Pastor Thanael Certa-Werner
Scripture | 2 Timothy 3:1-17 (NIV)
3 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. 6 They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, 7 always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. 8 Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth. They are men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected. 9 But they will not get very far because, as in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone. 10 You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, 11 persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. 12 In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, 13 while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. 14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
We’re in the third week of our sermon series taking a look at 2 Timothy in which we are discussing endurance. In other words, how do we, as Christians, make it through hard times? In the first week, we talked about how there will always be challenges, hard times, and failures for Christians. To endure, we must: 1. Fan the Flame, 2. Know there will be suffering, and 3. Guard our hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Last week, we talked about staying focused. To do so, we need to: 1. Stay Focused on Our Task, 2. Follow God’s Rules, and 3. Remember the Promise. This week, we’re taking a look at the key tool at our disposal for this work of endurance as we discuss our next step: choosing God’s way.
To Clean, You Have to Get Dirty
To begin, I want you to think of a time when you had to clean something truly awful – a time when you had to pick up something you really didn’t want to pick up, a time when you had a mess you would rather have left to your spouse. For me, most of these kinds of messes have come from my dog. Whether it by bodily fluids of all degrees of nastiness, or things dragged in the house, I have had to clean some truly nasty stuff. There’s been things that make me gag just from the mere sight of them; thing’s which smelled so rancid that I had to hold my breath to make sure that I would be able to hold down my lunch. And this is just my dog! I can only imagine what horrors await me in the glory that is a baby. The worst part of these things that need cleaning is that often, it means that you have to get dirty or at least have the possibility of getting dirty to get it clean. I have yet to clean out gutters and not come away with a shirt covered in nasty rotting leaves. Whenever you take a diaper off, you are playing Russian roulette with your child. But this is a reality in life.
For most things – especially the things that are really messy, you have to get messy to get them clean. In the Bible, the greatest mess in all creation also comes from babies. That mess is humanity. It’s not because humanity is completely evil or because we want to be this giant mess. Rather, we’re messy because God wants us to choose to follow Him for ourselves. That means that we’re going to get messy every time we don’t decided to follow God. What’s terrifying is that the mess is guaranteed to continue to the very end.
The Bible talks about end times every so often, and it always describes how terrible a mess those times are. In our scripture for today, that’s what we get to see. “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. 6 They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, 7 always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.”
Paul is really descriptive here – and the scary part is that his description sounds kind of familiar. It almost sounds like he’s talking about the world we live in now. Interestingly, the Bible never really describes how long the end days will be and doesn’t really give us a clue what it means by “end days.” But many Christians have put forth that the end days are those which are in between Christ’s resurrection and His second coming. So, this great big mess that’s described in the Bible – that’s what we’re living through right now. And worse, this big mess is what we’re called to work with God to clean up.
The Greatest Tool is Scripture
Doesn’t knowing that just make you excited for ministry? There’s no doubt with a mess this big, that we’re going to get dirty while we work. This doesn’t mean the kind of dirty that world uses – but rather it means that there will be moments when people around us will hate us – and I mean HATE us. There will be times that we stand for everything they stand against. There will be moments when we are the epidemy of evil in their eyes. They will want us dead.
Paul experienced this in his day, yet he realized why all of this was happening to him. He says, “You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, 11 persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. 12 In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, 13 while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” The reason for his sufferings and hardships is the very work he was called to do. We are so often surrounded by the forces of evil that don’t want you to succeed. Do you think the devil wants you to undo his work? Do you think evil wants good to succeed? Of course not. What Paul reminds us is that in these moments, when the forces of evil assail us – when we are met by terrible challenges, grueling failures, and the hard-hitting gut-wrenching moments – we are not alone. As Paul testifies, “Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them.”
Paul then goes on to give some advice because it’s not easy to have the fortitude to remember in these hard times that we supported by Christ and because in these moments, what can help us remain anchored in Christ. Paul says, “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God[a] may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Continue in what you have become convinced of.
Why is it that we put such an emphasis on the scriptures in Church? Why is it that almost every week includes a next step of reading the Bible every day? It’s because the scriptures help to guide us in our daily lives. They help us to be fortified in our faith so when bad times do happen, we are not swept away. And it’s because the scriptures are God’s great gift to humanity which allow us to get a glimpse of God’s goodness, to see a sliver of His love, and be reminded that He has brought us from the brink of self-destruction to eternal life through Christ.
Choosing God Over Me
Finally, we come to the crux of what Paul is leading us to. This all leads to the last reason why scripture is so essential to endurance through hard times. It’s from the scriptures themselves that we see how hard it is to tell between real Christians who hold the faith and those who hold the form without the function. In the early part of this text, Paul lists Jannes and Jambres who are two people who lived during the time of Moses. Their power seemed to rival that of Moses’ through God – and it seemed as though their path was that of God’s. Yet, they quickly become the prime example of trickery and deception.
This is a clear reminder that scripture helps us truly walk in the ways of God and not our own. When we regularly spend time in scripture – when we come to know it – it helps inform our decisions so that we do not deceive ourselves into living for ourselves under the guise of living for Christ. The danger of living for ourselves is that we alone cannot handle the challenges of this world. When we have to be enough, how do we handle cancer? Or death? Or financial ruin? Or natural disasters? When we have to be enough, we fail because we can never be enough. Yet, when we choose to follow Christ, we don’t have to be enough because He is enough. So, scripture helps guide us on the path of true obedience to Christ so that, as Paul says, “the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” For that, thanks be to God. Amen? Amen.