God saved us and called us with a holy calling,
not according to our works.
If you were with us in Romans,
this is a small encapsulation of what he took chapters to say in Romans.
We are not called because we’re worthy.
We’re called because God is gracious.
According to his own purpose and his grace, not our works.
Nevertheless,
God in his grace has given us a holy calling in the gospel,
calling to share the good news of Jesus Christ.
And this is what Timothy labors to do in the church.
It’s what Paul is writing to Timothy to help him do.
And I think,
you know, Michael, again,
it is particularly having worked our way through
a book like Romans,
where Paul lays out over chapters,
this deep theological argument.
To hear him just simply summarize it here in a sentence is really impressive.
You know,
God saved us, God called us, not because we deserve it,
but because he has
a purpose for us and he gives us grace to do the work.
You know, he has a really nice way of cutting that down to the core elements of his theology.
Yeah, because Paul is both able to very deeply make his theological case.
He’s also very capable to apply that to the life of a congregation.
And here we see the application happening here.
There’s no need to flesh out the details of how these things link together or how it fits
within God’s history of salvation,
the way that God’s plan has been made known to us.
All that matters here is that functionally,
it’s not our doing,
but rather it’s God’s
gracious calling that, of course, we can trust the God that’s going to animate or give us
the strength to do exactly what we’ve been called to do.
And then there’s this idea,
Clint, that strikes me.
Verse 10,
it’s now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior,
Christ Jesus, who abolished death,
brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
What is striking to me here is this language,
particularly at the end,
brought life and immortality to light.
That sounds almost Johannine.
If you’ve ever studied the book of John,
there’s a lot of language of light and darkness.
In the early church,
there were some folks who were particularly attracted to that language
because at that time,
there was some narrative around light that was even beyond Christianity.
It kind of had worked its way into culture.
There were some religions that worshiped light,
worshiped the philosophy of being illuminated.
What’s striking here is while most humans think of being illuminated as being puffed up or raised
up, we think that if we can see,
if we have grasp and hold of it,
then we’re stronger or more
powerful.
Here, it is clear that the only light that comes,
the light of immortality even,
comes because of and through Jesus Christ.
That is the through language.
I think we talked about this.
What was that?
It was one of the Pauline letters that we did.
Was it 1 Corinthians?
No, it was Galatians we did,
where we talked about Philippians.
There it is.
Where we talked about how these connecting words matter,
how through Jesus Christ
is essential to Paul’s understanding,
that there’s nothing that we do unto ourselves,
and that includes understanding.
The light does not come from our own mental acuity.
It doesn’t come from our ability to figure out the puzzle.
It comes from revelation,
from what Jesus does,
from going through Jesus.
That is when we make our way into the greatest and deepest truth.
That is both a pushback,
a criticism of Paul’s time in which people would have claimed that they
could get to the truth themselves.
That’s a critique of our own time as well, by the way.
But it is also an affirmation of the crucial core of the gospel he’s already named,
which is that grace comes by faith and not by our works.
It’s not done chiefly by us,
but rather by God’s working in us through Jesus Christ.
So it is concise,
and yet it’s deep.
I think that’s what Paul is at his best when he’s speaking to a congregation.
Yeah, and certainly, you know, he’s writing to someone who he believes understands this.
So he doesn’t feel,
I think, compelled to explain it in the way that he might in some of his other
letters.
He’s simply restating it and reminding it.
I do think, Michael, that perhaps our Presbyterian tradition would want us to at least point out
this line in this verse,
“This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.”
Reformed theology has made it one of our essential beliefs that God did not begin the
work of Jesus when Jesus got here,
that that was always God’s intention for humanity,
that Christ as a member of the three persons of the Trinity was always the saving act that
God would do.
It wasn’t plan B.
It wasn’t something that came later,
that the grace of Christ is not something we simply experience
as true on the cross and the empty tomb and our moment of faith.
It is the grace that has always been,
that was always to God’s intention for the
human family.
And so I just point that out as something that has been important to Presbyterians and Reformed Christians.
We’re not alone in that.
There are others who would affirm that and say
that as well, but feel like we should maybe highlight those things as we run across them.
Yeah, I think what you’re identifying there,
Clint, too,
is a little bit of one of the false
tensions that we sometimes make when we come to Scripture.
I think a conversation I’ve actually
had maybe surprisingly frequently,
I wouldn’t have anticipated this,
a number of people will ask
questions about, “Well, what is my part in salvation?
What do I need to do to be saved?”
Does that say the sinner’s prayer,
or is that be baptized,
or is it to have some particular spiritual gift?
I think the human mind gravitates towards,
“What’s my part in salvific history?
What does God require of me?” And what Paul does here so beautifully is he completely eradicates the
anxiety underneath that question.
In other words, we see right here that we’re relying on the power of God who,
past tense,
saved us,
past tense, called us with a holy calling.
So what you’re making point of there,
Clint, is that from our vantage as Reformed Christians,
we look at that and say,
“Hey, look,
God has a plan.
I mean, it’s been worked out.
God’s not innovating.
He’s not sort of flying by the wire and hoping to make by today.” No,
God’s plan is sure,
and the salvific plan that God has always had through Jesus Christ is reliable.
So therefore,
we don’t have to work.
We don’t have to work up a feeling of holiness.
We don’t have to find ourselves doing the exact
right machinations.
We can’t bend God.
That’s good news.
Everything after the call of God in Jesus
Christ, which comes to us by grace,
is then choice made in freedom.
We are free to choose the gift we’ve been given,
and then that enables us to have real agency in freedom.
The thing that we
ask, “What do I need to do?” should always come after the reception of the freedom that comes
through grace, and that is very Reformed, obviously,
but it fits beautifully within
our understanding here of what Paul writes.
It’s clearly not reading into the words.
I mean, Paul has laid that out clearly in Romans,
and now we see it again here.
Yeah, I think that’s well said,
and what is it,
according to?
Not to our works,
but His grace,
which was before the ages but is now revealed.
It has always been God’s
grace available.
It has always been God’s nature to be gracious,
but now the way that grace comes to us has been brought to light,
literally, too light.
It has been revealed,
uncovered, shown to us through the good news,
and that is synonymous in Paul and in the New Testament.
When you see the word gospel,
it is always synonymous
with the proclamation of Jesus Christ.
So, yeah, this is a tremendous
encapsulation of a much broader and bigger theological argument that Paul makes other
places, and this is boiled down about as well as anywhere I can think of.
There’s a wonderful,
similar kind of verse in Ephesians that has been important,
was important to Martin Luther,
but this is really good,
and I don’t think Timothy is often thought of as a place where you go
to interact with the deep theology of Paul,
but if you’re paying attention,
I think you will see it,
because it’s just inherent to how Paul writes and who Paul is.
Yeah, not to bore you,
but the truth is biblical scholars who study Timothy are generally
not considered quite as heavyweights as those who study Galatians and Romans.
I’m not saying the
scholars aren’t, but I’m saying that these works are not generally sought after by biblical scholarship.
Is that fair, Clint?
Yeah,
they tend to be on the practical side.
They tend to be small in the…
I mean, Romans is incredibly broad because it’s trying to outline the whole of the Christian faith.
Timothy is narrower in that Paul is trying to help Timothy deal with specific issues,
but even within that,
I think to your point,
Michael, is there it is.
Yeah, that’s the thing about,
I think, reading Scripture that we need to be very careful of.
When you put a book in a box and you say, “Timothy is practical,
Romans is theological,” you are now, by definition,
wrong because the Scriptures never live into those kinds of
bifurcations.
The Holy Scriptures have no interest in boiling down to one thing,
like, “Oh, that’s a nice little nugget of wisdom,” or,
“Oh, this is a deep theological insight that we should contemplate.”
That’s the amazing thing of what we call inspiration.
By that, we mean that God has,
by the work of the Spirit,
enabled the church to see and hear in these words far more levels
of complexity and nuance than could have ever been imagined.
As we seek to read them as community,
which seek to read them with some humility,
you are going to come across in the book of
2 Timothy moments that make you think, “Wow,
that’s really, really good,” and it helps us
defy some of those biases.
Maybe you didn’t have that bias.
Maybe you didn’t bring that to our
study because you didn’t think that there was a difference between Romans or 2 Timothy,
but anybody that does,
it’s good to have those biases somewhat rejected and found in want
because on the other side,
that we hear the Word of God for us.
Also think,
and just to close with,
I also think this helps us perhaps appreciate Paul
as a theologian, as an author, as a pastor.
He comes from the same place.
He’s not going to give
different advice to Timothy than he gives theology to the Romans.
He brings himself and his whole
understanding of the faith to the task and where his advice comes from is his deep-seated belief
in what it means to be a follower of Christ.
I think there’s a consistency throughout most of
Paul that there are moments that Paul leaves us scratching our head a little,
but far more often,
I think we hear echoes of what Paul has said other places wherever we read Paul,
and to his credit.
I think it’s a good word.
Thanks for being with us.
Join us again tomorrow as we finish out the week,
but until then, be blessed.