Hold Fast: How to Not Give Up on the Gospel

I wonder if any of you ever are tempted to give up.

Right?

You ever tempted maybe even this morning as you came to church?

I forgot that because it's been about six months since I preached that this iPad slides on this pulpit.

Excellent.

The Lord's sufficient for this.

I wonder if you're ever tempted to give up on God.

Maybe you were driving here this morning and you're like, you know, I'm just kind of tired of doing this whole thing.

I wonder if you're ever tempted to give up on the church.

And you think, you know, I'm good with God and Jesus and everything, but this whole church thing is getting to be a drudgery.

Too much is being asked of me, and I'm ready just to give up.

Maybe you're even to the point where you're ready to give up on the gospel itself.

Maybe there are various forms of either opposition or confusion that are assaulting you in your life in this season of life that are bringing you to the point where you just want to give up.

We have no shortage of uh influencers today who are trying to teach us the skills of resilience.

Uh, this is one of those buzzwords in self-help movements these days that everyone's really wanting to know how to avoid burnout, how to avoid hating your employers and your uh your fellow employees, how to get along with your family and avoid divorce.

And we need resilience.

We're too emotionally fragile.

And so that is one of those buzzwords today.

Well, in fact, the text today is all about resilience, it's all about endurance.

And so I want to invite you to open up to 2 Timothy chapter 3, where we will look into this passage where the Apostle Paul is exhorting his disciple and his mentee, a young pastor named Timothy, whose name is what this letter is addressed to him as 2 Timothy.

2 Timothy 3 · chapter mention

It's Paul's 2 Timothy letter to this young pastor.

And he is writing to him to continue and endure in the faith in the face of discouraging opposition and doubtful confusion.

And we'll see from the text that both of these are things that affected Timothy.

I'm titling this message simply, Hold Fast, How to Not Give Up on the Gospel.

The eight verses that comprise our text, they naturally divide into two parts.

We're going to basically have two major points.

I don't think I've ever preached a two-point sermon, but here it is this morning.

The first half of the text is where the Apostle Paul is addressing Timothy in this idea of enduring in the face of opposition and confusion.

And then Paul moves on to tell us how Timothy can do this with the things that God provides us.

Timothy was not alone in his evident temptation to give up.

In fact, a Barna study as of 2022 said shared that 42% of pastors said they had in the last year, in the previous year, contemplated leaving the full-time ministry.

That's nearly half of all pastors out there within the recent last year had contemplated, yeah, I think I'm done with this.

But it's not just pastors like Timothy.

It also, um, a Barna study showed that young adults in 2019, 64% of young adults that had been raised in the faith answered this survey that they no longer attend a church.

That's two out of every three young adults.

Um hopefully we'll we'll destroy the statistics here at Sacred Mission, but just think about that.

Two out of every three little kids that grow up in the church and they become teenagers, and then when they become adults, start making their own decisions, they're no longer in uh a body of believers.

64% have walked away from the church.

I think it helps us to know that when the Apostle Paul writes this letter, he's not riding from uh the backseat of a Rolls-Royce with uh a butler up there or a chauffeur or whatever who's driving and handing him um some caviar on a little plate.

He is in a Roman prison.

This is the last letter the Apostle Paul wrote ever because he would be executed soon thereafter.

He knew this was it.

He'd received the death penalty, he's in a Roman cell.

Somehow he was able to secure some parchment and was given the ability to write a letter and send it out.

But this is his final letter.

And interestingly enough, he's writing to Timothy not about the regrets he has, not about the fact that, man, I knew I should have been a professional tent maker.

Or I knew I should have stayed a Pharisee and I could have had a Kush job in the local synagogue in Jerusalem.

I had everything going for me.

No, he says, I'm writing to you, Timothy, to endure difficulty and hardness as a good soldier, he says earlier in this book in chapter two.

And here he tells Timothy he wants him to endure.

And you can just smell the human waste, and you can hear the cries of the fellow prisoners who are just in agony, who maybe some are in solitary confinement, and there's bickering and there's anger and there's coldness, and maybe there's heat and there's starvation and there's rats.

And here's the Apostle Paul writing of Timothy saying, It's all been worth it.

Even if you end up like me, as we're gonna see, he says here in a few moments, it's worth it.

Hold fast and endure.

So let's read our text in verses 10 through 13.

This is that first half of our passage in verses 10 through 13.

The Apostle Paul writes this.

You, however, Timothy, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions and sufferings that happened to me at Antioch and at Iconium and at Lystra, which persecutions I endured.

Yet from them all the Lord rescued me.

Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.

We were to sum up the Apostle Paul's message in these verses 10 through 13, it would be this.

Timothy, God's will is for you to faithfully endure.

This is what God is calling you to, Timothy, to follow me in my endurance in the face of all sorts of opposition.

In verse 11, Paul reminisces about some of the sufferings, and this is really interesting, that he's he's literally waiting for every time he hears the door open and a soldier walking in a hall, you know the thoughts in his mind, I wonder if they're coming to get me.

He would eventually be beheaded with a sword for sins against the nation.

The Apostle Paul reminisces in these final moments of his life on three cities he went to.

And he wanted to encourage Timothy that, hey, listen, opposition to the faith is something you're gonna have to endure.

He said, just remember the things I went through.

Timothy obviously was personally aware of these three cities, Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra.

In Antioch, Paul was forcefully kicked out of town.

He was preaching the gospel.

This was early on in his ministry in Asia Minor, and the crowds get stirred up and they're like, Yeah, you've got to leave town.

And they forcefully kicked him out of town.

Then it gets worse.

He goes to Iconium.

Iconium, these are all recorded in the book of Acts.

In Iconium, he boldly preaches in the synagogue.

Jews and Gentiles come to faith in Jesus, and everything's going great until the religious leaders realize what's happening, and they eventually create a plot to stone him.

This plot is uncovered, and Paul is forced to sneak out of the city under the cover of darkness, let down in a basket over the city wall.

He would later mention this in 2 Corinthians.

This was a humiliating experience in his life.

He couldn't just leave like he did in the first city, like, okay, okay, I'm leaving.

He had to flee for his life or else be killed.

And then finally, in Lystra, he mentions here, in this city, he uh he actually healed a lame man, and the crowds, these pagan crowds, saw the apostle Paul heal the lame man, and they began to think that he and Barnabas were from the gods, or maybe even themselves were divine.

They were worshiping them, and Paul was like, no, no, no, no, we're men just like you.

Well, once the crowd realized they were men just like them and they started preaching to them about Jesus and about their sin and how they needed to repent of their idolatry, then that fickle crowd that was worshiping them one moment, then picked up stones and actually stoned Paul almost to death.

They left him for dead thinking he was dead.

In fact, some would even say he probably died and God raised him from the dead.

Those people knew how to kill somebody, but miraculously Paul survived this and then he stumbles back into the city of Lystra undeterred.

And so we want we see that Paul wants Timothy and us to know that persecutions and opposition, these are not surprises.

That if we're actually living the way Christ calls us to, we will experience opposition to our faith.

We are swimming upstream.

If you think it's easy to swim upstream, just try it.

You swim as hard as you can and you look at the shore and you're barely moving.

It is hard work.

And that's the Christian life.

All the world, the Apostle John says, is under the thumb of the evil one.

And we're going against that world system.

He says in verse 12, indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

I wonder if if you expect opposition in your faith.

Or if it's something that always surprises you.

You think this is really hard.

Like when you touch uh, you know, a hot pan on the stove or something and it burns you.

Like, is it does it really surprise you?

You saw the light on, you were just cooking eggs, and then you reached and grabbed it.

That's but that's how we approach the faith sometimes.

We get surprised when it's difficult.

Paul said it's not an exception if you are swimming upstream and you feel like you're barely making headway and there's there's logs that are floating down, you're having to swim around.

This is really hard.

And Paul's like, yeah, it's an expectation, not an exception.

For many believers today, the idea of persecution and opposition to their faith is anything but hypothetical.

In fact, in 2015, you may remember the story of Joe Kennedy.

He was a high school football coach, and he had the he was in this Washington state, and on Friday nights after the games, he would he would kneel and he would pray at the 50-yard line.

He would thank the Lord for safety and for Jesus, and there were students who would voluntarily meet with him, quite a few students, and it was quite a spectacle.

And but the administration, apparently, people were complaining, so the administration came to him and said, Coach Joe, you've got to stop this.

This isn't something we want to stand for.

Washington State's not known for being the Bible belt.

And they're like, you can't do this anymore.

This is embarrassing.

And he's like, Well, it's voluntary.

I'm a Christian.

I can bow anywhere and pray if I want to, as long as I'm not obstructing traffic or something.

Like, it's not against the law, and their students are voluntarily doing that, so I'm not gonna stop.

And so they promptly fired him.

It went into a lawsuit, and eventually the courts were like, Yeah, that was his religious liberty, and they awarded him lost damages.

But but certainly you can imagine that Coach Joe was faced with a dilemma.

Am I being a bad witness by just being uh resistant to their wishes?

Maybe I should just go in the parking lot, or maybe I should just do some kind of Zoom call and pray.

Why do I have to do it out in front of everyone?

You can imagine him being tempted to compromise what he felt like God wanted to do because there were those who didn't like it.

And of course, when the lawsuit started, you can imagine him being like, you know, maybe we should just drop this whole thing.

Let me apologize.

I've talked to several Christians in Cincinnati um over the last few years who actually retired early from, I'm not gonna say the company's names, but from PNG and and uh did I say that'll um because during Gay Pride Month, they were handed out, all the employees were handed out these lanyards with rainbows, and it was very evident that you are in full support of all things LGBTQIA plus.

And because they were like, I can't in good conscience celebrate something that God condemns any more than I would celebrate some other sin, right?

I'm not gonna celebrate uh adultery, I'm not gonna celebrate infidelity or fornication, I'm not gonna wear something that's like, yeah, this is awesome.

And so they would resist that.

They were like, no, I'm good, thanks.

But it was very obvious when everyone had them on except a few Christians in the department.

Then there would be parties, like, hey, let's we're gonna come celebrate this.

It's it's gay pride month, and we're gonna do this.

And they didn't attend the parties, and it was causing friction and things on their teams, and they're not being hateful or anything, they're just trying to live by their convictions.

But they were tagged as being hateful.

And if they even uttered one word in disagreement with it, there was hate speech, and there was so much pressure that they ended up retiring early.

Thankfully, they were in a position where they could actually do that.

This is not hypothetical.

Some of you may have even experienced tensions in your own family whenever you just talk about Christ, or maybe the way you raise your kids, and maybe the things that you invest them in, and things that you uh withhold from them, and your and your unbelieving family disapproves of that, and you feel the tensions at best, or maybe even being cut off at worst.

Paul's concerns are not hypothetical.

Those who desire to live godly in this world will suffer persecution.

Doesn't mean we have this victim mentality and we're running around being all sensitive.

No, it actually means we're less sensitive.

It actually means that we expect it, that we don't even almost notice it when someone doesn't invite us to something because they know we're a Christian.

It doesn't matter because it's all right.

We can actually be tougher when we expect it, and we realize it's something that Jesus experienced, the apostles experienced, believers all over the world experience.

But these challenges to Timothy's faith and even to our faith, if we're living godly, and that's the thing, if you're thinking like persecution maybe across the sea, maybe if you're a Christian in Sedan and um burning down churches and that kind of thing, I can get it, but not in the States.

Well, it makes us question whether we're living godly lives in this present world.

Are we a threat to the world system?

Are we so good at being chameleons in public that no one even knows that we're a Christian?

Guess what?

If if no one knows you or I are a Christian, we're not going to be persecuted.

So that's a good check for us.

If we're not experiencing opposition in our faith from a world that truly hates and wants to throw off the shackles of Christianity and of a God to whom they're accountable, it begs the question whether we are uh whether they know we're on God's team.

If they're not tackling us, maybe they think we're on the same team.

But it's not just challenges from without the walls, it's challenges from within.

The Apostle Paul doesn't just mention opposition and persecution, he mentions impostors.

He mentions those who are deceiving and who are deceived, and they're getting worse and worse.

So even within the church, there are those, and in fact, the last part of chapter two and the first half of chapter three, we've heard in the last couple sermons here, talked about them in detail.

I think he gave maybe 20, 19 or 20 uh different adjective descriptors of these people, and here he just calls them impostors.

They look on the outside like they're believers, but they're compromised.

They want the trappings of religion, trappings of the church, trappings of Jesus, but they deny the power of it.

They deny all the things that are going to require repentance.

So they have Jesus in name, but not in truth, and Paul calls them impostors.

Timothy faced this too.

And what do you think the net effect is of a church in which there's impostors that are when some influential people like the Apostle Paul described him that we're actually leading people astray and leading people into confusion and error, he talked about at the end of chapter two.

What's the impact?

The impact is it compromises us, compromises me if I'm not an imposter.

It compromises me, it weakens my faith, it weakens my resolve.

When when someone tells me, yeah, you know, um, well, I'm not gonna get too personal here.

There's lots of examples I could give.

When someone communicates to you that they prayed about something and then they compromise their faith because they felt like that's what God wanted them to do, it weakens my resolve to not compromise the next time I'm faced with a decision, right?

That's the way it works.

You and I could walk into far too many churches here in Cincinnati.

And we would hear rank confusion.

Just trying to be generous, but you'd hear confusion, you'd hear theological, good-sounding, but faith-weakening teachings.

Or you could turn on your TV from the comfort of your own home to Trinity Broadcasting Network and Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church Broadcaster, Daystar Television Network.

Every time I'm at the hospital where I work and I and there's a TV on and flipping through stations and it's a televangelist, I'm just embarrassed.

Like I hate that other people, Christians, non-Christians around me, get to see the kind of filth that these folks are pilfering.

They're pilfering three things.

Probably more than that, but I'm gonna mention three.

We've talked about some of these before, but you're gonna find things whether you go to some churches in town, whether you go to uh these these stations on TV.

The first is moralistic therapeutic deism.

This is a fake, a faith destroying and weakening uh heresy, right?

And it's the idea that that God exists to make us happy, not holy.

Now it's it's almost more of an assumption than like something people teach, like this morning, church, we're gonna affirm moralistic therapeuticism.

No, it's more of like a milieu, it's more of like the water in which we swim that we don't even notice.

I mean, when's the last time you just assumed because something really happened to you that God doesn't love you because you got a cancer diagnosis, because your child broke their arm.

You're thinking, God, couldn't you just like help them?

You could have stopped that.

Uh maybe your job is not going the way you want it to, right?

And this automatic assumption that I know that God is that his main agenda in all the universe is for my life to be easy and happy.

I know the world's fallen and corrupt, and we're under the power of the curse and all these things.

But all that stuff aside, God should stop everything bad from happening in my life.

And if he doesn't, I'm going to question his goodness.

That's the assumption we often have.

That's moralistic therapeutic deism, that God exists for my happiness.

He exists to help us sort of rehabilitate ourselves, behave.

This obviously limits our perception of the wickedness of sin and of our desperate need for Jesus to be tortured to death for us.

And so Jesus is in the inf uh the uh priority of Jesus begins to lessen, and it's really all about us.

I remember I was in DC a couple years ago, and uh, it's been more than a couple years ago, I'm getting old.

And I remember seeing this big marquee in front of this United Methodist Church, and I kid you not, it said, Jesus did his thing, the spotlight's now on you.

I thought, well, at least they're being honest, right?

When you go to that church, you're not gonna hear really about Jesus.

Maybe mention it.

Yeah, remember Jesus?

Yes.

But now it's all about what you're doing in your life.

That's that's the gospel of moralistic therapeutic deism.

Secondly, the prosperity gospel.

The prosperity gospel basically says there's another assumption that if I do X, Y, or Z, God will bless me.

And if things are going well for me, that means God's happy with me.

If things are going really hard for me, that means either my faith is really weak, maybe I need to pray more, maybe I need to give more money to the church or send it to more televangelists and they can pray over me, send me a handkerchief that they sneezed on or something, and then I'll get rid of these migraines.

Right?

This is the prosperity gospel.

That if you believe hard enough, if you sacrificially give, then God will reward you in financial and health and prosperity ways.

This weakens faith because it's not reality.

When your life crashes up against reality, you start questioning everything, you probably should question those things.

The last one I'll mention is subjective authentic is the measure of truth.

This is the idea that I think it's more of a cultural thing than in the church, but it's seeping in, right?

This means that when we look at what is true and right and good, what is the final arbiter of what is true and right and good?

This idea of authenticity, subjective authenticity as the measure of truth basically says that your personal feelings, your authentic desires, when you are your true self, when you're just being your true self, that's your truth.

And in fact, God likes you being true to yourself, so that's God's truth.

Even if it contradicts Scripture, Scripture will bend to accommodate whatever your authentic desires are.

What is good, what is right, or whatever you authentically desire.

This is patently false.

One of the problems of it is it too breeds instability.

In the face of opposition to unpopular biblical truth, we just bend the biblical truth.

We just say, though, actually, you know, scripture unequivocally teaches that Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to me uh except, no one comes to the Father except through me.

But you know, because I've got a Muslim neighbor who's a nice person, my kids play together, it's great.

I'm gonna say that Jesus was only speaking for that specific time, but now we know that anyone can be saved as long as they're sincere in their hearts.

Right?

Those are the kind of things the way we compromise and we say, what Jesus said is gonna bend around what I feel at this moment.

It's weak because your feelings gonna change.

Absolutely.

So I want to ask you, if you were Paul, what advice would you give Timothy?

If you were the Apostle Paul and you're in this Roman prison and you smell human refuse and you hear cursing and anger and agony, and you're sitting there and you're writing this letter about how to endure, what would you say?

Because no pie in the sky feel-good kind of messages is gonna work in a prison like that.

Like we want brass tacks, Paul.

Like, how is Timothy gonna hold fast if he's in that prison a year from now?

The Apostle Paul answers in verses 14 through 17.

He says, but as for you, in contrast to the impostors, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you've learned it, and how from childhood you've been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus.

All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

Here the Apostle Paul is gonna raise Timothy's gaze off of the opposition, off of the confusion, off of his own doubts and subjective feelings, and he's gonna lift it up to the only ultimate answer and solid rock in the midst of all the sinking sand.

And that is God's inspired, authoritative, and sufficient word.

And that's not just for Timothy, that's for you and me.

How are you going to endure when you face things that you've never thought you would ever face?

The apostle Paul says, Hey, I'm in this prison, I'm about to be executed, I don't have to write this.

Here's my answer: God's word.

It is sufficient, it is inspired, it is profitable, it'll make you into the kind of person that will endure.

And so if we were to summarize this, we would summarize this passage in this way: God's word enables you to fruitfully endure.

Point one was God's will is for you to faithfully endure.

But here we find that how do we do that?

Well, it's God's word enables you to faithfully endure.

In these verses, Paul turns intimately towards Timothy.

And you can imagine the, he calls Timothy elsewhere his son in the faith that his heart yearns for, he prays for night and day.

He loved Timothy.

You can imagine him, as it were, reaching out of the prison and putting his arm around discouraged Timothy in the city of Ephesus and saying, But as for you, son, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed.

Don't give in to the opposition, don't give in and compromise in the face of confusion.

Paul tells Timothy to continue in the scriptures that he's known since childhood.

You know, some of you here, and including myself, were raised in Christian homes, and it's actually sometimes tempting to think that being raised in a Christian home is a disadvantage.

I've heard people say this.

Because it's not fresh.

Like if you talk to someone who came to faith in Christ in college, like they knew the emptiness of that life, and then they had questions that were unanswered, and they had guilt that was unresolved.

And when they heard about Jesus, and that there's a God who has a purpose for them and sent his own son so that they could have forgiveness from all the stuff that they can't live with themselves about, and then they see like fulfilled prophecies and they see Jesus as his teachings and they resonate in all this, the whole package, and they believe it, it's life-changing.

But what if you've heard that since the time you were two months old?

And you sort of slowly just warm up to it, and there's never a point in your life where you remember trusting Jesus.

You were taught to love Jesus.

We love Jesus in this family.

We pray to Jesus every day, and we pray to him at our meals, and you prayed as a child before we ever came to faith.

And so you just sort of gradually become this idea of trusting Jesus.

You can think that that might be a disadvantage.

And God's mercy is wonderful in all these different stories, right?

I praise God for my my Christian heritage, but it's tempting to sometimes be a little jealous of people who were playing around in wiccan witchcraft and they were uh addicted to things, and then they met Christ, and bam, different person.

People don't recognize them, and they have these huge inroads to their neighbors who were like, What changed about you?

I'm like, that wasn't my story.

But the apostle Paul actually leans into Timothy's childhood that he'd been taught the Bible.

He's telling Timothy to dig down deep.

We know elsewhere that Timothy's mother and grandmother, Eunice and Lois, had taught Timothy, had discipled him as a young child.

He had a Greek pagan father who didn't disciple him, and he had a mother and a grandmother that did.

From a young child, he learned the Jewish scriptures.

And so Timothy, Paul says, is to begin to think back on all the things he learned from a child because you're gonna need all those resources.

Every Bible verse you learned in mission kids or mission young, uh, mission youth.

Every gospel presentation that you've taken in, every time that you've prayed and you felt like God heard you, you're gonna need all of that to endure.

He says in verse 15, from childhood you've been acquainted with the sacred writings, this is the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

I think from this we can minimally say, oh, how important it is for us parents to be teaching our children scripture.

Not just raising them around it, but teaching it to them.

Children are so impressionable, they're little spongy minds.

I love how mission kids every month has a scripture memory thing, and and we have a little, I bought for five dollars, I bought this little uh little card holder that sticks to my daughter Eden's wall.

And every time they have a new uh Bible verse, I take one, I take it home, put it in there, and most nights we go through those, and I literally say to Eden, the Lord, she goes, The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet.

You must listen to him.

Deuteronomy 18, 15.

And she doesn't miss a lick.

We can be mid-conversation, and I'll be like, but uh, she's like, but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace.

I mean, it's amazing.

I just feed her the first two words.

I heard, I heard every creature say, blessing and glory and honor and power be to the one seated upon the throne and to the Lamb forever and ever.

Like I've memorized these two with her.

I'm convicted, like the Apostle Paul says here, that these things are gonna help strengthen my daughter Eden to endure in the future when she's faced with both opposition and confusion.

So maybe you're here and you're like, you know what, I haven't been doing that very well.

This is convicting.

I feel like a failure.

I feel like maybe I should just give up.

No, no, no.

That's the point of this message.

Don't give up.

There's a famous adage that says, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.

The next best time is today.

You can't go back 20 years and plant the apple trees, so you could be just plucking beautiful apples off of the tree and eating them now, but you can plant it today, and maybe your grandchildren will reap the benefits.

And so I want to challenge you today.

I wonder what you will talk to your family about around the dinner table tonight.

Maybe you haven't for the last year or two.

Maybe you have, I praise God for that.

But maybe you haven't.

I do like to celebrate uh victories in these things and not just call us to be better.

I love how Brian Smith often talks about uh having conversations with his sons, about God's designs for our sexuality or for our work ethic, or about being men and taking responsibility.

I love he's always doing that, and I'm super thankful for his example.

And I know many of you are doing the same exact thing.

A good friend of mine told me just the other day that every Sunday, driving to church, uh as a father, he says, All right, kids, let's pray for the, let's pray for the service.

And all the kids and the wife and the dad pray for the sermon, for the preacher, for God's word to change them so they can live as a family that glorifies God.

They do it every Sunday.

Can you imagine doing that over 18 years?

Every Sunday you go to church with the expectation that God's gonna change you, he's gonna work in your heart.

You're hearing from God, not just some half-baked thought, right?

If it's coming from Scripture.

There's an expectation there, there's a growth in prayer.

I guarantee you those kids when they're 10 years old, if you ask them to lead in prayer, they wouldn't hesitate.

They've done it hundreds of times.

We disciple our families one day at a time in small ways.

I have two questions of the Apostle Paul before we we finish up.

The first is this Paul, if we're supposed to look to God's word to sustain us to endure, what exactly is the nature of God's word?

Why is God's word so special?

The second question is, what is, or how does God's word sustain our faith?

So Paul responds to the first question in verse 16 by saying, All scripture is breathed out by God.

We sometimes speak of significant ideas as being inspired, right?

So we we read a poem and we're like, wow, that guy was so inspired.

That's not the kind of meaning the Apostle Paul has here when he says that this is God breathed.

Most English translations use the word inspired, and in fact it's called the doctrine of inspiration.

The ESV, root for the ESV, actually uses the words the Greek uses.

It's a one compound word, God breathed.

Thaapnustos in the Apostle Paul's writing.

Thaapnustos, all scripture is God breathed.

ESV says it's breathed out by God.

The church has always understood that scripture originates from God.

It's not God-inspired in the sense of God sort of gave a little extra boost to human creativity, but it comes from God.

Scripture is breathed out from God.

It is originated with God.

And thus because it's God's word, it's guaranteed that it's truthful and it's authoritative and it's sufficient.

God breathed or spoke the words of Scripture through over 40 different authors over 1,500 years, and each one of them wrote in different grammatical styles and in different cultural context and with different emphases and often with much embedded present cultural emphasis.

But through all of that, God is communicating his nature, he's communicating his redemptive plan, he's communicating his will for us.

And Christ comes on the scene, fulfills it all, and then commits to us through the apostles and to the preservation of Scripture God's word in written form.

Scripture is a fascinating thing.

We often would think that maybe it would be better if God would just speak in audible voices.

Right?

When's the last time you talked to someone who said they were hearing voices?

It's usually not a good thing.

There's medication for that.

Because often the voices are saying irrational things.

How are you going to differentiate the voice of God from the voices in your head?

When God committed to us scripture, it's called the inscripturation of divine revelation.

It's something that can be distributed, it's something that can be tested.

It can be like, you said this here and you said this here.

How do we reconcile those things?

If I'm just telling you stuff, I can be like, well, I'm not sure I really said that.

You're misrepresenting the way I said that.

Well, maybe I misheard.

You see, inscripturation is not a weakness of the faith.

It is it is us being honest saying, here, try this.

Search the scriptures daily, Paul told those at Berea.

Search them daily.

See if these things are so.

If it's just something I heard, which is how Muhammad received his revelation, he was the only one who saw it.

It's how the Book of Mormon was given.

Supposedly Joseph Smith was the only one who saw these gold plates with uh um from the angel uh Moroni, I think of what it says, or maybe Bologna, who handed him those golden tablets that he wrote, the Book of Mormon, that basically uh plagiarizes on the on the King James Version of the Bible, interestingly.

No, we have scriptures 1,500 years, 40 different authors, and there's this beautiful continuity that you just can't make up.

And Jesus fulfilling prophecy, Old Testament prophecies being fulfilled by pagan kings and all sorts of cool stuff like that.

God's word is inspired.

How does God's word sustain our faith?

He says it's four ways.

Scripture is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good word.

Scripture teaches us, it reproves us when we need to repent and turn back to Him.

It corrects us, not just by saying, hey, you're wrong.

It actually brings us back constructively to right understanding and right living, and it trains us.

I have lots of comments on all this, but it looks like my time is limited here.

Scripture helps us endure in these four ways.

I want to close finally with sort of the pinnacle of the text.

Maybe it's something you overlooked.

He says in that last verse, Scripture's profitable, and then he says this that the man of God may be completely, maybe competent and equipped for every good work.

The man of God.

Well, that's just is that a throwaway phrase?

No.

When Paul says the man of God, he's tapping into the rich history and heritage of the prophets of old.

Moses, Elijah, Elisha, others were called the man of God.

If someone needed to hear from God, they're like, go get the man of God.

Someone just died, go get the man of God.

Because they can raise him back to dead.

A rich history of the men of God.

What did the men of God do in the Old Testament?

They proclaimed the Word of God.

And if they didn't, and their prophecies were shown to be incorrect, they could be killed.

The Jews took it very seriously, whether you were a real prophet or a false prophet.

The man of God.

Here the apostle Paul says if you want to be a man of God, you've got to be a man of the word.

You've got to be someone who's being shaped by the word, being taught and rebuked and corrected by the word of God.

Now, the word anthropos here, man of God, it literally means God's man or God's anthropos.

Numerous places in the New Testament, it's used generically of humans.

And the fact that he says that scripture is profitable to do all these things, I don't think Paul would say those things are limited to men.

So we could say that the man of God or that God's man or God's woman can be competent, equipped for every good work.

What would it take for you to be God's man?

What would it be for you, ladies, to be God's woman?

It's gonna require you to be a person of the book, to familiarize yourself with the book, to study the Bible, to listen to the Bible, to pursue questions you have about the Bible instead of being like, yeah, I've got this hang up, but I'm just gonna move on.

If you've got a question, write it down and don't stop until you've found the answer.

But ultimately, the Apostle Paul, as he refers to the man of God, certainly our minds are called back to Jesus Christ, the ultimate man of God.

In fact, he was the ultimate God man.

Jesus Christ came as in that long tradition of the prophets.

He came, Hebrews chapter 1 and verse 1 says, God used to speak in times past by the prophets.

Hebrews 1 · chapter mention

He is now spoken unto us by his own son.

He's the final word from God.

In fact, he's the eternal word from all eternity, now made flesh, who's spoken to us the word of God, he's given us his Holy Spirit.

And Jesus lived perfectly, went to the cross, and as the man of God, bore the weight of all of God's, the sins of God's people on himself.

And then just as he had prophesied that after three days he would rise, Jesus was laid in the tomb.

Three days later, on Easter morning, Jesus rose from the dead, his words coming true, which tells us that everything Jesus taught is true.

In Hebrews chapter 12 and verse 1 says this: it says that we should look to Jesus, the ultimate man of God.

Hebrews 12 · chapter mention

Hebrews 12, 1 says, Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Consider him, he says, who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary and faint-hearted.

If you're weary this morning, if you're faint-hearted this morning, would you consider Jesus?

Would you consider that man of God, that God man who was faithful where you failed?

Who never gave up in the face of even satanic oppression and temptation and badgering?

He never once flinched.

We're told in the Gospels he set his face like flint to go to Jerusalem, knowing that death awaited him there and he did it for you.

Would you consider this, Jesus?

Consider how he endured such hostility.

Consider how he endured such confusion from the tempter.

And those who loved him one minute and hated him the next, who tempted him to become a king and to give up on this idea of death on a cross.

I wonder if you will look to Jesus this morning and to his written word that is breathed out by God for the teaching, reproof, correction, and training to endure whatever you are facing today.

Or will you give up the gospel?

Will you compromise when called to stand for the truth?

May we continue in what we have learned and firmly believed as men and women of God who are equipped to endure all opposition and confusion to our faith.