Sermon from April 22, 2007
I would like to make a proposal. Let's get in shape spiritually.
It's not that we are all out of shape spiritually, but as with the body, so with the soul. It doesn't take long for us to lose strength and grow flabby.
Some of us may be well-conditioned spiritually, but we're in a rut. We need some variety. We need to surprise our immortal souls and with some new ways of staying in shape spiritually.
I propose that we begin small and add a few new exercises along the way. Between now and the end of August I want us to become more familiar with several biblical writings: 2 Timothy, Philemon, Philippians, Galatians (all in the New Testament), Ruth, two Psalms and Habakkuk (all in the Old Testament).
I'll spend two weeks each on 2 Timothy, Philippians, Ruth and Habakkuk; one week on Philemon and each of the two Psalms, and three weeks on Galatians. This is not an in-depth study. I will seldom go line by line or even chapter by chapter.
However, I will introduce you to the spiritual power of each. That will add spice to the discipline I'll talk about later, which will help us get in better shape spiritually.
The Character and Content of 2 Timothy
Among the writings of the wise is a highly personal, somewhat rambling letter from the Apostle Paul to his protégé, Timothy. We call it 2 Timothy. Would you join me there in chapter three? I'd like first to characterize the letter briefly.
Paul wrote from prison. However, it gives no indication of having been censored; quite the contrary. Paul alternates between Christian instruction and highly personal feelings about people who had wronged him and people who had befriended him.
His instructions to Timothy have to do with Timothy's demeanor as a young, somewhat vulnerable spiritual leader within the church and with his fidelity to the teaching he had received from Paul.
Paul never expounds at length any great truth of the faith. The great truths are there like good seashells, left behind when the tide has gone out, intermittent treasures you have to look for. If readers are patient, they can collect these treasures and put together coherent pictures of Christian truth.
That's what I'd like to do today and next Sunday. Today, I'd like to show you what Paul believed about the Word of God. Let's begin with 2 Timothy 3:16.
The Voice of God and the Voice of Scripture
All Scripture is God-breathed. As I read this remarkable statement again for the first time in a long time, I thought about the company it keeps. Genesis 2:7 says: And the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being. If all Scripture is God-breathed, then God breathed it into the souls of the apostles as surely as He breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life.
The Apostle Peter contributed to this truth, when he wrote: Prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit – 2 Peter 1:21. Peter couldn't have been more vivid, if he had said, "As they were blown along by the breath of God."
In the church wars between Fundamentalists and Liberals a hundred years ago, 2 Timothy 3:15 became a major biblical text. In retrospect Liberal Protestant Christianity made a strategic blunder that continues to haunt the mainline Prostestant denominations. Seminaries, like Union Seminary in New York City and its most articulate pastors, like Harry Emerson Fosdick of Riverside Church, also in New York City, embraced European skepticism about the Bible.
Fundamentalist Protestants resisted the liberals. They fought to take control of seminaries and denominational leadership. They usually failed. They often split away and formed new denominations. They also started new Bible colleges and seminaries. At the heart of those new schools they enshrined the doctrine of inspiration of the Bible; and at the heart of their doctrine was 2 Timothy 3:16.
For example, the doctrinal statement of my seminary, Dallas Seminary, has become longer than when I was a student, and the faculty has refined it. One part of it reflects what characterized the fundamentalist view of the Bible. It says: “We believe that all ‘Scripture is given by inspiration of God’ . . . We believe that this divine inspiration extends equally and fully to all parts of the writings – historical, poetical, doctrinal, and prophetical – as appeared in the original manuscripts. We believe that the whole Bible in the originals is therefore without error.”
The Roman Catholic Church also had its own battles with modernism. The new Catechism of the Catholic Church expresses belief about the Bible this way: “‘Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 37).
It is tempting to see doctrinal statements as dry debating points. Unfortunately, too much unedifying debate has given theology a bad reputation. But in our culture where anything goes, people bombard us with ideas. Some of them, if we believe them, endanger our souls as a faulty diagnosis endangers our health. Good doctrine protects us.
We need have no quarrel with doctrinal statements. They summarize what the Church believes. Like a fingerprint, doctrinal statements give the Church its unique identity. They preserve an understanding of the faith, so that the next generation can experience the truth they guard. Doctrinal statements are not primarily debating points. They are signs that say, “Follow this path if you want to experience God and know God.” They are indispensable to a healthy Church.
What Paul Said
However, in 2 Timothy Paul offers no doctrinal statement about the Bible. He writes: All Scripture is God-breathed, and gives the Church something to chew on for 2000 years; but he did not elaborate on this seminal statement, which is three words long in the Greek language Paul used. But he did have a lot to say about Scripture.
For example, look back at verses 14-15 that precede this famous verse. He wrote to Timothy: But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
The Bible is very old, but we don’t read it to learn about the past. Verse 15 says that the Scriptures are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. They speak to our sins, our fears, and our addictions. They reveal the Savior, who is present every day, offering His power to us and unobtrusively imposing His will on our world. They teach us to call upon Him, and even to discern His presence in “the madd’ing crowd” that throngs the earth.
Before we leave this important text, Paul also said to Timothy at the beginning of verse 15: from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures. Fortunately, Paul referenced Timothy’s childhood earlier in this letter. There we learn who began to teach him Scripture, when he was just a little ankle-biter. Look at 2 Timothy 1:5.
I have been reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also. We know from the book of Acts 16:1 that his mother, Eunice, was a Jew and a Christian. We think that’s odd today, when many Jews say it is impossible to be a Jew and a Christian. But most of the early Christians were Jews. Timothy’s mother believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah of Israel. She also knew the Torah. She had learned it from her mother, Lois. They taught it to Timothy.
The picture emerges of a household where Scripture was revered, read, and rendered personal from one generation to the next. It was old birds teaching young birds to fly. I am grateful for my grandmother Freeman’s Bible, whose sensational drawings first drew me to the book of Revelation. I am grateful for my mother’s hours of patient listening as I recited Scripture and the catechism she had encouraged me to learn.
Last Sunday, Martin Haverley shared part of his faith story. He told us how he prayed with his mother to ask Jesus into his child’s heart. He was so young that he couldn’t remember the prayer; but he remembered what he did. And now in his adult life the ancient faith lives on fresh and relevant to his daily law practice.
I hope your home serves as a greenhouse where the seed of God can be planted early in your children’s hearts, watered by your tender persistence, and protected from other voices that begin at younger and younger ages to vie for your child’s heart.
Paul makes a third statement about God-breathed scripture in 2 Timothy 2:1-2:
You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others.
Here the picture emerges of a Church where Scripture is revered, read, and rendered personal from one person to the next and from one generation to the next. Formally, it happens in seminaries and Bible colleges and in the ordination to ministry. Less formally, it happens in sermons, Sunday classes, and small groups.
As an aside to parents, you should give thanks to God, if a mature, godly man comes alongside your teenage son and mentors him in the faith, or a mature, godly woman comes alongside your teenage daughter and mentors her in the faith. They serve as surrogates for the extended family few of us have.
If God speaks to us, how does He do it, and how would we know He had spoken? The Old Testament story of the young boy, Samuel, comes to mind. Three times in the middle of the night in the holiest place on earth, the voice of God called his name.
But that doesn’t happen often, and not many claims to hearing the audible voice of God persuade us. But if God’s usual habit is to speak to us inaudibly, how does He do it, and how would we know He had spoken? How have wise people in the past answered these questions?
2 Timothy gives us a reliable answer to those questions. In Scripture God speaks to us about how He saves us from the insatiable appetite of evil to destroy goodness that is abroad in our world, whether the evil is in our hearts or embodied in the institutions of our nation. Scripture is transmitted to us generation by generation through family and Church and as it confronts ideas and values that contradict it.
The Pastoral Center of Gravity
God has granted the Church in America not only to believe in Christ, but also to suffer for His sake unparalleled personal liberty for an unprincipled pursuit of pleasure. Will that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray (Revelation 12:9), corrupt our liberty into self-seeking; or will we use our liberty to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of us – Philippians 3:12? Will we aspire to spiritual and moral greatness?
If we so aspire, we will need the God-breathed Scriptures to make us wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Scripture helps us by correcting our spiritual myopia. “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes” (C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” God in the Dock, 200). The Bible brings to the discussion a different, wiser outlook.
What Richard Bauckham said about Revelation applies to the whole Bible. It “offers a different way of perceiving the world which leads people to resist and to challenge the effects of the dominant ideology” (The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 159): especially when that ideology comes to us via television, movies and the Internet.
So, where do we start? First, we read the Bible. That brings us back to where this sermon began. Let’s get in shape spiritually. I promised that we would begin small and add a few new exercises along the way. Let’s begin as a congregation with a disciplined reading of the Bible.
How do we do that? I have a workable suggestion. Read the part of the Bible that I am preaching, while I am preaching it. For example, I have two sermons on 2 Timothy; one today and one next Sunday. During the next six days, read 2 Timothy. Do it again next week. You can do it alone or with a friend or in a group. You can read a chapter at a time or the entire letter at one sitting, which is probably how Timothy read it.
Between now and the end of August I hope to preach on several biblical writings: 2 Timothy, Philemon, Philippians, Galatians, Ruth, Psalm 1, Psalm 2, and Habakkuk. You don’t have to remember all that. I’ll remind you from week to week. We’ll print them in the Ministry News from time to time. If you are here on Sunday, you’ll know which biblical writing I am preaching on, and you can read accordingly.
I have a second suggestion. When you read, read attentively. Pay attention to what takes hold of you. That’s your take away. Remember it. Try to understand why it took hold of you. Repeat it to yourself throughout the day. See how it fits your life and what it might require you to do.
I have a third suggestion. Have at least one conversation with someone else, who has also read the Scripture in question. It will help you to turn Bible reading into a spiritual discipline. It’s a lot easier to be consistent if you can talk about what you read.
If the thousand or so of us, who worship here regularly, read this way for the next five months, we will discover that God-breathed Scripture is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness – 2 Timothy 3:16.
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