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II Timothy 1:1-12
Ground to a halt?
Every Christian has ups and downs.
Some downs are deeper than others... but we bounce back.
Some downs are more worrying: some experiences re-shape the landscape inside our heads, and we find our feelings about the Lord, the church and our friends have changed but they won’t go back to the way they were before. We are down... but we won’t bounce back.
Timothy, the man who gave his name to this letter, was in this situation.
This letter was written by a skilled Christian mentor to jump-start another leader who was hesitant to move forward: his personal growth had levelled out[1] and his public ministry was starting to flag[2].
Two forces were at work re-shaping his ‘inner landscape’ and Timothy could do little about it. Let’s identify these two influences.
Timothy’s inner landscape: evaporating courage
When you read a New Testament letter you are, in effect, listening to half a telephone conversation. You have to try to reconstruct the other half! So let’s have a go: imagine you are on a train listening to someone on their mobile and they say this, “That’s why I am reminding you... fan the flames, you have got it in you! You don’t have a timid spirit!” Overhear a conversation like this and it is natural to deduce that the person on the other end of the ‘phone is struggling to step up to the plate and meet some challenge – you also know that the person speaking really believes in that person and wants them to go for it. That is what is hapenning in verses 6-7.
Timothy was an enthusiastic believer with lots of promise when Paul first met him (Acts 16:1-5). He had travelled with Paul and experienced the apostle’s high-risk lifestyle first-hand. But you need to know this: courage evaporates. People get older and more cautious, painful experiences are not easily forgotten and make us unwilling to repeat the experience. Your nerve goes.
But timid Christians are pretty useless – the Spirit of God does not give timidity he wants us to be courageous. Courage does not just arrive out of the blue when you need it, it is formed in a heart that decides in the easy times what it will do when the going gets tough. That is how Paul challenges Timothy (7): it is as though he was saying, “Sort this out now, not later!”
Earlier this month (April 2009) a beauty pageant star called Carrie Prejean was in the final of the Miss USA contest when one of the judges asked her whether she aproved of gay marriages. This would have been a great moment for Miss Prejean to go with the flow and say what she was supposed to say, but she didn’t. As some of the audience started to boo and hiss she politely replied that the believed that marriage was meant to be between a man and a woman. Now for a girl whose ambition is life is to be popular, that was courage. My guess is that her moral clarity came from a heart already convinced that popularity was not the greatest goal – personally I was impressed.
Sort this out for yourself now. God has given you his Spirit and it is a courageous Spirit. Choose courage.
There are three spiritual assets that give us courage in the teeth of challenges (7):
Power – whatever God calls you to do he will give you the power to do it.
Love – Imagine being powerful but love-less! God’s power is not usually shown in pyrotechnics (though they will have their day) it is shown in acts of love and tenderness.
Self-control – the New Testament writers often speak of the Spirit giving us self-control (see Galatians 5:22). The Spirit does not want to take away your dignity and use you like a glove puppet, he wants to give you the dignity of being in control but using his resources to do God’s work.
For whatever reason, the once corageous Timothy was now nervous of the struggle that lay ahead of him. Paul confronted this head on and reminded him of the resources availabe to recover his courage.
Timothy’s inner landscape: growing shame
In a section which begins, “Do not be ashamed” (8) and ends with “I am not ashamed” (12) Paul puts his finger on the two sensitive issues in Timothy’s psyche (8) and explains why Timothy can be comfortable and not ashamed.
What ‘sensitive issues’ would these be?
Roman culture was all about success: and success was a sign that the gods were on your side. This was a society with a low tolerance of ‘loosers’, being a looser meant either that the gods had dumped you or even that your god was a looser. Who wants a looser for a god?
Sometime in the late first or ealy second century a bored Roman scratched a cartoon into a wall of a house on the Palatine hill. A man stands with his arm upraised worshipping another man on a cross, except that the man on the cross has the head of a donkey. Underneth the drawing is a caption, “Anaxamenos worships his god”. It’s a pretty neat distillation of everything a first century Roman would have thought about Christians: a community of loosers worshipping a looser.
When you live in an atmosphere like that it is easy to begin to feel that the things you are meant to stand for are flimsy and unreal: you go quiet when people star to talk about them: you are ashamed.
First problem: in a city where Jesus looked like a looser (Roman Ephesus), Timothy was being intimidated – going quiet.
Second problem: Paul is in prison, so what does that say about Paul?
Exactly... now read verses 8 to 12: make sense?
Let’s get a few things absolutely straight. First, it is not cool to be a Christian, it never has been and it never will be. So if you are going to be a Christian forget being ‘cool’ – handsome men will think you are silly, pretty girls will think you are weak. There is only one way through this – boldness!
More than this: if you manage to pull off the oil and water combination of being a Christian and being cool, then having anything to do with any kind of Christian community (like a CU or a church) will have a major impact on your levels of coolness because there are so many embarrassing people in the church. As you well know associating with embarrassing people is social suicide.
There’s only one way to deal with this: humility, even the un-cool are your brothers and sisters and have a place in your life. Do not be ashamed.
It is worth a moment to look at Paul’s description of what Jesus has achieved and our place in it:
- God has a strategy in human history and you are now part of it (9)
- When Jesus died, death died and now has no power over me or any of my looser friends (10)
- Being part of this involves suffering – (8 & 11)
- The more you know Jesus the more comfortable you are with suffering and shame (12)
Finally, everybody needs a mentor
Paul was Timothy’s spiritual lifeguard, and every one of us needs on of those. He and Timothy had a close, but not unique relationship. This close pairing of two people to care spiritually for one-another is a powerful tool for growth and development. In this letter you see how it works.
Can I encourage you to make a priority of finding and growing a relationship like this?
[1] II Timothy 1:6
[2] II Timothy 4:1-2