The Gospel of Life, 2 Timothy 1:1-2

Note: I began a sermon series on 2 Timothy in 2005, shortly before I left Perkiomen Valley Brethren in Christ Church.  I never finished the series but have recently begun studying it again, because of my interest in the book.  Over the next several weeks I will be revising and posting the sermons I preached in 2005 and then will be writing and posting new ones (which I probably won't be preaching at any time in the near future).  This is the first sermon in the series.

In the few times I've played chess, one of my weaknesses has been that I'm anxious to get the first moves out of the way. In those initial moves, it doesn't seem like the game has really started, and I want to hurry up and get everything out onto the table. I've heard, from people who play well, that those initial moves are crucial and often determine the outcome of the game. But I've never cared enough about chess to learn to take advantage of those first few moves. I've struggled with a similar weakness, though, in reading the letters of the New Testament: my first impulse is to skip quickly over these opening verses. After all, Paul says similar things in all his letters: he identifies himself at the beginning, since the letter is being written on a scroll and it would be tedious for the person to go all the way to the end just to find out who the letter is from; he says who the letter is intended for, and then he usually says some words of blessing. There are minor variations, depending on who he's writing to, but the opening verses of his letters sound pretty-much the same, and I instinctively want to get past this and hear what he really has to say. But, as in the opening moves of a chess game, these opening verses are important and often give us some indication of what is to follow.

Awhile back I began praying through this letter. I use a four-step process in praying scripture, which slows me down and helps me stay with a passage long enough to let it sink into my heart. The first step, after praying and committing the time to the Lord, is to read the passage out loud, very slowly, several times. The object is not to get through the material, but to listen attentively to each word, so I go very slowly (which means I can't skip over these words of greeting). As I read slowly, over and over, I move naturally to the next step, which is meditation. I begin to see connections with other things that are said in Scripture; I start to see connections with my own life, things that God is calling me to do or reminding me about. This leads to the next step, which is prayer, and I begin praying in response to the things I'm seeing in the passage. I may, at this point, only be two or three words into the passage, but I continue praying until I've finished responding to what I've heard so far, then I move on, reading, meditating and praying in response to the Word, for the rest of the time I've set aside. And then, at the end, I'll read slowly through the whole section I've read and then sit silently in God's presence, being attentive to Him. So the four steps are 1) read, 2) meditate, 3) respond in prayer, 4) contemplate, sit silently and attentively in God's presence in the light of what you've heard. I recommend this to you as a way of allowing the words of Scripture to sink more deeply into your hearts. Today I'm going to point out some of the things I noticed as I was praying through these verses. I'll go through them phrase by phrase, they way I encounter them when I'm praying a passage of Scripture, as an illustration of how the process works.

First, Paul begins by identifying himself as "an apostle." An apostle is someone who's sent out as a representative. The word means, literally, "one who is sent out," and the stress is on the sender, not the messenger. Paul isn't speaking in his own name; he's speaking in the name of the One who sent him. Right away, we see that Paul, one of the truly great intellects of the ancient world, has been humbled. As an apostle, he has authority in the Church, but that authority has strict limits. He has no authority whatsoever to enforce his own will. He has authority only as a servant of Jesus Christ, an apostle by the will of God. Earlier in his life, Saul the Pharisee had chosen his own career. He'd been well-trained under the famous teacher Gamaliel, and he tells the Galatians "I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors" (1:14). But he'd made a mess of things. In his zeal he had tried to destroy the Church and had found himself fighting against God, the One he thought he was serving. Humanly speaking, he was a great success, but he was succeeding at the wrong thing; he was going in the wrong direction. Paul, who years before had been a gifted, promising young Pharisee, has been humbled. He no longer speaks in his own name; he's an apostle by the will of God.

But he goes on to say what his apostolate is about: he's an apostle "for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus." One way of looking at Scripture is to see it as the story of the fulfillment of God's promise. That promise was made, initially, right after Adam's fall into sin, when God said to the serpent, who had deceived Eve: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel" (Genesis 3:15). The promise is given more clearly to Abraham, when God tells him "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:3). And then, throughout the rest of Scripture, the promise is developed and restated until it's fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. At the end of the book of Revelation, we're given a glimpse of the final completion of God's promise of life in the new heavens and new earth. That's what Scripture is primarily about. It's not an instruction manual for living a successful life, although there is much wisdom in the Bible that can help us in learning to order our lives in obedience to God. But Scripture is primarily about the fulfillment of God's promise of life.

Paul's apostleship is rooted in this promise. In his earlier life, he had thought he was being faithful to the traditions of his ancestors. But when he became a Christian, when he saw Jesus face to face, he didn't throw away this connection with the past. He didn't say, "I can see that the whole problem is that I've been following traditions instead of cultivating a relationship." Paul, over and over again, stresses that his hope is rooted in God's promise to Israel. He tells the Jews in Rome: "it is because of the hope of Israel that I am wearing this chain" (Acts 28:20). Paul's problem wasn't that he was trying to be faithful to the traditions of his ancestors. His problem was that he didn't understand what those traditions meant. He didn't understand that God's promise was fulfilled in Jesus Christ, that it was all meant, from the very beginning, to prepare the way for Jesus.

And that promise is "the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus." The gospel is a message of life, not only of forgiveness. In contemporary Evangelicalism, we tend to focus primarily on the problem of guilt; because sin has made us guilty, our great need is to be forgiven. And this is part of the gospel. But it's not the only part. The gospel is not only a message of forgiveness. Through Adam, death came into the world. We live our lives in this world under the shadow of death. But Jesus has tasted death for us and is now risen from the dead, triumphant over the powers of death. We are united with Him in His risen life. The gospel is a message, not only of forgiveness, but of life. That's why I dislike so much the slogan, "Christians Aren't Perfect; Just Forgiven." It's certainly true that Christians are not perfect, but it is not true that Christians are "only forgiven." Christians share in the risen life of Christ; we've inherited the promise of life.

But we have life only "in Christ Jesus," not apart from Him. It's only in coming to Him, and remaining in Him, that we have life. He is the source of our life. Paul calls Him "Christ": the anointed, chosen One of God, who fulfills all the promises of the Old Testament. All the promises point toward Him, and everything now either looks back on what He did in the past or forward to what He is going to do in the future. But He's not only Christ; He's "Christ Jesus." The promise of life is fulfilled in this particular man, the Son of the Virgin Mary, who grew up in Nazareth, worked for most of his adult life as a carpenter, ministered publicly for three years in first-century Palestine, was crucified under Pontius Pilate and then rose from the dead on the third day.

All this is contained in Paul's identification as an apostle. Paul's life is no longer his own. He's like John the Baptist, who said: "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30). He had been a very successful Pharisee, but then he had seen Jesus face to face. Now he identifies himself as "an apostle," one sent out as a representative, carrying out a ministry not of his own choosing, but "by the will of God," and without any message of his own, but "according to the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus." Paul lost his life in the gospel pattern that Jesus laid down: "Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10:39). In losing his old life, he entered into eternal life: "and this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent" (John 17:3).

Next, Paul identifies Timothy as "my dear (or beloved) son." Paul's love for Timothy is obvious in this letter. But I wonder what Paul would have thought of Timothy before, when he was still Saul of Tarsus, the strict Pharisee. After all, Timothy hadn't even been circumcised when Paul first met him. Paul was a dogmatic, fanatical Pharisee, and Timothy's father was a Greek. I doubt that Saul of Tarsus would have found anything at all in common with someone like Timothy. But the gospel of life reconciles people who are alienated from each other. Death separates us from God, from one another, and even from ourselves. But the gospel, the promise of life in Christ Jesus, restores us into relationship.

God has revealed Himself in Scripture as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three Persons in One God. God exists eternally in relationship. Personal relationship is in the very fabric of creation. We don't live in an impersonal universe, we live in a creation that breathes the personal life of its Creator, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is not only important as a theological truth; it's important for knowing how we live our lives in this world. We were created in God's image, and part of what this means is that we were created to live in relationship.

Paul's conversion led to much rejection. His former friends and associates hated him and even sought to kill him. He experienced much loneliness as an apostle. But that's only part of the story. His alienation from the world of death was directly connected with his entrance into the kingdom of life. In the Church, he was given a family. In the Church of Jesus Christ, as people in fellowship with the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we begin the life of the future kingdom of God while we're still here in this world. We enter into relationships which will continue for ever. Because of the "promise of life in Christ Jesus," Paul is able to address Timothy as "my dear son."

And then, in the second half of verse 2, Paul pronounces a blessing: "Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord." The source of the blessing is "God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord." In the gospel, God becomes our Father. For some people, I know this isn't a welcome idea because their worst nightmare would be to discover that God is like their earthly father. Those who've grown up with abusive, small-minded, mean-spirited, or emotionally distant fathers naturally struggle with this idea of God as our Father. The best way to approach this is to understand that God is everything fathers were intended to be; He is the model of perfect Fatherhood. When we see abusive fathers, we know there's something desperately wrong; they're violating their calling, misusing their God-given authority and privileges for their own advantage. We see that and we instinctively recoil from it. For a father to abuse his position is desperately wicked, because he's not only harming his children; he's also defacing the image of God. We need to acknowledge that for what it is and then go on to cultivate the knowledge that God is everything we wish our fathers had been and infinitely more – because even the best fathers fall short. He is, to absolute perfection, our Father. If you want a picture of how He treats His children, look at Jesus in the gospels, because He is the "image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1). And Christ, His perfect Son, becomes our Lord. In submission to His lordship, in laying down our lives at His feet, we experience His blessing: "whoever saves his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it."

Paul sums up this blessing with three words: "grace, mercy, and peace." The word translated "grace" is often translated as "gift." The promise of God comes to us in the form of a gift, which both gives us access into God's presence and begins the process of healing the effects of our lostness. Grace brings us into God's favor and begins transforming us into the image of Jesus Christ. Paul says, in Romans 5, that we are standing in grace. Our whole relationship with God is permeated by a sense of givenness; the promise of life comes to us in the form of a gift which sets us free to become the kind of people God created us to be.

Mercy is being given the opposite of what we deserve. We are guilty, because of sin, but God has shown us mercy in Christ. God has shown us mercy, and He continues to show mercy. Paul is saying to Timothy, "may you continue to experience, in abundance, the mercy of God." And because we've experienced grace and mercy, we're no longer estranged from God. We're at peace with Him. That's the point Paul makes at the beginning of Romans 5: "Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." He's not talking here about a feeling of peace, but the reality of being at peace with God, no longer being at war with Him. Then, because we are at peace with Him, we are able to experience inner peace, the "peace that passes understanding" (Philippians 4). Our relationship with God has been healed by the promise of grace and mercy, and we are now at peace with Him.

All this – Paul's conversion and apostleship, the relation between Paul and Timothy which causes this to be the most warmly personal of all Paul's letters, and the possibility of a life characterized by grace, mercy and peace – all of this is rooted in the "promise of life that is in Christ Jesus." The gospel is not a cheap ticket to heaven. The gospel is a message of life that puts us on the path to becoming the kind of people God created us to be. In the gospel, we are incorporated into the life of the Holy Trinity, we are restored in our ability to live in relationship with one another. We begin the life which will reach its fulfillment in the new heaven and new earth. We don't experience it in its fulness here, but what we experience in the "grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord" is the life of eternity: "And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." May God enable us to hunger and thirst for more of this life and to live in the light of that day when we will see Him as He is, He who is the fulfillment of all our deepest longings.