In this sermon, Don Carson focuses on understanding the purpose and functions of the local church based on teachings from the Pastoral Epistles. He highlights how the church’s mission is rooted in the gospel, emphasizing preaching, teaching, and living out the gospel’s transformative power in the community. Carson stresses the importance of faithful ministry, enduring suffering for the gospel, and the eternal grace provided through Jesus Christ.
In some ways, this session is out of sequence. Instead of focusing on what the gospel is exactly, we’re reserving this session for the priorities of ministry in the context of the local church. Here one could refer to a great number of passages. I’m going to focus on a couple of passages from 2 Timothy. I’ll begin with 2 Timothy, chapter 1, verse 6 and read through chapter 2, verse 2, but I’ll say a little bit more later on chapters 3–4 as well.
“For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline. So do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner. But join with me in suffering for the gospel, by the power of God, who has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace.
This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. And of this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher. That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.
What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you—guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us. You know that everyone in the province of Asia has deserted me, including Phygelus and Hermogenes. May the Lord show mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, because he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains.
On the contrary, when he was in Rome, he searched hard for me until he found me. May the Lord grant that he will find mercy from the Lord on that day! You know very well in how many ways he helped me in Ephesus. 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 people who will also be qualified to teach others.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
So far as we know, 2 Timothy was the last letter Paul wrote, certainly the last one that has come down to us in the canon of the New Testament. Here we find Paul at the end of his life talking to a younger Timothy about what ought to drive him. In some ways, this nestles nicely into the rest of Paul’s ministry, his own testimony elsewhere, what else he says in 1 Timothy and Titus, but we cannot look at everything. We have to focus a little bit.
What I want to do first of all is to outline the main thrusts of the passage I read, especially 1:8–2:2, and then far more briefly focus a little bit on what Paul says elsewhere to Timothy in chapters 3–4.
1. Maintain a clear grasp of the value of the gospel.
That really is the burden of verses 8–11. Yes, it talks about not being ashamed and joining Paul in his suffering for the gospel, but the gospel by the power of God, who has saved us and called us to a holy life, not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace.
“This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, and it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. And of this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher.” Do you hear that language? It is brimful of confidence and pleasure and joy, even thinking through what it is.
There is something hopelessly, pathetically sad about a so-called church that somehow claims to defend the gospel or to articulate the gospel or to be faithful to the gospel, where, frankly, about 98 percent of the people in the congregation are bored silly. It makes me wonder if they’ve understood anything. Let me focus on just a couple of things that are emphasized here.
First, the gospel is the unimaginably important news that the one who saves us from death makes us holy now and for all eternity, all out of God’s sheer grace. All of those points are mentioned in these few lines. Do you hear that? Saved from death. Granted eternal life. Already made holy. And this out of sheer grace by the power of God. What planet are you on if that doesn’t excite you?
There is something, therefore, about maintaining excitement about the gospel, of being hot for Jesus and for the gospel, that he brings in our emotional reaction that is part of what it means to maintain a clear grasp of the value of the gospel, which means these things have to be reiterated again and again so that people see what is precious about it all.
Then you have to see that Paul exalts in the fact that this gospel, anchored in eternity, is manifest in history in Christ Jesus. So verse 9: “This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus.” Then this historical element is picked up again in 2:8: “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel.”
I was reared in a Christian home, and one of the results of being reared in a Christian home is that it is not uncommon for such people not to know exactly when they got converted. I may have been saved when I was 8, almost 9. It may have been in second-year university, because often kids brought up in a strong Christian home, like mine was, come to some sort of point of realization, where they wrestle through what is really theirs and what they’ve merely inherited, and often that doesn’t take place until late teens, early 20s, or the like. I’m one of those.
As a result, I maintain a mental checklist of things I want to ask God when I get to heaven, and one of them is, “When did you save me?” I suspect he may answer, “From before the foundation of the world, my son.” That’s what’s here. It was brought about by Christ invading history at a certain space and time, and no doubt his Spirit worked his regenerating power at some point in my experience, but, in fact, the decisive stuff is already in the mind of God from eternity past.
Verse 9: “This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus.” That’s not only in time; it’s in history. That’s why Christians can never, ever mock history or treat the gospel as if it were an ahistorical set of truths or merely a set of philosophical connections, no matter how rich or deep.
This gospel of God’s saving grace, determined in the mind of God before the creation, before the beginning of time, nevertheless appeared not to generic human beings but in one human being, the first-century Jew, Jesus, born in Bethlehem of Nazareth. He suffered under Pontius Pilate and was buried and rose from the dead, with witnesses who saw and touched and handled and watched him eat fish, even as they saw him suddenly appear through closed doors. They saw the marks in his hands, the stigmata, and they bore witness, even under threat of death, to what they had seen and heard.
In other words, when Christians talk about their faith, they cannot commend it merely on the ground of having tasted and seen that the Lord is good (although that’s a good thing to say) or merely on the ground that it provides a more coherent picture of reality than, in their view, Hinduism or merely on the ground that it seems to work for them. “You have your spirituality, and if it’s vibrating crystals for you, that’s fine. But for me it’s Jesus, and I’d like to share with you a bit about my Jesus.”
It’s not merely a personalized thing. It’s deeper than that. It is bound up with what God has disclosed in real events in history. The incarnation was a historical event. So I worry about a new generation of young people growing up in some of our churches who decide to give Christianity a bit of a pass because they don’t like something that has gone up their nose. They don’t like the youth pastor or whatever. They’re more interested in Buddhism or whatever it is that’s currently passing by. We all have our different forms of spirituality.
Yes, but what about the history? Did God disclose himself in space-time history? Did Jesus rise from the dead or not? If you decide that he didn’t and walk away, then at least you’re being consistent, but you can’t walk away if you decide that he did without being stupid as well as lost. There are facts, which is why the best creeds are talking about the facts as we have received them.
So although it is important to talk about the compassion of Christ and the love of God and the truth of God and the transforming power of God and what it means to know God, at the end of the day you are talking about truth that manifested itself in space-time history, and it is tragic to the point of abysmal blindness to see that the truth is there and then walk away from it.
There’s a sense in which if I see a young person coming along in our church and saying, “I just don’t believe any of that happened. I’ve become an anti-supernaturalist. I’ve become a philosophical materialist. I don’t think there’s anything more beyond matter and energy, space and time. That’s it. I can’t believe all this resurrection bunk.” Okay, then we can start having a conversation at that point and start all over again.
But for somebody to come along and say, “Well, I still believe Jesus rose from the dead. I believe he was the Son of God, and I believe he died on the cross to pay for the sins of humans. I believe all of that, but I just want to do it my way.” That is so unbearably sad. It’s like saying, “Yeah, I know the way to Seattle is north from here, but I’m going south anyway.” Do you not hear the ignominy in that, the denial of reality?
That is why when Paul talks about the matters of first importance amongst us.… When he writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 15, he says, “Let me reiterate to you the gospel that I gave you, the matters of first importance. First, Christ Jesus died for our sins. He rose again the third day.” Do you see? The facts surrounding the historical self-disclosure of the God of eternity, manifesting himself in space-time history.
At the end of the day, we have to keep insisting in our postmodern generation that facts are stubborn things. If you want to deny the facts, go down that route, and then we’ll talk about that, but you cannot affirm the facts and walk away and be in any sense coherent or consistent. It’s just willful walking away from facts, from truth.
So Paul wants us to magnify the gospel, the glory of what it accomplishes, saving us from death, making us holy for all eternity out of God’s favor, grounded in an anchoring in eternity and a manifestation in history, and that means keeping this gospel central. Not keeping preaching central or keeping the ministry central; keeping the gospel central. The preaching is the means to an end. The preaching is not an art form to be admired, nor is it atomistic. It is a way of declaring the whole gospel of God by the power of God for the transformation of God’s people.
2. Maintain a willingness to suffer for the gospel.
That already surfaces in verse 8. “Do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner. But join with me in suffering for the gospel.” It shows up again in verse 12. “That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.”
It shows up in 2:8–9: “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel, for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God’s word is not chained. Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory.”
Last night, when this came up in a Q&A, I mentioned a couple of other verses. Philippians 1:29: “To you it has been granted on behalf of Christ not only to believe in his name, but also to suffer for his sake.” It has been granted. It’s a gracious gift. God has graciously granted you not only faith but suffering. Aren’t you pleased? Yet there’s so much in so-called evangelicalism that wants the belief part, all right, and the rest is power, health, and wealth and transforming joy in Jesus. You’re not allowed to suffer. It’s letting down the side.
What does the Bible say? “To you it has been granted not only to believe …” That’s grace gift number one. “… but also to suffer.” Grace gift number two. Then Paul, knowing full well that he already knows God, says, “Oh, that I may know him [that I may know him better] and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering, being made conformable to his death.”
We saw last night that that is tied in with Jesus’ insistence that those who want to be his disciples must take up their cross and follow him. Or in John, chapter 15, Jesus on the night he is betrayed goes to some length to associate any future Christian suffering with his own suffering. He says, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own.
As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: ‘Servants are not greater than their master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me.”
Or again, in a passage that if people know the Bible at all, they know of this one, the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus ends his list of Beatitudes by saying, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.”
“Go in a corner, feel sorry for yourself, and mope.” No, it doesn’t say that. It says, “Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Now obviously, not every Christian suffers in exactly the same way. That’s already made clear in the Bible. Do you remember the last chapter of John’s gospel?
Jesus tells Peter by what death he will glorify God, and indeed, Peter would die a martyr’s death. He was crucified, according to tradition, upside down in Rome. Peter hears these words, and he looks over his shoulder and sees John following, and he says, “What about this guy? What shall this man do?” Jesus says, “If I want him to stick around until the second advent, that’s none of your flipping business.” In other words, we’re not to compare our service records.
This is not a huge crowd, but out of this crowd, there will be some of you who will pastor very substantial churches. Maybe some of you will have international ministry. Some of you will die young. Some of you will endure divorce. Some of you will fight illness all your life. Some of you will fight depression all your life. Others of you will have spectacularly fruitful ministries, full of joy until the very end, and then go out in an instant in your sleep.
You know what? Some of you could end in jail. I don’t mean for doing something that all of us would view as social pathology, but for the gospel’s sake. All you’d have to do is make certain things civil rights issues, and you could very easily end up in jail. If not in my time, then in my children’s time. It could easily happen. Some of you may serve overseas and be martyred. When the saints go marching in, which one will be at the head of the line? I don’t have a clue. It’s none of my business, and it’s none of yours.
In the era of modern missions.… There were missions long before that, but in the era of modern missions, Western missionaries went into Japan and into Korea at about the same time. Today, the gospel has massively taken hold in Korea. It’s barely struggling to survive in Japan. Two small communities, both Asian, with similar religions. One has more Shintoism than the other. Both have quite a bit of Buddhism.
There are some social differences that, after the fact, you can analyze until the cows come home, but at the end of the day, who would have predicted in advance that the gospel takes place in one country and does not really take root, so far, in the other? I don’t know anybody who got that prediction right. Does that mean all of the missionaries who went to Korea are far more spiritual and more godly, and all of the ones who were bumped off in Japan instead were ungodly? “It’s none of your business; you just follow me,” Jesus says to Peter.
Today there are Christians in parts of the world where suffering is not uncommon. I came back recently from the Middle East, a country that shall not be named. It’s a country where there is a little more freedom than other countries. I met refugees there from Iran and Iraq. The ones from Iran had all spent time in jail for the gospel, and they could all tell me about people who had been martyred. Many of them prayed diligently for America, that we would be tested by enough fire to make our faith secure. They just view it as normal.
I spoke at one underground meeting. It wasn’t dangerous or anything like that. It was just highly illegal. The government probably knew about it, but they just look the other way in that particular country. There were about 75 university students there. About half of them were Christians from all sorts of backgrounds. The rest were a mixture of Muslim, Hindu, Zoroastrian, secularists, and so on.
The whole time I spent articulating the gospel, and it felt like the first century, because the matters mattered. It was life and death. It was eternity. It was heaven or hell. Nobody was playing a game. We need that quality of intensity and consistency in the church of Jesus Christ in every generation, which in some circles is going to arouse animosity. It may not be in jail, but don’t forget what Jesus said in the Beatitudes.
“Rejoice when people insult you …” That too is part of persecution. “… or say all manner of evil against you for my sake.” I can’t believe there are many Christians in this room who haven’t experienced something of that. So rejoice. That’s what the text says. You’re in line with the prophets. “Yes, Jesus, thank you. Give me another one.” Whereas if, instead, your whole plan of life is to get through with as many people thinking positive thoughts about you as possible, it’s going to be very hard to be a consistent, compassionate Christian of integrity.
Now don’t misunderstand. There are some people who go out looking to be persecuted, and they deserve it. There are some people who are not contending for the gospel; they’re being contentious about the gospel. There are some people who make the gospel so ugly I’m almost embarrassed to be a Christian, or at least I want to disown them and say that they’re not. Either that or they’re Christians who are as blind as bats, and may God have mercy on their souls.
After you’ve laid aside all the bad apples … there are always some … at the end of the day, walk with integrity in the gospel, and you will attract some flack. That’s the way it is. Wear it as a badge of honor. That’s part of what the church must do to be mature in any culture, especially in a culture where the drift of the culture is away from its historical connections with the gospel of times past.
Maintain a willingness to suffer for the gospel’s sake. After all, if you expect that you ought to get away with it without any flack, then implicitly what you’re denying is that this world is a lost place and that the servants of Jesus have a right to escape what Jesus himself did not escape.
3. Maintain the mandate to guard the gospel.
Verses 13–14: “What you heard from me, keep as a pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you—guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.” This injunction assumes that there is something precious to guard and that the treasure is easily lost. Otherwise, there’s no point in guarding it.
That brings us back to the first point. You keep reiterating the preciousness, the wonder, the glory of what the gospel really is. It’s the gospel that is the power of God to salvation to those who believe, but this also assumes not only the preciousness of this which is to be guarded but also the ease with which it is lost.
It can be lost a lot of different ways: sheer laziness, Bible teachers who only teach popular things, an absolute refusal to confront those in transparent error just because it might be a shame culture and you don’t want to make anybody lose any shame, atomistic approaches to the Bible that focus on relatively peripheral things.
I can introduce you to some people who every time you talk to them have to bring up something about creation, what you have to believe about creation and whether you’re young earth or old earth, and on and on and on, because they’re just trying to be faithful. I have yet to meet somebody in that sort of camp who’s actually effective at winning people to Christ.
It’s not that what they’re saying is unimportant; it’s that somehow they have so focused on something that is important that it becomes all-embracing to them, and they can’t see the big picture anymore. After all, Jehovah’s Witnesses have the same high view of inerrancy that I have.
Nor do they have an extra canon the way Mormons do. Mormons not only have the Holy Bible but the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price that they think are canonical. Jehovah’s Witnesses have the same Bible I have. They hold to the same doctrine of inerrancy I have, but they’re wrong again and again and again. They distort the Scripture.
Now it’s not a question of an additional canon, an additional authority. It is, instead, really bad hermeneutics, really bad principles of interpretation that are simply incorrigible. It has become an inbred system. So it’s possible to read the Bible and get it wrong. I know some kids brought up in Christian homes, Christian churches, who pick up an awful lot of Bible.
They can pick up all sorts of Trivial Pursuit questions based on the Bible. They just don’t put a foot wrong. They know which one was the left-handed judge. (It was Ehud, in case you were wondering.) They know that, but what they’re missing is what Paul here calls the “pattern of sound teaching.” They don’t really know how their Bibles are put together. They just have a whole lot of bits of data.
This element in the motivation of Christian leaders, the responsibility to guard the gospel, can obviously be turned into a defensive negativism that is mean-spirited and demeaning toward others and condescending and supercilious. I know that. I worry about some ministries that focus constantly on correcting everybody else.
Yet the converse is not very attractive either. You can only say positive things, and you can never say that anybody is wrong. Doesn’t anybody read the Bible and see how often the Bible tells us we’re wrong, tells individuals that they’re wrong? I mean, what’s going to be said about Phygelus and Hermogenes in verse 15 is not too attractive either. Then later, “Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present evil world.” People actually named.
I think part of the problem is that we have been fed with a certain view of what the Bible says about the value of Christian unity. Let me explain. The Bible does place a very high premium on Christian unity, and so it ought to. For example, in John 13:34–35 John says, `“A new commandment I give you, that you love one another, as I have loved you. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
There’s a huge price on Christian unity, but how do we work out the tension between the biblical appeal to unity and the biblical appeal to truth? I think that part of the problem is that some of us have made unity an absolute good, whereas in reality, there is both godly unity and ungodly unity in the Bible, and there is both godly division and ungodly division in the Bible.
Godly unity. John 17:22: “That they may all be one even as you and I are one,” Jesus says to his Father. The epistle of Paul to the Ephesians. Unity between Jews and Gentiles, one new humanity in Christ, powerful appeals to Christian unity. On the other hand, ungodly unity. The Tower of Babel, where the whole culture was unified together to build something over against God.
Or Jehoshaphat, a basically good covenant-keeping king who was constantly keeping bad company with his semi-pagan neighbor to the north, even though God told him to keep his distance. He was constantly building a kind of unity, and eventually it cost him his life. Unity is not an absolute good. It depends on the context.
Similarly, there can be ungodly division. “Watch out for those who cause divisions. Warn them once, then warn them twice, then have nothing to do with them.” (2 Timothy 3) Warning against ungodly division in Romans 16:17. Oh yes, there’s warning against divisiveness and schismatic attitudes. On the other hand, what do you do with Luke 12:15, where Jesus says he did not come to bring peace but a sword, and a person’s enemies will be of his own household? The gospel can be fundamentally divisive.
So now come back to our text. “What you have heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching …” There is a pattern in the teaching of Scripture. It’s not atomistic bits of data. It’s how the whole Bible fits together, how you understand it holistically. “… with faith and love in Christ Jesus.” There is a trust in him so that the exercise is not merely intellectual.
It is intellectual, it is cerebral, but it’s not merely that. It involves trust and confidence in Christ Jesus, faith and love in Christ Jesus; this out of a service of devotion to God, a spirit of transparent adoration and affection toward him, and not endless one-upmanship, as if you’re going to correct everybody in the universe and claim its allegiance to Jesus.
There’s a matrix of life, thought, attitude, and heart in which you are keeping the pattern of sound teaching. In that framework, then, guard the deposit that was entrusted to you. It was passed on. Now guard it yourself, because you must understand there will always be voices that try and take it off on the side. Some voices try to diminish the gospel by subtraction.
“Do you really have to believe in the virgin birth? We all know Jesus is the Son of God. The virgin birth is a bit over the top. You don’t want to make something peripheral so important, do you? It’s just divisive. I know some really fine Christians who have been born again. Their lives show it, and they believe Jesus died on the cross for their sins, but they don’t believe in this virgin birth stuff. So why do you want to make that a crucial point?”
Gradually, you can natter away at something by subtraction, but you can also do damage by addition. “The gospel really is very powerful. It does help you, all right. It brings you into reconciliation with God, but quite frankly, if you experience my counseling course on the identity of the self, you will find a whole new richness of your understanding in Christ Jesus that will utterly transform your existence.”
Now suddenly it’s the gospel plus something else, and the gospel is diminished again. Where is the pattern of sound teaching? It’s not that there’s nothing to learn from counseling. It’s not that there’s nothing to learn from historical criticism. I’m not saying any of those things. All I’m saying is where is the pattern of sound teaching being preserved? There will always be voices that try to minimalize and marginalize the gospel and put it aside.
Guard against it. Preserve the pattern of sound teaching. That is the responsibility of any church. Ideally, it’s a mission discharged by the pastors and elders, although it is interesting that when Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians in chapters 10–13, where the leaders of the church all seem to have gone another route, there Paul lays it on the church to get rid of those teachers, and then he says, “If you haven’t done so by the time I get there, I’ll get rid of them for you.”
He views the preservation of integrity in the teaching offices of the church as a matter of primary importance, since that is the fount that waters the entire congregation. In other words, maintain the mandate to guard the gospel. The same sort of thing is found in other passages. In 1 Timothy 4:15–16, for example, a passage I rather love, Paul writes to Timothy, “Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.”
“Watch your life and your doctrine.” That is, how you live out the gospel and what you believe about the gospel. Watch them both closely, and let everybody see your progress. Over five years, people who are watching you in any sort of leadership capacity in the church ought to be able to say, in effect, “You know, he was a pretty good teacher five years ago, but his grasp of the gospel and of Scripture and of the glories of Christ just becomes better, and I see his own growing conformity to Jesus.”
“You know, She taught me Sunday school class, and I see her becoming more conformed to Jesus as I watch her grow. It’s a wonderful thing to watch.” Do you see? “Let all see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them.” That’s part of guarding the gospel. Not only for yourself, but if you do so, you will save both yourself and your hearers. The same applies to other sorts of institutions as well. Let me give an analogy outside of the context of the local church, but it has a bearing on us.
There is a very famous book now (it was written about a dozen years ago) by James Burtchaell called The Dying of the Light in which he analyzes the various steps taken by some of the great institutions of higher learning in this country that were founded by Christian visionaries. Princeton, Yale, Andover, to some extent Harvard, all founded by Christians who had a vision in the first place for training people for the ministry and were committed to the gospel.
The question is how do you get from Princeton as it was founded, as the College of New Jersey as it was called, until it becomes Princeton University today? How do you get there? What are the steps by which you get there? Instead of looking at just one school, the author Burtchaell did his research very carefully in the primary sources across quite a lot of schools to see if there was a pattern that developed.
His book is about 800 pages long, and I promise I won’t bore you with some of its more interesting finds. Let me just mention one. He points out that almost always these institutions are founded by a pastor/visionary/entrepreneur, somebody with a real grasp of the gospel who has entrepreneurial smarts to know how to get things done and plants something. It’s driven by a certain gospel vision.
Eventually, the thing is successful enough with enough people that you really have to get some good managers involved, and eventually the board appoints a president who is entirely orthodox but not a visionary and who really does know the mechanics of administrative leadership, and that is perceived to be just what is necessary at this stage in the institution’s development.
In some sense, that’s right, but when you ask, “Who is orthodox?” you are always asking that as measured by debates in the past. Orthodoxy is measured according to the debates that have been worked out in times past, whereas the confrontations that we face today are never exactly the same, such that unless a person is theologically equipped, biblically informed, discerning, and so on, he or she may really not see today’s dangers, even though they are entirely orthodox by yesterday’s dangers.
Today, for example, in Christian seminaries or Christian colleges, I don’t think there is much chance of a board coming along and appointing as president somebody who’s a flat-out liberal. I don’t think there’s any chance of it at all, because there are all kinds of safeguards against old-fashioned liberalism. “That’s not orthodox. We won’t go down that route.”
But does that mean the contemporary leaders today are well equipped to handle any number of things that are on the agenda today that are argued over? The new perspective on Paul, the shift in the meaning of justification, openness of God theology, and on and on and on. Most of them aren’t. They’re going to appeal to unity, and then they’ll start hiring some people who may or may not be part of the pattern of sound teaching, until you have two or three more generations of that and you’ve lost the institution. It doesn’t take very long.
That means it becomes institutionally wise to preserve in the top slots people who are pastorally theologically driven and under them hire all the administrative smart people who can keep the books and get your best structures in place and make sure the machinery is running efficiently and know how to put in a digital system and all the rest that goes into it these days, but don’t give the top slots to people who are not driven by biblical, theological, discerning comprehension so as to be able to keep the pattern of sound teaching.
That can happen in the context of the local church. John Piper likes to say he wants his church doors to be as wide open as possible to invite as many people in from every conceivable background to come in and listen and hear, and he wants the eldership kept really tight. It’s not because he’s mean. It’s because he sees the importance of preserving the pattern of sound teaching, and that’s part of the mandate, the responsibility, first of all of the teaching offices in the church, but then of the church itself.
4. Distinguish the betrayers and supporters of the gospel.
Verses 15–18. Both are mentioned. On the one hand, Phygelus and Hermogenes. On the other hand, Onesiphorus is extolled. As you work through, for example, the long list of people who are mentioned in chapter 4 or that Paul mentions in Romans 16, you discover how Paul is discerning. There are links of friendship everywhere in Paul, but so often his most discerning criterion is whether they themselves display a loyalty to the gospel, a loyalty to Christ.
Look around, folks. Take a look at one another. There are a lot of funny-looking faces around. Tell me, how many of this lot do you think would likely be your personal friend if it were not for the gospel? One of the things I worry about a university Christian group, whether it’s InterVarsity or Campus Crusade.… At the end of the day, they’re all between 18 and 22. They’re all interested in roughly the same kinds of things. They’re a little homogenous group.
Then when they graduate and have to get into a church and they’re not homogenous, some of them wander off because they can’t stand how diverse the whole group is. It makes me wonder if in this so-called Christian group they were simply finding friends of like mind and similar interests, similar age, and similar hormones, the same mishmash of 18- to 22-year-olds.
Whereas in the church you have wise people and unwise people, rich people and poor people, older people and younger people, people who are really good at figuring things out and writing technical books and others who know which end of a screwdriver to hold, and the converse, some who don’t know what a hammer is for and others who couldn’t run a computer if their life depended on it. All this diversity.
Some are very articulate. Some are very gregarious, and others are very restrained and restricted. The restricted people think the gregarious people are show-offs, and the gregarious people think the others are somewhat incubated and retarded. Eventually, the only thing that holds them all together is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Then you throw in a few extra cultures. Some are black and some are yellow. Who knows what colors of the rainbow are in there these days?
If you really anticipate what will be around the throne with men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, then ideally you want the church to look like that today. You want to say, “Bring it on.” If, instead, all you’re comfortable with is your own little homogenous group, good grief! What does Jesus say about that? The pagans have their friends too.
That means the line that is holding you together is Jesus and the gospel, such that even if in the group you find someone who really is sympathetic to you, close to you, someone with whom you share a common background in friendship, allegiance, family interest, where there is a huge divergence on what the gospel is, then it’s the unity of the gospel that must take precedence in your mind.
I had a very painful letter this week from a pastor who had to lead the church through the discipline of his parents who were breaking up in a wretched divorce, compounded with adultery and all kinds of things, because there’s a certain kind of gospel allegiance that comes first. When you look around, you’re going to find some styles of ministry you like and some you don’t like, some that are more aggressive, some that are more restrained.
Mark Driscoll is not exactly like Tim Keller, in case you hadn’t noticed. On the other hand, both are seeing thousands of men and women genuinely converted, and both have a passion for the gospel. I can live with the diversity. Just give me the passion for the gospel. That doesn’t mean I have to like everything that either one of them does.
They could all just be like me, and then everything would be perfect. As soon as you say that, you see how stupid it is. So where is our alignment? Where is our test of loyalty? It’s in the gospel. It’s in Christ. Meanwhile, perhaps they’ll both convince me that I’m wrong in many of my ways.
5. Work hard at passing on the gospel.
You have to remember, as I’m sure most of you know, that when these New Testament documents were first written, there were no chapter and verse divisions. Those were added much, much later in order to help us find specific passages, so they’ve become part of the tradition, but they’re not part of what was first given.
In my judgment, there is a big mistake made by making a break at the end of chapter 1, and then beginning again in chapter 2. It’s indicated by the connective you find in various translations. “You, therefore …” or “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 people who will also be qualified to teach others.”
How do you preserve the gospel? How do you exercise gospel ministry? One of the things you do is work hard at passing on the gospel. You can’t preserve the pattern of sound teaching by merely a negative posture of discernment. The way you preserve the pattern of sound teaching, the way you discern between supporters and detractors of the gospel is, in the first instance, in promulgating the gospel.
That’s why I worry about people who try to develop a ministry of discernment where all they’re doing is saying that everybody is wrong. What I want to see is people who are promoting the gospel, who are clear, concise, accurate, and biblically faithful in their articulation of the gospel and, in God’s mercy, maybe seeing people genuinely converted because of it. That also is how you preserve the pattern of sound teaching.
You don’t preserve it simply in a little box. You preserve it in people, and that means evangelism, discipleship, mentoring, teaching people how to live. That’s how you preserve the pattern of sound teaching. I never, ever worry that classic liberalism will ultimately swamp evangelicalism at its best. Do you know why? Because within half a generation, liberalism invariably stops evangelizing.
The only way they can keep maintaining things is by turning more wet evangelicals into liberals, but the people who are evangelizing and seeing new converts and new growth are going to be those who have a passion for the gospel. Therefore, we ought to make that as part of the way we think. Now when you come to different ways in which people are called to vocational ministry, in the New Testament the patterns are extraordinarily diverse. I don’t have the time to go through all of them. Let me mention one other in the Pastoral Epistles.
In 1 Timothy, chapter 3, the apostle says, “Now if anyone desires to do the work of an overseer [bishop, pastor, elder], then he desires a good thing. These are the criteria.” So now the initial impetus is coming from some individual himself. “This is what you want to do? Okay, this is the way you have to start looking at it.”
In this case, the impetus is not coming from an individual who says, “I think I’d like to find out more about that.” Now the impetus is coming from someone who is senior in the Lord and is looking around in the congregation for people who might be persons of potential for passing things on in the future. Do you hear what it said? “The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.”
My first degree was in chemistry and mathematics. I thought I had my life pretty nicely planned out. Eventually, I worked in a research lab in Ottawa and planned to go on to do a PhD in organic synthesis at Cornell if they let me in. That was my plan. Somewhere along the line, the pastor of a church in Montreal.… His name was Ellard Corbett. He tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’d like you to be an intern with me this summer.”
I said, “There are quite a lot of college young people in this church. You have me mistaken for somebody else. Some of them are heading for the ministry. I’m not heading for the ministry. I’m chemistry myself. So take your invitation and find the person doing theology.” He insisted that he did know who I was and that he still wanted me to be an intern with him in any case. I said that wasn’t the direction I was going; I really couldn’t do that. So then we had a knockdown, dragout two-hour fight, and I won. I didn’t do it.
Nevertheless, that was the first impetus that God used in my life to force me to at least start thinking about something else. There were a lot of other things the Lord used first, but it was Ellard Corbett who first tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I want you.” To this day I wonder if in the mystery of providence Ellard Corbett had not tapped me on the shoulder if I ever would have gotten the machinery working in that direction, humanly speaking. I know God can surprise you in all kinds of ways, but all things being equal, I wonder.
Now the question becomes those of you who are a little older, a little more mature, whether you’re in vocational ministry or not, have you taken the responsibility to look around in your own churches and say, “You know, I’ve been praying about you, and I wonder if the Lord isn’t calling. I’m not trying to play God in your life or anything, but on the other hand, I think maybe you should be considering three years at seminary.
Grow up a little bit and find out some more about the Bible. Here’s a Bible study I’d like you to lead, and I’ll be able to help you if you’d like, but I want you to think seriously about the ministry.” It may not work out that way, and sometimes you’ll make mistakes, but don’t we have a responsibility along those lines, precisely because we’re trying to preserve the pattern of sound teaching?
It’s never merely a defensive thing; it’s a recognition that in every generation we desperately need to pass on the things we have received to a new generation who will be able in turn to pass them on to another generation. There is no other plan but this plan for continual proclamation and articulation of the gospel to another generation and another generation and another generation, world without end, until Jesus himself comes back. There is no other plan.
Now to close, let me turn to another passage. In this case, I don’t have the time to work through it in detail, so what I’m going to do is give you an outline. Just prime the pump. Then you can develop it for yourself. From chapter 3:1 to chapter 4:8 the apostle Paul articulates how Christians should respond to situations in what he calls the last days.
What he means by the last days is the entire period between Christ’s first coming and his second coming. He clearly doesn’t mean just at the end of the age, because he’s telling Timothy in the context precisely how to address it, how to handle it. What he means is what the New Testament often means by the last days.
As John writes in his first epistle, “My dear children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so also many antichrists have come, whereby we know it is the last hour.” We are already living in these last days, this last hour. So he describes what some of the characteristics of this age are. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, and so on. Then after describing the wretched circumstances, he then gives his positive exhortations in verses 10–11.
A) Hold the right mentors in high regard.
“You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, 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.” In other words, over against following all of these bad examples, you hold the right mentors in high regard.
For you especially who are younger, look around in your churches. Look around in the broader church of Jesus Christ, and find men and women who are mature, discerning, who know how to pray, who have learned how to suffer, who are joyful in the Lord, who might give you a bit of time on how to have some devotions yourself, might take you with them when they’re witnessing, might give you some instruction in your marriage. Find godly mentors.
Paul openly says, “In the light of all of these bad examples that are around, you, however, know my life.” Elsewhere he says, “Be imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ.” Don’t ever think it’s wrong to say to a young person, freshly converted, “Well, I can’t tell you what to do, but I’ll be praying for you.”
No, what you should be saying if you’re a mature Christian is, “Watch me, and I’ll show you how to live as a Christian.” That’s what Paul says. “Be imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ.” “Come into our home. I’ll bet you’ve never said grace before. I’m going to teach you how to say grace.”
“So you’re on your third marriage, are you? Arrested twice for drunkenness and disorderly conduct and abusing your first two spouses. I’m going to show you how to be a man, a Christian husband, because you’ve proclaimed allegiance to Jesus Christ, and the gospel transforms you, and part of the way it transforms is by the power of God’s grace working in us who believe showing you, passing it on. ‘Be imitators of me, even as also I am of Christ.’ I’m not pretending for a moment I have it all right, but insofar as I follow Christ, you follow me.”
That’s part of the way things go on in the church. So on the one hand, hold the right mentors in high regard. You choose the right examples. Don’t follow somebody just because he’s your personality type or gregarious or seems to be “successful.” Look for the Christian virtues. Follow them. Those of you who are older, make sure you’re tapping people on the shoulder. The church is essentially relational in its training and transforming of people. So hold right models in high regard.
B) Hold few illusions about the world.
Verse 12: “In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” Tim Keller likes to say, “For the Christian, optimism is naÔve but pessimism is atheistic.” Optimism is naÔve because we really do believe what the Bible says about sin. We should often be horrified by sin, starting with our own, but never surprised by it.
If we’re surprised by it, it’s because we haven’t listened to what the Bible says about it. So don’t go through life with a Pollyanna-ish view about how wonderful everything is, and then when something comes along that’s disastrous or cruel.… “Oh, it’s so shocking. How could this be?” Read your Bible. It’s the entailment of the fall. It is shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. Hold few illusions about the world. Don’t go through a Pollyanna-ish view of things.
C) Hold on to the Bible.
That’s the whole burden of verses 14–16. In Timothy’s case, he was taught the Bible by his mother and grandmother. I don’t care whether you were taught by your mother, your grandmother, your grandfather, a neighborhood servant, or a friendly Sunday school teacher. If you’ve been taught the Bible, take that as part of your God-given heritage and rejoice in it.
In this case, a godly mother and a godly grandmother who taught Timothy the Bible and so opened up his eyes to the pattern of sound teaching that when he heard the gospel in the matrix of the full delivery of the apostle Paul he became an apostolic messenger himself. Listen. “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that all God’s people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Hold on to the Bible.
D) Hold out the Bible to others.
If you just hold on to the Bible, it can be a defensive posture, but if you hold out the Bible to others, you’re back to the entrusting the gospel to sound people and the future all over again. That’s the whole burden of chapter 4, verses 1 and following. “In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead …” This is getting pretty serious to ratchet up his announcement along these lines.
“… and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist …” That word is probably misunderstood in our translation. It’s literally, “Do the work of the one who promotes the gospel.” Gospel and evangel are the same word in the original.
Evangelist for us means just preaching to outsiders to try to win them to Christ, but “Do the work of the gospel” really means keep articulating the gospel both to outsiders and to insiders. Be an evangelist in that sense. As an evangelist, be a supporter of the evangel. Be a gospel person, in other words. “… do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.” In other words, hold out the Bible to others. Let us pray.
Lord God, not for a moment do we want to ignore the many other things these Pastoral Epistles say about caring for the widows and orphans in the congregation, for example, or about how to entreat old men and old women and young men and young women, about how the rich should be generous to the poor. Not for a moment do we want to overlook the personal instructions of a senior apostle on his way to glory, in prison, to a junior protÈgÈ who’s still a bit timid.
What we do discern, Lord God, is the spectacular centrality of the gospel and what faithfulness to it looks like, not only in the context of our own lives but of our witness, of our discernment, of our proclamation. We beg of you, Lord God, to have mercy on us, to make us faithful, living out and teaching the pattern of sound teaching in our generation. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
