2 Timothy 2:1-7

Hey friends, welcome back.
Our daily Bible study on this Tuesday as we continue through 2 Timothy,
moving today into the second chapter.
I made this comment yesterday,
Michael, while you were gone,
good to have you back.
But I made the comment that I think we see,
I think we see in the next couple chapters, a lot more
kind of devotional type stuff.
I think there’s a little more of what we might think of as poetic or,
I think there’s some
more jumping off places.
That first chapter was largely biographical and here we get,
as we move into the second
chapter, I just think we get a little bit more of stuff that might be helpful to us.
So, let me jump in,
read a few verses and then we can unpack them.
“You then, my child, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus and what you have
heard from me through many witnesses in trust of faithful people who will be able to teach others as well.
Share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.
No one serving in the army gets entangled in everyday affairs.
The soldier’s aim is to please the enlisting officer.
And in the case of an athlete,
no one is crowned without competing according to the rules.
It is the farmer who does the work,
who ought to have the first share of the crops.
Think over what I say,
for the Lord will give you understanding in all things.”
So, we make a transition here as we move into these verses.
Again, Paul uses this father language,
“My child,” he stops a little short of “my son,”
but that’s the idea.
“Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” This is really,
I think, really well said.
Strong here doesn’t necessarily mean what we think,
but be able to stand,
persevere,
be strengthened by,
be held up by the grace that is in Christ Jesus.
We’ve said this before,
but when Paul wishes something for someone,
it is often grace that
he offers them, that he wants to bestow upon them.
And here he calls Timothy to be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus,
and he connects that with,
“And what you have heard from me
through many witnesses.” So,
an appeal to grace as is—and teaching.
You know,
if
really, Michael, I think if you summarized what Paul writes in a lot of letters,
it would come down to that—grace and what I have taught you about the gospel,
and certainly not surprising to see that show up again here in the second chapter of Timothy.
I think you’re right,
Clint, to point our attention to that particular word,
“strong,” in verse 1 there,
because what you’re going to see as we go through is Paul’s going to
use some really interesting metaphors of people who are all in their own way strong.
You’ve got the enlisted soldier,
you have the athlete,
you have the farmer.
All of them
are hardy individuals in their own way.
And you know, I think what’s fascinating to me,
Clint, about this is how easy it is for
us to take scripture and to sort of read it along the lines that make sense to us, because “strong”
in the grace could really go in a few different directions,
really, right?
We could talk about it as being confident.
We could talk about it as like the idea of being a strong man,
you know, sort of a heady
or maybe even an arrogant kind of person.
Would be one way you could take a word like that in English.
But here,
the Greek word actually has the sense of being firm in,
or the antonym of
this is to be headstrong.
So you know, the idea,
or that’s rather in the negative sense.
So here, the positive is to be rooted and confident,
to be enduring and persistent.
The kind of strength that you see in something that weathers and holds on over time,
that is exactly what describes a Christian’s encounter with grace.
I think you could make a compelling argument that Paul’s entire understanding of grace
that we find flushed out in Romans is built upon the idea that it is the bedrock of Christian
life, that every fruit that is good in the Christian life finds its root
in this kind of foundational trust and holding on to
grace.
And that is,
you know, maybe a kind of thing that we read over quickly in a book like Timothy.
You know, you say, “Be strong in the grace of sin Christ Jesus.
It sounds like a little bit of a header on an email.”
I think it’s way more than that to Paul.
I think for Paul that this is really the heart of it.
I think the analogies that come after those,
Clint, are going to be to reinforce and to
illustrate what Paul means by this idea of strength of grace.
I think we would miss the point if we think that Paul here is referencing some kind of
our own personal strength.
For Paul to be strong is to be in grace.
This is not a patting ourself on the back.
This is a recognition that we stand in the grace of Christ.
And then he continues,
you know, leader to leader,
“What you’ve heard in me through
many witnesses entrust to faithful people who will be able to teach others as well.”
There’s a real leadership insight here.
Paul is calling Timothy to do exactly what Paul is doing with Timothy,
to identify for himself someone to invest in,
someone to teach,
someone to bring into the cause of sharing the gospel.
And he is then modeling for Timothy what he hopes Timothy will do with someone else.
“Choose someone trustworthy and teach them as well so that they will be able, in turn,
to teach others.” What has been entrusted to you,
there’s a wonderful sense of the faith being passed along here, Michael.
What you heard from me through many witnesses entrust to someone faithful,
to faithful people, so they will be able also to teach others.
You know, there’s a sort of cycle to that.
There’s a kind of outreach to that that I think is really interesting from a leadership perspective.
And I think shows Paul’s inherent assumption that the gospel is made to be shared,
though to be shared thoughtfully, carefully,
and faithfully.
And he calls Timothy to follow again his example by choosing those who can be trusted and literally
investing in them so that they will be able to teach.
So really,
I find that a very interesting verse.
Let’s not forget either that the chapter and verses added later,
right?
So in the flow of the text,
you know, we’ve jumped into chapter two,
but for the reader,
this is connected to what Clint,
you dealt with yesterday,
the talk of those who are
really fighting against the grain of the gospel and those who are lauded as being those who
have stood by Paul,
even in the midst of his imprisonment,
that’s immediately followed by this idea of entrusting to faithful people,
those who are going to teach, pass on.
There’s a little bit of a sense in that,
that Paul’s already affirmed someone who’s not
ashamed of the chains that have come because of Paul’s apostleship.
Now he’s affirming these witnesses,
and now he’s going to move on.
He’s going to describe these people who are also firm in that grace themselves.
I mean, that is beginning to really,
I think, flesh out this narrative that we’ve seen elsewhere in Timothy,
that where there are opponents,
you know, Paul makes it clear,
don’t allow them to have the privilege of influence and leadership in the Christian church,
but where there are,
and I think this is a great way to phrase it, faithful people,
many witnesses where those exist in the life of the Christian community.
Those are to be invested in, to be supported.
That does have a generational aspect,
like you’re saying, Clint.
It also has an upbuilding kind of aspect.
A community that is blessed with those kinds of voices will naturally be the kind of community
that goes deeper into grace,
that lives in a kind of persistent model that is replicable.
I mean, a church that’s healthy tends to be able to rely upon the wind of the spirit
to remain healthy.
I mean, it has a kind of cyclical benefit to it,
and very clearly, Paul’s instructing Timothy here to do what he can,
as leader in the community,
to encourage that, to foster it and to advance it.
Yeah, and he follows that up with an interesting word,
share in suffering like a good soldier
of Christ, and probably the most important is share in suffering,
which may seem like
strange instruction, but if you’ve been with us in the past, particularly through, say,
Philippians and Romans, you understand that Paul puts a significant importance on our
own suffering as a connection to the suffering of Christ.
Paul’s not a masochist.
He doesn’t advocate suffering for its own sake.
He doesn’t say that you should go out there and try to suffer.
What he says is that we,
in Christ, rejoice because our suffering reminds us of our own weakness,
it reminds us of God’s strength,
it throws us onto the arms of Christ’s mercy,
and it creates for us an empathy and an understanding that Jesus suffered for us.
So Paul is not saying that our suffering is good.
He’s not saying that suffering is inherently good.
What he’s saying is that through faith in Christ,
our suffering can produce good in
us by connecting us to the suffering of Christ,
and so it is not something as a leader to be avoided,
and this is important.
You know, if you’re in a leadership position,
you may have the means to kind of get away
from and what Paul is saying to Timothy is that’s exactly the wrong track for a Christian leader,
share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ.
And then he unpacks a couple of these things,
soldiers and athletes and farmers,
and what he’s saying,
the common theme and all that is that it’s work,
that we have to make an
effort to please the one whom we serve,
just as a soldier would,
just as an athlete competes
according to the rules,
just as a farmer should be blessed with the first fruits,
so it is that a leader must put effort in,
in trying to bring about the intended result,
which is the glory of God.
And then I love this last verse, Michael,
think over what I say,
and the Lord will give you understanding.
You could read that a couple of different ways,
but I think generously and I think correctly,
it shows a kind of openness in Paul to say,
you know, it’s okay, you may not get everything, God is faithful.
Paul doesn’t,
there are people who read Paul and think that Paul is overconfident and if
you point it to certain writings,
maybe that’s true, but I see in Paul a willingness and
an expectation of continuing the conversation.
Timothy, it’s okay if this doesn’t all make sense.
Keep it in prayer,
keep trying to do the right thing,
and eventually it will come about.
It will make sense,
you will understand.
Think over what I say,
for the Lord will give you understanding in all things.
There’s a wonderful confidence in that that I admire.
Yeah,
it expects that Timothy is going to grow,
number one, that there’s room for his
Christian discipleship.
I think in many ways Paul proves himself,
especially in these letters of Timothy that
we’re in right now,
he proves himself to be a teacher who’s aware of where his student
is and the opportunity of where that student can go.
I think there’s also, though,
a sense here in which Paul is working to redefine understanding.
This is especially relevant if you’re willing to reflect back onto first Timothy.
Remember all of that language about what the opposing teachers were teaching and what they
thought they knew and all those kinds of things.
And now you see Paul talking about suffering,
talking about the real long arc of leadership,
that nothing happens quickly.
Everything worth doing takes real concerted effort.
That should be an expectation of Christian leadership.
And now he ends by saying the Lord will give you understanding in all things.
You really can’t just breeze past the idea that understanding is in a meaningful way
connected to the work it takes to get there.
And anyone who’s been Christian for some time,
Clint, I think can affirm that through
experience that some of the most fruitful,
deep, abiding lessons of faith we only get
to because of some slogging it took to get there,
some period of life that we needed
to wrestle with some questions or wrestle with God,
some times of self-doubt.
It’s in being faithful in those,
maybe what we would call long periods of discipleship,
doing the work.
That’s where we often find the fruit of understanding.
And to whatever extent that’s what Paul’s referencing here,
I think that many Christians
could bear that out in their faith experience.
Yeah, it would be nice if wisdom came fully packaged with faith,
but Paul understands that it does not.
Wisdom is a journey.
Understanding is a journey.
And he trusts that Timothy will make progress along that road.
I really,
I think that’s a,
again, I think we see a sort of wise outlook from Paul,
not to rush a young man,
but to put confidence in him and assure him it will be okay,
you’ll get there,
keep up the work,
and you’ll arrive.
So,
and this is a slight diversion,
so I apologize for that right off the bat here,
Clint, but I think it’s worth taking a step aside here to say that is one of the core Christian competencies
of discernment.
And what I mean by that is,
when we come as Christians into a form of teaching,
especially Christian teaching,
a discerning and wise person recognizes there’s no shortcuts.
And this is a cultural temptation,
I think especially in the Western church,
the idea,
hey,
the three spiritual laws that moves you ahead,
or the two spiritual prayers,
if you pray these, it will affect this change.
That is a temptation for efficiency and speed.
There’s nothing wrong with people trying to order our lives efficiently,
but it is not
inherently Christian to live our life in a way that we can try to shortcut the wisdom
that only comes through daily faith,
practice in trusting God,
recognizing we cannot escape
suffering.
It is a part of our human experience,
and it is being faithful in the midst of that
suffering that God will prove the faithfulness to us that God is sure to commit.
I think that we as Christians would do well if we would remember that,
especially in the face, Clint, of that sort of cultural temptation to speed things along.
Yeah, no, I think that’s well said, Michael.
That’s a good last word.
We’re grateful that you’ll be with us today.
We hope that there’s been something meaningful and encouraging in this to you.
Waylon, see your comment, and I’ll definitely get to the comments to answer that question
after the study.
Thanks for being with us.
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and we will see you tomorrow.
Thanks, everybody.