Faithful through Grace

Welcome to God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. Check us out online at www.sharonrpc.org. We pray that this message will be a blessing to you and that the Lord will use it to transform your faith and your life. This morning we're going to begin a short series out of 2 Timothy and since I'm going to be here for over the next five weeks for four of those five, I thought we would look at this short epistle. We'll not quite get finished with it and maybe you'll invite me back another time and I can finish the epistle when I'm here another time in the future, but 2 Timothy Chapter 1, we'll be looking at the whole chapter this morning, Paul's second epistle to Timothy. Let's hear the Word of God. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, according to the promise of the light 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 Jesus Christ, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher and an apostle and teacher, which is why I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and 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, We are aware that all you who are in Asia turned away from me, among whom are Philegius and Hermogenes. May the God-Great grant mercy to the household of Anisiphorus, 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.

Let's ask God's blessing on us as we look at His Word this morning. Gracious Lord, we come now to look at Your Word, a Word that speaks to us of the underpinning of grace in all that we do. We ask and pray that we would hear it and receive it as it is, the very inspired, inerrant, infallible, holy Word of God. that you would help us to have attentive ears to hear what it says, that you would give me clarity, and above all, that it would not be me, but it would be your word that would be seen this morning, and that we would be people whose hearts are changed by the word. For in Christ's name we pray, amen. As Christians who profess to believe the gospel of Jesus Christ, grace, of course, is at the center of what we believe and should be at the center of how we live.

We sometimes refer to grace as God's unmerited or undeserved favor. That's mostly true, but really we should expand on that and say it's God's gift and mercy and forgiveness to those who deserve just the opposite. Because we don't deserve anything. In fact, we deserve judgment. and condemnation from God, but God has been gracious, kind, and forgiving to us.

The Apostle Paul has often been called the apostle of God's grace. It is certainly true that grace is a theme that runs throughout his epistles. I have been preaching quite a bit over at the Washington Church lately, as they have been vacant, and I have been doing an afternoon service on the Book of Romans, in which the grace of God permeates it. But all of scripture is that. I've been preaching on 1 Peter over there in the morning and that episode as well is permeated by the grace of God. Because the theme of grace, God's unmerited undeserved favor to those who deserve condemnation, runs throughout the scripture.

And it shouldn't surprise us then as we look at this epistle in this little short time we will have here, these few Sundays we have here, that we would see grace as a theme that flows through all of this epistle as well. And this first chapter in particular, we will see that. Now this little epistle is actually Paul's last final epistle. And it's an important window into his thinking because he is giving advice to Timothy, this young preacher whom he has nurtured and trained, and giving him some encouragement and some instruction.

Paul is sitting in a Roman jail knowing that his execution would be soon. and it was. In less than a year he would likely be executed. He was beheaded rather than like some of the other apostles because he was a Roman citizen and that limited the kind of capital punishment that could be done. But our early church history tells us he was beheaded because of his preaching of the gospel.

And this first chapter of this epistle gives us an unprecedented opportunity just to see how grace was at the core of who Paul was and how it was worked out as he gave instructions to young Timothy. As I said, this is Paul's last epistle. It comes before Titus in our Bibles, but chronologically it's after Titus.

He had written to Timothy before. It was probably written between the years 64 and 68. Not quite sure. It depends on exactly how you put a few details together. We don't know what the specific charges were against Paul. But we do know that our early Church historians tell us that he was executed by beheading. Now, where was Timothy? He was over in Ephesus, which is in modern-day Turkey.

You can get your map out in the back of your Bible and you can track that, and you can see it was quite a distance away. Western Asia, what was called Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, was a stronghold of the Christian faith in the first century. That may surprise some of us today because there aren't very many Christians in that part of the world.

A few, but not many. Most of them have either been driven out, executed, or the churches have fallen away. Matter of fact, if you look at the Book of Revelation, remember the letters to the seven churches? Those are all in that area, what we call Asia Minor. Some of those churches, at least one or two of them, doing pretty well. A couple, as you read that, you realize, not so well.

Those churches, there were a lot of churches there. Most of Paul's epistles, like the epistle to the Galatians, to the Colossians, to the Ephesians, were over in that area. That's where Timothy was. And Ephesus was a place in particular where false teaching was a problem.

Biblical scholars do what they call mirror reading. That means that they try to read and you can look backwards in the mirror and you can see reverse images. And they try to look at the false epistles and say, what was the nature of that false teaching?

And we can put some pieces together, but we can't know explicitly what every detail was. We just know that false teaching was a real problem. We also learned some, and we'll see that reflected as we go through the epistle. We also learn some personal information about Paul and Timothy that we don't get in any other book of the Bible. We see Paul's personal struggle in the face of what looks like some rather bleak areas of outlook. Things weren't always rosy.

Sometimes Christians have this tendency to say, if only I could have lived in the early church when things were wonderful. I had a particular professor, a preaching professor in seminary, I won't tell you which denomination he belonged to, but he said something about, he said, he had a little bit of a dry sense of humor.

He says, I know my denomination was, he says, was the denomination that's the true original one. He says, look at all those arguments and splits and problems the early church had. He said, my denomination has had those from the very beginning. So I know my denomination was definitely that of the early church.

In other words, we tend to romanticize the early church sometimes. and see them as a perfect, idyllic time. Not so. It was a time full of struggles. All you have to do is be a church historian like I am. I'm not an early church specialist, but I do focus on the late 19th and early 20th century in my historical work. But churches always had struggles. Early church had that as well.

Yet Paul is also concerned about Timothy as he is as much about himself. And he's seeking to encourage Timothy. And there's a tenderness toward Timothy that you will see in this passage. And that's why he opens it up by talking about this grace that underlies, underpins everything he does.

Let's look at how Paul describes this grace in this passage. this first chapter. First of all, he says it's something that's shown intergenerationally. It's shown through faithful generations. This is an important theme that we need to make sure we don't miss in this first chapter. That's why I had us read and sing, and I'm glad Jim prayed through Psalm 103, because it's a key biblical theme.

His covenant is faithfulness from generation to generation. You see how Paul begins. He's an apostle by the will of God according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus. Anytime you see the term promise in scripture, you should think of the content of God's covenants. The various covenants that flow through scripture. And that grace of God is a promise that goes all the way back to the beginning.

Adam and Eve fell into sin. What were they doing? What happened to them? They were given a promise. Genesis 3.15. The covenant that God gave with Abraham, what did it consist of? A promise.

Through you, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. So much so that the Apostle Paul in the book of Galatians can say, that's the gospel. Through you, all the nations of the earth will be blessed. When Paul says, the will of God according to the promise of the light that's in Christ Jesus.

He's saying, my focus is on this gracious promise that God has given and underlies everything I do. But he gets more specific because he says that in verse 3, I thank God whom I serve as did my ancestors. In other words, Paul is saying, this gospel I'm preaching isn't anything new. This is something that goes back through my answers. He's thinking all the way back. As the book of Galatians makes very clear, as the book of Romans, how many times does he refer back to Abraham? Abraham, our father. Abraham, our father.

Paul, when he's in court before the Sanhedrin, he says, for the hope of our fathers, this is why I am on trial. Because of that, he says, I can serve God with a clear conscience. This is an interesting statement. Paul says he can serve God with a clear conscience because of the power of the gospel. The same God who is the God of his ancestors.

If we really think about it, we might be tempted to say, oh really, Paul? You have a clear conscience? Weren't you the one who was persecuting the church? Weren't you the one that God had to stop on the road to Damascus, strike you blind for a while? That's that same Paul. He said, I have a clear conscience. Why?

Because he understood the gospel. He understood that the gospel can cleanse our consciences. The gospel can give us a clean slate before God. Because God's grace comes in and wipes the slate clean. So Paul can say, I serve the God of our ancestors with a clear conscience.

There is a continuity between all of scripture, between the Old and the New Testament that he is emphasizing here. As I said when he was on trial, he appealed to that. He said, I am on trial for the promise to the fathers. Those promises include Psalm 102, 28, in which God promises that the children of his servants will continue.

Deuteronomy 5, 9, and 10, in which he says God's promises are for a thousand generations. I don't know, you'd have to, you'd get lost if you start counting back trying to figure out what a thousand generations is. And that's probably a round number. When you get numbers like a round number like a thousand, this is probably a round number saying as far back as you God is faithful and His covenant will continue. Psalm 103 says His steadfast love is from everlasting to everlasting and His righteousness to children's children. You know, some of our other evangelical friends will sometimes say, well, you know, that was that Old Testament. You know, that's when they had that family idea. But the New Testament, it's all personal, you and me, God, and it's all very personal. There's no family connection. Oh, really?

They will make that claim on the basis of the New Covenant passage in Jeremiah that says, you know, everyone will know God. Well, the New Covenant pass, discussion of the New Covenant in Isaiah 59 says, Verse 21 says that the Holy Spirit will be passed on from generation to generation to generation. We don't drop this in the New Testament.

Acts 2.38, when Peter stands up and preaches that gospel sermon, he says, the promise is to you and to who else? And to our children.

He mentions, did you see what he did in this passage here about Timothy? He says, look at it. You have a sincere faith that first dwelt in your grandmother, Lois, and your mother, Eunice. He said, I can see this. This faith that you have, Timothy, is not new. Your mom had it. Your grandmother had it.

Now, apparently, his father may not have been a believer because he talks about his father being a Greek. But it's a faith, he says, that was sincere or genuine, I think, the new King James that many of you are looking at had. And he brings this chapter to a head by talking about the faithfulness of the family of Onesiphorus. He doesn't say Onesiphorus, but his family.

All of this fits with, for example, a passage like Acts 16.31. And I find this interesting.

If you would ask a number of Christians today, what must I do to be saved? What the Philippian jailer said, most of them would respond with would be this. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, forgetting that Paul goes on to also say, you and your household. Let me ask you that. Have you heard very many others actually quote the whole sentence that Paul gives? You shall be saved, you and your household.

Every time as Reformed Christians we witness a baptism, we're rejoicing in the covenant faithfulness of God. Because this idea is thoroughly biblical and not just confined to the Old Testament. God is a God whose grace goes from generation to generation. So when you're watching a baptism, don't look at the cute kid. They're cute, no doubt about it.

But have the right attitude, have the right understanding. This is a sign of God's grace. you know sometimes it can in some churches that practice the baptism of infants it just becomes a kind of a wet dedication parents get up and make some pledges and they we forget God is making promises I will be a God to you and your children that's even worse and you get you know you hear stories about and for example in England and people are members of the state church the parish parish and they come about once a year and they have a new baby and grandma says, are you gonna have, when are you gonna get that baby done? You know, that's what they'll talk about, get that baby done. So they make, they go and visit the rector with a couple of sponsors on a Tuesday morning at about 10 o'clock and then the rector does, gets the baby done for them and then they go out for a nice brunch afterwards or something like that. And it loses all significance of what's going on.

We need to make sure we understand, God is a God who says, I'm a God to you, and to your children. That's not disconnected from the means of grace. That includes faithful teaching. And we're going to see that Paul's going to talk about faithful teaching. There's godly discipline, nurture, good examples. But we must always emphasize, as Paul does here, that it's the grace of God that underlies and undergirds all of this.

None of us is perfectly faithful. You know, there are some Christian parents who, if they have a child that drifts, and it happens once in a while, that you get a child that drifts. Some fall away. You'll discover they never were believers. It happens. Paul talks about that in Romans 11. He says there are some branches that get broken off. And parents will sometimes beat themselves up and say, oh, it must be my fault. I must have done something wrong. Not necessarily.

We have to trust the sovereignty of God in those cases. But above all, we must trust God's gracious promises. And we pray on the basis of those promises for wayward children, not on the basis of our ability to bring them back. Just as we pray on the basis of God's promises for our own children.

There's always a reminder from the great parable of the prodigal son. the prodigal son, the one who came back. The father ran out to greet him. Now that has a much bigger gospel application than just a wayward child. But it does have an application to that wayward child. God is able to bring them back.

We can be grateful for faithful churches. Think of Sharon. Think of the Washington Church that I've been preaching at. Old churches, churches that have been around for many, many years, standing faithful. Some of you have deep roots in that. You can think of faithful people.

Some of you may be saying, You know, I don't maybe quite have that. Maybe you're a first generation convert. Well, you're starting a new line. You can say, well, maybe, you know, I don't have those Baird and McElhenney and Rob and all of those other names that I can, you can trace them all the way back to the 17th century to covenanters in Scotland. You know, a few of you do have that, but not everybody does.

But we can still see God's faithfulness from generation to generation. The church needs to take seriously, of course, its role in passing on the faith to the next generation. Now that doesn't mean that all of our kids, even if they are believers, will do things exactly the way we do. Every parent needs to come to grips with this. You raise your kids in a certain way. You raise your kids with certain ways that you believe best exemplifies the gospel.

And it may be different than some other Christians. That doesn't mean that our kids will always, shall we say, do things exactly the way we do them. That doesn't mean that they necessarily are not believers, because our Christians will do a number of things differently. It also means that we need to be very careful about making sure how we are passing the faith on. Think about this.

We need to install in our kids, as we're going to talk about the need for sound doctrine, But real antenna, so they know, think about this, if your kids or even your grandkids, when they move away from here, and many of them will, that's just the nature of our society.

Do you know how to point them to a sound church? The RPNA is a little smaller than my denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, but both are very small denominations by American ecclesiastical standards. Your kids move away, they can't find a church exactly like this. Do you know what to look for and help guide them to what's a sound church? Because they may end up in a church that's a little different.

But is it a church that's based on the word of God? What do you know about the kid? If you're an adult parent with adult kids, what do you know about the church that your kids and grandkids are in? Have you just assumed, well, I'm just glad they're in a church. I can guarantee you, I'm a church historian, just being in a church in some ways is meaningless because there are tons of churches all across the landscape of our country that don't preach the word of God, don't believe the gospel. How do you know?

Now, you might say, well, that's a lot of work because if you've ever looked up in the directory of American churches and you see denominations you've never heard of in your life, I guarantee you, You've probably never heard of the Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God and Jesus Christ with Signs Following. I looked it up one time. There was a church with that name. Now that sounds weird, but there are churches that you've never heard of.

And what if your adult child moves and says, that's the church I'm joining. Do you know anything about it? Are you able? Passing on the faith from generation to generation is something we are active in. It means that takes some work on our part. Let me ask you though that. Some of you have young, I see the young children here. A lot of young kids here compared to the last time I was here. There's still gonna be a time when they're gonna leave. How are you gonna prepare them for a church where they can nurture your grandkids? Those of you who have adult kids, think about the church that your kids are in. What do you know about it? What do you know about the preaching that goes on there? This is all part of our responsibility to say the gospel gets passed on and God's grace gets passed on from generation to generation.

I'm grateful for my own family history. I can go back about four or five generations. All of my ancestors came from the Netherlands and I can see I had a couple of church elders. even great-great-great-grandparents who were church elders. I can go back to a town in the Netherlands where the famous off-skiding, the rebirth of Orthodox reform theology in the Netherlands took place in that town that some of my ancestors came from. But there were a few, shall we say, soiled pages in my family history as well.

That's always gonna be the case. But God's grace still comes through. I was talking to my wife, Jenny, about her family. Her ecclesiastical background is far more checkered. There are probably half a dozen denominations in her church background. But she can see. She can see grandparents and great-grandparents who are Christian believers. We can be grateful for that. We can be grateful that God says, my grace flows from generation to generation. But this grace is also the underpinning of our existence as believers.

Paul can talk about his testimony for the gospel as the cause of his suffering in verse 8. He says, I'm in chains, he says, because of this. Yet in verse 12, he can say, I can rejoice and have hope even in the midst of all of this, because I know what the gospel is all about. Verse 9, he says, this gospel, do you see what he says?

It was planned from the ages before. because of God's purpose and grace which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began. This is the gracious purpose of God, not because of anything we have done, but because God has planned it out. That's a hallmark of our Reformed tradition, that God's grace was planned, as Paul will say in Ephesians 1, before the foundations of the world. In other words, as Reformed believers, we don't believe in the God of the long cosmic telescope.

You might say, what does that mean? You know, just like the Marines were looking for a few good men. God doesn't have a long cosmic telescope. Oh, I found a good one there. Let me choose him. That's a good one. I found a good one. Well, this one, he's got the right beliefs. I think I'll choose him. If you think that's the way God's doctrine of election, the doctrine of election, the way God elects is biblical. You're absolutely dead wrong. It's because of grace. He chose us in Christ, Paul says, because of grace. Undeserved. Unmerited. Paul says, because I know that foundation. I know there's nothing, nothing I did. And Paul experienced this.

I mean, he was on the road to Damascus, gonna go arrest, and probably in his mind do worse than just arrest those Christians, and God knocked him off, I assume he was riding a horse, I'm not sure, but he knocked him off that horse and said, okay, Paul, I got other plans for you. I'm gonna make you the spokesman of the gospel to the Gentiles. Instead of persecuting that church, you are going to be building up my church. Wow, what an incredible story.

Paul understood that he was called to holiness to serve God. That's what it says here. Not because of anything he had done. He says it right here. But because of pure grace. God didn't call us because we were holy. He called us to make us holy. Faith and repentance are gifts of God. He'll talk about that actually later on in the epistle. If we had to deserve this love and grace, we would all be up a creek without the proverbial paddle. No hope.

Yet He says this grace was manifested in all of its splendor when Christ, the very embodiment of that grace that we were chosen in Him, came and He lived and died and rose again. smashed death. That's what he says here. He smashed death. Because as he'll say elsewhere, death is the very embodiment of the sting of the law that's against us.

The wages of sin, he says in Romans 6.23, is death.

But the gift of God is eternal life. Life and immortality, he says, were brought by the gospel. Those are future-oriented. Immortality in the full sense is not something that's the natural possession. We sometimes will say, well, people have an immortal soul. To be technically correct, we have to say they have an everlasting soul. Immortality only belongs to Christians because immortality is the idea of a different kind of life. And that is what the gospel brought.

That's why he will say, I can entrust this, and we'll explore that a little bit in our next point, but he says, I can trust this to God because he says, I know that I live in the already but the not yet is still there. I'm living knowing the final outcome is not done. I know whom I have believed. I can trust God.

Grace was the whole foundation of Paul's life. He had the assurance that what he was doing was not an afterthought on the mind of God. He had spoken with those who had witnessed God's decisive acts in history. He had talked to those 500 who had witnessed the resurrection. He had the absolute confidence about God's plans for the future.

He knew that God had called him, not because of who he was, but because of God's own mercy. And that confidence gave him everything he needed in the midst of that opposition, as he sat in a Roman prison, knowing that he was likely, and it was, he was absolutely right about that, that he would be beheaded. Now, that didn't make the difficulties go away. Sometimes we have a tendency to think, well, if I just have strong faith, the difficulties will all go away.

Nope. It's not the way it works biblically. The Christian faith is not what I call the magic carpet ride view of the Christian life. What's that? I have faith in Christ and then I just sort of like a magic carpet fly above all the struggles in life. It's been presented that way by some people. If you ever hear a Christian teacher or preacher, start presenting the Christian faith as some sort of magic carpet ride.

I was preaching on Romans 6 over in Washington last Sunday afternoon, and Paul says, reckon yourselves dead to sin and alive to Jesus Christ. There's some people who said, oh, I just have to have an active faith and reckon myself dead, and I won't struggle with sin anymore.

No, that's not the way it works. You still struggle with sin, but you struggle from a position of strength. You don't get on that magic carpet and have no difficulties. It's not a magic carpet ride. Paul says, I have this foundation. God called me. I'm here though in prison because of the gospel. But I don't despair. I know the underpinnings that God's grace has for me. It didn't make the difficulties go away. It put them into perspective. God's purposes are certain. He has invaded history to bring the decisive blows to defeat sin and the future is absolutely certain. That's why Paul can say God's grace is the underpinning, the foundation for everything that I do. Now, he also moves on from that and says that grace of God is a call to what I call faithful and loving orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy simply means straight teaching. My own denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, got its name, even though it's been confused sometimes with Greek Orthodox churches. We literally had that happen one time. and some Greek Orthodox priests were out in California, and they were at some convention, and they looked up and saw the word Orthodox in one of our church's names, and they came in with their full regalia, you know, the robes and the big beards and everything, and they were kind of shocked to find out it was a confessional Presbyterian church that they had walked into. The point is Orthodox means straight teaching, and that's what Paul is talking about here.

He says there is a deposit of the gospel Paul had had the courage to denounce those who would cloud the gospel of Christ in Galatians 1. You read that sometime and really read seriously what Paul is telling them to do. He's telling them to do something to their bodies that's not very nice. That's what he tells them that they should do. He said, I would rather they go do that than make the gospel unclear. Timothy was facing people who were seriously departing from the faith.

So that's why he says in verse 13 to follow the pattern of sound words. Or as some translations say, the standard of sound words or the norm of sound words. This theme runs all throughout the so-called pastoral epistles, the two Timothys and Titus. Ten times it's found there. The word sound is found. There was a clear standard of what was true and what is false, a standard of orthodoxy.

By the way, Paul will elsewhere talk about passing on the tradition. You know, sometimes we in our Protestant traditions, so to speak, I said that purposely, will say, you know, we're the Bible people. We're the anti-tradition people. The mother people, those other churches, they believe in tradition and we believe in the Bible only. You have to be very careful about that. Because the Apostle Paul talks about a tradition that gets passed on, sound words.

Now, the way to bring those two together is to realize there's a difference between sola, scripture alone, and solo scripture, scriptura. Sola means the Bible is the final authority. And that tradition that gets passed on must be in line with scripture. Solo scripture, Torah is simply saying, just me and my Bible, and I can come up with any wonky interpretation of the Bible I want, but I got it out of the Bible, so that must make it right.

No. If you come up with an interpretation that no other Christian has ever had, you better go do triple check, or quadruple check, or multiple checks to see if that is really an interpretation. Because I have seen some, in the history of the church, some really wacko interpretations of the Bible, and then they start, what do they do with those? People start false cults when they do that.

But the point is, Paul says here, we need to guard that deposit. This is a good thing, he says, that has been given to you. This sound teaching is a deposit. Now it's interesting, in the ancient Near East, when you were given a deposit and told to guard it, that became a sacred thing that you were supposed to do. You have been given the honorable task of guarding someone's deposit. And you were supposed to lay down your life and give up your own rights rather than to dishonor that deposit. Paul says, I was given this deposit and you have too, Timothy, because of the greatness of the grace of God.

Look what he says here. He says, I know whom I have believed. Verse 12. I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that He is able to guard until that day that which has been entrusted to me. I grew up in a church where there was an old gospel song that we used to sing, and the chorus went, I know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded, this is an old King James Version, that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day. Paul is saying God in His grace has given me this deposit. In other words, I have a deposit of what's the true faith. You have it too, Timothy, and you have to guard that deposit, that true tradition that is being passed on, that we today can find assured for us in the scriptures.

Now, this isn't just nitpicking, but the proper response to the grace of God extends to the words as well as the substance. But he reminds us in verse 13 that it has to be all done, follow the patterns of sound words that you have heard from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. That means this orthodoxy, these sound words that are passed on to us, must be handled in a loving, and living, loving, gentle way. Not what you might call a brittle nitpicking just because we want to win arguments with people, but because when we share those sound words with people, when a pastor shares those sound words from the pulpit, he's saying because these are good for you. It's the loving thing I can do to share these sound words with you. This is terribly important. Grace drives us to a concern for doctrinal orthodoxy, including a concern for sound words that oftentimes will seem nitpicking to others.

This is just as important in today's church as it was in the time of the Apostle Paul. I told you that I'm a church historian, and a week and a half from now, I'm going to be at a historical conference. I belong to a group of scholars called the Presbyterian Scholars. Pastor Brian has been very interested in it, and I know he's probably, he's a historical scholar as well. I think he's going to try to get in in the future years. But we get together in Wheaton, Illinois every fall, and we present papers and discuss things about the history of the church. Well, I'm on a panel discussion with a few friends of mine and a couple of people that I don't know, but there are some pretty good scholars on that. And it's about the 100th anniversary of the founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a man named J. Gerson Macham.

And he wrote a little book called Christianity and Liberalism. He's not talking about political liberals, people who belong to a certain political party. He's talking about theological liberalism. 100 years ago already, most of the mainline denominations, including the big Presbyterian church that he was a part of, were drifting into liberalism.

And I know from talking to some historians, and Pastor Brian knows the RP history, the RPs even had some struggles with this during that time. And it took Johannes Voss and a few others to help bring them back and stem the tide in the RP church. And he was the son of Machen's colleague, Gerhardus Voss, at Princeton Seminary. But Machen's little book basically argued this. He says, the so-called liberal Christianity is a different religion. It's not even Christianity. It calls itself Christianity, but it's not. And he went point by point through that book and showed that it wasn't.

That's what's taught in a lot of churches today. What's the driving force behind this? Finger to the wind. Whatever the culture tells you is right, you follow that. Have you been shocked at churches that all of a sudden, on sexuality and all kinds of other issues, just totally, you know, five years ago, they changed their mind what they were, what they taught five, 10, 15 years ago? You shouldn't be. Why? Finger to the wind. Whatever the culture tells you, it's saying the modern spirit drives truth, not what the scriptures say.

That's why I said earlier, when your kids go and join a church, I believe parents and grandparents have a responsibility to say, what does that church teach? Now, there can be some variation. Sometimes within a larger delamination that has departed from the faith, there will be individual local churches that are fine. But the point is, we have to be faithful. There are those who are compromising the church, churches. They're compromising the faith. It's not nitpicking to say that some things are true and some things are false.

There was a recent discussion Al Mohler had with another man, and that man said he liked to draw circles. He didn't like to draw lines. He liked to draw circles. Some of you have seen Al Mohler's Sunday school classes for Ligonier. And Dr. Mohler said, he said, hey, in the Christian church, we need to draw lines sometimes. Look at Galatians and see what kind of line Paul draws there. Big, bold, extra thick, sharpie lines.

And he says, this is true. This is false. You know, it's interesting. Sometimes people in the pew can point this out. The famous Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper was raised in that and went to school in that liberal tradition and he went to his first church after he graduated and he went out and he said there was There were some old folks, among whom we called in Dutch the kleine leiden, which means the little people, the insignificant people. And there was this dear old lady who challenged him and said, what you're preaching in that pulpit, not true. I know the scriptures.

What you're preaching isn't true. And it kind of knocked him upside the head, as we say. And he said, I need to rethink everything. And he went to become one of the great champions of the historic Reformed faith. And it was some dear little old lady who went to him and said, what you're preaching, not right. It's not true. It's not the sound words that scripture talks about.

Now, we have to do it in the loving, gentle way. Paul makes that very clear. But we have to make sure that we keep those sound words. Paul is saying concern about sound doctrine is a grace-driven loving thing to do when it flows from a vital relationship with Jesus Christ. When we know whom we have believed, we will know his gift and his grace, and we want to see it magnified and not compromised by false teaching. And then the last way Paul talks about grace underpins us here is that it's the antidote to spiritual cowardice. That's an important theme.

Paul tells in verse 6 for Timothy to fan the embers of his faith, implying that the embers were sometimes getting a little bit low. You've seen that? You know, you go to watch a blacksmith and he's got these big bellows and he goes, and that fire is almost going out and then that fire starts to flame up. Timothy, he says, fan the embers of your faith. He says, there's a lot to do. Don't be timid. The theme of not being ashamed runs throughout this whole chapter.

Paul mentioned some who deserted him. What's the implication? They were ashamed of the gospel. Maybe they were ashamed that Paul got put in prison. I don't want to associate with any guy who has to go to jail for what he preaches. I'm going to tone this down.

Now, sometimes we talk about the fact that they lived in a more shame and honor culture than we do. What's that mean, you might say? That's a culture where people are driven to do things heavily by the pressure of the culture to be a shameful thing or to be an honorable thing. If you've ever been around Orientals, Japanese in particular, that's a strong shame and honor culture. And you hear about Japanese students who are afraid of dishonoring their parents so they will take their own lives sometimes because they didn't want to dishonor their parents. But Paul is speaking into a culture that's like it, but every culture has a certain amount of that. where the culture will try to shame us.

Philips paraphrases Romans 12.1. He says the world around you is always trying to squeeze you into its mold. And one of the ways they do this is by shaming us.

He tells Timothy in verse 7 not to be ashamed. and reminds him that God hadn't given him a spirit of fear. Now, this is important, because you might say, well, I thought we're supposed to fear God. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Yeah, it does, when you use fear in that sense, but Timothy is told a different word here.

It's a word that's used only once in the New Testament, and it was a word used of soldiers who ran away from their duty. That's crucial. Soldiers who ran away from their duty. The enemy was coming. They had a lot of guns pointed at me. I got scared and I hightailed it to the back of the lines.

Timothy, he says, don't be like that. If you understand the grace of God, if you know who you believed and are persuaded, you can't turn tail and run. Timothy, he says, you don't have to be ashamed of the gospel. that you preach or that I preach. Because it's the glorious gospel of grace. Paul knew that grace was the foundation. And Anisiphorus was a wonderful example of someone who wasn't ashamed either. Paul makes that very clear. He says that he was not ashamed of my chains. Look at verse 16. God grant mercy to the household of Anisiphorus for he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains. Now, we don't live in quite the same shame and honor culture.

But you know what? I think our culture is becoming a little bit more like that. Because our culture has lost an objective sense of what's right and wrong. And what people do now is they will try to shame you. Why do they do that? You hear about so-called woke culture. in which people will say, you know, if you don't toe the line in what I think we ought to do, we're going to ostracize you. We're going to make you somebody who doesn't get the plum jobs, somebody who people don't like to hang around with. In some cultures, they say you don't get invited to the right parties. What is that all but an attempt to try to shame people into certain actions by ostracizing them?

The antidote as Christians is to be gripped by the gospel, to be gripped by God's grace. The gospel, the good news of forgiveness, restoration to wholeness, adoption as a child of God, promise that all things will be made new. All of this to those of us who don't deserve a single thing. We deserve just the opposite and we receive it as a free gift. Being ashamed of the gospel, when we really see what it is, can only be described as a sinful tragedy.

The really holy boldness we need can only be come by those who have been gripped by the gospel and the Spirit is at work. We will really know whom we have believed and be confident of His keeping power. After all, 1 Peter says that we should give a reason for the hope. Always be prepared, he says, to give a reason for the hope that is within us.

Paul says that all of Asia had turned away from him. Now, that's probably hyperbole. You know, people say that. Everybody's against me. And we know what they mean. There may be a couple of people still on your side, but it means the majority. That's what Paul is saying here. And he mentions a couple of people that had been close friends of his, Philegios and Hermogenes. He's saying, they deserted me, probably because they were ashamed in the way he's developing this here, of what had happened to Paul.

None of us are free from the pressure of shame, from the world squeezing us into its mold. It's only the gospel of grace that can give us a strength. It should give us a strength to be an encouragement to be bolder. Even if they tell you, if you don't adopt this particular policy, you don't put that pride sticker on your door, you don't teach this particular curriculum, you don't do this, you don't do that, Even if they threaten you with your job, you have to say, I can't be quiet.

I know whom I believed, and I'm persuaded that he is able to keep that which I've committed unto him against that day. We're saved by grace. We're called to live by it. It's the foundation of who we are. It's passed from generation to generation. By the grace of God, we're called to guard the gospel, which gives us the details of what that grace is all about, and it should make us bold to live in a world that's constantly trying to shame us into believing anything but the good news of the gospel.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your truth. We thank you for this word. We thank you that we know, even though we know we oftentimes will be ashamed, have the temptation to be ashamed of the gospel, that if we really understand it and the grace that underlies it, that it will be something that will give us a backbone to live in this world and to pass that grace from generation to generation, the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. For it's in his name we pray.

And thanks for listening to this week's message from God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in rural southeast Iowa. We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith in your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website, SharonRPC.org. We'd love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue, Morning Sun, Iowa, 52640. May God richly bless you this week.