WWUTT 667 By the Will of God?

If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you did not come into this faith on your own. You didn't just one day decide, hey, I'm going to believe. Somebody preached the gospel to you and you believed it.

And this was all according to the will of God when we understand the text.

The Will of God in Coming to Faith

This is when we understand the text studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ. Find all our videos online at www .wutt .com as well as links to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe Hughes.

Thank you, Becky. We have begun a study in the book of 2 Timothy, and I'm going to come back to the beginning here, starting in verse 1 and reading through verse 7. Paul introduces himself, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus.

To Timothy, my beloved child, grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day.

As I remember your tears, I long to see you that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and now, I am sure, dwells in you 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 God gave us a spirit, not of fear, but of power and love and self-control. What an affectionate beginning to this letter, and not just in the beginning of the letter from verses 3 through 7, but even in the greeting, the first two verses.

Paul’s Apostolic Calling and the Greeting of 2 Timothy

I think it's pretty common for us to skip the greeting, or at least we don't pay much mindfulness to it. A lot of those greetings at the start of the epistles sound the same. Most of them begin with that phrase, grace to you.

That's why John MacArthur's ministry is called Grace to You, because in these instructional letters that fill up most of the New Testament, that's how those letters begin, a greeting of grace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

There are some similarities to these greetings, but there are also some differences. It's not just your usual dear so-and-so. There is a reason why Paul has chosen the words that he has chosen. So pay attention to that any time that you begin a study reading in these epistles.

Here, Jesus mentions the name of Christ Jesus three times in these two verses. And just that way, Christ Jesus, Christ meaning Messiah, and Jesus being the one who will save his people from their sins.

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus, to Timothy, my beloved child, grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

You get the distinct impression that Paul wants to remind Timothy that we do this, this mission that we are on, this calling to spread the gospel, we do this for Christ Jesus. We do this in the name of Christ Jesus.

We do this because we have been called and appointed by Christ Jesus. Paul, in particular, being an apostle, he was personally appointed by Christ. Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus, as we read about in Acts chapter nine, when Paul was on his way to persecute Christians there, to gather them up and bring them back to Jerusalem.

And Jesus appeared to him on that road, blinded him, sent him into Damascus, then appeared to Ananias, said, you're going to go baptize this man. For I have chosen him to be my messenger to the Gentiles.

He is going to take the gospel message into the entire world. So Paul being personally appointed by Christ for this work means that Paul was a carrier of the word of Christ. What Paul said was the word of Jesus.

Some of you who follow me on Twitter, you might know that I received a critical email from someone recently, and I posted a portion of that email in which the person said to me that I make an idol of the epistles.

He said, he went on to say, you deify a collection of inconsistently translated letters written by fallen men, especially Saul, meaning Paul, as if they were the words of God himself. They're your golden calf, you heretic.

I couldn't seem to get him to understand that the word of an apostle was the word of Christ. The apostle Peter equated the words of Paul with the rest of scripture. We have this in second Peter three, 15 through 16, Peter said, and count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother, Paul also wrote to you, according to the wisdom given him as he does in all his letters.

When he speaks in them of these matters, there are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do the other scriptures. So there you have Peter equating Paul's word with scripture.

And Paul did the same thing in his letter to the Thessalonians. This would be second Thessalonians chapter three. He says that if anybody does not receive what we say in this letter, take note of that person and have nothing to do with him, that he may be ashamed.

Do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother. And the reason why a person would be excluded from the church for not listening to this letter from the apostle Paul is because it wasn't just Paul they were rejecting.

It was Christ in Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, or at least the second letter that we have in canon, second Corinthians. Most of that letter, Paul is giving an apologetic defense for his appointment as an apostle of Jesus Christ.

So Paul answers there the very criticism that this man was making in this email that he sent to me, that he is indeed an apostle and he was appointed by Christ to carry his name, his word to the nations.

As Jesus said to Ananias, Acts 9, 15 through 16, he, meaning Paul, is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.

And even here at the very beginning of second Timothy, Paul refers to himself as that apostle by the will of God. This wasn't something that Paul was aspiring toward. It wasn't some dream that he had to become somebody who would suffer for the sake of the name of Christ.

It is by the will of God that he is who he is, a carrier of the word of Christ to the world, according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus. And that's what it was that Paul proclaimed. The gospel that he shared, the good news of the life that is given in Christ by his death on the cross and resurrection from the grave.

This is the message that Paul shared. And then says to Timothy, my beloved child, grace, unmerited favor, mercy, the kindness of God that we don't deserve and peace, the reconciliation that we have with God through the sacrifice of Christ from God, the father and Christ Jesus, our Lord.

This is the meat of just this greeting that we have here in just these two verses and how precious these words would have been to Timothy as this is one of the last letters that Paul wrote. Now, I don't believe it was the last letter that Paul wrote, but it is the last one that we have record of.

Why would I say that? I don't think it's the last letter that Paul wrote. Well, because when we get to the end of this letter, thinking of Second Timothy 4, 13, Paul says the following. When you come.

So he's begging Timothy to come to him while he's in prison in Rome, awaiting his sentence to be martyred. When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books and above all the parchments.

Now the parchments were rolled up scrolls in which a person would put their writing materials so they would lay their writing materials right there on the parchment and then roll it up. So Paul was asking Timothy to bring his writing tools so that he could write more.

And there may have been other letters. They may have been more personal in nature. It may not have been large church letters that Paul was sending out to some of the churches, but may have been writing some short things that were sent out to particular teachers and whatever happened of those letters.

We don't know. There is no record of those. So what survived of the works of Paul? This is the last one, at least in the chronology, not in canon because we still have Titus and Philemon to go. But as far as what Paul wrote, if you were to put that in a chronological order, Second Timothy would be last.

And we have reason to believe that maybe he even wrote more after this. But this would have been the last letter that Timothy would have received from Paul before he went to Paul and brought his writing utensils to him.

So this was very precious to Timothy to have gotten this letter. Likely Timothy had heard about Paul being imprisoned again. And so now he gets this letter where Paul is calling upon Timothy to go to him, instructing him in what he's going to continue to do in this work in Ephesus because Timothy would have gone back there.

As Stephen mentioned yesterday, Timothy was martyred at Ephesus. So he goes to see Paul in Rome and then he's sent back to Ephesus where he continues this work. So these instructions that Paul gives are for Timothy to continue in the gospel that he was taught that has saved him and has the power also to save his hearers.

Timothy’s Faith, His Family, and the Faithfulness of Earlier Believers

And Paul makes reference to Timothy's very faith here in this introduction. In verse three, I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors. Even those who before Christ served God, they serve the same God that we do now.

It's just that they were looking towards something that had not yet come to pass, which was the coming of the Messiah and the work that he would do on the cross and his resurrection from the grave. The prophets and the law bore witness to it, but they didn't understand it, not until it happened and God opened their minds to understand what it was that had been done, as we read about at the end of the book of Luke.

And so there were things that were spoken about by the prophets and the apostles. They had a hope and an anticipation of what God was going to fulfill in Christ, even though they didn't get to see it or didn't understand it, yet they were servants of God.

So Paul makes reference to the ancestors that he had who served God, because it is by their faithfulness that Paul has come to the place where he's at as a servant of Jesus Christ. He wouldn't be a servant of Christ if it wasn't for those faithful who had gone before him.

We have a reference to those heroes of the faith in Hebrews chapter 11. And by the end of that particular chapter, verses 39 and 40, we read the following. After the writer of Hebrews has gone through laying out all of these heroes of the faith that are mentioned in the scriptures in the Old Testament, we read at the end of that chapter, and all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us, they should not be made perfect.

And so we owe the faith that we have now to the faithfulness of our ancestors in spirit, those who were obedient to the Lord even before Jesus came. And so Paul is saying, I have salvation today because of their faithfulness, all according to the will of God.

And so it's very likely here that Paul is making this reference to Timothy to say, you have your faith because of me. And so this is all a work of God. None of us can take credit for this. It is all the work of God.

Salvation is from beginning to end the work of God. He will say to Timothy a little bit later on, 2 Timothy 1 .9, that God saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works, but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, and which now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

And so even here, he makes that reference to the faithfulness of his ancestors, that he has come to faith because of men who have gone before him. And so likewise, Timothy has come to faith because of them as well.

And Paul says that he is a servant with a clear conscience. Remember, this is a farewell letter. This is Paul saying that I am about to go be with the Lord, which he is looking forward to. He's about to receive his reward for his faithfulness, preaching the gospel as Christ had appointed him to do.

So he is in prison where he is at, not because he is guilty of any wrong, but he is there with a clear conscience. And he says, as I remember you constantly in my prayers, night and day. This is more of just pouring out that affection that he has for Timothy.

And we often see this affection, this affectionate side of the apostle Paul, even when he is writing of somebody and not necessarily to somebody. He will talk about the emotion that he has for them. In Philippians chapter three, he mentions those whose God is their belly.

And because they do not worship Christ, they will go to destruction. And Paul says, I remember them with tears. He mourns over those who have given in to false teaching, does not want them to die, but that they would come to repentance and know the Lord Jesus Christ before they face the day of judgment.

And so Paul is very affectionate, endearing in his letters. How much do you show emotion in your prayers for those that you are praying for? I mean, does it cause you anxiety, the desire that a person would come to faith or a desire that a person would keep the faith?

Paul said this in 2 Corinthians 11 verse 28, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. He has this, this anxiousness in his soul that these people whom he has preached the gospel to, who stopped worshiping idols and worship the true God, the Lord Jesus Christ, that they would remain in the faith and that there are others who would come to the faith.

Those who rejected the faith and have have fallen into false teaching, that they would repent of that and return to the faith. Paul had a yearning in his soul for these who had heard the gospel. And so he had a yearning for Timothy, his true child in the faith.

He says, as I remember your tears, verse four, Timothy likewise had an affection for Paul as his spiritual son, Paul looking at Paul as though he were his father. Paul says, I long to see you that I may be filled with joy.

I am reminded of your sincere faith. Paul made an appeal to his sincere faith. And now he's talking about Timothy's sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice.

And now I am sure dwells in you as well. So here Paul, once again, is making reference to those who have gone before Timothy, that it was the will of God that even they would come to be believers so that they would teach Timothy and Timothy would become a believer because of the faithfulness of these women, Lois and your mother Eunice.

When I preached over this book in Second Timothy, this has been several years ago now. I think it was at the start of 2015 when I finished up a study of Second Timothy. But I remember in starting the preaching through this letter, I had a grandmother in my church who had a daughter who was a single mom and she had three daughters of her own.

And I remember there being a struggle in that family about teaching their girls about Christ, that they might come to know the Lord, even though they've not had a father to be a good father figure to them, to teach them discipline and teach them about God, but that their daughters would come to know Christ because of the grandmother's faith and the mother's faith.

And I remember preaching through this section and looking directly at them and saying, the faith of a grandmother and the faith of a mother is the reason why Timothy, one of the heroes of the faith that we have listed in the New Testament, became a Christian and one of the most influential writers in the New Testament.

Some of the letters of Paul were written by Timothy. Paul may have been the voice that Timothy wrote down. He was just writing what Paul told him to write, but it was by Timothy's pen. So he became one of the most influential writers of the New Testament because of the faith of his grandmother and the faith of his mother.

So single moms out there, don't lose heart for as their faith contributed to Timothy's faith. So you in your faithfulness can raise up godly men and women, even if you are going at this alone. Paul says, I am sure this faith dwells in you as well.

He had seen the evidences of a genuine faith in the heart of Timothy. Pray for your sons and daughters. Pray, pray, pray for them. Be faithful to the Lord and the gospel and do not neglect to teach your children.

They can come to the faith because of your faithfulness. In verse six, Paul says, for this reason, I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God because of people who have labored for you. Paul is labored for him, his grandmother, his mother labored for him for this reason, because you have people that are looking up to you and depending on you, not the least of which is the church that you are pastoring there in Ephesus.

I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. Now, when we talked about this while we were in first Timothy, I mentioned that a lot of teachers will say, we don't know what that gift is.

I believe we do know what that gift is. It was the gift of preaching and teaching that Timothy had exactly the reason why Paul sent Timothy there to Ephesus. And Timothy apparently had been given this gift because of the blessing of the apostle Paul through the laying on of my hands.

For God gave us a spirit, not of fear. Do not be afraid. Don't be afraid because I'm in prison. It's like Paul said to the Philippians, don't be discouraged because I'm here. As a matter of fact, the gospel is even spreading around in the palace guard because I'm here because I'm being persecuted for the gospel.

So likewise, Paul saying to Timothy, do not be afraid, even though I'm in prison, even though you will face many hardships, even while you're there in Ephesus, God gave us not a spirit of fear. Remember that Paul told Timothy in the previous letter, first Timothy 6, 12, fight the good fight of the faith.

So likely the kind of fear we're talking about here in second Timothy one, seven is a cowardice that fills a soldier on the battlefield, causing him to run away from the fight. Well, that is not the spirit that we've been given for.

As Paul says in Romans one, 16, I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to all who believe. So this is the spirit that is in the heart of the believer, a spirit, not of fear, but of power, a spirit of love.

It is the hallmark of a Christian that they have a growing love for God and for the people of God. We have a spirit, not of fear, but of power and love and self-control. God has given us in our hearts, the ability to resist temptation in this world and the schemes of Satan and cling to Christ and follow the will of God.

So as Paul has commissioned Timothy in this way, we must know it applies to us as well. God gave us a spirit, not of fear, but of power and love and self-control. Let us pray. Our gracious God and heavenly father, we thank you for the salvation that we've been given in Christ.

There was somebody who was likely a faithful servant of Christ themselves who preached to us the gospel that caused us to turn from sin and believe in Christ and so be saved, not because of any work of our own, but because of your own purpose and grace.

And so Lord fan into flame, this faith that we have been given by the spirit of God, that we may grow in it more and more, and that we would understand the spirit that is within our hearts is not one of fear so that we have nothing to fear of the world, that no man can do anything to us for we are secure, safe, sealed by the Holy Spirit in the hand of Christ and of our father in heaven.

Help us to be reminded that the spirit that is within our hearts is one of power and love and self-control and help us to grow in each one of these things as we pursue godliness in this present age. We pray and ask these things in Jesus name.

Amen.

Fan Into Flame the Gift of God and Live Without Fear

This has been When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabriel Hughes. For all of our podcasts, episodes, videos, books, and more, visit our website at www .utt .com. If you'd like to submit a question to this broadcast or just send us a comment, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com and let your friends know about our ministry.

Join us again tomorrow as we grow together in the study of God's word when we understand the text.