The apostle Paul, who went from a persecutor of the church, to a hero of the underground Jesus movement, is now nearing the end of his life. He’s looking back on a life well lived. He’s looking back and considering all he’s been through, and all that he has become. And he is not doing this to brag, but to instruct the next generation of leaders who are called to continue to proclaim the gospel he loves.
We’re in the book of 2nd Timothy today, a letter Paul wrote most likely from prison, when he was in his sixties.
One day you will be in a hospital bed, surrounded by loved ones, looking back on your life. And you'll ask yourself, did I really give it all for Christ? Or did I miss the mark? Now rewind to today. How can you build your life in such a way, that when you're near death, you may look back and say to yourself: This was a victorious Christian life. I became all God wanted me to be.
If we want to start today, and begin moving in that direction, we may believe a simple statement: I can be everything God desires me to be.
Do you believe that? Or have you sold yourself on a mentality of defeatism? That you can’t ever quite get over that hump? I dare you today, to believe, God is able. I can be everything God desires me to be.
Or as Paul wrote: "I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength." -Phil 4:13
And in Hebrews 6:1a we get a picture of what that journey looks like: “Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity” -Hebrews 6:1a
So we want to discover today how to obey that teaching of going on into maturity, with the help of the belief that we can be all God has called us to be, for the purpose of living a victorious Christian life.
What does that word maturity mean in the Greek? It means perfect, mature, of full age. It implies spiritual completeness.
Pastor I can’t be "perfect," true, but we can be mature. This doesn’t mean we never make mistakes, it does mean we are generally mature in our attitudes and thinking. We’ve grown up. A child in elementary school can be expected to behavior as one who is in elementary school. But if an adult behaved as if they were in elementary school, we'd know there was something wrong. Similarly, we who are spiritual should not find ourselves behaving as spiritual grade-schoolers when we ought to have proceeded into adulthood. But the question is: How do we get there?
For our example today, we look to the life of Paul. Paul, writing to his mentor Timothy, who was a pastor at Ephesus, instructs him on Christian living. Paul has written about false teachers, which we discussed last week, but starting in verse 10, he reminds Timothy about his own life.
It says, “You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance,”
We’re looking at Paul’s way of life. And we want to mimic Paul, as Paul mimic’s Jesus. Paul’s way of life is first of all defined by his purpose. In anything we do in life, we have to know our purpose.
Why am I on Earth? What am I here to do? Your purpose on Earth is to love God with all your heart, and to love people around you. Those are the two commands Jesus gave us, defining the base of our purpose, love.
Paul’s love for Jesus who changed his life propelled him forward. It fed his entire being with passion, excitement, he was on fire for Jesus.
If you struggle in your walk with God, it may be because you lack a clear understanding of your purpose. Or, you once were excited, but the flames have died down.
Ask God today, pray right now even, and say Lord, I need you to set me on fire for Jesus. I need you to show me my purpose, so that passion can propel me forward, in Jesus name, amen.
Without knowing our purpose we won’t be able to do anything else on this list Paul gives us. But if we do, zeal will fill us. "Zeal" is a spiritual word, it means excitement.
But if you don't know your purpose you'll be rudderless in life. I see a whole generation of young people who were sold on the lie that life has no real purpose except that which we invent for it. And that philosophy has consequences, it has led to a generation of young men and women are feel like has no purpose. They just go to the bars, doom-scroll social media all day, play videogames constantly, and have no real goals or aspirations aside from hedonistic pleasure. And it's a lie. That philosophy is a lie. And it nearly destroyed me. It may have not been explicitly taught to me in school, but it felt "baked in" to everything propagated by our society, from television to schooling to modernism to scientism and everything in between. And it nearly destroyed me. It's destroying lives today, because people don't know their purpose. But once we know our purpose, who God is, who Jesus Christ is, and where history is going, we become dangerous to a broken system that pushes materialistic relativism.
Next, is faith. What is faith? It’s conviction in your heart of the truth of something. You believe it’s really true. You trust it’s true. You trust in God for your salvation. You believe essentially that Jesus is really real.
Purpose and faith hook together in your heart and they feed off of each other. You know your purpose is to love God and love others, it fills you with desire to do it, that’s coupled with your faith that Jesus is really real and the gospel is true. This produces a fire in your heart.
If you’re struggling with doubts that’s ok, go back to some apologetics, evidence for God, the Bible, the historical Jesus, and let it fuel your faith. Faith comes from the word of God as well, so study it carefully.
Next, patience. Waiting is the key fact of the Christian life. We are all waiting and waiting, often waiting in difficult circumstances.
Many of you are waiting on the Lord in difficult circumstances. You have chronic health issues that won't go away. You've got unsaved loved ones you've been praying for, for years. But you've kept your eyes on heaven, and waited on the Lord patiently. It is something we all need to understand and learn.
Next, flowing from purpose, through faith, across the great expanses of the wilderness of patience and longsuffering, we come to love. Love is at the very center of the gospel. For God so loved the world that he gave his son.
Everything we do as a Christian is meant to be done in love. Compassion, empathy, affection, it’s all based in love. But we are not able to love on our own.
We must receive love from God, and love God back. That happens in our relationship with Him. The best thing in the world I can suggest to you, is to sit alone with God, on a lawn chair outside, and just talk to Him for hours. And you will sense your heart filling with love. Then you’re able to pour out that love to others.
The key thing God is teaching each Christian is how to love Him and how to love other people. It’s everything. Love is everything. With the goal in mind of going on into maturity, make love your goal. Learning it, doing it, receiving it, giving it, and you’ll become mature in Christ.
Next, is faith. What is faith? It’s conviction in your heart of the truth of something. You believe it’s really true. You trust it’s true. You trust in God for your salvation. You believe essentially that Jesus is really real.
Purpose and faith hook together in your heart and they feed off of each other. You know your purpose is to love God and love others, it fills you with desire to do it, that’s coupled with your faith that Jesus is really real and the gospel is true. This produces a fire in your heart.
If you’re struggling with doubts that’s ok, go back to some apologetics, evidence for God, the Bible, the historical Jesus, and let it fuel your faith. Faith comes from the word of God as well, so study it carefully.
Next, patience. Waiting is the key fact of the Christian life. We are all waiting and waiting, often waiting in difficult circumstances.
Many of you are waiting on the Lord in difficult circumstances. You have chronic health issues that won't go away. You've got unsaved loved ones you've been praying for, for years. But you've kept your eyes on heaven, and waited on the Lord patiently. It is something we all need to understand and learn.
Next, flowing from purpose, through faith, across the great expanses of the wilderness of patience and longsuffering, we come to love. Love is at the very center of the gospel. For God so loved the world that he gave his son.
Everything we do as a Christian is meant to be done in love. Compassion, empathy, affection, it’s all based in love. But we are not able to love on our own.
We must receive love from God, and love God back. That happens in our relationship with Him. The best thing in the world I can suggest to you, is to sit alone with God, on a lawn chair outside, and just talk to Him for hours. And you will sense your heart filling with love. Then you’re able to pour out that love to others.
The key thing God is teaching each Christian is how to love Him and how to love other people. It’s everything. Love is everything. With the goal in mind of going on into maturity, make love your goal. Learning it, doing it, receiving it, giving it, and you’ll become mature in Christ.
Sometimes we face a challenge though. We've been hurt so badly in life, hurt in our child hood, hurt by circumstances, abused and mistreated by someone we should've been able to trust, that we've closed off our hearts from love. We've shut that gate. And now we find ourselves cold, numb, and unable to open that gate again. My challenge to you is to seek God on this one, and let Him take you on a healing journey. He can do a work in your heart, to open that door closed by pain, which will allow love to flow once again.
And endurance. We humans live within the confines of God’s system of time. Life may feel short, but it's also quite long. That’s why it’s so important to have the mindset of endurance, one day at a time.
When we look to the 1828 dictionary, the definition for endurance is “Continuance; a state of lasting or duration.” In the recovery community an individual who has stayed clean and sober another year often celebrates their sobriety date with cake and a coin citing how many years they’ve been sober.
Maybe we should do something similar in Christianity. How many years have you been a Christian? What date were you first baptized? We celebrate our marriage anniversaries. We should be celebrating the day we got saved. I was first baptized February 10th 2013, I still have the video of the testimony I gave that day, endurance is seeing the long game.
In NFL football each team is often focused in on the current drive down the field, play by play, how do we reach the end zone, but any good coach sees the long game, how many quarters are left, how many scores do I need to make to win this game, and if they’re a very good coach they’re thinking weeks ahead, they’re thinking months ahead, years ahead, to build their team to be Superbowl contenders.
Patience and endurance are connected. We talked about waiting in difficult circumstances, like many of you here deal with everyday. Endurance is like that, when we’re dealing with a difficulty long term, endurance biblically does two things: First, it accepts the reality of it and walks with it each day, without endlessly resisting it. Instead we embrace the difficulty and accept that it’s part of what we’re going through. Second, we don't let it weigh us down. We accept the situation, but we never surrender to despair. Never. We always keep our hope and joy strong.
Next, verse 11, “...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.”
Most of us will never experience the incredible persecutions Paul endured. In Antioch and Iconium Jews in the cities stirred up the crowds and drove Paul out of both cities. In Lystra it was even worse, Paul was surrounded, pelted with stones and his body dragged outside the city gates.
Yet Paul makes the vital statement, “The Lord rescued me from all of them.” I always expect in my walk with Jesus, when I face difficulties, that God will rescue me.
My wife Chelsey and I were really at the end of our ropes in Chicago, at our last posting. We felt trapped, empty, we felt like there was no future, no hope. We were so burned out. And we figured, we can’t ever leave The Salvation Army, I’m called here, so I’m stuck, my wife is stuck, despite how things have gone. But God said no, I’m calling you somewhere new, and we felt so seen by God, we felt so completely that he really did see us, and He made a new way for us. That’s who God is. He is a rescuer. But understand timing, endurance, patience, because I waited many years feeling hope fade before God moved.
Next, verse 12: “In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted...”
Now not everyone wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus. They want Jesus, but they don’t want to live godly. They want Jesus and sin too. They aren't going to be persecuted, necessarily. They aren’t going to heaven either.
But if you want to live a godly life in Christ, you will be persecuted. But the thing about persecution is, it actually helps us. It molds us, it shapes us, it matures us. It shows us how to respond the right way to critics and haters. That builds character.
Next verse 13: “...while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.”
From the ages of 18 to 27, I went from bad to worse, I went downhill so very fast. And when I was 27 I gave my life to Christ and ever since then, each year I become a better person. That’s God work in me. You see it in yourself as well, God molding and shaping you.
And endurance. We humans live within the confines of God’s system of time. Life may feel short, but it's also quite long. That’s why it’s so important to have the mindset of endurance, one day at a time.
When we look to the 1828 dictionary, the definition for endurance is “Continuance; a state of lasting or duration.” In the recovery community an individual who has stayed clean and sober another year often celebrates their sobriety date with cake and a coin citing how many years they’ve been sober.
Maybe we should do something similar in Christianity. How many years have you been a Christian? What date were you first baptized? We celebrate our marriage anniversaries. We should be celebrating the day we got saved. I was first baptized February 10th 2013, I still have the video of the testimony I gave that day, endurance is seeing the long game.
In NFL football each team is often focused in on the current drive down the field, play by play, how do we reach the end zone, but any good coach sees the long game, how many quarters are left, how many scores do I need to make to win this game, and if they’re a very good coach they’re thinking weeks ahead, they’re thinking months ahead, years ahead, to build their team to be Superbowl contenders.
Patience and endurance are connected. We talked about waiting in difficult circumstances, like many of you here deal with everyday. Endurance is like that, when we’re dealing with a difficulty long term, endurance biblically does two things: First, it accepts the reality of it and walks with it each day, without endlessly resisting it. Instead we embrace the difficulty and accept that it’s part of what we’re going through. Second, we don't let it weigh us down. We accept the situation, but we never surrender to despair. Never. We always keep our hope and joy strong.
Next, verse 11, “...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.”
Most of us will never experience the incredible persecutions Paul endured. In Antioch and Iconium Jews in the cities stirred up the crowds and drove Paul out of both cities. In Lystra it was even worse, Paul was surrounded, pelted with stones and his body dragged outside the city gates.
Yet Paul makes the vital statement, “The Lord rescued me from all of them.” I always expect in my walk with Jesus, when I face difficulties, that God will rescue me.
My wife Chelsey and I were really at the end of our ropes in Chicago, at our last posting. We felt trapped, empty, we felt like there was no future, no hope. We were so burned out. And we figured, we can’t ever leave The Salvation Army, I’m called here, so I’m stuck, my wife is stuck, despite how things have gone. But God said no, I’m calling you somewhere new, and we felt so seen by God, we felt so completely that he really did see us, and He made a new way for us. That’s who God is. He is a rescuer. But understand timing, endurance, patience, because I waited many years feeling hope fade before God moved.
Next, verse 12: “In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted...”
Now not everyone wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus. They want Jesus, but they don’t want to live godly. They want Jesus and sin too. They aren't going to be persecuted, necessarily. They aren’t going to heaven either.
But if you want to live a godly life in Christ, you will be persecuted. But the thing about persecution is, it actually helps us. It molds us, it shapes us, it matures us. It shows us how to respond the right way to critics and haters. That builds character.
Next verse 13: “...while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.”
From the ages of 18 to 27, I went from bad to worse, I went downhill so very fast. And when I was 27 I gave my life to Christ and ever since then, each year I become a better person. That’s God work in me. You see it in yourself as well, God molding and shaping you.
But it’s often difficult to accept, particularly within our own families, that they aren’t getting better, they are either staying the same it seems, or they seem to be getting worse.
It’s hard to watch as a Christian, because you’ve got the Master Physician working on you each day. And it’s awesome. But to see someone on the other side, without Christ, it’s hard. They don’t have Jesus. They are getting worse over time.
And there’s really no way to force someone to get Christ. As hard as we try to show someone, it’s their choice. Often attempts to force will actually make it worse. So honor their free will. Invite, encourage, pray for them, don’t try to force them. For children it’s a bit different of course, we can't force them to become believers, that's between them and God, but we can require them to come to church until they reach an age when they can make that decision themselves.
It’s hard to watch as a Christian, because you’ve got the Master Physician working on you each day. And it’s awesome. But to see someone on the other side, without Christ, it’s hard. They don’t have Jesus. They are getting worse over time.
And there’s really no way to force someone to get Christ. As hard as we try to show someone, it’s their choice. Often attempts to force will actually make it worse. So honor their free will. Invite, encourage, pray for them, don’t try to force them. For children it’s a bit different of course, we can't force them to become believers, that's between them and God, but we can require them to come to church until they reach an age when they can make that decision themselves.
Next, verses 14-15: “14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”
We understand that going on into maturity in Christ, growing up into our salvation is going to take many things, from purpose to persecutions, but ultimately it’s going to take an attitude of the mind. That attitude is continuance.
Keep moving forward. And what I think that means is this: Make it your goal to keep getting closer and closer to God. Never settle at a particular place. Say no, I’m going to go deeper.
I remember in Owosso we did a series on a book by a famous French contemplative writer named Jeanne Guyon. She wrote a book called Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ. We did a series going through the book, and it changed my life. Because it helped me realize one simple fact: The Christian life is about setting out on a journey to dive into the depths of the heart of God.
I’m not sure I can explain exactly what that means. But I think there’s a statement that Moses makes, he asks God, “Show me your glory.” He’s asking God to show him who he really is. He is looking at God and saying, who are you? Not just things about God, but looking at God himself. So often in church we talk about God, but we don’t actually turn to Him and say "Oh hi, you’re right here. Who are you really Lord?"
My wife wants to know people deeply. I love that about her. She doesn’t have a lot of time for small talk. She wants to go deep and see into your heart and talk about your deepest desires and hopes and dreams. And she wants to point you to Jesus Christ in all of it.
Take that desire, to know someone deeply, and point it toward God. I want to know you deeply, all about you, your very depths. It can be intimidating, to launch out in a little space ship toward such a huge God, but make that your journey. God I want to know you more, your mysteries, your ways.
Paul reminds Timothy here, continue forward in what you’ve been convinced of, and look to the holy scriptures, which will make you wise for salvation.
Next, famous scripture, verse 16-17: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work."
The goal is the servant of God, that’s you and me, may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. All scripture, which is breathed out by God, is useful in attaining this goal.
All of this put together means we are equipped by God’s word, ready then, trained, to do good things for God in the world. We know God, we love God, and we love his people. We've chased God, we know Him, we know His word, and it's fundamentally changed us over the years. We are built up. We are lit up. We are on fire. We are grown up. We are mature in Christ. And from all this flows a beautiful flood of love-filled good works. And God will not fail to reward us for this.
Bringing in Hebrews 6 again, which God linked with our passage today, verse 10: “God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.”
The reward is greater than we could possibly imagine and God will not forget our service. He is watching every single deed, every ounce of love we give, every tear we shed is stored in bottles, every detail of our journeys is recorded in books in heaven. God will not fail to richly reward your faithfulness in seeking Him. Believe that with all your heart. If you go on into maturity, your reward will be great. Why go on into maturity? It means becoming everything God has called you to be, and on judgment day that equals a life without regrets. I can say, "I was all in!" And I can look back with pleasure that I really did believe God could do it. And He did!
But the greatest reward of all will be, when you walk through that doorway into heaven, and you see your blessed living savior, waiting for you with arms wide open, and you’ll know, I became the man or woman He wanted me to be, and now… the adventure has only just begun. Hallelujah!
Let’s Review our Journey Today:
1. You can be everything God has called you to be - remember the goal, looking back at the end of our lives, we want to be able to say, I lived a victorious Christian life, obtaining that means changing the present
2. Go forward into maturity: see it as a journey toward God
3. We learned the equation for success: Purpose, Faith, Patience, Love, and Endurance
4. Expect persecution, but don’t fear it: It actually helps you
5. We may be improving each day in Christ: Don’t expect the same from the world, they are becoming worse and worse
6. See your Christian life as a journey toward the heart of God: “Who are you really Lord?”
7. Through God’s Word we are thoroughly equipped for this journey
8. God will not forget: The reward is greater than you can ever imagine
