5/12/24 2 Timothy 3:10-17 “Make Jesus Happy & Mom Proud”

09 May 5/12/24 2 Timothy 3:10-17 “Make Jesus Happy & Mom Proud”

5/12/24   2 Timothy 3:10-17        “Make Jesus Happy & Mom Proud”

This is one of those Sundays where I have to be careful about how I talk about Mother’s Day because I don’t want to offend anyone and yet there is an importance about Mother’s Day. This is because all of us have or have had a mother and father.  There are people who have never known their mother for one reason or another.  There are those who have had a bad experience with their mother or father.  Some have had bad memories of their mothers.  And for some, all we have left is memories.  At the beginning of the service, I had you all stand or wave your hand or do something if you have had a mother.  We all have had a mother regardless of the situation.  God set the world in motion so that everyone would have a mother and a father but we will wait a month to talk fathers.  God set up the family so it would be a good thing for us humans.  However, because we are humans and we fail all the time, we have many instances where families have broken down.  This is our fault and not God’s.  But just because we fail doesn’t mean that the concept of family and mothers and fathers is bad.  It is a great idea and a great plan.  I have never read or found any sort of alternative that is better or even close to being as good as families with mothers and fathers.  It doesn’t exist.  So once again, happy Mother’s Day to everyone!  In today’s reading we will find out why this concept and many of concepts of God are so good and always true.  Let’s see if we can get rid you of a misconception or two.

The late Ravi Zacharias, a Christian intellect, was at Ohio State University for a speaking engagement.  As he was being driven to the lecture hall, they passed the new Wexner Art Center. The driver explained that the new building was a post-modernist view of reality.  The building had no pattern.  Staircases went nowhere.  Pillars supported nothing.  The architect designed the building to reflect life.  It went nowhere, was mindless and senseless.  As a sidebar here, I’m glad Ohio paid for this and not us.  Anyway, Ravi then asked the driver if they did the same thing with the foundation.  The driver chuckled and said, “You can’t do that with a foundation. You can get away with it in the infrastructure. You can get away with random thoughts that sound good in defense of a world view that ultimately doesn’t make sense. But once you start tampering with the foundations, you begin to see the serious effects.”  That is what church is all about, the foundation.  Hopefully, we set down a good foundation and we can withstand all the attacks that come our way.

Before we begin, I think that we need a little background.  Timothy was a young man and had been Paul’s traveling companion.  He probably made 2 journeys with Paul, maybe more.  He was the leader of the church in Ephesus.  It has also been said that Paul was probably in jail in Rome at the time he wrote this.  If you know anything about Paul, you know that he had been beaten, flogged, shipwrecked, run out of town and jailed many times in his ministry.  If there was ever anyone who suffered on behalf of their faith, it was Paul.

So Paul sits and writes a letter of instruction to a faithful follower of Jesus, Timothy.  Just prior to this in Chapter 3 we find Paul giving the warning of the end times.  This is something that is repeated by several authors in the New Testament and should not be taken lightly.  There is no doubt in my mind that these things will happen because they are repeated several times.  Always pay attention when things are repeated in the Bible.  It means they are important.  I’m not going to go there today but you can go back and read verses 1-9 at your leisure.  However, we do need to know it is there so that what Paul says next makes a little more sense.

Paul begins this section with a little history of his ministry.  This is not unlike when Paul would arrive in a new town to preach.  He would first give a little history of Judaism so that the people could connect the dots to the Messiah, Jesus Christ.  Here Paul is reminding Timothy of his teachings, his purpose, his faith, his love, his endurance and his persecutions.  He doesn’t go into detail because Timothy knows the details.  But he does tell us that it is because of Jesus Christ that all these things happen.  Jesus is given all the credit of rescuing Paul from all of the persecutions he had to endure.

He is telling us that we will be persecuted for our beliefs.  This type of thing has been going on ever since Jesus came to us.  Today, it is everywhere.  I think of some of these poor African nations where atrocities happen every day in an effort to get rid of Christians.  This happens in other parts of the world also.  It is even happening in this country as Christians are seeing more and more of their freedoms being taken away.  Canada is on the verge of outlawing Christianity.  And why is all this happening?  It is happening because of this book, the Bible.

So, how do we know that everything happens because of God and the Scripture?  How do we know the Scripture is true?  We know that the Scripture is true because it is God breathed.  Because it is God breathed into the writers, then it must be true.  Peter also writes in 2 Peter 1:20, “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation.”  We believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and we are told of this several times in the Bible.  If you don’t think this yet, that is ok.  Hopefully we will keep you on the right track until you finally see that Scriptures are always right and never wrong.  People say that I must be crazy for some of these views.  They tell me to my face that I must get in the right century if I am to preach the word of God.  May God have mercy on them!

The reason I believe the way I do is because of my faith.  I know that the Bible is the inerrant, God inspired word of God.  There was a time when I thought that there might be some inconsistencies.  I had to struggle with passages from the Old Testament because they didn’t make sense to me.  This is the journey that we all have to take.  We have to wrestle and struggle with passages.  Sometimes we struggle because of what we are doing in our own lives.  Sometimes the struggle is because our warped society tells us that the Bible is false and full of inconsistencies.  After much struggling and reading of the Scriptures, I have come to the conclusion that I don’t have to understand them.  I only have to believe them.  This is why I now say that Bible is right 100% of the time and is our best guide for life.

Because we know the Bible is the truth, we can use the Bible for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.  When these people and us put our faith in the Bible that it is the inerrant God inspired word of God, then we can use the Bible to help ourselves in life because what we read is true.  We can teach our children and we can teach others.  However, if we think that we are smart enough or we are so good that we can change some of the things in the Bible, then we might as well throw out the whole thing.

Back in the time when John was writing, this is what they were doing.  The Gnostics had changed the Scripture so that its meaning was more in line with their philosophy.  They said that Jesus was not human, only divine.  They made changes accordingly.  This cult flourished for many years and finally died out because it was not based on the truth.  It changed the truth so it didn’t work.  We can look throughout history and find the same thing.  Someone thinks that they can improve the Bible, a ridiculous thought, so they make changes and the movement dies out.

We think that it is different today because we are so much smarter, which we aren’t.  There are several cults in this country that have gained huge followings and they seem to be thriving on a Bible that has been changed.  We even have main line formerly Christian denominations who have or are changing the meaning of the Bible so that it fits in with today’s society.  You might even have friends and neighbors who have bought into this view.  Some of us may not live long enough to see this but all these false teachings will die out.  The truth will prevail forever into the future.

Jesus Christ is unshakable so you should quit trying to shake Him.  Therefore, I say to you today, don’t be afraid to teach your children the truth as it comes from the Bible.  It will be something that they can use for their whole lives.  If I were a Christian book publisher, I would find or write a book that teaches reading and writing from the Bible.  I mean, what could be better than having a first grader’s first reading words be, “In the beginning.”  You should be teaching your children the power that comes from the Bible that can come from no other place.

So we now have a source for our teaching.  We also have a source for our rebuking.  This is the process of telling someone that something they are doing is wrong.  In order for this to work you need some sort of standard.  You need a moral code that comes from outside of yourselves.  You need the Bible to give you this standard.

The people who Timothy is dealing with need or will need rebuking.  This is where Timothy, the pastor, comes in.  We understand what the Scriptures are trying to tell us and we are supposed to see when things are going bad.  Then you are to tell the person or persons that it is wrong.  You are not supposed to go and see if we can bend the moral code so that you don’t offend anyone.  Sometimes even the pastor, even I need to be rebuked and it has happened.  I think I have grown from these experiences.

Sometimes all a person needs is a rebuke because they know that what they are doing is wrong and they know how to do it right.  It is getting to happen more often in our modern society that we don’t even know the correct behavior from wrongful behavior.  We have tried to raise at least one generation without the Bible and God.  So in these cases we also need an authority on behavior from a reliable source.  Self-help books won’t quite make the grade and that is why there are so many of them.  None of them quite work.  Laws of the land don’t work.  The only thing that has worked throughout the centuries is the Bible.  The Bible works all the time and every time.

So, we go to the Bible also for correction or to get back on the right track after we know we are on the wrong track.  You have learned not to kill, not to steal, not to covet and so on.  Ok, say that you are a compulsive coveter, how do you get out of this mess?  It is very simple.  What does the Bible tell us to do?  It says to go to Jesus.  Go to Jesus!  Go to Jesus in prayer.  Go to Jesus in reading the Scriptures.  Go to Jesus in your worship.  Go to Jesus on the tractor.  Go to Jesus in the truck.  The command is to go to Jesus no matter what.  Jesus is your source for correction.  If you are stuck in an alcohol habit, Jesus can get you out; the same way with a drug habit or a bad life style or anything.  Jesus can get you out.  Most of the time this doesn’t happen overnight, but if you keep at it, Jesus will get you back on track.  That is His promise to you.

Then we come right back to the beginning, almost, when we able to do training in righteousness.  This again is like teaching only I think that this might be a little bit more hands on type of training.  We are teaching again and we use the Bible as our standard but we are teaching by being the hands and feet of Jesus Christ in this world.  In other words, from John Wesley, do all the good you can, avoid all evil, and pray to Jesus on a regular basis.

God has made being a Christian as easy as possible.  It all boils down to “believe.”  Believe that the Bible is the inerrant inspired word of God.  There is proof of this in the Bible.  Believe this!  Believe that Jesus is exactly who He said He is.  There is also much more proof of this than not.  Then go and teach, rebuke, correct and train in the name of Jesus.  In other words, get to work!

Steve Shepherd tells the story of a retired farmer named Otto.  He and his wife, Elsie, didn’t have much and they now lived in a small house in town.  They really didn’t have a social life except they were very faithful to Christ first and then their church.  They never missed a service.  As a matter of fact, they never missed a Bible study, a fellowship a concert or anything that took place at the church. There were times when they were the only people from the church who showed up.

Now Otto couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket but he would still sing a solo on occasion.  Both Otto and Elsie were willing teachers.  If there was no one willing to teach a class, they would.  Amazingly, they weren’t bossy and didn’t try to run the church.  They were there to serve in any way possible.  People still remember Otto praying his prayer out loud, “Lord, we know not what tomorrow holds, but we know who holds tomorrow.”  Otto died of a heart attack while he was going to pick up a blind man for church one Sunday morning.  This was a man to look up to, to learn from.  This was a man who knew how to be the hands and feet of Jesus.

I would like us all to try to do this.  Try being the hands and feet of Jesus Christ.  Bless 3 people this week.  There is not a mother in the world that does not want the best for her children.  I have tried to show you over the course of all my preaching and teaching, that Jesus Christ is the way to the best life, the only way.  Don’t be afraid to follow Him.  It will make Jesus very happy and your mom, no matter where she is today, be very proud.  And thank you Jesus for this wonderful life.  Let’s pray.