Preaching

Got to preach this past weekend.  Sound cuts in an out and can be a bit annoying, but hopefully you'll be able to follow well enough.  You can find it here.  Below is a copy of the manuscript I wrote.  I changed quite a bit for the actual sermon, but the basic ideas are the same.

I hope over the past four weeks you have been able to read the entire book of 2 Timothy. As has been mentioned most Sundays over the past few weeks, this book was written by Paul in the shadow of the gallows… he was on his way to die and this is his final set of instructions to his disciple Timothy.  And if we had time to read the entire book out loud this morning, something would jump out at you with these verses: everything in these verses has already been said in the book.  In fact, 2 Timothy is the final set of instructions from Paul to Timothy and these verses are, for lack of a better term, Paul’s manifesto to Timothy.  Everything that Paul has unpacked at length in his letter gets packed into several verses as Paul gives his final, solemn charge to Timothy.  And that final charge can be summed up as this: fight the good fight, run the race well, keep the faith.  And so this morning, I want to look with you at what Paul defines as fighting the good fight, running the race and keeping the faith and challenge you with this: are you living the Christian life well, or do you have form of godliness that completely denies the power of God?  That is too say, are you living life as if you were saved to live on a playground, or saved to live in a battle?  In doing so we will first look at the reason Paul gives for this charge, which is entirely negative, and then turn towards what Paul’s charge to Timothy and us, actually is.

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.  For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.  As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come.  I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.  Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.

You don’t have to look very far to notice that our culture is completely engrossed in three things: consumerism, comfort, and complacency.  We are a culture that places supreme value on our own comfort and culture has answered that call with a never ending stream of trinkets for us to buy in order to maintain our comfort, from houses and cars to technology and shoes (personally I don’t get the shoes, but I grew up with two sisters and have been married for four years and stopped asking that question a long, long time ago), and we use that comfort to become complacent in life.  And in the process of pursuing our own comfort as ultimate, we have created a whole new set of disease and crime.  I read recently that there is actually a clinical diagnosis of “low frustration tolerance,” for people who seek immediate gratification or the avoidance of immediate pain… it is basically a doctor’s note to procrastinate.  We are consumed with our own comfort and ourselves.  And hear me, this is not something new.  If you read scripture, you find that God created the world in perfect shalom, perfect beauty, perfect peace, an place man and woman in the garden and basically said, “Look, all of this perfection, all of this beauty, all of the perfect fellowship you have with me and each other is yours forever if you just submit to my authority.  I have placed you here as my image bearers, but you are a created being, you are not God.”  And he placed a tree in the garden which they were not allowed to eat from as a reminder of their limits and their place in the universe.  But man and woman rebelled.  They were convinced it would be better to be God, to seek their comfort and peace outside of God, and so they rebelled, and that perfect relationship between God and man was severed and ever since mankind has been born with a nature at odds with God and with eyes only for himself (if you doubt me, I’ll let you talk with someone currently involved with raising a two year old).  Now all of that is in the first three chapters of Genesis.  The rest of the Bible deals with God’s reconciliation of the severed relationship.  You see throughout the Bible God calling into the darkness, and it is unbelievably dark, and calling to himself a chosen people, set apart.  As we systematically walked through scripture, we see God call and save people out of the darkness and set them apart for Himself.  We see God call Abraham and we follow that down to Moses who leads the nation of Israel, Abrahams descendants, out of the nation of Egypt.  And God gives them the law, which is good and holy, and then gives them the sacrifices to make atonement for when they fail at the law.  The purpose of this, according to the OT, is for the nation of Israel to be set apart as different from the world as the means through which God revealed Himself to the world.  In other words, Israel existed to share God with the nations.  And throughout the OT they fail miserably at this. 

Israel continually wandered off and either out rightly worshipped other gods, or engaged in what is called syncreticism, that is the blending of religious practices.  So they take a few practices from the Philistines and the Babylonians and mix them with the Jewish rituals.  And they would accumulate for themselves teachers that would allow them to do whatever it was they pleased and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.  And so God sends the judges and the prophets who say, “God is going to destroy you if you keep this up.”  And the people, not liking what they were hearing, persecuted and murdered the prophets, and found teachers that would tell them what they wanted to hear.  And then God brings judgment on the nation to continually call them back to Himself, all the while pointing toward the day when God would send His Messiah who would fulfill the law and permanently make atonement for His people.  And this brings us to Jesus.  And you see Jesus, God in the flesh, walking on earth proclaiming that the kingdom of heaven has come.  The hope that the prophets (who by the way by the time of Jesus were now revered, even though they had been hated) had pointed to was here.  And the people of Jesus’ day did the same thing their father’s had done and they persecuted and murdered the one bringing Hope.  Now we know that was God’s plan, and that through that death and His subsequent resurrection, Jesus provided atonement for our sin and that He still is calling and saving out of the darkness. 

And this brings us to Paul and Timothy.  Paul knows all of this history.  He knows that the natural inclination of man is to hate God and the message from God and, just like Adam and Eve, pursue our comfort and peace through our own means.  This is Paul’s entire reason for giving Timothy this final charge.  Paul’s entire reason for solemnly charging Timothy is that there is coming a day, and it was already happening in Paul’s time, just as with Israel and the prophets, just as with Jesus and the religious leaders, in which sound teaching is not tolerated and people turn away accumulate teachers that tickle there ears, teachers that tell them what they want to hear.  Now, the temptation here is to look at our culture and pick an extreme example of people ignoring right doctrine, that is right thoughts about God and his character, and assume that since we are not part of that extreme, we are ok.  This is a silly little game of comparisons that we are experts at.  We judge our holiness, our sanctification, by other people’s wrong actions and convince ourselves that because we don’t struggle with such and such that we are ok.  It is a destructive, foolish game to play and we must realize that the reason Paul is giving for his final words of warning to Timothy ismore than just what we would consider gross immorality.  These verses in 4:3-4 are really a summary of what Paul unpacks in 3:1-9.  Let’s look at that together.

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.  For people will be 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, yet denying its power.”

Look at this list… if we were honest, and I know that church can at times be the most impossible place in the world to be honest about where we are actually at, but if we were honest I think everyone of us could pick ourselves out of that list.  And if, just by chance, you can’t find yourselves in the specifics, Paul sums up the list by describing it as people who love pleasure and have a form of godliness while denying it’s power.  And that, unfortunately, defines much of church in America.  We want God, we want godliness, but there is so much of the world that we love and cherish and are unwilling to give up.  And so we come up with this form of godliness that has an outward appearance of holiness but is inwardly destructive.  We say the right things, we know the right answers, and yet, if we were to take a careful inventory of our hearts, we would not be all that much different from the world that surrounds us.  We profess great faith in Jesus Christ and then live our lives in such a way as to never depend on Him for anything, and thus deny His existence by the way we live.  And thus Paul writes his final manifesto to Timothy, urging him, and us, to fight the fight, run the race, and keep the faith.  And it is to the specifics of this charge that we will now turn and spend the rest of our time together.

Paul’s charge is put in the most serious of terms when Paul charges Timothy, in 4:1, in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom.  This is a solemn reminder to all who read it of two realities.  Jesus Christ is coming back, and every human to ever live will stand in front of Jesus Christ and give an account for their lives.  We have a tendency to focus on this second point, that Jesus is coming back, almost to an excessive degree, while living our lives ignoring the first fact.  Hear me, it is good to know what scripture says about Jesus’ second coming.  But the primary weight of this charge does not lie on the fact that He is coming back, it lies on the fact that we will stand in front of Him.  What a refreshing change it would be if we as the church could stop trying to figure out if locusts in Revelation are apache helicopters and start living like Jesus is one day going to rip open the sky and we will stand before Him.

So in light of Christ’s of the fact that one day we will stand before Jesus, and the fact that he will one day return, and because people will inevitably turn away from sound doctrine, Paul tells Timothy to preach the word, be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.  Preach the word.  Now, I realize that half of you just checked out mentally for the rest of the service.  You think, “I’m not a preacher, I’m not an evangelist, so this doesn’t apply to me.”  I don’t think you could be more wrong.  Turn with me to Acts 6:1-7:

“Now in these days when the disciples where increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution.  And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables.  Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty.  But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.  And what they said pleased the whole gathering, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch.  These they set before the apostles and they prayed and laid their hands on them.  And the word of God continued to increase, and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.”

So here we see the disciples decide to focus only on preaching and find other people gifted in service to exercise their giftings and serve the church.  But guess what we read in Acts from this point until the conversion of Saul.  We read the account of 2 of the 7 chosen, Stephen and Phillip, and guess what, they aren’t waiting on tables, they are preaching.  Powerfully preaching.  In fact, there is not another recorded sermon by the apostles in the book of Acts, but all of chapter 7 is a sermon by Stephen, and in chapter 8 focuses on Philip and his preaching.  My point is, this call to preach the word is not just a call to those who stand before you on Sunday mornings.  The idea of preaching in the NT is not so much tied to a position, but rather the idea of heralding and proclaiming.  Not only is it something we are all to do, it is something we all do, we just don’t do it about Jesus very much.  There are countless TV and radio shows where grown men talk about boys running around in tights on a field throwing a leather ball for HOURS.  They are preaching the gospel of football.  Everyone of you has something you are passionate about that you could talk for hours about.  If one of you comes up and asks me about flying airplanes and my wife hears you, you will get hit and yelled at because she knows we won’t be leaving for a long long time (and she isn’t here this morning so I can say that).  Everyone of you could talk to me for hours about something you are passionate about.  The problem isn’t that we aren’t preachers, the problem is that we don’t preach about Jesus.

We were not saved to take up space in a building on Sunday mornings.  We are saved to make much of Jesus.  We are saved to point others to Jesus.  We are saved to take our ultimate joy in Jesus.  That is the whole point that Paul is making here when he says preach the word.  The Word is about Jesus.  This book is not a road map to life, I mean, if it is, it’s a really bad one.  It’s not a how too manual.  It’s not a systematic world history.  No, this book is about the nature and character of God and how he deals with and is dealing with his creation.  And it culminates in and around the person of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh and the call to preach the word is a call to make much of Jesus in all that we say, do and think.   When was the last time you had a lengthy conversation about God or the things of God?  When was the last time you talked as much about His beauty as you do about whether the NFL strike will make this the broncos second year off in a row?

And Paul goes on to say that we are too do this in season and out of season which is just a really fancy, poetic way of saying, all the time, whether it is convenient or not, preach the word.  Paul goes on to give several imperatives for how to preach the word that mirror much of what Rick hit on last week out of 3:16-17 on what the word is useful for.  And here is the main point: the reason it is so important to preach the word, is that it is the Word of God that convicts and cuts to the heart and it is the Word of God alone that will stand in front of sin and false doctrine and keep a person from wandering into myths.  It is the word of God that Hebrews says is sharper than any two-edged swords and convicts the heart.  It is the word of God that stands forever according to the Psalmist.  And hear me, apologetics aren’t bad.  Systematic theologies aren’t bad.  But it is the word we are to preach and know how to employ at all times.  It is the word that we are to stand fast and unyielding on.  Paul emphasizes we are to do so with clear minded patience.  But we are to stand fast non-the-less. 

And here is why this is important.  If you hold fast to Jesus Christ and continually point to Him, your life will look drastically different from the world, and the world, the world that is accumulating teachers that tell people what they want to hear and the world that is chasing after myths, will hate you for it.  Thus Paul’s admonition to endure suffering in verse 5.  A study by Gordon-Cronwell university estimates that there have been 70 million martyrs since Jesus ascended into heaven.  45 million of those came in the last century.  That is almost 65%.  The war is intensifying and yet many of us are living as if we were saved from a life of suffering rather than being saved from a life of sin.  We are living as if we were saved to play on a playground, rather than being saved to fight in a war.  We have fallen in love with our comfort, there is so much in this world that we are unwilling to give up, and a church that is in love with their own safety and comfort requires very little attention from the enemy.

And so you get this final manifesto from a battle-hardened hero of the faith.  The man giving the solemn charge reminds everyone that all he has encouraged and exhorted us to do, he has done.  He has finished the race, he has fought the fight, he has kept the faith.  This is coming from the same guy who had been stoned and left for dead, the same guy who had been whipped, and shipwrecked and spent a day and night in the open sea only to wash ashore and get bite by a snake.  And oh, by the way, the only reason he was on that boat is because he never shut his mouth about Jesus Christ.  This is the man who’s clothes healed people, people literally took his work apron, put it on a sick person, and they got better.  This is a man who, from a jail cell wrote to the church in Philippi and said,

“I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.  For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.  Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.  Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own.  But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

            I count everything as rubbish that I might gain Christ.  And now, here he is, at the end of the race.  The cry of his heart to dwell in the presence of Jesus is at hand and he will soon see Jesus face to face, and enter the rest of Lord.  But his charge, his charge to preach the word to a world that doesn’t want to hear it and a world that will fight back with everything in it when you do preach it, his charge is to those still in the fight, to those still racing.  I would like to close this morning with a quote from an author named AW Tozer who says,

“We tend to think of Christianity as a painless system by which we can escape the penalty of past sins and attain to heaven at last.  The flaming desire to be ride of every unholy thing and to put on the likeness of Christ at any cost is not often found among us.  We expect to enter the everlasting kingdom of our Father and to sit down around the table with sages, saints, and martyrs, and through the grace of God, maybe we shall, yes maybe we shall.  But for the most of us it could prove at first an embarrassing experience.  Ours might be the silence of the untrained soldier in the presence of the battle-hardened heroes who have fought the fight, and won the victory and who have the scars to prove that they were present when the battle was joined.”

            You were not saved to treat life like a playground, you were saved to fight in a war.  Are you fighting the fight?  Are you racing the race?  Are you keeping the faith? Let’s pray.