Fan the Flame

One of my New Testament professors was a man named Don Carson. Doctor Carson was not only a great handler of the Bible, he was also a keen observer of culture and of history. And one of the things that I heard him say on more than one occasion was that we are never more than one generation away from losing the gospel. What he means is every generation of the church is responsible for handing the gospel on to the next generation of the church. And of course, the Bible is God’s unchanging truth for all generations. But if you think about how it is that you know what the Bible says, I’m sure you’ll agree that the church community throughout your life has helped you read it and understand it and live it out. Doctor Carson is simply saying that every generation of the church sets the gospel legacy for the next generation by how well or by how poorly it teaches the scriptures to them. And looking at this, the history of the church over the last 2000 years, Doctor Carson saw a three part cycle for the generations of the church. He’d say that the first generation would believe the gospel. They would embrace the gospel. They’d hold to the gospel and proclaim it. The second generation would be so thoroughly saturated by that first generation, so thoroughly saturated in the gospel that they would begin to assume it. And they would no longer proclaim it or even passionately live it out. It just sort of became like water to fish. It just became sort of the world they they lived in. And this would lead to a third generation who wouldn’t see the importance of the gospel, and they would deny it. I’ll leave you to think on whether or not that’s a helpful observation. That’s his sort of broad observation of history. And if you think it’s a helpful observation, I’ll leave it to you whether you can determine where the church in America is today.

But the one thing I know for certain, which is very clear, both just logically and how we see the world and also in the Bible, is that the next generation of the church is always shaped by the church that came before it. The next generation’s understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ rests firmly in the hands of fathers, mothers, pastors, teachers, small group leaders, counselors, every disciple making part of the body of Christ who is commissioned by God with the responsibility of giving that gospel to the church of the future. So today we are going to begin a summer series through 2 Timothy. A series entitled The Next Generation. This letter, 2 Timothy, is the final letter that Paul wrote that’s recorded for us in Scripture. He writes from prison to his friend, his son in the faith, Timothy, the young pastor who is now leading the church at Ephesus at that time.

This letter reads like the passing of a torch. Like Paul’s handing the torch off to Timothy. You’ll hear Paul give Timothy instructions for how to hand this gospel, proclaiming responsibility,on to the future generation of faithful church leaders that are in his church.

Church, I feel like the timing is perfect for a series like this for a number of reasons. We’ve been in a season of alarming growth here at Calvary. I’m sure you’ve noticed. I’m a little overwhelmed by it. As we head into the fall and we expand to three services and all that’s happening, I don’t want us to lose the plot. I don’t want us to get our eyes off focus of what we need to be about as a church. Expansion is great, but never at the cost of gospel fidelity. Our growth,what that means is that God is giving us an even greater role in the future church of Rochester. And that comes with great responsibility to share the gospel clearly and accurately. We need to hold, without reservation and without embarrassment to the historic gospel of Jesus Christ that is recorded to us in God’s Word that was preached by the apostles. And every single one of us needs to recognize our God given responsibility to use the gifts that he’s given us to invest the gospel into the next generation. So that the church of Rochester, 50 years from now, is even stronger and more vital than it is today.That would be the goal that we would look 50 years from now we would look back and say, wow, I’m so glad they left a legacy because look at the church in Rochester today.

So if you have your Bible, go ahead and open your Bible to 2 Timothy. 2 Timothy, it’s a short letter. If you have any trouble finding it, it’s right after 1 Timothy. I mean, it is. I’m going to read the whole introduction to the letter first. Then I want to show you how Paul looks at three sources of Christian heritage before he encourages Timothy to be the gospel heritage for the future church. And it’s easy to see these because Paul uses the word remember when he looks backward and when he looks to the present, and he uses the word remind when he looks to the future. And as we look at this, I want you to notice how Paul is thinking generationally, both looking at the past generations and also forward to the future generation. So beginning in verse one, Paul writes, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, according to the promise of 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 day and night. As I remember your tears, I long to see you, that I may be filled with joy. I’m reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and in 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.

So the first heritage that Paul mentions is his ancestry. He’s thinking here now of the generations of the Jewish nation that came before him that’s recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. And he mentions them as part of telling Timothy that he’s praying for him a lot. He’s saying, I’m praying for you constantly. Night and day is how he puts it. But Paul isn’t just telling Timothy, I’ve been praying for you to encourage him. He’s not telling him just because he wants him to know that, he’s telling him so that he knows that he’s thanking God for Timothy and for Timothy’s ministry. That ministry is part of a vast ancestral heritage. Basically, he’s saying, Timothy, I’m thanking God that you and I are part of a long history of service to the Lord, and that service to the Lord is so perfectly in line with that his ancestral heritage and the fulfillment of the promises contained in the scriptures, that Paul can say that he serves God with a clear conscience. Now, that’s saying quite a lot. That’s that’s a lot for Paul to say, I’m serving the Lord right now as I serve Jesus. I’m serving the Lord with a clear conscience. When you compare that with who Paul was before he met Jesus. Paul was a persecutor of the Christians before he met Jesus. He hated Christians. And the reason he hated Christians is because he believed that Christians were leading people astray from Judaism and the teachings of Scripture. Paul was a highly trained Pharisee, which is a sect of Judaism. Pharisees had twisted the Old Testament into a way of earning favor with God, a way of keeping the law of Moses. That was the way you earn favor with God. They didn’t they didn’t trust in God’s grace. They believed in rule keeping. And so when Jesus claimed to be the fulfillment of the Mosaic Law, and he preached salvation by grace through faith in him, the Pharisees saw him as leading people away from Jewish teaching. They didn’t see that what Jesus was actually doing was restoring a proper understanding of God’s law,that God had always been gracious and that salvation always came through faith like it did for Abraham and for all the other Old Testament believers. So the law pointed people to Jesus, and it prepared people for Jesus.

Pharisees didn’t see that way. And Paul, as he put it in his own words, he was the Pharisee of Pharisees. He was a big name in the Pharisaical world. But when Jesus radically inserted himself into Paul’s life, literally blocking his path on Paul’s way to persecute even more Christians, Paul had his entire worldview corrected. Jesus showed Paul that that he wasn’t imprisoning heretics. That’s not what you’re doing, Paul. What you’re doing is you’re persecuting the Lord himself. You’re waging war against the God that you think that you’re serving. Jesus corrected Paul’s misunderstanding of his own ancestry, and he realigned his thinking so that he could see that by serving Jesus, he was continuing the ministry of Adam and Abraham, Moses, David, all the prophets, all those Old Testament saints and covenant promises that were made to them are mentioned in Paul’s letters and they’re mentioned in his sermons in Acts. And what this means for us today, church, what that means for you and I today, is that our ministry of spreading the gospel of Christ rests on that same ancestral heritage.

We share the same heritage he does. Churches that preach Christ today and continue the ministry that began with with God’s creation of the world and was carried by the nation of Israel and was revealed to the world by Jesus and was established by the church for the last 2000 years. We’re all part of the same heritage. We all have it. Just like Paul, we too can thank God for all the gospel proclaiming churches that preach and share the gospel of Jesus and that open his word and handle that Word of God well. And that’s why when we open God’s Word here every week or in all of our groups, when we open God’s Word, we read it as God’s Word to us today. He’s speaking to us today. It’s the God breathed, collected works of our people. Of our heritage, the Body of Christ throughout all of human history. We share in that. So think of this heritage, this first one, as the deep and wide stream of God’s historical work in Christ throughout all of redemptive history. Here in 2024, we we are part of that. But there’s another way of looking at heritage, to look at the heritage of our faith. We see it in the second thing that Paul is reminded of, he’s reminded of Timothy’s tears. That seems to be a little strange, don’t you think? To mention that it’s something that you remember someone else doing? I remember you weeping openly.

But he’s saying that he remembers how close the two of them are. He remembers this wasn’t just a teacher student relationship. This was a father son relationship. You can

see up in verse two he refers to Timothy as my beloved child. That’s how we felt about him. Timothy is his Paul’s son in the faith. He’s been investing in Timothy ever since he met him on his second missionary journey. So Paul is now sitting in prison. He’s likely at this point in his life to be executed for his faith. And he longs to see Timothy so that he can be filled with joy he says. He probably never sees Timothy again after he writes this letter. Not in this life. Now, there’s nothing in this verse that commands us to do anything. You look at it, you read it. You’re not being told to do anything. But what we have here is a description of the bond that unity in Christ and ministry together forges between Christians. This is what it looks like.

The second heritage of Christianity is the family that we have with each other. This is why throughout the New Testament, you find references to other Christians as brothers and sisters in Christ, right? It’s why in our in our collective relationship with God, we are referred to as children of God. If you’re a follower of Jesus, you are a child of God. In 1 Corinthians 12:26, Paul says, when one member suffers, everybody suffers. And when one member is honored, everybody rejoices. Who does that? Family. Family does that. You go to one of these graduation parties recently? One of these graduation parties for a senior here at at Calvary. You show up there and it’s like a worship service is about to break out. It’s all Calvary people. Like, we already started the third service. Like it’s this the third service? Oh it’s not. Oh, this is your garage. That’s because the relationships that were growing here are like family with all of us investing in each other’s lives. And when this happens, there will be a there will be spiritual mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and grandmas and grandpas. There’s going to be mentors, teachers, counselors, people speaking into each other’s lives, building these relationships, and all these bonds will get forged. The church hangs out together and watches out for each other. You should find that there are people, at least a few people, who are investing time in helping you grow in Christ here at Calvary. But you should find that there are a few people who are looking to you to help them grow in Christ here at Calvary.

And those relationships aren’t just knowledge transfers, okay? They’re not just student teacher relationships. It’s not like stale sitting in a classroom listening to a professor. Those are life on life, family type relationships where God is both taught and he’s modeled in relationship. Now I can imagine that there are a couple of responses to what

I just said there that aren’t great. The first is the parent who says, you know, I have that relationship, but it’s just with my own kids. I’m focusing and investing all of my time on them, on my own kids. I’ve heard this response over the years, especially with people who don’t really want to connect relationally within the church family. And the problem is that that is half right. That’s really the problem with it. It’s hard to refute because it’s half right. The investment of the gospel from parents to children is extremely important. It’s the third heritage that we’re going to look at here in just a minute. But this is not either or. It’s both and. The dynamic of the body of Christ is a family of families. Discipleship is accomplished through a whole web of family relationships, and we all need to be a part of that because we are each other’s inherited family. If you pull yourself out of that to focus on your own kids, think of it this way. You are depriving others of the gift of God that has been given to them in you. Do you follow that? God gave a gift to other people in our church. That gift was you. You’ve decided not to give it. You should have some people in the church with whom you have a Paul like and a Timothy like relationship. And that’s the first kind of not so great response. The second, sort of not great response to this is, hey, that sounds great, Kyle, but that is not my experience of church at all. I have never experienced church that way. It’s never been like that for me. And I understand that. I was reflecting this week on why that is, why it is that so many of us do not have that experience in church. And it seems to me that there are quite a number of reasons why that would be. Can I just rattle off a bunch of them to you? Just give you a bunch of brainstorms that I had this week? Let’s just talk about the church side. On the church side of this, I can see that the size of the church can overwhelm people. Getting to know people in small groups can take a pretty long time. Programs can be time consuming, and they might not fit everybody’s schedules. On the individual side, some people just don’t want to invest in other people. Some expect the church to do the work of making relationships for them, which is impossible, by the way. Some resist truly being known by others. They have kind of a arm’s length relationship with other people. You can kind of know me, but not really know me. Some see the church as an event that they go to, and not a body to which they belong. And there’s cultural factors too. On the cultural side of this thing, we have a tendency to quickly dispose of relationships that we don’t like, right? That’s the way we operate now. We have problems. Get rid of that relationship. Problem solved. The internet robs us of the ability or even the desire to connect with people face to face. There are probably dozens of other factors, but the point is, we have

to work hard. We have to work hard to be the biblical church. So we as a church need to work hard at building structures of relationship so that those relationships flourish, not just a factory of religious goods and services, but a way of actually being a church for one another. And all of us, as individuals within the church, need to work hard to overcome our own tendency to isolate and excuse ourselves from being the family of Christ that we are called to be. Because building this relational body of believers is part of how we leave the gospel legacy to the next generation.

Here’s the third heritage. And that’s the heritage of family discipleship. Paul says that he’s reminded of Timothy’s sincere faith that he first saw in Timothy’s grandmother, Lois, and also in his mother, Eunice. You can read in Acts chapter 16 about Paul meeting Timothy in the town of either Derbe or Lystra. It’s a little bit confusing there, a little unclear as to where he actually lived. Paul planted churches in both of these towns that were right next to each other, and both of them are located in modern day Turkey. If you’re interested. It says that Timothy was the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer. So here we learn that her name was Eunice. And Paul got to know grandma Lois too. They’re both Jewish background believers, so they just like Paul, have now seen that the alignment of their pre-Christian Jewish faith comes into alignment with a fulfillment in Christ. Today, Jewish community believers refer to themselves as Messianic Jews or, and I kind of like this phrase. Completed Jews. Which I think is that’s a very clear way of showing that continuity. By remembering the sincere faith of Timothy’s mom and grandma, we get another aspect on spiritual heritage. We get the family. The family. We often say around here at Calvary that the first circle of discipleship that anyone has is their nuclear family.

It’s the believers who are at home when the pandemic shut down the world. Remember that? Sorry to bring it up. But when when the pandemic shut down the world and caused us not to be able to do Sunday morning services, ali, my daughter, who was only nine at the time, said, that’s okay. We’ve got a pastor right here. That’s actually true, though, of all Christian homes. That’s true of all Christian homes. See, parents are the first shepherds. You’re the first pastors. Dads and moms hold the most key position of discipleship in the lives of their children. When you invest the gospel in your kids, you are literally rearing the next generation of the church. That’s what you’re doing. And you

have them far more than any program here at Calvary could possibly have them, or should possibly have them. A few hours on Sunday morning and a couple hours on Wednesday night. Those are that’s great, but they’re learning about God from you every day. And we recognize and we embrace that as a church. It’s why one of our core values here at Calvary is strengthen families to disciple the next generation. So the church comes alongside the family and supports it and fuels it and encourages it. Now, just knowing how the gospel works in families in general, as you look at reality, you might say, well, you know, Kyle, that’s great for Timothy.

That’s great that he had that. But that doesn’t describe my family at all. Some of you are first generation Christians. You know you don’t have a whole family, nuclear family, of blood family to look at that you meet with through the year and say, these people support me in my faith. Some of you are brand new to this. And I say, Praise God that you get to be the first generation in your family. You have the opportunity to change your whole family tree. You are in a unique position to be able to set the course for a whole generation of your family, perhaps even having influence on the older generations of your own family. But before you lament not getting to have what Timothy had. Okay, before you go, oh boy, I wish I had what Timothy had all this great family heritage. Before you lament that, let me point out to you that Timothy’s dad was not a believer. Timothy grew up in a mixed faith home. If you go to Acts chapter 16, it says specifically that his mom is a Jewish believer, but that his dad was a Greek, not a Greek believer, a Greek. That’s probably because Eunice came to faith after she was married and his dad didn’t trust in Christ, at least not at the time of this writing.

Okay. So when Paul refers to Timothy as his beloved child, he’s saying he sits in the role of spiritual father for a young man who did not have a spiritual father, he didn’t have that at home. And I point this out to you, because I don’t want you to think that the Bible presents some kind of an ideal family situation for everybody. That’s just not the case. It’s not what the Bible is saying. Bible’s very real. Jesus told us the gospel is going to divide families. For families to be divided over Christ today is unfortunate, but it is not unexpected. It’s fully expected. And this is where the symbiotic relationship between the church and the family becomes so vital. We need spiritual fathers and mothers to disciple their own kids, but we need those same fathers and mothers to invest in the

greater church family too. The next generation of the church needs a tightly woven, committed family of believers that are willing to invest heavily, both in their nuclear families and in the fuller family of the church, because we don’t want anybody to slip through the cracks. And you may find yourself being a spiritual mother or father for a younger person, or a newer person to the faith. And you absorb them into your spiritual family, and you help them grow and they become part of your legacy.

You get to be part of their spiritual heritage. So what do we do? What do we do,given these sources of spiritual heritage? If this is what the the family of God looks like, here’s what Paul tells Timothy and what he tells us to do. We need to fan into flame the gift that God has given us. So by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we each have been given gifts that are to be used in the work of raising up the next generation of the church. Think of these like coals in you, smoldering embers in you. You blow on these embers and the fire pops up. The fire comes to life when you fan them. A couple of years ago, I went to I went to a the Boundary Waters with a with a bunch of guys from Calvary. And it started off pretty nice, but it pretty quickly became 2.5 hours of canoeing in a driving downpour. I mean, you recently, you know what I’m talking about, a driving downpour. This was followed by another couple of hours trying to set up camp in a typhoon. I thought we were going to blow away, so we finally got the whole thing set up. We’re huddled under the tarp. We’re sitting in a slurry of mud. There’s literally, like, rivulets of of water pouring through this tarp, and we’re all huddled underneath there.

Wayne Bowers is trying to cook dinner. God bless that man. We were like World War I foxhole soldiers. You know, John Potter and I decided to make the smallest fire you have ever seen in your life. So we had this little pile of sticks, and I was lighting paper that we had in a plastic bag, and I was blowing on it, and he was adding the wood. Now, there was some tension over whether it needed more air or more fuel. I was team air. He was team sticks. But do you know what that fire needed? Nothing. Because you can’t light water. No amount of effort on our part. Air or sticks was going to light water on fire. You just can’t do it. If I’m right, there are a lot of Christians who think that their efforts to get involved in making disciples would be like lighting water. They think that they don’t have any God given gifts. Or enough Bible knowledge or whatever it is. So getting involved in ministry would be a lot of energy toward futility. Church, this passage that we’re looking

at this morning, this passage teaches us the problem is exactly the opposite of that. The problem isn’t that God hasn’t given gifts. It’s that they lie dormant in God’s people. The coals are hot. The flame is simmering. God has never justified and sanctified a person into his church to whom he did not give white hot embers of spiritual gifting intended for use.

But there are plenty of folks in the church who refuse to fan them for one reason or another. Paul says that the Holy Spirit operating in us shouldn’t cause us to be fearful or timid or lax. The spirit operating in us should cause us to work in power, in love and self-control. All the things that we need to be able to make disciples of the next generation. Church as we head into the next season of ministry this fall, leaning hard into the growth that God has given us, we need this whole church body to fan into flame the gift that God has given to you. We need you to pray and think and act in faith. We need more people using their gifts. We’ve had a crush of new members in the last year. It’s hundreds of people have either begun or completed the process. To become a member, we need you to find your role as the disciple making mothers and fathers to the next generation of the church. On July 14th, you heard it mentioned earlier, we’ll be having a ministry fair called Fan the Flame, where you get to learn all about the various ways that you can serve here at Calvary. We need people. We need people to invest in children and youth.

We need you to invest in children and youth. We need small group leaders. You know how many people are waiting to be in a small group? We need small group leaders, people willing to say, I’ll open my home. I’ll open the Bible, I’ll lead the way. We need more men training to be shepherd elders. We need women to lead Bible studies and to organize ministries. You know, our VBS this year was bigger than it’s ever been, but we had a hard time staffing it. Calvary Rochester is coming to us. They’re coming to us. And so I’m going to ask you between now and July 14th to pray. I want you to pray. And I want you to consider what gifts God has given you that need to be fanned into a roaring flame for his glory. At the risk of throwing too many metaphors at you, I want to close with an image that is very near to my heart. When I think about where we are in church history, when I just sort of think of the broad aspects of where we are in church history, I think of a theatrical stage. Some of you know, I enjoy stage acting. And so this is why this one hits home for me. See, when you’re on stage, you’re telling a story. Picture off here on stage

left, there are a number of actors who already performed.

They had their time on stage. In fact, the story that we’re now telling on stage is a continuation of the actors who have gone on, who have left. But over here on stage right, we have a large group of actors, and they’re waiting to come on. They’re listening for their cue. And at the right moment, they will step out on the stage, and they will play their role, and they will pick up the story where we left it. They will continue what we leave behind. When our time on stage is over,when our role has come to its conclusion, we will exit stage left and the only thing that we will leave behind is the story the next set of actors will carry forward. What will we leave them? What are we going to leave them? Are we going to leave them a tragedy that has to be fixed? We’re going to leave them a comedy that made light of everything? Are we going to leave them the serious and hopeful drama of the gospel? See, that’s where we are right now. Because we’re alive. Because we’re here, because we’re breathing. We’re on stage now. In this drama of human history that God is writing. God is deemed in his sovereign wisdom that our time in church history is now. What story will we tell? What work will we do? What legacy will we leave behind for the next generation? Let’s pray.