Sermon Transcript
All right, good morning everybody. Happy Father’s Day to all of you who are here. There’s a lot of racket going down in the front there, Nate. Really? Like, what do you have for— like, you have an entire box of donuts?
No, I don’t want one. I’m trying to preach. People came here today because it’s Father’s Day and they want to hear a Father’s Day message today.
I don’t— no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, timeout. Don’t encourage this. Okay, I see a few donuts here. If you’re gonna have donuts, then you better have brought enough for everybody here, and clearly that’s not enough for everybody here. Do you have enough for everybody here?
Of course I do. All right, we do have enough for everybody here. All right, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this?
Dads like donuts, I’m told. So yes, in honor of all of our dads, donuts for everyone. Oh my goodness.
Yes, we have some donuts coming down. No, no, no, no, no, I don’t want one. I don’t want one.
Oh, this reminds me of the early church in the book of Acts. How they gathered together to the breaking of donuts and the gathering, the teaching of the Apostles’ Prayer and the teaching of God’s Word. Wow.
We will wait for the passing out of the donuts.
You never know what’s going to happen. You don’t have to take one. Well, We’re not taking communion, Chaz Pilar, with these donuts. That would be a step too far. I would be handing in my resignation if that was to be the case.
Okay, some of you are— okay. Why? We have some empty boxes here. Austin Ward has some donuts here. We have some donuts over here.
Who hasn’t gotten any? Okay, here in the back.
The people in the back get all the leftovers, I think. That’s how that works. No? Okay. Yeah, he’s happy about that.
I’m looking over here at Jim Noyes. Jim, you have your doughnut, and you’re probably wondering who’s paying for all of this as well. I know that that question is on his mind as well. Who? Okay, making its way around here.
Paul Tokar there. Yeah, thank you. We appreciate our youth and our kiddos.
We are not going to be doing this every Sunday, so— okay, over here on the side, Laura’s making her way on over here. If you do not have a donut but you would like one, raise your hand there in the back. Okay.
James, did you get one? We have them.
Okay, yeah, I saw that hand. We could just have an altar call right now and we can just be done with this. That’d be good. The Lord’s been good to us today. Awesome.
Thank you, you. Thank you, kids. Can we say thanks to them?
And the first 4 minutes of my message are gone, so now I’m gonna have to just extend it. Hey, Happy Father’s Day to all of you. Being a dad is one of the greatest joys of my life and something that I thought was not going to happen for a number of years. If you know our story through multiple pregnancy losses and all the different things that come along with that, Mother’s Day for a number of years was not a happy time for Shannon, and Father’s Day was not a happy time for me. We prayed, we prayed, we prayed, and just asked for the Lord to bless us with children.
And, you know, for many, Father’s Day is not a happy time, and so we recognize that. I’m grateful that the Lord gave us 3 children through the process of adoption, and that’s a huge part of our story. I have 3 kids who are now 19, 19, and 17, and I’m just super grateful, and I love talking about fatherhood, and I love talking about dads, and it’s one of my favorite topics. And when I lived in Texas before I moved out here, one of the ministries that I was privileged to be a part of was a ministry that was specifically to dads in the Central Texas area. And I would be a part of conducting classes and groups for dads in the area, some of whom had nothing to do with the church or the faith community at all.
But I would, for instance, go into the hospitals, and I led a class called Boot Camp for New Dads. Where dads who would be expecting their first child would be coming to us while their wife or their significant other was in a breastfeeding class. I would be doing a class for new dads, and we would have babies brought in, and I would teach these guys everything about how to hold and how to diaper and how to do all the different things that go along with that. And we had a blast. We had a lot of fun with that.
I would do father-daughter events, and I would do father-son events, and I just I love Dad. And what that process reinforced in me was a conviction I already had, but it just put language to it. And that is that— and this isn’t a controversial thing among this group, but just to say that dads, I believe, make unique contributions to the lives of kids. I’m not saying that they’re better than what moms contribute. I’m not.
A lot of people hear that and they say, well, are you saying that dads are better or more important than moms? I’m not saying that. Just saying that the things that dads do, it’s unique in the ways that dads interact with kids from the time that they’re little all the way throughout their lives. It just looks different and it’s potent. It makes a huge difference in the lives of a lot of kids.
And when I say that it’s not a controversial message, there were some places that I would go to in Texas when I would be asked to present and to talk about fatherhood that it was a controversial message because a lot of people haven’t had the best image of fathers. And when you look at what’s on TV and in our— and on the movies and on the news, you don’t always get the best picture of fatherhood, right? And so that’s not always the most positive of messages, but I want to say here today that I want to affirm dads everywhere. I don’t believe Father’s Day is a time to beat up dads. I think fatherhood is a time— Father’s Day is a time to affirm dads and to encourage them.
And no matter what the age of your kids, even whenever the kids move out of your home, and now I’m in the process of sort of that transition. One of our 3 has moved out of the home. By the end of this summer, a second one will have moved out of the home. Your job is never done as a dad. I was talking to a dad recently whose child just graduated, and we were joking around, and he said, I’m done.
I said, you’re not done. You’re not done. Your job is never done. You never stop being your child’s mother. You never stop being your child’s father.
But the question still is before us today, and I don’t want you to tune out if you’re not a father or if your kids are not currently living in the home, and I’ll tell you why here in just a moment. But I want to say this, that on this Father’s Day, the challenge before us men, dads, is the same that it’s been from the very, very beginning, and that is, how do I transfer my faith to my children? How do we pass along our faith to the next generation so that it doesn’t die out? How do we take faith and cause it to be transformative and genuine and life-giving, and how do we ensure that that goes along to the next generation? That’s the question before me.
It’s the question before all of us. As dads. But once you become a dad, or once you become a parent, you learn very, very quickly that all of that sounds really, really good, but that parenting is really, really hard. And I heard a quote a little while ago from a guy named Paul Tripp, who I read a lot of his writings, and he said, here’s the problem with parenting. What is parenting?
Parenting is one deeply flawed individual who has been commissioned to give guidance and help and direction to— wait for it— another deeply flawed individual. It’s really, really hard, and so you try your best to modify your children’s behavior, and then you realize this child has a lot of depravity within them. This child is a horrible sinner, and hello, I’m a horrible sinner. I have a lot of depravity in me. So passing along faith becomes really, really difficult, yet it’s the challenge before us.
It’s the challenge before every generation. It’s the challenge before this church. And we hear a message like this, and again, if you are not a father or if your children are not in the home, you go, okay, I can tune out a message like this today. But I want to caution us if that is our approach, because one of the things— and we’ll look at this more next week in next week’s passage, and I’m going to be sharing with you next week as well. We won’t have donuts, but I will be sharing about God’s Word.
About the fact that God’s Word is God-breathed. He inspired it, and it’s profitable. All of Scripture comes from God, and if all of Scripture originates with God, then we ought to listen to all of Scripture. And for us to say, that doesn’t apply to me, that doesn’t apply to me, that doesn’t apply to me, is to rip out pages of the Bible and say God can’t speak to me through passages that don’t directly speak to my circumstance in life. And I don’t think any of us Or hopefully none of us would want to do that.
All of Scripture is inspired by God, and so we want to take it in whether it directly speaks to our current life circumstance or not. The other thing is this: if our approach to a message that is for fathers is to say, that doesn’t apply to me, then I would also say that we don’t understand why the church exists and what God’s purpose is behind the church. God has designed the church, and if you are a Christ follower, you are the church. It’s not this building. This church is simply a building.
It could go away any moment. But you and I, as the people of God, have been called to pass faith along to the next generation, whether you’re a mother or father or not.
So this is a challenge for all of us. That said, I am calling this a charge to dads today, but it’s a charge to moms, it’s a charge to anyone who’s a Christ follower, If you have any children in your life, whether they have your last name or not, this is a charge to, to all of us if you’re a Christ follower. And I want to look at 2 Timothy. We’re continuing our study, the book of 2 Timothy. We’re in chapter 3, almost through our study here.
In just a couple weeks we’ll be done with 2 Timothy, but we’re in the middle here of chapter 3. We’re going to start in verse 10, and if you were here last week You heard Pastor Dave talk about the nature of the times in which we live. Paul described them here in chapter 3 as terrible times. These are the last days, and that, that word last makes me think that it’s a reminder that our time here on earth is finite. We never know when the end will come, so we need to make the most of every opportunity that we have.
But in these terrible times, in these last days, We saw last week in the first part of chapter 3 of 2 Timothy, Pastor Dave was showing us that our world is filled with phonies, people who have the veneer of religion and of spirituality but hearts that are far from God. It’s a form of godliness, but really what it is is a lot of people whose hearts are far from God. And you have people who are deceiving others and they are in fact deceived themselves. These are difficult times in which we live. And yet Paul is going to call Timothy here, this pastor of the church in Ephesus, his protégé.
He’s a spiritual father to Timothy. He’s going to call him to something different. Look at verse 10 here. It’s also in your notes in the bulletin if you have those. You can follow along with us.
I’m reading out of the New International Version. In verse 10 of chapter 3. You, however— that word however shows us there’s a contrast. In contrast to all these other individuals, these spiritual phonies, these charlatans who worm their way into people’s life and are deceiving other people— you, however, Timothy, you know all about my teaching. You know all about my way of life.
You know my purpose, my faith, patience, love, endurance. 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. Verse 12, in fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evildoers and imposters will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.
But as for you, continue in what you have learned, Timothy, and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. It’s obvious that Paul isn’t speaking directly to fathers here. So how do we get a Father’s Day message out of this and a charge to dads out of this? But I think that there are principles, without going too far afield here, that we can pull out without misinterpreting these scriptures that I think would be helpful for anyone who wants faith to move on to the next generation. And hopefully that’s you, and it’s certainly me.
If we want faith to move on to the next generation, how do we go about it? 3 principles that I see here, one of which is in verses 10 and 11. That is to pursue a spiritual life that is worthy of imitation. To pursue a spiritual life that is worthy of imitation. Pretty sure that you all know this because you’ve seen this, but kids— it’s within kids, it’s within their very nature to imitate, isn’t it?
You may have seen last week or two a video that’s made its way around. It’s a viral clip of a father who’s sitting on the couch with his little infant son, and they’re having a conversation and it’s being videotaped. And as the conversation goes along, the child gets more and more animated and is just saying gibberish, but is having a conversation with the child or is having a conversation with his dad and just imitating. Watch. I think we have it here.
Okay. They need to work on that, right? Yes. Okay.
Did you understand it though? No. No. Okay.
Oh no, not, not this one. This the, this the grand finale of this one. Okay, the last one. Yeah, that’s the last one.
That’s what I was wondering. I don’t know what they going to do next season cuz they did some stuff this time.
Exactly what I was thinking. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Don’t bring that again, you know what I’m saying? Don’t do the same stuff, you know what I’m saying? Yeah, I was thinking that.
Yeah.
Yeah, like go somewhere else with that, but don’t break here, you know what I’m saying? Yeah, that’s what I said.
He was like, ah, you know what I’m saying? I was like, what in the world? But don’t do that here, you know what I’m saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah, really?
I thought the same thing. We think a lot alike, huh? That’s crazy, right? That’s awesome. That’s good.
That’s good. That kid’s gonna be a preacher someday. That’s awesome. Can’t understand a word he’s saying, but it doesn’t matter. He’s just doing whatever his father is doing.
Isn’t that a beautiful picture of how Kids imitate what they see in front of them. I have a picture that reminds me of that as well, and on this Father’s Day, I thought I would present it to you. Yes, this is me years ago with my son Tate, who is now 19 years old, and we’re both wearing jean shorts. No, I don’t normally walk around without my shirt on, and yes, that is my hair. I had a lot of it back in the day, and I don’t anymore, but this is Tate when he was about 2 and a half years old.
And we realized we were both wearing the same types of pair of shorts and the same type of shoes, so we thought we’d take a picture. It’s just a reminder that again, kids imitate what they see in front of them. I would play games with my children when they were little. This TV show that was popular at the time, I think it’s still out, called Man vs. Wild. They would take this guy and they would drop him in the middle of the wilderness and he would have to try to figure out a way out of the wilderness.
And I would take my children in the living room, in the living room, we would recreate this on the pillows and under the tables and on top of the furniture and doing all the different things that they were doing. It’s because kids love to imitate. Kids love to imitate what they see in front of them, and they naturally do that. You don’t have to teach them how to do that. They just do that.
And what Paul here is saying here is, as opposed to these other individuals, Timothy, that you’ve seen around you, these phonies who act under the guise of religion but are secretly somebody else. He’s saying here in verses 10 and 11, Timothy, you know all about me. You know my life. I’ve lived my life out in the open. Nothing has been hidden.
And if anybody would know the difference between practicing and preaching, Timothy would have known it. He would have seen it in Paul. He was around Paul. He says here, you know all about. And that word know actually means to be intimately familiar with, to investigate.
That’s not something you can do from a distance, is it? You might know something about me, but if you really want to know me and all about me, then you would follow me around. That wouldn’t be a very exciting week for you, but you would follow me all around and you would watch how I interact whenever nobody else is there. And Timothy had the privilege of seeing that in Paul as a spiritual father to him. And Paul was mindful of that.
He says, you know all about my teaching, you know all about these other areas. And I want to just pull those out here because he’s saying nothing is left to chance here. Timothy, you know, you’ve investigated, you’ve seen all about my teaching. That means my doctrine. You’ve heard me teach You’ve watched me teach, Timothy.
You’ve seen that my doctrine comes straight out of Scripture, that what I communicate comes from God. You know all about that. You know about my way of life, he says there in verse 10. My way of life, that’s that my life matches up with what I teach. There’s complete and total integrity, Timothy.
You’ve seen that in me. There’s not a gap between what I communicate and then how I live. You know about my purpose. What does that mean? Well, you know about my motives.
You know about what motivates me. You know about my priorities. Paul made clear throughout the letters that he wrote to the different churches what his purpose was. His purpose was to decrease so that the Lord would increase. It was to know Jesus Christ and him crucified.
It was to take all of his credentials and to forget those, put them in the past, but to focus on what God was calling him to. His purpose was to know Jesus and for not to bring any time that Paul would go to a church— Paul’s purpose was not that people would be impressed with him, but that there would be a demonstration of the Spirit’s power and that people would turn their hearts to the Lord. He’s saying, you know all about my purpose, Timothy. You know about my faith, and that speaks to not only Timothy’s belief, or Paul’s belief and trust in God, but also Paul’s faithfulness. It can mean faith, but it can also mean faithfulness, loyalty, dependence.
But then patience, you know all about that, Timothy. You know about how patient I’ve needed to be with other people. My love, the word there is the agape love, the Greek word there, agape, the unconditional Christlike love. You know all about that, Timothy. And then he mentions my endurance and persecutions and sufferings.
Timothy knew all about that, and Paul mentions 3 places here: Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra. And you can find out about those in the book of Acts chapter 14, where Paul and his traveling companion missionary journey went to Iconium, the city of Iconium, and there was a plot that was hatched among the Jews and the Gentiles there to mistreat Paul and Barnabas. And Timothy knew all about that. They had a plot to stone Paul and Barnabas. So Paul and Barnabas left Iconium, and then they went to a place called Lystra, which Paul mentions here in 2 Timothy.
But the people from Iconium came to Lystra, and people from Antioch came to Lystra, and they actually did follow through on stoning Paul, dragging him out of the city, and then leaving him for dead, thinking that he was dead. But then he got up and kept on ministering. He kept on doing the things that God had called him to do. And he’s saying, Timothy, you know all about that. There’s other persecutions that Paul mentions in other letters that Timothy would have known full well about.
He’s saying, you know all about that stuff, but you know that I didn’t waver in all of that. And I love this phrase in verse 11, yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. Isn’t that a great thing to communicate to the next generation, to say Look at all the things that I’ve been through in life, but it’s not about me. The Lord has rescued me. He’s delivered me because the Lord’s a rescuer and he’s a deliverer.
We need to communicate that to the next generation. Absolutely. The Lord rescued me from all of them. And so he’s saying, pursue a spiritual life that is worthy of imitation. This sounds arrogant to us, right?
Hey, do what I do. It’s not as if Paul has his act together here. He’s not saying, follow me. He’s really saying Follow me as I follow Christ. It’d be more arrogant to say, ah, I’m not anybody worth following here, because you’re making more of yourself actually whenever you actually say that, if you think about it.
He’s saying, no, follow Christ, but look at my life. He’s not saying that he’s completely arrived, but don’t pattern your life after these other individuals. And so the question for us as dads, the question for me as a father and any dad here in the room or any parent in this room is, is What do I want my kids to imitate? Because they will imitate something. What do I want them to imitate?
What am I demonstrating and how am I modeling a Christlike life for them? And we can tell a child, okay, do as I say, not as I do, but you and I know that doesn’t work very well. And it’s a reason why many children, as they get older, decide they don’t want anything to do with faith because they have a parent or an authority figure in their life whose practice didn’t match up with what they taught. And Paul is saying, Timothy, I’ve been like this for you, and it’s a reminder to all of us to watch how you live because people are watching, even the children who do not live in your home. People are watching.
Pursue a spiritual life that is worthy of imitation. He gives us a second principle here in verses 12 and 13 that I think that we can apply to the fact that this is a charge to dads and here on Father’s Day, and that is to prepare the next generation. Prepare them for battle. Prepare them for battle. Paul is saying, Timothy, follow my way of life, but know that if you do, verses 12 and 13 says, if you do, what’s going to happen?
You will be persecuted. If you were passionate about pursuing God’s call on your life and you wanna follow Christ, here’s a message we don’t hear enough: you will be persecuted. It’s a narrow road. It’s hard.
I have very often seen coffee table books, and I think you’ve probably seen some of these as well, that have Bible promises in them about God’s presence with us in time of need and How God is always with us, and those are awesome promises. I’ve never seen a Bible promise book that has verse 12 in it that says, in fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. That doesn’t make its way into the coffee table books. Why? Because nobody wants to hear this.
But the fact is, is if you are sincere about following Christ, it’s going to cost you. Won’t it? And we have to communicate that to the next generation to prepare them for battle. I think about all the things that a parent tries to instill in their kids before those kids leave the home. Think about, okay, you need to do this with the car, and here’s how you go about it, and you apply for a job, here’s how you study, and here’s how you handle relationships.
One of the jobs of a parent, that we’re to prepare the next generation for what to be able to expect, and we do that so that when they encounter those situations they’ll be prepared for it and they’ll know what to expect. We distribute wisdom in that way, but we’d be doing a disservice to the next generation if we don’t tell them verse 12 and 13, if we don’t prepare them for battle. We need to tell children, we need to tell the next generation who the real enemy is. It’s not the person who sits next to them in class. A real enemy is not your boss.
Our real enemy is not the person who antagonizes you and is frustrating. Who’s our real enemy? Our fight is not with flesh and blood. We have a spiritual battle that we are in, and if you follow Christ, you’re going to come up against the forces of evil and of darkness, and you need to be ready for that. He’s saying, I want you to be ready for that so that when it comes, you’re going to be able to stand firm.
We need to train the next generation and how to live here on this earth recognizing that this world is not our home. We’re merely aliens and strangers, and yet very often we get too comfortable here. And the moment that your kids begin to get comfortable is the moment that we can begin to point them to say, God doesn’t want us to be comfortable. He wants us to be salt. He wants us to be light.
He wants us to follow him and to remember the promise that Jesus gave to his followers in John 15 where he says If they persecuted me, they will persecute you. You follow me, you will also follow me into hardship. We need to prepare them for battle, and not just prepare them for life, but prepare them for the difficult things that come so that they can stand firm and not waver in their faith when hard times come. We need to prepare them. And then verses 14 and 15 give us a 3rd great principle to anyone who wants to pass faith along to the next generation.
And that is to plant God’s Word in their lives early and often. And Paul is reminding Timothy here in verses 14 and 15 who Timothy’s first teachers were, the people who instructed him as a child. In fact, in my translation here, it uses the word infant, and that’s what the word— if you have the word child in your translation, it actually means tiny infant. And so from infancy, Paul is reminding Timothy, you’ve heard the Holy Scriptures, you’ve received them. And who is it who taught Timothy that?
Well, we know that, you know, not the full list, but in chapter 1 and verse 5, we know that it was at minimum Timothy’s grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. These were individuals who took Deuteronomy 6 and said, I’m going to be serious about transferring faith to the next generation. Deuteronomy 6 is a passage that I come back to again and again and again whenever I work with parents that our greatest calling in life is to pass faith along to the next generation. And because it’s such a potent passage, I think it’s good for us to read every now and then. And so I have it up here that we’re gonna put up here on the screen.
I wonder if we could all read this aloud together. This is something that in Jewish homes every day they would read. It’s called the Shema. Let’s read Deuteronomy 6, verses 4 through 9 together aloud. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.
Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. Thank you. When that message was given to the people of Israel, it wasn’t simply given to parents. It was given to all of Israel, the entire faith community. And so this is a message for all of us, that faith doesn’t just stay with you.
It’s to be passed along— parents, grandparents, great-grandparents— to the next generation. And notice, it’s to be within us. First. So we’re to plant God’s word in their lives early and often, just like Lois and Eunice did in Timothy’s life. But the goal is not just simply to talk about how to be a nice person.
When we share God’s word, when we teach it and pass it on, we’re not simply to talk about how to be a moral person, because that doesn’t accomplish anything. God’s word is designed to do certain things that can help us to have an eternal perspective. And one of the reasons One of the goals that we’re to pass faith along to the next generation. We see it here in verse 15. It’s in order that they might become wise for salvation.
It’s in order that they might become wise for salvation. Wisdom is not how smart you are. You know this, right? You know somebody who’s a genius in their field but is a complete fool? Many of us know individuals like that, somebody who’s just Their IQ is off the charts, but they’re foolish.
They’re foolish. Wisdom is having the right information and knowing how to apply it and then actually applying it. That’s biblical wisdom. And so in order to become wise for salvation, we need to get our information about salvation from God’s Word. To be wise for salvation doesn’t mean that a person receives salvation by believing in God’s Word.
That’s not true, because even the devil believes God’s Word. His demons know and believe God’s Word, but they’re not recipients of salvation. No, to become wise for salvation is to understand that the Bible answers all of the questions that a person would need to have answered in order to receive salvation. It answers what I think are the 3 most important questions that every young person, every next generation needs to know. One is, is Why do I need to receive salvation?
Why do I need salvation? Scripture from Genesis all the way through Revelation points out that God is pursuing a relationship with us and we need to be rescued, we need to be delivered because our sins separate us from God and all of us are sinners. And the wages of our sin is death and separation from God for eternity. We need salvation and Scripture helps us to become wise for salvation by answering that question. Repeatedly.
But then it also answers the second question, and that is, how do I receive salvation? How do I become saved? Am I saved by what I do? Am I saved by what I believe? No, we’re saved because of what Jesus did for us on the cross, and then allowing him to come into your life by saying, I accept his substitutionary sacrifice on the cross for me.
That’s how a person receives salvation. We’re not saved by our good works. We’re not saved by religion. We’re not saved by coming to church. The next generation needs to know that, and God’s Word answers that again and again and again.
It answers, why do I need salvation? How do I receive salvation? And then it answers a third question that once you’ve received salvation, people want to know is, how do I know that I’ve received salvation? The Bible can answer that for us, especially books like 1 John can answer, how do I know that I’m saved? How do I know if I’m right with God?
Because I think that I am, but I’m not sure. We need to help a person to become wise for salvation by pointing them to what Scripture has to say about these things: the need, the fact that God provides salvation, and then that we can have confidence in what Jesus has done for us on our behalf. And so, we plant God’s Word in the next generation’s lives early and often. Hopefully even from infancy, but if not from infancy, then as soon as possible and often as possible. And we do that so that they might become wise for salvation.
And then verse 14, also in order that they might continue in it. In order that they might continue in it. How can you continue in something if you haven’t already received it? But Paul is saying here, Timothy, you know all about these Scriptures and you are wise for salvation. But I want you to continue in it.
And that word continue here is a Greek word that means to remain, to abide. And that word abide makes us think about again John 15, where Jesus said, abide in me. I’m the vine, you are the branches. As a branch remains and abides in the vine, so you need to remain and abide in me. And in fact, the exact same word that Jesus used is the same word Paul uses here.
I want you to continue I want you to remain. I want you to abide in God’s word. I don’t want you to depart from it. I don’t want you to go beyond it, to think that you’re ever without the need for it. I want you to continue in it.
And that’s an interesting contrast between verses 13 and 14, where he says these other individuals that he’s talked about in the first 10 verses, they’re gonna go from bad to worse. They’re gonna progress. They’re gonna move forward. They’re gonna continue getting worse. But he’s contrasting that and saying, Timothy, you’re going to continue, but you’re going to continue remaining in God’s Word because you’ve become wise for salvation.
If you’re wise for salvation, you never move beyond your need for that message of salvation that is found in God’s Word. So we plant God’s Word in their lives not so that they can do really, really well in a sword drill and be able to find something really, really fast in Scripture. We plant God’s Word in the next generation’s life early and often so that they might become wise for salvation and so that they might continue in it. And this is crucial because the way that we know the difference between what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false in this world, is not through your own intellect. It’s through God’s Word.
You can’t stand up— a person cannot stand up against the forces of evil and against the deceiver, the Satan’s called the father of lies. We— a person can’t stand up against that without God’s Word. So we plant God’s Word in their lives early and often that they might become wise for salvation and in order that they might continue in it. Deuteronomy 6 compels us to say, before I’m worried and thinking about what the next generation looks like, I need to be more focused on what’s in me first. Did you notice that there in verse 8 of Deuteronomy 6?
That we just read. It says that have these words in yourself, to take them in yourself. How can you pass along something that’s not in you? How can you transfer something that you haven’t received? It needs to be within us first.
And in order for our kids to love God fully, it needs to start with us and what we as the church and the body of Christ model for them. What better way to help our kids to fall in love with Jesus than to show them what that looks like? Kids hunger and long to know. The next generation longs to know that faith is relevant, that God is real, that prayer matters, that, that, that we have a God who loves us and that we can have a relationship with. They want to know what that looks like.
And so that’s what you and I are to live out in front of them at all times. And to pursue that again and again and again. But again, you can’t transfer something that you haven’t first received yourself. So as I do almost every time that I get up here and I share, and almost any time that Dan or Pastor Dave gets up and shares, we want to make sure that if you have not received salvation, that you know salvation is available to you. God’s divine rescue is available to anyone.
The Bible says whoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved, and anyone can receive that today. If you have not received that, if you’re not sure that you’ve received it, what do you do? You simply tell God, God, I know that I’m a sinner and that my sins have separated me from you, and I ask you to come into my life and to forgive me and to make me right with you. Help me to lean on you and not on my good works. Something to that effect, a prayer of faith like that is what saves a person, not the prayer itself, but the actual receiving through faith the offer that is made through Jesus.
And if you haven’t received that, you can receive that today. And if you’re not sure again how to do that, even after us talking about it today, come talk to me and I’d love to talk to you about that. If you have received salvation, we need wisdom on how to model for the next generation what faith looks like. So we need to ask God for wisdom. James 1 says, if anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask of God.
God gives generously. We need wisdom. This is serious business, guys. It really is. And I look at you all as— to me, many of you are spiritual mothers and fathers to me.
You are to the next generation, and we can’t stop. We have a group of young people who are about to head off to camp in just a few minutes, and we’re gonna have the opportunity here in a little bit to actually pray for them. What an awesome commissioning. What an awesome opportunity we have to convey to them that we’re not only gonna pray for you here, we’re gonna pray for you all throughout this week. And we’re not just gonna outsource spiritual training to the experts, we’re gonna model it for you.
You can’t outsource discipleship. You can’t outsource spiritual training. We have to model it. It begins with us. It’s a charge to dads, it’s a charge to moms, it’s a charge to grandmas and grandpas and all of us who are part of the body of Christ.
Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for the power of your word, and I trust that it’s gone— as it’s gone forth today, that it will accomplish what you want it to do. I have no power or ability to make it transform a person’s life. But your word is powerful, it’s living, and it’s active. And I pray that we would come back to it again and again.
God, forgive us when our example falls short, that— or forgive us, Lord, whenever we’re callous or hard-hearted about the next generation instead of saying, you know what, I want to be invested in the next generation, I want to live out in front of them, I want to teach them God’s Word. I pray, God, that we would care more about that. I pray encouragement for dads here in the room today. I pray encouragement for parents.
