I am very concerned for my church. I would rather not write this, but the same theme keeps emerging from our pulpit and it must be addressed. I am concerned that we have heaped up teachers for ourselves to satiate our itching ears, teachers to our own liking. And what is our liking? I see it as standard us-vs them religion of the Pharisees and all such people throughout time. We seek the perfect system, systematic theology, that is at the expense of being and doing what Jesus commanded us to do. And so we love teachers who spend their time criticizing and nit picking the details of every one else’s supposed belief system, instead of focusing on the faults of their own flock.
Now, there are a lot of good things about our church. I am always surprised at the level of biblical knowledge displayed by the average person in most of the sunday school classes I have ever attended. There are a lot of very godly people living out very godly lives. There is work being done all over the world by missionaries we send and support. These are very good things.
The Priority of the Word?
But, the sermon on Second Timothy last week, was the final straw, because it could have addressed some of our own flaws and how best to fix them but instead it was another litany of, other people’s sins. I really hoped it was going to go there, but now we are beginning a new generation of preaching, of not going there. This book is a handing off from Paul to Timothy in some ways, and so we are seeing that hand off in our own church. I was struck by the way Paul refers to the gospel as ‘my gospel’ (II Timothy 2:8). We like to pretend that other churches are making stuff up, but we just let the Word speak. It’s BS, and Paul wasn’t afraid to own his message. Our pastors have a message and their offspring and their students will become like them, that’s just how it works. Their children and all of our children are beginning to resemble the list of evils at the beginning of II Timothy chapter 3. Our culture, even our very town is falling apart, for want of the Light.
I’ve heard it said that gossip is confessing other people’s sins. I suppose the same thing can be applied to preaching. I doubt very much if our sermons reach the ears of that many Catholics, Charismatics, or Prosperity Gospel people. If so it’s probably the annoyed, family members of people in our body. Which only furthers the us vs. them mentality. Where are the sermons for us? I don’t mean sermons to make us feel good or get us through the week with our lame problems, but the sermons to address our unique layers of self-deception, our sin. Beware the sidelong glance(Matthew 20:1-16, John 21:21-22). God knows those who are his(II Timothy 2:19).
It is difficult to let the Scripture speak for itself, when you take such small portions of it, so let’s bite off a larger piece. You can read the whole book in about twenty minutes, so I suggest you do it. There are a lot of good things in there, and a lot of repeated themes. Paul an older Christian is exhorting his student Timothy in what he needs to know to continue faithfully in the work of spreading the Gospel. There will be suffering, it will be difficult, but it is worth it. There are also a lot of details about people we know nothing about, people who have left the faith, people who have remained faithful and a some wanted parchment and a cloak.
There are exhortations to Timothy for being bold and full of love and self-control. There are a lot of action words, “be strong”, suffer as a soldier, compete as an athlete, work hard like a farmer. Cleanse yourself, by living a pure life, so that the Lord can use you. Paul’s credentials and his exhortation are not just about proper theology, they are about obedient living. There are two exhortations to avoid vain babblings, but it’s not about refusing to engage in theological debates, as much as it is to avoid preaching which does not lead to proper living.
Then we get into our passages, the stuff we love in chapters three and four. “In the last days. . .” everything will go to hell, except for the few, the proud, the members of Grace Bible Church. We love this stuff. We can tally up all the evils of the world and conclude that the rapture is at hand and we just have to stare at our Bibles until it comes. The only problem is that there has been 2000 years of church history, and it didn’t get worse that whole time. Paul’s ‘last days’ were probably around 70A.D. and not necessarily 2015A.D.. We are fortunate as to be the results of a Puritain cleansing and a few Great Awakenings and even locally a legitimate revival, which led to the founding of our church. Those were times when it got better. Timothy is not exhorted to let it get worse, he is told to get out there, live a good life and fight for the same thing in other people, “reprove, rebuke and exhort”. We shouldn’t pride ourselves in the fact that our children are “lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self- control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power”, we should be taking responsibility and finding leaders who have proven they can reproduce the faith of Paul and Timothy. Leaders who’s houses are in order (I Timothy 3).
Then our seminal verses. We are after all a Bible church. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” But do we really believe this? Take into consideration that Paul is here talking about the Old Testament. When was the last time you heard a sermon on the Old Testament? When was the last time our pastor preached through a book of the Old Testament? Paul says the Old Testament is “able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ”. The Old Testament! It was all in there. The focus exclusively on the New Testament has led to a great many errors. The New Testament was commentary, slightly modifying the Old, even the words of Jesus are mostly from the Old Testament. The Sermon on the Mount reads like Leviticus. Most of the images of Paul are borrowed. The focus on the New Testament and the unique events that centered around the Life of Jesus without the Old, is to dwell on the infant stage of the Church, without the mature words which are able to make you wise. We are always children, longing for persecuted early church, instead of the Church spread to the wold world. Every knee will bow(Philippians 2:10).
I was struck in Timothy by a couple of passages connecting the Old and the New. Paul tells Timothy to continue in what he has learned and connects it to his childhood(vs. 3:14,15). If you do the math Timothy was about 30-40 at this point and so he grew up before Christ died and Christianity was a thing. Earlier Paul referred to the faith of Timothy’s mother Eunice and grandmother Lois. I don’t think he is referring to the fact that they were baptized into Christianity first. There is a long tradition of faithfulness in Timothy’s family. Faithfulness of the kind we see in John the Baptist and his family, or in Joseph and Mary. Or the faith of Simeon the priest(Luke 2:26). There is a continuity between the faith of Old and New Testament. We are reading the last chapter or perhaps the footnotes of a book we know very little about. And what’s even worse, we pride ourselves in how much better we know the Scripture than all the other churches. Shame on us. We need to start by purifying ourselves. Then correct our opponents, as Paul says, so that the might be saved.
I love how Paul doesn’t have all the false humility we pride ourselves on today. He knows he has completed the work God gave him to do. And he knows he will be rewarded. He doesn’t spend the whole time wondering if he should be speaking so boldly and saying things like ‘who am I to say?”. He gets it done courageously. And so should we.