Preach the Word

Well, I want to start by thanking our preaching team for doing such a great job this summer. Preaching through 2 Timothy. The series addresses one of the most important aspects of the mission of the church, and that’s making sure that there’s a strong, gospel centered, Christ exalting church for all of those who will come after us. 150 years from now, no living person will know the names of anyone in this room. I mean, how many non-famous people can you name from 150 years ago? Exactly. You see what I’m saying? Our legacy won’t be because of our fame. It’s going to come from the investment of faith that we leave to the next generation. Who will be charged to leave it to the next generation. And one of the values we have here at Calvary is developing leaders, and that includes preachers. So I’m thankful for the good work of our preaching team and how much they work to sharpen one another’s sermons, to prepare to teach this summer. And by doing that, it also gave me a chance to travel with other pastors to hike the Alps. A very strange sentence to come out of my mouth. Actually. I almost survived the trip so close, but it was very hard and I’m glad I did it, once. But now because of that, you get to endure illustration after illustration… I woke up one morning cresting the Swiss Alps. I’m joking, but that’s probably going to happen, so be prepared for that.

We’re going to be writing some articles for Trinity, which I’m really excited about, to be able to give back to our denomination’s school. In addition, I was able to work on another writing project. I was able to preach to dozens of kids at camp. It was good to have such a solid team of preachers here at Calvary and teachers throughout our congregation who can open up God’s Word and can share it and bring us to a fuller understanding of Christ and His gospel. And this is actually the topic of our passage this morning from 2 Timothy chapter four. So if you have your Bible, you can open there 2 Timothy chapter four. I believe our passage today contains the most important instruction given in Scripture to the health and well-being of every generation of the church. If you ask me what is the most central doctrine of Scripture, I would tell you that it’s salvation by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone. But if you ask me, what is the church to do to make sure that this doctrine of salvation remains central, I would argue that our past passage today tells us what to do. If a church loses focus and fails to carry out the charge that Paul gives to Timothy today, that church will lose the gospel with devastating consequences. And we know this because we see it all the time. It’s not rare. We see this all the time. We see it in the history of the church. We see it today in the contemporary church. We see it here in Rochester. The charge is to preach God’s word. Paul unpacks all that preaching God’s Word entails, including how to do it. And what happens if we don’t do it? And I have to say, I’ve been a little nervous this week thinking about what needs to be said from this passage concerning the state of the church today, but I think it’s very important for us to heed Paul’s description of what will happen to people in the church over time, and why that should drive us to preach God’s Word faithfully. So I’ll do my best to describe that. If we are to hand the gospel faithfully to the next generation, We are charged as a church to faithfully preach and apply all of God’s Word in every ministry, without exception or qualification. If we find ourselves shying away from parts of Scripture because they aren’t to our liking, or if we’re reinterpreting parts of Scripture because we don’t happen to think we align with them, we are not only damaging our own walk with Christ, we will then be misleading other people from Christ. If we boldly read, accept, and apply the entirety of God’s Word to ourselves and to each other, we’re going to grow in Christ and we’re going to fulfill our duty as the church to Christ. So we’re going to look at just five verses this morning. 2 Timothy 4:1-5 will follow Paul’s argument in four parts. The gravity, content, context, and execution of the charge to preach God’s Word.

First, let’s look at the gravity of the charge. I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom. I want you to picture a wedding ceremony where a man and a woman turn to each other and make vows, or picture a court of law where a witness sits in a stand and gives the facts or picture an inauguration where a new president takes an oath of office. In all three of those situations, the people involved could say the same words on their own, in private, if they wanted to. You could say all of those same words. You could do it at home. You could do it in private. You could say the oath of office to become president of the United States in your living room this afternoon. You might want to actually. What makes these words count, though, what makes them, what gives them weight, what turns them into speech acts, what makes reality is that they are said in the presence of witnesses. There’s people in the crowd who create a web of accountability and can testify to what was said. They are official people who can make things legal. The judge on the bench or the pastor who conducts the ceremony, or the Supreme Court justice who gives the oath. All of these people give official words that create legal realities. But also in all three cases, the ultimate witness is God himself. Wedding vows are said before God. Courtroom witnesses take an oath to tell the truth with God’s help. There’s still, even for now, a prayer given at the inauguration of a president calling on God to bless our nation. Now, look, I get that that can be disingenuous. I get that not everybody who references God or calls on God is actually caring about the witness of God. But God as the designer of marriage, as the source of truth, as the blesser of nations, always does witness. And Paul knows this. You want to know the gravity of the charge to preach the Bible? Just look at the witnesses that Paul calls on to testify, to give accountability to this task. Paul says that he charges Timothy to preach God’s Word in the presence of God Himself, here referring to God the Father and also Christ Jesus, who he elaborates and says is the one who will judge the living and the dead when he returns and culminates the kingdom of God. In other words, he stands before God as his judge and his king to give Timothy this charge. This charge is in alignment with the will and the plan of God Himself. And if it’s not, if it’s not, then Jesus will judge him. That’s the weight of this charge. That’s how weighty this charge is. To not do what Paul tells Timothy to do is to be in defiance of the witness of God in the same way that divorce breaks God’s covenant of marriage, and lying on the stand would dishonor the God of truth. Paul isn’t just giving Timothy a suggestion for what his ministry could look like. He’s not just giving him an effective way of doing ministry. He’s telling him that failing to fulfill the charge to preach the Word of God is to stand condemned before Christ as our judge, and to be left out of his kingdom. Do you see that? That’s how important this is. Sometimes you’ll hear people say that evangelical Christians or fundamentalists take the Bible too seriously. I was just having a discussion, a conversation a couple of weeks ago with a friend who attends a progressive liberal church who said that very same thing. She said that to me. She says that that she’s a Christian, but she doesn’t want to get into the details of the Bible. She doesn’t want to get into it too seriously. She just wants a little bit of Bible. Not too much. And why do people take it so seriously anyway? I would say that the problem is not that Christians take the Bible too seriously. I would say that the problem is that we, myself included, do not take the Bible seriously enough. that’s where the real problem lies. See, we don’t understand the gravity of what God has said to us and what he told us to do with His Word. We don’t on a regular basis feel the weightiness of standing before God accountable for what we’ve done with the word that he has given us. And that’s exactly what Paul says here. That’s he why he begins his charge this way. He wants us to see the gravity of this charge that we stand before God Himself in carrying out this charge, and in the balance of that is eternal judgment and eternal life in the kingdom of God. That what stands. Let’s look at the content of the charge. Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching. Now it’s a little strange to preach to you this morning on the nature and importance of preaching. Doesn’t that seem strange? It’s a little bit strange. And yet good preaching is so vital to the health and mission of the church that we have to preach on the indispensability of preaching God’s Word. See, preaching is declaring the authoritative Word of God to the church. It’s not simply teaching. See, teaching is sharing knowledge. In preaching knowledge is shared, but more is happening than just simply sharing knowledge. Preaching calls the listener to transformation. Preaching is a bridge between God and the listeners, taking God’s words to God’s people using accurate, declarative, compelling words. A preacher says what God has said. A preacher speaks God’s words after him. And you say, Kyle, is that what you’re doing right now? I’m trying, I’m trying. I’m doing it imperfectly. See, all preachers do this. All preachers preach imperfectly. Our goal is to simply be jars of clay, that vision that we’re given in 2 Corinthians. Right. This jar of clay, this fragile, broken jar of clay, carrying an indispensable treasure of the gospel to other people. My words are not God’s Word in the way that Scripture is God’s Word, but as the Holy Spirit uses my imperfect words to illuminate God’s inerrant word, and then God’s inerrant word changes your heart preaching has its effect. Do you see how that works? That’s what preaching is. And you can see this in the words that Paul uses to elaborate to Timothy what he should be doing when he’s preaching. He should reprove, rebuke, and exhort. Whoa! Hold on. Where’s encourage, strengthen, comfort, delight even where are those words? Is preaching just yelling at people about how wrong they are. No. Sort of. But no, it’s not what it is. Don”t read, reprove, rebuke and exhort here in negative, angry terms. I know that’s kind of how we hear them, but don’t read them that way. Read them as transformative terms, because that’s how Paul intends them. That’s what they are. The Bible is a change agent for sinners. It’s a sculpting tool. It’s a scalpel that cuts but in order to heal. Outside of Christ, we are in rebellion against God. So what do we need? We need our hearts and minds changed. In Christ, we embark on a lifetime of sanctification, being cleansed by the Holy Spirit so that we become more like Jesus. So what do we need? We need our hearts and minds change. Do you see how it’s the same? It’s the same thing. Whether you’re a Christian or not. God has spoken his Word to bring salvation and transformation to all people. So preaching God’s Word means declaring the transformative power of the gospel to all people, to confront our old self and create our new selves in Christ. And that’s why Paul says the content of preaching is to reprove, rebuke, and exhort. Reproving is showing someone where they went wrong and showing them what’s right. Rebuking is saying definitively that sin is wrong and can’t be coddled or tolerated by the mind and heart of a Christian. And exhorting is a firm, authoritative call to walk in obedience with Christ. The Christian life is a life long series, of course, corrections. That’s what it is, really. It’s a life long series, of course corrections to make us more like Jesus through repentance and renewal. And preaching, then, is one of those tools that God uses to make that happen. And this is true, by the way, of all different kinds, of course corrections, which is why these three words, even though they sound negative to us, they include encouragement and hope and resting in God’s grace. If you’re struggling with fears for the future, you’re afraid of what’s going to happen next. What you need is you need to be reproved by the encouraging words of God’s sovereignty that you’re forgetting. You need to be course corrected by God’s sovereignty and his goodness to you, because you’re telling yourself lies about the future. You’re giving yourself anxiety through lies. You need to be rebuked of that sinful temptation to tell yourself lies and course corrected. We don’t think of it much that way, but calling someone to rest in the grace of Christ is as much of a course correction as calling them out of persistent sin. Look at the when and the how of when we’re supposed to do this. The when is in season or out of season. That’s a way of saying whether it’s popular or not, whether it’s going to be received or rejected. Because here’s the thing. It’s easy to say God’s Word. It’s easy to declare God’s Word when people are eager to hear it. It’s a lot more difficult when they don’t want to hear it. And what helps with that is the how. He says with all patience and teaching. The all, by the way, goes with both patience and teaching. So it’s all patience and all teaching. We need God’s Word preached, but those who preach it need to be patient, to allow the Holy Spirit to use that word to bring about transformation in another person. We don’t shame people into repentance. We patiently rebuke and correct them. We don’t yell people into obedience. We patiently exhort them to follow Christ, and we do all of that with all teaching. Meaning we do it accurately, we open God’s Word and we show people where it’s written. We work hard to dig into it so that that when we interpret and apply it, we do so correctly and accurately. I don’t want to say stuff that God didn’t say, because if I do that you’re not hearing from God, then you’re hearing from me, and nobody needs to hear from me. None of us need to hear another person’s musings on what they think God is like. Don’t you agree? I don’t need to hear somebody’s interpretations or thoughts what they happen to think God might desire. He’s shown us who he is. He’s shown us what he wants in his word. So we need to hear God’s Word, and we need to hear that word rightly handled. Do you remember that from chapter two? A few weeks back when we were in chapter two, verse 15. The Bible rightly handled. Anyone can handle God’s Word. Anybody can handle it. All you got to do is open it up, pull a verse out of context, tell a story, make an emotional appeal, and convince people. You’ve handled, that’s handling God’s word. Poorly handled. Terribly handled. But handled. Remember, with Jesus, even Satan can handle some scripture. Anybody can handle it. But rightly handled, requires careful study with humility and time so you can help correct people with patience and sound teaching. All teaching. And the reason we need it is because of the trend that we will see in the church over time. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. Paul gives us a historical context for this charge. He says that over time, there’s going to be a trend. There’s going to be this trend among all people, including God’s people, toward a false, unhealthy doctrine. Now, I believe Paul is referring to all people everywhere that he’s saying that across the world, there’s going to be people that are going to have these itching ears. But I think there’s a particular emphasis on people in the church because he’s talking about preaching. And that’s where you hear preaching, you hear preaching in the church. So there’s going to be a desire among people in the church to grab hold of preaching that masquerades as God’s Word, but actually is not God’s Word. They won’t want the rebuke and the correction of God’s actual word because he says they won’t want to endure it. They don’t want to painfully conform their thinking and their lifestyles to God’s actual word, because it doesn’t match up with their passions or their interests, values, or their beliefs that they already have. So it requires an endurance that they don’t want to exert. And so what they do with God’s Word is they jettison that and they go after people who will say the things that they’ve already decided. I liken this to a patient. You medical types will like this. I liken it to a patient who has already done all the research online and has determined what’s wrong with them, and now they’re sitting in the doctor’s office not for diagnosis, but for confirmation. Right? I know what you’re saying, doc, but you’re saying cancer, I’m saying heartburn. Can you just give me the pills? Yeah. Can I just get the thing that I know I already need. I know you have blood work, but my aunt is a nurse. And she said…. Doc says, why are you even here? I know you can’t say that, but don’t you want to? Don’t you want to say that? Why are you even here? Why did you even show up here? What’s the point of being here? Paul says, here’s what’s going to happen. Their ears are going to be itching to hear the things they want to hear so they’ll go find the people who will say those things. They’re going to find those people. They’re going to accumulate a team of teachers, writers and friends who will back them up in the things that they already want to believe. I believe this might be the first reference in history to echo chambers. An echo chamber is created when you shut out everything to the contrary, and you only listen to those voices that say to you what you want to hear. Like cable news. Cable news is an echo chamber. People will create spiritual echo chambers just like that. Paul’s saying were they only hear doctrine that’s the doctrine that already fits within their own beliefs and practices, and it will lead those people astray. They will get exactly what they want and nothing that they need. And I see this all the time. Someone will say something like, well, I don’t really like that doctrine. And I share some scripture and I asked them to make their case from the Bible. Okay, you don’t like that show me in the Bible what you’re seeing. And they can’t but some other teachers they heard said otherwise. And then I look into that teaching that they’ve looked at, and it doesn’t rightly handle God’s Word or it doesn’t refer to the Bible at all. See church this desire to soothe itching ears means that there are going to be preachers and teachers and entire churches and entire denominations of churches that are willing to do the scratching with unsound, unhealthy doctrine. And they’ll get there by mishandling God’s Word and convincing a number of people who don’t want to handle it at all. I subjected myself to a fair number of online sermons this week, from guys that I’ve been warned against and know to be poor handlers of scripture. Fun, it was great. Some local, some not. Some you know, some you don’t. Does not matter. It doesn’t matter who. It only matters what. What are these men doing with God’s Word? And how does it speak to the state of the church today? I saw all manner of mishandling the Bible. There are so many ways you can mishandle the Bible. There are so many ways you can do it. It’s not my intention for these next examples to sound mean. I’m not trying to be mean here. I mean for them to sound lovingly cautionary, especially for those of you who will grow up and move away and have to find a good church. Okay, a number of you in here you’re going to grow up, you’re going to go and you’re going to say, what am I looking for in a church? How can you mishandle the Bible? Well, you can just have a couple of big ideas in front of you and shoot from the hip and tell some stories that make those points without much more than a passing reference to God’s Word. Because those big ideas that you have didn’t really come from the passage that you’re supposedly teaching. That’s one way. You can take a clear but difficult okay, clear but difficult. It’s clear what it says, it’s difficult to apply. You can take a clear but difficult scripture, and you can undermine the whole thing by referencing some dubious historical point. Nobody seemed to know up until now, and tell everyone, that they’ve been misunderstanding this passage their whole lives because they didn’t know the ancient Greek philosophy or whatever, something like that. And inevitably, the new interpretation of that passage lines up with some cultural value that the pastor wanted to embrace in the first place. Isn’t that convenient? Now listen, history and philosophy, they are good things to study. They really are and we do need to know the historical context of a passage. We do, but not if you’re using them to twist scripture to appease spiritual passions. You can treat the Bible as one of a few conversation partners that you have. Taking a little Bible and a little culture and a little opinion, you pack it together in sort of a talk snowball, right? That’s how you can create a lot of false doctrine, just pack it all together. You can talk about God’s Word as an ancient document, which it is, but also how God is still speaking today. That’s, by the way, the motto of the United Church of Christ. God is still speaking. Guess who gets to fill in the blank for what God is saying? The United Church of Christ. Or and this is probably the most popular way the evangelical church today undermines the charge to preach God’s Word. In an effort to draw the biggest crowd by tickling the most ears, you might just keep it light and fun. Just keep it light and fun. Keep the delivery slick. Avoid problem doctrines, land the jokes, say hope and peace and all of that a lot. But not sin. Don’t say sin. And whatever you do, do not talk about the just wrath of God. Do not do that. I once listened to a pastor, a pastor who I respect deeply actually, I saw him fall to the temptation to edit God’s Word. He pulled out an entire verse in his passage that referenced the wrath of God and just put an ellipse there on the screen. How do we get to a place where so much preaching can be so devoid of God’s Word? How is that possible that it’s easy to find this kind of preaching? English theologian Edwin Hatch back in the mid 1800s. Okay, so we’re talking 150 years ago. Back in the 1800s, he pointed out what had happened to philosophy. Okay. He’s talking about philosophy. He said that philosophy started out as the pursuit of truth. But when it became popular to listen to philosophers, a lot of people fell in love with the form and the turn of phrase and the showmanship of speaking. So what happened is people stopped caring about the logic of the arguments or the truthfulness of the content, and the guy with the best stage presence won the day. And so Edwin Hatch says, rhetoric killed good philosophy. Rhetoric killed it. Sophistry which is making your point with false arguments. Sophistry took over and it didn’t matter because people didn’t care about whether an argument was sound, only whether it was compelling and entertaining. That’s all they wanted anymore, was to be entertained. And even in his day, 150 years ago, this was already happening in church pulpits, Hatch said. Listen to this. This is his quote. No sooner is any impulse given either to philosophy or to religion then there arises a class of men who copy the form without the substance and try to make the echo of the past sound like the voice of the present. So it has been with Christianity. How do we have preaching today from professed Christians that so severely lacks God’s Word? Because there arose a class of preacher who fell in love with the form, but not the substance. Tickling the ears of people who want far less Bible. Church, I don’t mean to make it sound like we do it all right here at Calvary. We don’t, I don’t. I make mistakes all the time, and I dont want to make it sound like there aren’t good Bible teaching preaching churches out there in the world. There are so many great rightly handling the word churches that are out there. But I would say it is my sense, this is my opinion, that the number of churches preaching God’s Word faithfully without compromise is diminishing. It’s going down. As an entertainment culture increases its desire for palatable ideas and wants to only hear those sermons that, that, that suit their passions, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to find preachers and churches that are willing to be wildly unpopular. So what do we do? How do we ensure that we maintain our commitment to preaching the Word of God and not wander off into myths? How do we give that kind of church to the next generation? Paul tells us, as for you always be sober minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

Paul tells Timothy to do four things to keep his ministry and his church on track. I think the fourth thing is a summary of the first three here. First, he says, always be sober minded. That’s clear thinking. Now that we know that ears scratching, Bible light false teaching is going to be misleading people, remember that and work against that. We as Calvary need to recognize that we could trend in this direction. We could easily trend in this direction, especially as we grow. We could start making decisions based not on what Scripture commands of us, but what will please and retain the most people. And so we have to be sober minded. We got to be clear thinking on this, constantly aware of that temptation, and remember that our charge to preach and teach all of God’s Word clearly and accurately. We’ve got to carry that out. And when it’s not popular, boldly.

Second, he says, endure suffering. Since this is a summary, Paul probably means all the different kinds of suffering that comes from being in Christian ministry, but that includes the suffering that comes from preaching God’s Word accurately to people who increasingly will not accept it. Church, it’s not going to become easier to stand for Christ and uncompromisingly teach the Bible. That is not going to become easier in time. It is going to become harder, especially when it speaks to unpopular topics like sexuality or the gender roles of men and women. Eternal judgment, the exclusivity of Christ, the sanctity of life, the treatment of the poor and the immigrant. Preaching God’s word is definitely not in season right now. We got a marriage series coming up, and if you think everything in that series is going to dovetail well with how you already think marriage ought to be, you are going to be sorely disappointed. It’s going to be challenging. And disappointed people like to email. I have learned this. Oh, their fingers are going they’re already getting ready. Oh, they like to email. I will endure suffering. You will endure suffering if you stand for Christ in a world that doesn’t. And if you share Christ with friends who can’t endure him, you will experience suffering.

But the third thing that Paul says to Timothy is do the work of an evangelist. This gospel is going to challenge people with different worldviews all around us, and figuring out how to reach them is hard. And sharing the gospel with them takes courage and their response will cause us to suffer sometimes that’s why it’s work. But that is the job. That’s what we’ve been given. If we lose sight of our call to take this gospel to as many people in our community as we can, we may as well just close doors and call it a day, because that’s what we are. That’s what we’re called to do. That’s what we’re called to be church. The community needs the clear, uncompromised gospel patiently and lovingly shared.

The fourth thing that Paul tells Timothy to do is to fulfill his ministry, which is a way of saying, take this charge seriously. Do everything necessary to complete what God has given you to do. Church, we stand in the presence of the Triune God. These are not suggestions. This is a charge before the Triune God. We have the charge to preach, teach, and share God’s Word accurately and clearly. And we cannot be faithful to Jesus unless we fulfill that ministry. Would you pray with me?