2 Timothy: Suffering for the Gospel in Our Culture | Student Pastor: Sam Rapp

Well, this summer uh we are continuing through the book of 2 Timothy.

So this morning we're gonna be in 2 Timothy chapter 2.

2 Timothy 2 · chapter mention

And normally we have like a scripture reading, an intro, and all that.

Uh so that was that.

So we're not gonna stand and read, but we're gonna dive through it together.

So uh this morning we're gonna be in chapter 2 of 2 Timothy.

So if you do have your Bibles, uh go ahead and grab those uh and turn there.

And this morning, we're gonna be working through the whole chapter, which is 26 verses, so we're gonna move quick.

Uh so y'all just get ready and we're gonna crush it.

Uh we're gonna crush it together.

So give you up to speed a little bit.

Uh we started in chapter one last week.

So this is Paul's personal letter to his spiritual son, Timothy.

He's not his biological son.

Paul was never married, had no children, so this is his spiritual son in a sense.

And Paul adores Timothy.

We saw that last week.

He adores him.

Timothy is probably one of Paul's favorite people in the world.

They have a deep, vulnerable, and really rooted relationship.

They've endured suffering together.

They've seen many souls one to the Lord together, and now they're apart.

There's pain in Paul's words that we write.

There's missing a longing that Paul has for Timothy in this book that we see.

Timothy's a young man, probably between 30 and 35-ish, and he's newly pastoring the church at Ephesus, like that little book we read called Ephesians.

Timothy's that pastor.

And he's facing a lot.

The church is heavily divided.

There are intense divisions on secondary beliefs, which is probably comforting to us.

Not much has changed since the first century.

Emperor Nero is persecuting Christians like the world had never seen before.

And Paul is about to die.

So that's where we find ourselves.

So let's like put it at ground level together, because it's easy to hear those things and be at a distance.

So let's just bring it here.

So let's imagine our pastor Russ, instead of being on sabbatical right now, let's say he was beaten and thrown into prison.

Uh, President Biden was setting Christians on fire and feeding them to animals.

Half of your friends got scared, left the church altogether, and then you're left with an infant like me to lead you.

That's where we're at this morning in 2 Timothy.

Okay?

So this is what is happening as Paul writes this letter.

Babyface Timothy leading this church in the gospel.

So last week, with that in mind, we talked about the Christian's call to guard the gospel, to protect it, to stand behind it, to guard it from all the world will try to take from it.

And so we're seeing our culture today disintegrating around us.

I know y'all see it.

And what we believe in the gospel is that we actually have the redemptive, life-giving answer that the world is trying to give but can't find their way to.

That's what we believe.

Do y'all see how hopeless the world feels right now?

Do y'all see the division?

So the call for us in chapter one from Paul and into chapter two is we don't need to be ashamed of this message.

Why?

Because the God of the Bible is alive, He's moving, the gospel is moving like wildfire across the world, and the message of Christ and Him crucified transforms hearts and lives like no message, no legislation, and no rulings in the world can offer.

And that's what we believe.

So with that in mind, let's dive in.

We're gonna be in 2 Timothy again, chapter 2.

We're gonna start in verses 1 and 2.

So Paul says this to Timothy You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, and trust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.

So, as with every other imperative in the Bible, it's built on the indicative.

Every command from God in Christ is built out of what is the indicative.

So, in other words, we're not commanded to do things because of what we are commanded to do things because of what God says about us, and it's not the other way around.

So, for example, I'm married to my wife Grace, and because of that, I get to bring her flowers, right?

I don't bring her flowers in hopes that I would win her over.

In the same way, we don't do for God that we might win him over for us, but rather in Christ we are called sons and daughters, fully, freely, forever, forgiven, innocent forever, and therefore we get the freedom to be obedient to him.

So here's what's going on here.

At the end of chapter one, Paul talks about this big kind of turning away that happened in Asia, as he says.

So in this day, when Paul's talking about Asia, it's not Asia as we think about it.

To him, Asia was kind of like Turkey and in the surrounding areas, right?

So, where is Timothy pastoring, right?

Ephesus.

Where is Ephesus?

But Turkey.

So as Paul is talking about this huge turning away, he's talking about the landscape that Timothy is pastoring in in this world.

He's seeing people, dozens, dozens, hundreds of men and women walking away from the faith because they're terrified of Nero.

They're seeing each other walk away, and so there's this huge turning away.

And that's that's about all we know about it.

So that's why Paul's message to guard the gospel is so important to Timothy.

And how important is it for us?

Because we see our culture completely doing this, don't we?

How uncool and behind the times is it to be a Christian today in the West?

And that brings us to the whole point of this chapter.

This is the whole point and the lens that we're gonna be looking at chapter two together.

It's to suffer for the gospel.

That's what Paul's charge is to Timothy in chapter two, is to suffer for the gospel.

And it's built off of chapter one's message, which again was to guard the gospel and say, this is what Paul is saying.

It's hard.

It's hard to guard the gospel.

So to illustrate this point, Paul gives us three metaphors.

So we're gonna kind of paint this picture together.

So we see one, the soldier, which is in verses three through four, but that represents unwavering dedication.

The athlete, verse five, represents committed obedience, and then the farmer in verse six represents continuous toil.

So keep those images in your head as we look through verses three through six together.

So Paul writes here in verse three Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.

No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuit since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him.

An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules.

It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops.

So these three metaphors are painting one big picture, right?

This is what it looks like to guard and suffer for the gospel.

This is the picture that Paul is giving us.

So we're just gonna work through each one of those three pretty quickly together.

So, soldier.

A few weeks ago, I had the really exciting task of preaching in Revelation 12 and 14.

And that's just by the way, the passage in Revelation that talks about the woman and the dragon and the mark of the beast.

So it was awesome, right?

Uh but there's this tiny, like pretty unknown show on Netflix called Stranger Things.

You might not have heard about it, uh, but it's pretty small.

Uh but in this show, there's a boy named Will Byers, right?

And he's a little kid at the beginning, uh, and he gets taken.

Uh he's biking home with uh some of his friends after a thrilling night of Dungeons and Dragons, and on his way home, all of a sudden he disappears.

No one has any clue what happened, no one knows where he went.

And they thought he was probably dead, just gone.

Like they thought Will Byers was just gone out of the picture.

But as the show unfolds, as his crazy mom, Winona Ryder, is talking to walls, talking to lights, right?

Like putting Christmas lights around her house and talking to them, something really eerie begins to emerge, doesn't it?

So what we learn is that there's this place called the Upside Down.

Uh so we have a picture of it uh that kind of shows this image here.

And in Stranger Things, the upside down is the world as they know it, but flipped upside down.

It's the same world but much darker, much scarier, and with monsters that are out to kill, as we learn.

Uh and as the show continues on, the more the characters understand the reality of the upside down, the more their lives begin to change.

They want to understand it, how it works, how to kill these monsters, and ultimately how to defeat the evil that resides within.

And that's the whole narrative plot of the whole show.

And those chapters of Revelation that we looked at a couple weeks ago, I think John is using these big apocalyptic images to grip us, to hook us deep in our gut about the spiritual reality that's going on in our world.

What's true is that we have a real enemy, his name's Satan, uh, and he is the big dragon in Revelation, right?

And we saw in Revelation 14 that he's going down swinging, and as he's going down on his way down, he desires to split churches, he desires to split marriages, to cast us against one another, and ultimately to stir in us a sense of hopelessness, and that God's not good.

So just like a soldier, we have to recognize that the gospel is war, right?

It's war against evil.

It's war against everything that is against God.

And our enemy isn't just a person that wrongs us or an ideology that threatens us or a country out there seeking to destroy us, but we believe that we have an enemy behind all enemies, right?

And it's so easy to forget about these spiritual realities, to forget about the upside down, right?

Paul says this in Ephesians 6, and remember, that's the book that Paul was writing to this church that Timothy's pastoring.

He says this, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

So just like a soldier committed to the task of serving and pleasing the one who enlisted him, we too, if we want to guard this gospel, if we want to work for it and even perhaps suffer for it, we have to be more committed to God's glory than our own, which is really hard.

Fully dedicated to this mission that he has, which is to bring redemption and healing and life to the world through Jesus of Nazareth and through no other way.

And we also have to recognize that there are spiritual realities, right?

That there is this upside down in a sense that is real and present.

We win this battle not by legislation or great programming, we win this battle by the people of God being committed to the message of the gospel, by worshiping, living lives of worship and by fasting and prayer.

And that's that's the warfare that the Bible speaks of.

Alright, next point.

Athlete.

Here's the whole point of athlete.

Here's the whole point.

If we want to continue in the gospel in the world, to guard it and to suffer for it, we have to play by the rules, right?

That's what Paul says in verse uh four and five there.

In that, Paul's just essentially saying this we can't pick and choose from the Bible what we want it to say.

We can't take verses and the ones that we don't like and kind of sweet talk away around them, right?

If we want to run the race and get the victor's crown, like Paul talks about, we have to be obedient to the whole counsel of God's word, which is really hard.

It's really hard.

And then lastly, the farmer.

This is an analogy that's consistent throughout the Bible.

We see it all over the New Testament, especially.

Jesus talks about farming in the parable of the sower, right?

Paul talks about it throughout his letters.

And this is primarily because the economic system of the first century was almost entirely agrarian.

So a farming illustration would have hit home for everybody that would read these letters.

Here's the point: farming is hard.

It takes endurance, commitment, and trust.

But the harvest is worth it.

But the harvest is worth it.

Paul writes this in 1 Corinthians 3, 6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.

Being a farmer takes hard work.

It takes months and months of tending to the plants, watering them, feeding them, picking weeds, and killing insects, right?

It's hard, sweat on the brow type work.

And this is what Paul has explained to Timothy about the ministry of the gospel, about being a pastor in this church.

It's hard work.

It's a lifetime of work.

It's sweaty work, but the harvest is worth it.

Harvest is worth it.

But what we have to remember is in these three metaphors, they are rooted in what Paul says to Timothy in verse 1.

He says, Timothy, my child, my child, be strengthened in the grace of Christ Jesus.

How?

This isn't for Paul to tell Timothy to pick him up by his bootstraps and try really hard, painting himself to be perfect.

And that's definitely not the message for us either.

But being strengthened in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

And this is the grace that is sufficient in our weakness.

That's actually made perfect in our weakness.

The grace that took Jesus to the cross with your sin in mind.

And the grace that has stirred God's heart to ignite in you faith to love Him, even when you are running from Him.

That's the grace that Paul is talking about here.

And this is the grace that strengthens us, the grace that gives us hope when we feel like we've outsinned it.

This is the grace that gives us courage, that gets us to keep going when everything in our world tells us not to.

That's the grace that he's talking about.

Alright, let's jump to verse 8 together.

And we're gonna go through verse 13 together.

So verse 8 Remember Jesus Christ risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel, for which I am suffering, bound with chains as a criminal.

But the word of God is not bound.

Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.

The saying is trustworthy, for if we have died with him, we will also live with him.

If we endure, we will also reign with him.

If we deny him, he will also deny us.

If we are faithless, he remains faithful.

So Paul begins this by saying, Remember Jesus Christ.

I'm not thinking our boy Tim was gonna forget that, right?

For this war to be won, for the gospel to move like wildfire in our culture and in our world, the gospel of Christ and Him crucified has to be central.

Has to be central.

That's why every single week here at Redeemer and every Sunday night at Youth, that's the message we preach throughout every verse in the Bible.

How can we get this to Jesus?

Souls are not transformed by moralistic do-better sermons.

Souls are transformed through the preaching of the gospel and the ignition of the Spirit.

That's Paul's point.

It's gonna be tempting to sway.

It'll be tempting to preach around hard topics.

And that's where Paul is guiding us as he gets to verse 9, right?

Paul's in prison, about to die.

He is bound like a criminal.

But he writes one of my favorite verses in the Bible.

The word of God is not bound.

Though Paul is bound, the word of God is not bound.

If you look at the history of the church over the last 2,000 years, the more the church seems to be bound, the more a government presses down on the gospel and on the word of God, the more the gospel is ignited and moves.

I love this quote from this guy named David Guzik.

He writes this no government, no religious authorities, no skeptics, no scientists, no philosophers, or no book burners have ever been able to stop the work of the Word of God.

In places like the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, that's where the gospel is moving like wildfire today.

And that's where it's hardest to be a Christian.

Now, in verses 11 through 13, we saw this little poem that Paul cites, right?

And a lot of times in Paul's letters he's citing from the Old Testament, but here it's actually really cool.

What he's doing is he's kind of giving this poem that is likely a hymn that the first century church sang together in corporate worship, which I just think is awesome.

Which means that this first century church congregation, they probably sang it together, which I just love that.

I think that's so cool.

But here's the point of that whole poem: spiritual and eternal life come through Jesus Christ, and spiritual and eternal death come through ultimate denial of him.

That's the whole point of that hymn.

Now, this next section of 2 Timothy is directly dealing with the false teachings that Timothy is facing.

And again, there's three illustrations or metaphors that Paul uses.

He kind of does group of three, him, group of three, right?

So that's how he paints it for us.

And these are the three kind of metaphors that he gives for us in the second half.

He gives the unashamed worker in verse 15, the vessel for honorable use in verse 21, and then the Lord's servant in verses 24, 25.

So I'm going to work through these three really quickly, and then we're going to land the plane.

So the false teaching that Paul is referencing here is in verse 18, where he says that false teachers were claiming that the resurrection had already happened.

And they would have agreed that the resurrection of Christ already happened, but what they were referring to here is the final resurrection, or when Jesus returns, our bodies and souls are united together, and the new heaven, the new earth are fully consummated, right?

So there's two things I just want us to hit on here.

False teachers often, number one, were once teaching the truth but have swerved.

We see that in verses 17 and 18.

That's what happened to these two guys Paul mentioned.

That would stink to be mentioned by name about that, wouldn't it?

That would be tough.

But they used to teach the truth, right?

At one point, they taught the truth, but they swayed.

And swayings like this don't happen overnight.

No one wakes up teaching this.

Swayings like this happen over long periods of time, slowly drifting.

Internal doubts go unchecked, right?

Internal wrestlings with the Lord go unspoken of.

Until all of a sudden, like these false teachers, they were consumed by them and they were in a tough spot.

So the compassionate word for us from Paul, I think, is if you're in here, and all of us in here, if you have real doubts about the Lord, about his goodness, about the gospel being the one truth, if you wrestle with the Lord of the Bible, like please find someone to talk through.

Nobody ends up walking away from the faith after one night.

It happens over a long period of drifting.

And so just the plea for you is if you're wrestling with these serious things, like please find somebody to talk to.

Number two, false teaching is not always a whole lie, but is often a partial truth.

Verse 18, we saw that.

In other words, false teachings will we will see and hear in our day will sound right.

And with that, they will be partially right.

But even if a tiny part of a claim is false, it negates the whole truth, right?

So the question now that we're left with for us today is how do we counter false teaching?

How do we spot it, how do we counter it, and how do we walk together?

So I think, again, three things.

Number one, I think these are the three things he gives us.

Number one, know the Bible, verse 15.

Number two, live holy lives, verses 20 and 21.

And then number three, counter false teaching with grace and truth.

That one's really important.

So point number one, know the Bible.

This might seem like super obvious, and I'm sorry we have to do it, but uh, this is something a lot of us heard probably our whole lives in church, right?

Read the Bible, know your Bible, whatever.

So Paul writes here in verse 15.

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved.

A worker who has no need to be ashamed.

Remember the unashamed worker.

How is one to be unashamed?

Rightly handling the word of truth.

So remember, Paul's writing to Timothy, right, who is a pastor.

So he has pastors in mind here.

He has church leaders in mind here, but also he has all Christians in mind.

We see in 1 Corinthians throughout the body of Christ, right?

We all have this part to play.

We all have a part to play in this idea of rightly handling the word of truth, right?

So what that means is that we all come to the Bible with our 21st century Western presuppositions, right?

We all have these thoughts that we're coming into the Bible with.

And I think the thing that's true from Paul here is that there's ways to interpret it rightly and there's ways to interpret it wrongly.

And it takes work to understand it rightly.

And that's the theme that we're seeing, right?

But it is work that is worthwhile, I think.

Why?

Because there are people with m-divs on TikTok that are discipling your middle and high schoolers into believing that the Bible is a made-up mythological book.

These people with m-divs on TikTok are uh telling your middle and high schoolers that Christianity is a hateful and bigoted religion, that there are inconsistencies in the Bible and therefore we should discount it altogether.

These people that claim to have m-divs are discipling our kids.

That's why we need to know it.

Because Gen Z is walking out the back door of the church faster than ever.

Alright, second point.

If we want to continue in this world as Christians, we are called to be holy.

Paul, giving another illustration, paints this picture of these vessels of gold and silver and then of wood and clay.

And what he's doing there is showing that there's some for honorable use, right, and some for dishonorable use.

This illustration is building off of his point in verse 19, which says this let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.

And here's his point: we are all vessels, we are all carrying messages, we are all holding things.

And if we carry the message of the gospel, what Paul is saying is our lives need to reflect it.

The inside of our hearts needs to be consistent with this holy life that He is calling us to.

That doesn't mean perfection, of course, because all of us just will never be there.

But what it means is that we're called to live differently.

We are called to be loving in ways that the world doesn't love.

We're called to treat each other differently than the world says to treat each other.

Now, again, this is the result of the grace of God.

This is not a try harder point.

Yourself up from your bootstraps, kind of holiness.

Not a moralistic do great kind of thing, right?

But it is a combination of the Holy Spirit working in our hearts through his word, through the gospel working in the body of believers.

It's not a solo project.

And it's also our own will and effort matched with all these things.

In other words, we don't sit on the sidelines passively hoping that all of a sudden we become more like Jesus.

As we rest in our identity in Christ, as we soak up the grace of Jesus, we are empowered actually to live holy lives, is what the gospel says.

And again, this isn't moralistic legalism.

This is not trying to grow in holiness so that God will love and approve of us more, right?

He already loves us and approves us perfectly through the cross of Christ.

So when we mess up big time, we're actually free to run back to our Father, not away from him in the gospel.

In 1957, one of my favorite films hit theaters.

And if you're thinking, yeah, the 16-year-old likes old films, that's true.

But one of my favorite films hit theaters, it's uh Sidney Lumay's masterpiece, Twelve Angry Men.

Uh it's probably one that not many of y'all have seen, but here's a picture that I just love uh that kind of captures what's going on.

And I'll be honest, before I saw it, I never expected uh for 90 minutes of 12 old white guys arguing in a room to be as fun as it was.

I thought it was gonna be brutal, but it was awesome.

But in this, there's a young man about 16 years old who is uh on trial for murder.

Uh and in this jury, the 12 angry men are in charge of determining his fate, which is really black and white.

It's either innocent or death penalty.

Those are the two options.

And what's interesting is that you don't see much of the actual trial at the beginning.

It's very brief.

So you, as the viewer, enter into this deliberation room seeing this going on.

We don't really actually know if he's innocent.

Like we don't have a good conclusion built up in our minds as the movie starts.

All we know is that this kid is from the slums, he's poor, and it seems like the jurors are dead set in their opinions.

They need a unanimous vote, either way, before they can leave that deliberation room, no matter how long it takes.

On the first vote, all of the first 11 jurors, without question, voted guilty.

Without even blinking an eye, voted guilty in favor of sending this 16-year-old to death row.

But then our boy, juror number eight, Henry Fonda, much like Yoda, comes out and says this there were 11 votes for guilty.

It's not easy for me to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first.

Then, with incredible patience, with amazing empathy and gentleness, Fonda slowly convinces all 11 other jurors to vote for innocence.

Sorry for the spoilers, it came out 70 years ago.

Now, what we don't know is whether or not they were right.

We don't know if the boy was guilty.

We don't know if he was innocent.

But what we do know is that the 11 other jurors would not have had their minds changed by a kicking and screaming angry man.

It took nuance, it took good questions, it took compassion and empathy, and it took grace.

As we close our time, Paul is explaining to Timothy that a good Christian leader should be able to disagree well.

There will be people in the church and outside of the church that we will disagree with.

And they really might be wrong, right?

Like they really might be wrong.

But the challenge here is not to just label someone and then attack the label, because that's what our culture is really good at, right?

The challenge is to seek correction and disagreement and challenge with grace, with gentleness, and really with love.

And that is so different than the culture today.

We have both sides screaming at one another.

And so what a time to be a light.

What a time to speak life into this culture that's disintegrating.

I'm gonna close with this passage from 1 Corinthians chapter 9.

1 Corinthians 9 · chapter mention

This is Paul painting this picture about what his life looked like trying to win people for the gospel.

And I think it's beautiful.

So as I read it, I want you all to imagine with me that instead of when he says Jews or someone under the law, imagine someone that thinks radically different from you.

Someone that's on the other political side of the spectrum, someone that you disagree with boldly.

I want you to put them in your mind as we read this passage.

This is 1 Corinthians chapter 9, verses 19 to 22.

1 Corinthians 9:19–22

For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all that I might win more of them.

To the Jews I became as a Jew in order to win Jews.

To those under the law, I became as one under the law, though not being myself under the law, that I might win those under the law.

To those outside the law, I became as one outside the law, not being outside the law of God, but under the law of Christ, that I might win those outside the law.

To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak.

I love this.

I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.

Let's pray together.

Father, thank you so much for this time.

We get to come and hear from your word that is not bound and will never be bound.

Father, the promise from Isaiah is that the word of God will do that which it accomplishes, it will not return void.

And the word that is from you, Lord, is one that brings liberation to captives, one that brings life to dead men and women, and one's one that brings redemption through Jesus Christ.

Father, your word is not a word of condemnation.

Your word is not a word of shaming.

Father, your word is actually one that tries to set us free from the bondage we've placed ourselves in.

So, Father, this morning we we just we come to this book and into this room with baggage, with wounds, with addictions, with doubts, with anger.

And Father, I just pray that this morning your word would speak a better word to us.

That you would speak a word of life in the midst of words of death that we see all around us.

Father, I pray that you would empower us by your Spirit to be a city on a hill, to be a people that speak life and light into a culture that speaks death and darkness.

Father, I pray that we would rest more deeply in the gospel that that says that all of our sin was nailed to a cross on Jesus' shoulders, and then if we simply believe in him, we would have life and forgiveness forever.

And Father, I pray that your spirit would have done work this morning in our hearts.

And I pray that you would continue to work on us, to show us the goodness of Jesus.

I pray that as we move into this time of communion and close with worship, Lord, I pray that you would stir our hearts and affections for Jesus.

I pray that we wouldn't have felt burdensome from this word, but that it would actually be a relief of burden on the shoulders of Christ.

Father, we love you.

I pray all this in Jesus' name.

Amen.