Guarding the Gospel | 2 Timothy 1
Brian Hedges | April 30, 2017
Sometimes a person’s dying words reveal much about their character, about their priorities, about the things that are most important to them in life. Sometimes these words are very serious. For example, Benjamin Franklin, his dying words were these: “A dying man can do nothing easy.” So Franklin evidently found death a very difficult reality.
Sometimes these words are more tender. The famous actor John Wayne, 72 years old when he died, said to his wife, “Of course I know who you are. You’re my girl. I love you.”
Sometimes a person’s dying words are rather witty and humorous, and perhaps something of a cover for the true feelings of death, but Groucho Marx, when he was dying, said, “This is no way to live.”
In contrast to all of these example and dozens more, you have the apostle Paul. Now of course we don’t have exactly Paul’s dying words, but we do have his last will and testament; we have the final letter that he wrote, and we know what was on his heart. Essentially, Paul said, “Guard the gospel, preach the word, and grace be with you.”
Well this morning I want us to begin a multi-week series in this final letter of the apostle Paul, the letter of 2 Timothy. I want you to just feel the urgency of this letter. Paul is in prison as he writes. This was the Mamertine prison. This was nothing like a prison in the United States today; this was probably something like a cave or a hole in the ground with just a little bit of light. He would have been on a subsistence diet, perhaps only the food and water that his friends would bring him. He is awaiting trial and probably martyrdom, and he writes to one of his best friends. He writes to his son in the faith, Timothy, whom he calls his dearly beloved son.
He writes Timothy for several reasons. He writes a very personal letter, he writes a letter that is full of urgency. In fact, Calvin said that “all that we read here about the kingdom of Christ and the hope of life eternal and the Christian warfare and confidence in confessing Christ and the certainty of doctrine should be seen as written not merely in ink, but in Paul’s life blood, for he asserts nothing for which he is not ready to offer the pledge of his death.”
He knows death is coming, and he writes out of this urgency to Timothy, and he’s basically giving Timothy instructions for what to do in Ephesus. Paul’s in Rome, Timothy’s in Ephesus. Paul gives him instructions, and then Paul says, “Now, please come and visit me. Come see me one more time.”
So that’s the context; it’s a very personal letter. It’s an emotional letter from Paul. But it’s also an encouraging letter, and it’s a letter that, when you read it in this context as a dying man’s words to his son in the faith, one of his best friends, when you read it in that context it just gives such clarity to the church today regarding our task, regarding our priorities; regarding what we need to be about in the world.
That’s why I want to look at it with you for four or five weeks at least, because I’m viewing this series as something of a seeding for things to come for our church. There are things that are on my heart, there are things that on the hearts of our elder team, the pastoral team, as we think about the overall shape of our life together, our discipleship, our growth in the gospel, our sense of mission in the world. I think Paul’s words here in 2 Timothy speak to those burdens, and so I want us to ground a lot of our thinking for the next couple of years in this passage of Scripture.
So, 2 Timothy, chapter 1, and I’m going to read the full chapter this morning, 18 verses, so 2 Timothy chapter 1, beginning in verse 1.
“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. Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, and which now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher and apostle and teacher, which is why I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me. Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you. You are aware that all who are in Asia turned away from me, among whom are Phygelus and Hermogenes. May the Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains, but when he arrived in Rome he searched for me earnestly and found me— may the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that day!—and you well know all the service he rendered at Ephesus.”
This is God’s word.
So I want to ask three questions: What is the gospel? Why do we need to guard it? And then, how do we do it? So we’re talking about guarding the gospel. Paul says, “Guard the good deposit.” What does he mean by that? What is the gospel, why does it need to be guarded, and then how do we do that?
I. What Is the Gospel?
So, as we think about what the gospel is, I want you to notice a couple of things here. I want you to notice Paul’s terminology for the gospel, which is interesting and in some ways even somewhat unique in 2 Timothy. Then I want you to drill in with me to the summary of the gospel in verses 8 through 10.
So the terminology ranges from “the gospel”, which he mentions several times, verse 8, verse 10, to “the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus” in verse one. I think that’s interesting; here is Paul, about to face death, and when he calls himself an apostle he calls himself an apostle “according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus.” So one of the things you’ll see in 2 Timothy is that Paul, as he faces death, when he explains the gospel, he often does that in terms of life, in terms of resurrection, in terms of the great redemptive realities brought about by the death and resurrection of Christ.
He calls the gospel “the testimony about our Lord.” It’s for this testimony that Paul himself is suffering, and he wants Timothy to join in suffering for the gospel, to stand by Paul and to stand by the gospel itself.
He also refers to the pattern of “sound,” or healthy, words, in verse 13. Again, this is a note that you see throughout 2 Timothy, and we’ll see this more and more in the weeks to come. Paul essentially is telling Timothy, “Timothy, you don’t need to reinvent the gospel, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel; you don’t need to come up with a new message. Just be faithful to what I’ve told you. Hold fast to this pattern of teaching that you’ve received from me, because it’s healthy teaching. It’s good teaching. It’s solid. You can trust this.”
Then he of course tells Timothy to “guard the good deposit entrusted to you.” “This message, this teaching, this gospel that you received from me has been entrusted to you. I’m handing it off, now guard it; defend it, treasure it, hold fast to it.”
But then in verses 8 through 10 you get a summary of this gospel, and again Paul casts the gospel in terms of the great work of Christ for us in his death and resurrection, what that has accomplished for us, and in terms of its essential character and origin.
Let me read it again, this time in the NIV. Paul says, “So do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord or of me as prisoner; rather join with me in suffering for the gospel by the power of God. He has saved us and called us to a holy life, not because of anything we have done, but because of his purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”
Now when you read that the first thing that’s obvious is that the gospel is about salvation. Paul says, “Share in suffering for the gospel. He saved us,” and he begins to explain this salvation, to describe this salvation.
I like John Stott’s outline from his excellent exposition of 2 Timothy, and he shows how Paul deals with the character of our salvation and then the source of our salvation and then the ground of our salvation.
(1) So the character of our salvation: he saved us and he called us to a holy life, and then by the end of verse ten he moves all the way to life and immortality, which is brought to light through the gospel.
Stott sees these three things, salvation, and being called to holiness, and then life and immortality brought to light through the gospel, he sees that as roughly corresponding to our forgiveness and our justification, and then our sanctification, our transformation, called into holiness; and then our final glorification as we are brought into the experience of immortality.
Stott says, “Salvation is a majestic word, denoting that comprehensive purpose of God by which he justifies, sanctifies, and glorifies his people, first pardoning our offenses and accepting us as righteous in his sight through Christ, then progressively transforming us by the Spirit into the image of his Son, until finally we become like Christ in heaven with new bodies in a new world.”
So when we think about the gospel we’re thinking about the gospel of our salvation, we’re thinking about the gospel that proclaims the message of salvation, the gospel that is God’s instrument to save us, and we’re thinking about all the comprehensive realities involved in that: the forgiveness of our sins, the pardoning of our guilts, being brought into the family of God and accepted as sons and daughters of God. And then we are called, effectively summoned, by God into a relationship with him in which we are set apart for him and become holy progressively; sometimes slowly, sometimes painfully becoming more and more like Jesus Christ. But we’re also thinking about the future reality of glorification, where we experience the resurrection life of Christ himself, life and immortality which has been brought to light through the gospel.
(2) Then Paul explains the source of our salvation in verse 9. “He has saved us and called us to a holy life, not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace.” What’s the fountain behind the river of salvation? It’s the purpose and the grace of God. This grace was given to us not because of our works, it was given to us out of God’s own good pleasure.
In fact, Paul says you can trace this grace all the way to eternity past, and his language here almost confounds our categories of thinking. He says, “This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time.” Before he ever created the world, before the world began, God purposed to save you through Jesus Christ. He purposed to give you grace. That’s the source of salvation.
(3) And then the ground of our salvation is the work of Christ. He’s given us this grace in Christ Jesus. He did it before the beginning of time, then verse ten, “But it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus.” The appearing of Christ; this is the word from which we get our word epiphany. The first appearing of Christ in his incarnation.
He brought to manifestation God’s eternal purpose and grace, but then how did he do that? Through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. How did he do that? He destroyed death by dying. He brought life and immortality to light by rising from the dead.
So the death and resurrection of Christ are right at the crux of the gospel, right at the heart of the gospel.
So when you look at this you can see that the gospel has to do with God’s eternal purpose. It has to do with the historical work of Jesus Christ in his death and burial and resurrection for us, and it has to do with our personal experience of that grace as God calls us into fellowship with him, calls us to holiness. It embraces all of it.
There are a couple of implications for us in thinking about the gospel as we think about this passage.
(i) This shows us, first of all, that the gospel is an objective message handed down through the apostolic word. Even though there are distinct emphases in the way Paul writes about the gospel in different places, it’s the same substance. Whatever language he uses, and this is true of the other apostles as well, when you really drill down into what they say, the heart of the gospel is always the same. It’s always the same. It’s always God’s grace displayed through Christ to save sinners and bring them to himself; that’s always what it involves. It’s always God’s work on our behalf through Christ, and it’s always an effective work. It’s a work that actually brings us into fellowship with Christ, that calls us to holiness.
We can’t mess with the substance; we can’t change the message. It’s not a wax nose that we can shape any old way we want, it’s not just a message that makes us feel good, it has definite content, the content that is found in Scripture. So guarding the gospel means that we hold onto this essential message.
(ii) The second implication I’ve basically already stated: the gospel is a message of good news, centered on God’s saving grace, given through the person and work of Christ. Christ is always central to the gospel, and one of the ways you can tell that a church or an organization is beginning to drift is if Christ becomes less central and something else becomes more central.
Now the Bible teaches a lot of things, and many things it teaches very, very clearly. Some things it teaches less clearly than others, and so there’s disagreement among gospel-believing Christians about exactly how do you interpret that passage of Scripture. But let me tell you something: the Bible teaches one thing very clearly. It teaches that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and that message we can’t compromise.
There’s room to disagree about a lot of things, but there’s no room to disagree about that. We have to hold onto that; we have to safeguard that, and that has to be at the center, not our particular mode of baptism, as strongly as we may hold that. Not our view of end times and how the prophecies all work out, as strongly as we may hold that. Not our particular view of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, however we interpret that; but the person and the work of Christ. That’s what unites us; that’s what saves us. That’s the message that we hold. That’s the gospel.
II. Why Does It Need To Be Guarded?
Now, why do we have to guard it? That’s the second question. Why do we need to guard the gospel?
One reason is because it’s valuable. The gospel is a treasure; it’s a deposit, something that has value. But there are threats to the gospel. They don’t threaten the message itself, I mean, the saving efficacy of what Christ did, but there are threats to our hold on the gospel. There are threats to our persevering in the gospel. And Paul was conscious of those threats, because of what he was seeing happening around him, because of what he had experienced, and he mentions a number of them in his letter.
So look for a minute at these first century threats. There was the threat of suffering and persecution. That’s why he tells Timothy, “Do not be ashamed at the testimony about our Lord or of me as prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God.”
There’s the threat of apostasy. An apostate is someone who confesses to believe in Jesus Christ, and then departs from the faith. Paul actually names them! You see this in verse 15. He says, “You are aware that all who are in Asia turned away from me.” Can you imagine how discouraging this was to Paul? I mean, Paul had done all of this work in Asia, he was planting churches, he was evangelizing, he was preaching the gospel, people coming to faith in Christ; and then, when he gets thrown in prison, they just start dropping like flies. Where are they?
Even Demas, one of us fellow workers that he mentions in one of the earlier letters, [Colossians], even Demas in chapter 4 he says, “has forsaken me.” He’s loved this present world. Demas is gone. And then there are these two guys, Phygelus and Hermogenes. “They have turned away from me.” Paul doesn’t want Timothy to turn away.
Now this is one of my burdens, because I see people, and I know people, and you do too, I know people who were in the faith, they were in the church, and now they’re gone. Now I’m not talking about people who go to another church; that’s fine. Somebody goes to another church that better meets their needs, then I’m not going to weep over that. But when someone forsakes the faith, that’s what keeps me awake at night.
That’s one of the burdens behind this series, because I want to figure out, under God’s grace and under the direction of the Spirit and in submission to the word, how do we make disciples who last, who stick, who don’t turn away from the faith when the going gets hard? How do we do that? Well, Paul was concerned about that. That’s why he writes this letter.
He’s also concerned about the false teachers. He names them in 2 Timothy chapter 2; we’ll see that next week. Then he writes about times of difficulty that are going to come in Second Timothy three, verses one through nine. I’m not going to read it now, we’ll see it in two weeks, but you read that, and it’s like reading the headlines of the morning news. He’s describing what we live in, these times of difficulty. All of these Paul perceived as threats.
Well, there are threats in our day as well. There are very particular 21st century threats to the church, threats to our hold on the gospel. There is, for example, increasing hostility towards the claims of Christ. Did you know that we live in a world that is fine with you being spiritual, they’re fine with you having some kind of faith, but as soon as you say that Jesus Christ alone is the way to God, they’re not fine with that. They’re not fine with the exclusive claims of Christ.
We’re living in a world that is increasingly hostile to the claims of Christianity, and folks, we have to figure out to live in this environment, how to live in this society. It’s changed! We don’t live in the same country that the United States was in 1950. It is a different world.
Now in many ways our world is more like the first century world than it’s been in several hundred years. We live in a pluralistic society, where there is a multiplicity of religious options. That was very much the world that Paul lived in. We have to figure out, what does that look like, to live in a society that’s hostile to the gospel?
But there’s another problem; there’s another threat today, and especially in the American church, and that is the hollowing out of biblical faith in the church. This is what I mean: I mean that there are hundreds and thousands of people that in the polls will check off the boxes and say, “Yes, I’m born again, yes, I believe in God, yes, I go to church,” but in terms of actual beliefs and practices they look just like the world.
Okay. George Barna and Robert Wuthnow (who I think is somehow related to our Mark Wuthnow) I mean, these sociologists have multitudes of books on this. Christian Smith, there’s a book out on the table right now, Soul Searching, that’s about the faith of American youth, and Christian Smith essentially says that American young people basically have a religion that is moralistic, therapeutic deism. That’s what he calls it. It’s moralistic (try to be a good person), it’s therapeutic (do whatever makes you feel good), and it’s deism, that is, a view of God that is essentially remote and far removed and not involved in our daily lives. Christian Smith says that’s basically what young American Christians believe today. It’s the hollowing out of biblical faith. It’s like we keep the words, but they don’t mean anything anymore.
Here’s another person who comments on this: David Wells. David Wells, I think, is a very astute social and theological commentator. He’s written a number of books, five or six of them; this is from one of his earlier books, called God in the Wasteland. This is what David Wells says.
“It is one of the defining marks of our times that God is now weightless. I do not mean that he is ethereal, but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God’s existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers’ sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness.”
Now brothers and sisters, that applies to us. I’m not talking mainly about other churches here, okay? This applies to us. The things we saw we believe, do they rest with weight and consequence on our lives? Do they really make a difference, or do we have a confession of faith that has very little to do with the way we live and feel and think day to day?
We can add to this the growing biblical illiteracy among believers. People used to be Bible readers; many of you, I’m sure, are, but by and large people don’t read their Bibles like they used to. People used to be catechized in the faith; they were taught doctrine through catechisms, just through questions and answers. Today people are catechized, not in the faith, they’re catechized through movies and television and music. We’re catechized by the world, and we are given a worldview that is in competition with the Christian worldview, and we get it through all of the media we ingest.
How many ways have we embraced individualism, consumerism, and a therapeutic mode of living?
Individualism, where we make decisions by ourselves, for ourselves. Rarely do we make important decisions in conversation and in community with other people, and we certainly don’t want to submit to any kind of external authority.
Consumerism: we shop for the best product, whether that’s a job, a school, a home, a car, or a church. We have options, we have preferences, and we have every right to exercise those preferences and choose from among those options.
A therapeutic mode of living: basically, “Be nice, and do whatever makes you feel good about yourself; whatever makes you happy, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else.”
We all live like this to some degree or another. There’s not a person in this room that’s not touched by this, me included. We individualistic, consumeristic, and therapeutic in our approach to the world, and only through real intentional formation and discipleship can that change.
So these are some of the threats that are facing the church, that face even our church, that face our lives; threats to the weight of the gospel upon us.
III. How Do We Guard the Gospel?
So, how do we face those threats, how do we guard the gospel? I want to give you five answers from Second Timothy one. These will be brief, because I know time is ticking, the clock is ticking.
(1) Number one, believe the gospel. That’s first: we believe it. Paul says, “Follow the pattern of the sounds words that you have heard from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” Then earlier in the chapter he affirms Timothy’s faith. “I am reminded of your faith,” he says, “your sincere faith, a faith that first dwelt in your grandmother, Lois, your mother Eunice, and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well.” So he assures Timothy, he confirms Timothy in his basic embrace of the Gospel, his faith in Christ.
And then Paul talks about his own faith, in verse 12; he says, “I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me.”
Just as we sang that beautiful hymn this morning, “He Will Hold Me Fast,” Paul says, “I know whom I have believed, and he is able to keep me,” and the phrasing of this could be either he can keep that which I’ve entrusted to him, or that which he’s entrusted to me. God’s able to keep us. When we believe in the gospel, we are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time, Peter says, 1 Peter 1:5.
So, first of all, I have to stop and ask, “Do you believe? Do you really believe? Do you believe the gospel? Do you believe Christ? Have you placed your trust in Christ? Have you banked your hope in Christ? Have you received Christ as Savior, as Lord? Do you believe the gospel?” I don’t mean, “Did you make a profession of faith 20 years ago,” I mean, “Do you now, today, believe? Are you holding to Christ? Are you clinging to Christ with all that you have?”
(2) Secondly, there is a call to suffer for the gospel. I’ve already read verse eight, “Share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God,” and again, we live in a society where this is going to be more and more true of us. If we hold to the theological and the moral convictions of Christianity, we will suffer more and more. Paul says in chapter three, “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.” Are we willing to do that?
(3) Number three, we need to communicate the gospel, communicate the gospel. Paul says, “It is for the gospel that I was appointed a preacher, and an apostle and a teacher.” I like John Stott’s comment on this. He says, “The apostles formulated the gospel,” so it’s through the apostles we have the apostolic word, “preachers proclaim the gospel like heralds, and teachers instruct people systematically in its doctrines and its ethical or its moral implications.”
Now, have you ever heard that phrase, “Preach the gospel. If necessary, use words”? You heard that? I know what people mean by that. They mean that we want to live the kinds of lives that show the reality of Christ in our lives, through our love for others, through our words, through our deeds; but that is a really bad statement. “Preach the gospel. If necessary, use words,” that’s a bad statement, because you can’t preach without words. You can’t communicate the gospel without using words, because remember what we saw a few minutes ago, there is content to it! There’s propositional content to it, and so Paul says, “Follow the pattern of sound words that you received from me.”
So we have to use words. We want to embrace the gospel as the message, and then communicate that message. And of course we want our lives to validate the message that we proclaim.
So we need to communicate the gospel, and that means in all of the formal ways we do it, such as preaching and teaching in classes and so on, but it also means in all of the informal ways we do it, as you’re having gospel conversations with family members and with friends and with coworkers and with classmates; as you’re talking about Christ, you’re talking about the gospel with others. We need to communicate it.
You might say, “Well, I don’t have the gift of communication. I’m not an apostle, I’m not a preacher, I’m not a teacher, I’m not Paul, I’m not Timothy, I’m not a Sunday school teacher, I’m not elder; so I guess I have to leave guarding the gospel to others.” No, there’s another piece here.
(4) We also need to serve the gospel. We need to serve the gospel.
Paul says that he served God with a clear conscience, verse three, but then there’s another person mentioned by Paul in the last three verses of this letter, and I just love these little asides in Paul’s letters. Did you notice this? He mentions this guy Onesiphorus. Now who in the world is Onesiphorus, and what did he do? Well, he was the friend of Paul, and he’s only mentioned in this letter; here in chapter one, and then again in chapter four, verse 19, where Paul says, “Greet Prisca and Aquila, and the household of Onesiphorus.”
So he perhaps was from Ephesus, and maybe even had something like a house church, a church that met in his house, or a group of Christians that met in his house. We don’t know much about it. The Orthodox tradition says that Onesiphorus was one of the 70 disciples chosen and sent by Jesus to preach, but that’s pure speculation; we don’t know. All we know is that he was a friend of Paul; he was Paul’s friend, and Paul doesn’t commend him for his teaching, for his preaching; he commends him for his service. Look at what he says.
This is verses 16 through 18. Notice what Onesiphorus did. Paul says, “May the Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains, but when he arrived in Rome he searched for me earnestly and found me. May the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that day, and you well know all the service he rendered at Ephesus.”
Here was a servant to the gospel. Here’s someone who served Paul. He served Paul! He refreshed Paul. Did you know apostles need to be refreshed? Pastors and leaders need to be refreshed; they need to be encouraged. Some of the greatest encouragement for me is when I have a refreshing conversation with a fellow believer who has very different gifts than I have, perhaps; very different interests than I do, perhaps, but if there’s a common bond in Christ, that’s really refreshing. Or when some of you have been so gracious to serve our family.
When you do that, you’re serving the gospel. When you serve one another, you’re serving the gospel. When you serve in all of these ways that you have to serve to keep this machine running. You know, we have a lot of children in this church, and we have a lot of children’s ministries in this church, and we have a lot of gaps to fill. We’re just going to keep saying it until all the gaps get filled, “Please sign up! We need you to serve. We need to take a rotation. We need you to step in.” But when you do that you’re not just plugging a hole; you’re serving the gospel! You’re sharing the gospel with children; you’re modeling the love of Jesus to them, so please, don’t count that a light thing. This is not a light thing, to serve like Onesiphorus.
(5) So we need to serve the gospel, and then here’s the fifth and final thing: in all of this, we depend on the Spirit. Look at verse 14. Paul says, “By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.”
I think Paul refers to the Spirit, at least in some degree, in verses five through eight as he tells Timothy, “Fan into flame the gift of God which was given you by the laying on of my hands.” I think was a spiritual gift that was given to Timothy.
And then he reminds Timothy, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, or of cowardice; he’s given a spirit of power and of love and of self control.” And then look at verse eight one more time: “Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God.”
Let me just say, as clearly as I can, for all that I’ve said this morning about the need for content and for the message and for instruction and for this body of truth, the pattern of sound words that we get from the apostolic word; for all that I’ve said about that, that’s not enough. That’s not enough! We need the word and the Spirit, and it is only by relying on the Spirit that we can really guard the gospel and communicate it and share it and live in the reality of it.
That’s why we need to pray like crazy. We have a prayer meeting tomorrow night. We need to pray like crazy, because we need the Holy Spirit. We can’t do this on our own. We just can’t do this by ourselves! If there’s not some kind of power coming from outside of us that’s infusing with not just energy but with grace and with genuine love for Christ, a power that is working on our souls and that is working in our homes and is working in our children; if we don’t have power from God, there won’t be any real discipleship or real transformation or real evangelism. We need the Holy Spirit.
So what is the gospel? It’s the good news of salvation through grace, given to us in Christ, in his death and resurrection on our behalf. Why do we guard it? Because there are all kinds of threats to our hold on the gospel. And how do we do it? We do it by believing it and by suffering for it, and by communicating it to others, and by serving in it. We do it by relying on the Holy Spirit.
Brothers and sisters, that’s the call on our church this morning. This is a call on the church for all time, but a particular focus for today, and I think for this season ahead of us, is to guard the gospel, to hold to the gospel, and then to learn, how do we pass that on to others? That’ll be our focus next week.
So would you pray for me to that end, with that heart, with that desire, that God will burn this into our hearts and help us in very practical ways to live it out?
Let’s pray together.
Gracious Father, we thank you that you have revealed yourself to us through the gospel, through the person and work of Jesus Christ, that you’ve sent your Son to abolish death by taking our death upon himself, and that through his resurrection he has brought life and immortality to light. We’re so grateful that someone shared the gospel with us, whether it was a parent or a friend or a coworker; somebody shared with us, and we believe, and that’s why we’re here. We trace the origin of all of that not to ourselves but to your eternal purpose and grace given us in Christ before the ages began, and we thank you for it.
We pray that you would help us be faithful stewards of this message, in all the ways that we’ve thought about this morning; we pray that you would show us as a church how to do that in very practical ways.
As we come now to the Lord’s Table we pray that the gospel that we have heard from your word we would now observe and celebrate in a tangible way with hands taking the bread and then eating, hands taking the cup and drinking, and that in this physical, even visceral, experience of taking the elements we would be reminded of how all-embracive faith in Christ is. It involves all of us, all that we are, as Christ has given all that he is for us.
So meet with us now through your Holy Spirit as we take these elements, and continue with us as we continue to worship. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
