The Growth of a Disciple

2 Timothy 2: 1-10

If you have a Bible with you, I am going to read some verses from 2 Timothy 2. That’s a letter towards the end of the Old [New] Testament.

And while you are turning there, many of you know that we have just come back from the land of Israel and also the kingdom of Jordan. We took 370 folks, viewers of Living Truth, including a number from this church. And we had representatives of every province and territory in Canada with the exception of the Yukon.

And overall, we had a wonderful time. We saw many amazing sites, things that we have read about for years in the Scriptures that we were able to see and come to life. And if we tend to read the Bible in black and white, we certainly can read it in color once you have been and seen some of these places.

But it wasn’t just a vacation, just a tour; the idea was that it would be an opportunity as well to meet with God and to hear His voice and to respond to Him. And we planned six services along the journey. We were in the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem – they kindly closed it for the whole morning – that to the disadvantage of everybody else, but to the advantage of our group. And we had a service there. It was a wonderful thing to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and to talk about its meaning right there in that area which may well be – few of these sites are certain – but may be the scene of the tomb of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We also went onto Mount Nebo in Jordan where Moses looked over the land and saw it all but was never allowed to enter it. And we were able there to talk about Moses and why it was he never entered the land and what the message is for us today.

We were at the Jordan River, on the Jordan side of the Jordan River, in Bethany where John would baptize and Hilary brought us a wonderful message of what John’s ministry was all about. He was a pointer to Jesus and nothing more.

And then we were in Galilee – it was wonderful to speak with the waters of Galilee lapping in the background and talking about some of the things that Jesus did there.

And then on Friday morning we were in Nazareth and again Hilary spoke overlooking the city of Nazareth.

And we also had a service in the King of Kings Church in Jerusalem. It’s the largest evangelical church in Israel and it was a privilege to be with them as well.

And we thank God for great weather and we believe that for many folks it was a journey of enrichment and growth in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Some of us got back last night, others flew in – about 150 arrived this morning at 7 o’clock. And remarkably some of them were in the service this morning – first service. Bob Wells, who is directing and produces our TV program came straight from the airport to do the production here this morning. So, we hope he will stay awake for the duration.

And others are arriving back this afternoon. And the last bunch get back tomorrow, because we couldn’t all get on to the same flights; there were too many of us.

Well, it has been a great privilege to speak against a background to some of those places and now here this morning I am speaking against the background of a village in Austria. And the folks who built this have done a phenomenal job and we trust that next weekend we will have good crowds for whom it will be the beginning – for many of them – a beginning of a journey towards the Lord Jesus.

Somebody who was in Israel with us said that, “I only come to the Peoples at Christmas time – I always bring people with me.” This person said, “We’re bringing the whole street this year.” And God uses it as a point of contact and connection and conversation and it’s as we, the congregation, use the event next weekend that we get its most benefit, as we use it as a catalyst for conversation about the Lord Jesus and Christmas.

So anyway, here in Austria, nice to see you this morning!


Let me read to you from 2 Timothy 2. I am speaking just for a few weeks on what I’ve called “The Growth of a Disciple” using Timothy as the example, as the sort of case history that we are looking at, whom Paul seemingly led to Christ in the town of Lystra and became involved in developing this man who naturally did not seem to have a lot of potential, as I will show you this morning, but whom God worked in his life in a marvelous way, made him a great leader eventually in Ephesus where he was when this letter was written by Paul, the last letter that Paul ever wrote before he died.

And he says in 2 Timothy 2:1-10:

“You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others.

“Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs – he wants to please his commanding officer.

“Similarly, if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor’s crown unless he competes according to the rules.

“The hardworking farmer should be the first to receive a share of the crops.

“Reflect on what I am saying, for the Lord will give you insight into all this.

“Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel, for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God’s word is not chained.

“Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory.”

Keep your Bible open, but that is as far as I am going to read.

Some of you play golf and some of you don’t. And those of you don’t may not know that on most golf courses when you go to tee off, there are two positions; one is for men; one is for ladies. And the ladies are a little closer to the goal.

And one day a golfer was on the first hole and he was getting to ready to swing at his ball when a public address announcer came on and said, “Would the man at the red tee please step back to the white tee.”

Well, the golfer stopped, stepped back from the ball, looked around, wondered what it was all about, went back to his ball and went to hit his ball when he heard the P. announcer say, “Would the man at the red tee please step back to the white tee.” This time he added, “The red tees are for women only.”

The man stopped, looked around, nobody else there, stepped back to the ball again. By this time the announcer was getting exasperated and the P.A. said, “Would somebody please tell the man at the red tee to step back to the white tee. The red tee is for ladies only.”

Finally, the golfer in exasperation shouted back, “Would someone please tell the announcer that I am on my second shot!”

Well, maybe that story didn’t really work but I’ll tell you why I tell it to you. I talk with many Christian folks who feel a little bit like that regarding their own progress and development and growth in the Christian life.

“I am a lot further back than I feel I ought to be. Why don’t I see much growth,” we ask ourselves. “Why isn’t there more of a spiritual maturity in my life than there seems to be? Where is the progress that I ought to be making but seem not to be making? Why do I hear people talk about a Christian life that is real and exciting and yet in my own life it seems tedious and it’s a bit mundane and it’s not like what I hear it talked about as being?”

And I want to address this situation today because we are talking about the case history of a disciple, using Timothy as an example. And there are many of us who look around at other people who seem to be a lot further along than we are, though, by the way, they are thinking what you think – just to let you know that – they don’t think they are a lot further on at all.

But I want to ask this question: what really is a disciple? The instruction Jesus gave His disciples was to go and make disciples of all nations. That’s their job. That is the reason why we are here today. That is the only valid reason for this church existing, that we make disciples and we grow in discipleship.

But what do we mean by that? And how do we?

One of the reasons why I like Timothy and chose to use him as the case history of a disciple (though we could have used a whole variety of people whose stories we know something about in the New Testament) is because many of us will identify fairly easily with Timothy. You see he was not a bold, strong, confident, courageous kind of man. In fact, we can deduce from things that Paul says to Timothy that he was quite the reverse of that.

He was evidently very timid in himself. In 2 Timothy 1:7 Paul has to say to him,

“God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.”

Why is he saying that? Because Timothy has a tendency to be timid, to hold back, to be reserved.

He also has a tendency to slack a little bit because Paul says in 2 Timothy 1:6, (and he says something similar in his first letter to Timothy) he says,

“I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you.”

“Timothy, God has gifted you. Stir this gift up. Don’t just sit back passively and hope somehow, it’s going to find its way out without a disciplined stirring it up in your own life.” And it seems that Timothy needed to be encouraged to do that.

He had a tendency to be intimidated. In 1 Timothy 4:12 Paul said,

“Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young.”

Timothy was obviously young, and I am going to talk about that on another occasion, because often as young people, we can feel intimidated by older folks around us, and Timothy obviously felt that.

He even was ashamed sometimes of the Gospel. He lacked the confidence that in situations where the Gospel was not welcomed and there was hostility to it, that he was ashamed. 2 Timothy 1:8:

“Do not be ashamed to testify about our Lord…”

And beyond that, he says,

“…or ashamed of me his prisoner.”

It seems that Timothy was a bit ashamed about his associations with Paul. I’ll mention that in just a moment why that might have been.

Physically he was not strong. He was often sick. 1 Timothy 5:23, Paul says to him,

“Stop drinking only water and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.”

“Timothy, you are frequently ill.” Now there is nothing wrong with that. You can’t do anything about that if that’s the way, physically, there is a frailty there. And he says, you know, “Take a little wine because of your stomach.” (And when I was a young man, I heard somebody try to persuade us that what Paul meant was rub some on the outside of your stomach, but I don’t think he did. This is medication.) But the point is that Timothy was frequently sick.

He needed to toughen up a little bit, in 2 Timothy 1:8, Paul says,

“Join with me in suffering for the gospel, by the power of God.”

“Timothy, you know, there is some suffering.” And he talks to Timothy quite a lot about that. “And you need to join me in this, Timothy. Don’t hold back.”

And the picture we have of Timothy in these verses is of someone who is reserved, who is retiring, who is somewhat weak physically, personality wise, spiritually, maybe emotionally, courageously. He is not your stereotypical hero that you stick up on a pedestal and say, “Wow, look at that great guy over there. I’d like to be like him. Come on, let’s try and be like him.”

No, this is the kind of person you wouldn’t notice when you go into the church in Ephesus and Timothy is there. He is timid and retiring, probably not feeling very well. And yet Paul writes this letter to say to him, “Timothy, you need to understand what it means for you to be a disciple.”

Paul wrote two letters to Timothy. 1 Timothy was about how to manage the church in Ephesus. Second letter, how to manage yourself.

And in the verses I read to you, Paul gives Timothy three images of what a disciple is going to be like, and they are images that probably scare most of us and probably scared timid Timothy.

He said, “Timothy, you need to be like a soldier,” (Oh boy!) “like an athlete, and like a farmer.”

Now we could spin out all kinds of parallels between these three images, what it’s like to be a soldier, to be an athlete, to be a farmer, and we could let our minds run all over the place with this.

But I want to limit it to what Paul says is his reason for saying you need to be like a soldier and you need to be like an athlete and you need to be like a farmer. He gives reason for each.

As far as being a soldier, the issue is this:

“Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Jesus Christ.”

And then he says a bit about what that hardship will involve.

As an athlete his message is:

“An athlete does not receive the victor’s crown unless he competes according to the rules.”

The message there is, “Timothy, you have got to live according to the rules.”

Now that doesn’t mean legalism, we are going to see; this is about according to the Word of God. And there are reasons – clear reasons – why I say that is Paul’s meaning of living according to the rules.

And the farmer image is, he says it’s,

“The hardworking farmer who should be the first to enjoy a share of the crops.”

“You’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to be persistent, Timothy, and you have to be patient and wait for the fruit and wait for the results, for the crops.”

Now I confess to you that I prepared much of this message yesterday on a flight from Frankfurt to Toronto and I hadn’t any means of timing it, and so I ended up having prepared a lot more than I have time to say. I didn’t know that until I came to what I thought was the end of my first point this morning and discovered it was already past the finishing time of the service. So, I am going to just give you the first and then on another occasion we will look at the second and the third images.

What does he mean when he says, “you need to be like a soldier?” That’s a very intimidating image. I mean soldiers are tough. They are trained to be tough. And most of us this morning say, “Man, I am not that at all.”

Well let’s let Paul speak for himself. There are two issues here that he speaks. The first issue is, “Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” Endure hardship.

You know the whole idea of being a soldier is far removed from many Christians, I suggest to you. But it’s an image that Paul uses elsewhere as well. In Ephesians 6:12-13 he talks about the fact that we are engaged in conflict. It’s a cosmic war and we are to put on as Christians the full armour of God, that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. “Our struggle,” he says, “is not against flesh and blood, but against rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armour of God.”

And Paul in that passage talks about being dressed appropriately. And he wrote that in prison, may well have been sitting in his prison cell looking at the soldiers who were there to guard him and describes in the following verses the kind of armour that they are wearing. He says you need to be equipped with the weaponry.

Now that is not the specific image here in 2 Timothy 2. Rather it’s this idea that if you are going to be a soldier, you have to endure hardship as a soldier.

I grew up in the county of Herefordshire in the west of England. It’s a rural agricultural county on the border of South Wales. But the city of Hereford is also home to the SAS, which is one of the most able military units in the world, (so the British Government keep telling the British people.) I have no doubt there are parallels elsewhere. The Special Air Services it’s known as. And when there are crises in the world they are often taken there and engage in behind the line activities.

The barracks where they were based was on the road that led to the village in which I grew up. And although I didn’t attach any significance to this at the time as a boy, we would sometimes see these guys running and when they ran through my village, they were already eight miles away from their base. And they had big backpacks on, full uniform. I was told their backpacks were filled with rocks – I don’t know if that is true or not. And boy they were tough. They were well trained.

And Paul, thinking of the training of a soldier, says you need to learn to live with hardship. When Paul wrote this, he is not theorizing. It’s not just well, here’s a nice example; I think I’ll use this example of a soldier enduring hardship. Notice what Paul says,

“Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Jesus Christ.”

Paul, by the way, never wrote his letters in an armchair or at a desk with a nice lamp at the side and everything’s comfortable and I’m writing a bit of theology, a bit of doctrine here. He always wrote his letters in the field of conflict, on the front line, which is why his letters are so valuable to us. They are not just doctrine written by theologians. It’s about life written by a man in the battlefield. And he says, “Endure hardship with us.” If you look in 2 Timothy 1:8, he says,

“Join with me in suffering for the gospel.”

In 2 Timothy 1:11,

“Of this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher. That is why I am suffering as I am.”

In 2 Timothy 2:9,

“This is my gospel, for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal.”

I read those verses because these are verses where Paul states to Timothy in these first two chapters, “I am suffering. Join with me in suffering. I am chained here like a criminal.”

Now you know that Paul was in prison a number of times. He was in prison in Jerusalem briefly, in Caesarea for two years, in Rome for two years. He spent a winter in Malta as a prisoner when his boat was shipwrecked. Though he was a prisoner, he was held in Malta for a winter.

And after his release from Rome at the end of the book of Acts, (although Acts doesn’t record his release, but we know he was released at the end of that time) he was re-arrested and re-imprisoned – we have no details about that other than the fact that when he writes this letter to Timothy, he alludes to the fact that he is in prison in Rome (2 Timothy 1:16,17).

Now he says to Timothy, “Please, Timothy, do not think that you are exempt from this. Please don’t believe the superficial idea that if you are in the center of the will of God, you will know you are because everything will go well for you and life will be comfortable for you, and all your problems will evaporate in front of you, and all your sufferings will be diluted and they won’t really hurt you.”

No, he says in 2 Timothy 3:12,

“Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”

Now that’s a promise. It’s not the kind of promise we put on calendars. We only put the nice promises on calendars. It’s not the kind of promise people memorize. It’s not the promise anybody claims, but it’s a promise. You lead a godly life; you will be persecuted.

Now don’t go looking for trouble of course. There is no virtue in suffering for its own self. But what he is saying is that if you are going to be faithful to Jesus Christ, Timothy, I know you are timid, I know you are physically weak, I know you are often sick, I know you are easily intimidated, I know that you slacken sometimes, I know you are hesitant to stir up the gift you have been given, I know that you are sometimes ashamed of the Gospel and ashamed of me, but Timothy, if you are in this business for the interest of Jesus Christ, you are going to have to endure suffering. And all who live a godly life will be persecuted.

In fact, one of the agents of growth in our Christian lives is often suffering and that suffering often comes when we are prepared to stand firm, to endure hardship like a soldier endures hardship.

C.T. Studd was a great missionary a century ago. He opened up parts of China and India and laterally in Central Africa where he spent most of his time. And he wrote a little booklet called The Chocolate Soldier. And the basic premise of this booklet is that Christians are called to be soldiers of Jesus Christ. But many Christians – too many Christians – says Studd, are chocolate soldiers. We melt when the heat is on, is his point.

And Studd says the church is so often ineffective, missionary organizations are short-staffed because there are too many chocolate soldiers, that the moment there is any pressure, they give in.

And Timothy needs to endure hardship with us, with Paul. We could have looked at Paul’s demonstration of the hardship he endured but we are not going to because I want to look at his exhortation to Timothy to be willing for that.

Paul is being treated as a criminal and it seems, you know, that Timothy has some sort of shame about that. He finds it difficult to be associated with Paul. We know that because in 2 Timothy 1:8 he says to him,

“Don’t be ashamed to testify about our Lord, or ashamed of me his prisoner.”

And later in Verse 16 he contrasts Timothy’s tendency to be ashamed with Onesiphorus, another one of Paul’s men, his team. And he says about Onesiphorus in 2 Timothy 1:16,

“May the Lord show mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, because he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains.”

So it seems that Paul is gently and kindly saying, “Timothy, you remember Onesiphorus? He was not ashamed of my chains but you need to be careful that you are not as well.

And Paul makes his own position clear in 2 Timothy 1:12.

“I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.”

Why would Timothy be ashamed? Well of course when people like Paul were thrown into prison, you can be absolutely sure, as we know from later times definitely, that the Romans would put out some good reason for holding him in prison. And that good reason would always incriminate the character of the prisoner – Paul, in this case.

You know, after the fire of Rome in 66 A.D. when much of the city was destroyed and the emperor looked around for a scapegoat because the belief was that he himself was responsible for this fire (because he wanted to rebuild that section of Rome and the inhabitants didn’t like the idea at all because it meant having to relocate).

And suddenly, quite conveniently, the place experienced a massive fire and everybody was angry and they looked for somebody to accuse, and they accused the Christians as being the cause of it. They accused the Christians in fact of being terrorists, as we would call them today. And they sent out propaganda about the Christians.

Here are just three of the things that were widely circulated and widely believed: that these men were political revolutionaries because they preached about a kingdom of God, and they were not interested in the Roman empire; they were interested instead of another kingdom and so they were revolutionaries and politically active. And this fire was part of their strategy, their terrorism strategy to bring about this kingdom.

It was passed around that they were cannibals because when they met together in their services, they took bread and they took wine and they said, “This is the body of Jesus, this is the blood of Jesus.” They ate the body, they drank the blood.” And they said, “These Christians are cannibals; they eat flesh and they drink blood.”

Their communion services were called love feasts and the Romans passed around that these love feasts were sexual orgies, that these Christians were sexually immoral. And it stayed in circulation until the early 4th Century. And if you stopped somebody and said, “Do you know anything about Christians?”

“Yeah, I have heard about them.”

“What kind of people are they?”

“Oh man, they are bad people.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you should see what they get up to. They are cannibals for one thing. I mean they are sexually, totally corrupt and they have an agenda to set up another kingdom.”

Now that wasn’t circulating at the point at which Paul was writing to Timothy but I am just saying this illustrates the fact that Paul, as a prisoner, there is probably given some public rationale for his imprisonment and Timothy is getting a little bit ashamed of associating with Paul.

“And Timothy, you need to endure hardship about being misunderstood and hardship about the fact that people don’t understand you and don’t understand us.”

You know I sometimes hear people talk about the cringe factor in the Christian church. I understand what is meant by that but here’s the danger: we try to reduce anything that makes us seem different to the world at large. We want to become so non-offensive, so non-confrontational, so non-different that we end up being non-effective. We’re the same as everybody else; our hobby just happens to be that we go to church on a Sunday. But there is nothing radically different about a Christian.

And sometimes in our desire to communicate with people we so water down and dilute what it means to be a Christian, we sometimes preach a Gospel that is so spineless in its content; all it’s about is just asking Jesus into your heart to go to heaven when you die. Nothing confrontational about that – that’s a fantastic invitation. It doesn’t address the root of man’s alienation from God and the corruptness of the human nature that Christ came to not only forgive us of but to replace with His own nature.

There is an offense to the Gospel of Jesus it says several times, and I quote one verse: “They took offense at him” (Matthew 13:57).

And did Jesus apologize and say, “Hey, I’m sorry. You guys are getting this wrong. I’m not as bad as you think I am. No, I’m really quite nice actually.”

No, they took offense and He never ran after them.

Paul writes in Galatians 5 about the offense of the cross. He writes to the Corinthians about the stumbling block that the Gospel is to both Jews and to Greeks, for different reasons.

He doesn’t say, “Hey, this is a major problem; let’s redefine our Gospel to get the stumbling block out of the content,” because the reality is that people are looking for something different and when God is at work in people’s hearts, they are hungry for something different.

And the danger is we can be too concerned about our reputation and we go through makeovers in our churches to disguise the uniqueness of the Gospel. We are not being soldiers; we’re being wimps.

And he says, “Timothy, don’t be ashamed of the Gospel and don’t be ashamed of me. People don’t have to understand why you do what you do and say what you do, but just keep doing it and God will work through it.”

But there is another aspect of being a soldier, you see. He says in Verse 4 – in 2 Timothy 2:3 he says, “Endure hardship with us like a good soldier” and in 2 Timothy 2:4 he says,

“No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs – he wants to please his commanding officer.”

Now what in the world does this mean? What kind of civilian affairs is he thinking of? Is he talking about opting out of civilian life - you try to isolate yourself and separate yourself from the rest of the world? There are some who have tried to do that.

Is he talking about Christians not being involved in politics, for instance, and government and these are the civilian affairs?

Well, no, because he is not saying don’t get involved in civilian affairs; he says a soldier doesn’t get involved in civilian affairs because he is pleasing his commanding officer, so you too must learn from this lesson as well, that because you are pleasing your commanding officers, there are certain things you will not get involved with.

And so we don’t have to be ambiguous about this, he explains some of those things in the rest of the chapter. It’s always important to interpret the text in its context. And here’s some things he warns them about not getting involved with. 2 Timothy 14:2,

“Warn them before God against quarrelling about words; it is of no value and only ruins those who listen.”

You know, I hear this quarrelling about words, detail. (“Which translation of the Bible are you reading? What is your understanding of ambiguous things?) Because people don’t fight over the major things – we must fight for the major truths – but over ambiguous things.

And I get letters from people every week – and I am very happy to get those letters; please don’t not write because of what I am going to say now – but probably 90% are about things that don’t matter. They are peripheral things. Now they are important to the person and that’s good, so we need to address those. But we really don’t often – or should I say – we very often get involved in what Paul describes as quarrelling about words.

He says in 2 Timothy 2:16,

“Avoid godless chatter, because those who indulge in it will become more and more ungodly.”

This is the danger of gossip, by the way. It creates ungodliness. Now godless chatter, as he describes it there, can be fun because it can be nice and juicy and the old nature in us loves a good gossip, of course we do. Newspaper editors know that.

But he says, (2 Timothy 2:4) “Don’t get involved in civilian pursuits. “What that means, Timothy, is don’t get involved in quarrelling about words that are of no value, don’t get involved in godless chatter. 2 Timothy 2:23,

“Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels.”

Don’t major on minor things. In your own mind just assess on a scale of 1 to 10 how valuable is this particular argument or this particular fight somebody wants to pick with me. If it’s about something crucial, about the deity of Christ, the cross of Christ, all these important things, it’s a 10.

But so many of them are 1, 2, 3. Hey, don’t waste your energy, he says, don’t get involved in civilian pursuits.

“If you are a soldier, Timothy, you make sure when you are standing on the pulpit you are talking about the important things. You make sure, Timothy, as the pastor of the church in Ephesus” (which he left him there to be), “you make sure,” (as he tells him later and we’ll look at this on another occasion) “you preach the Word. And then you will keep the main thing the main thing.”

But it’s very easy, you see, to move away from this and to become almost sitting back with your feet up – let’s chat about all these things that we may not like or that are peripheral or secondary or not really important.

I heard somebody say one day, “There are two kinds of soldiers in a battle. There are those who are on the front line and there are those who are back in the barracks.”

He said, “You will know who they are by the kind of conversations they engage in. If you were to go on to the front line and you were to listen to what they are talking about, you will find they are talking about the enemy, they are talking about strategy, they are talking about tactics, they are talking about resources, they are talking about weapons, they are talking about reinforcements, they are tending to the wounded. They are probably tired, weary, but they are energized, the adrenalin is flowing.

“But if you go back to the barracks and you listen to what they are talking about, you will hear people saying things like, you know, “My bed was hard last night, my coffee’s cold, I don’t like the food, I wish it would stop raining, I’m cold.”

Now the person who said this – and I was challenged by it – he said, “You know, there are two kinds of Christians. There are Christians on the front line. If you want to know who they are, just listen to the kind of things they are concerned about. And there are Christians back in the barracks. If you want to know who they are, just listen to their conversations. What is really important to them?

And it’s very easy, you know, to be an armchair disciple, an armchair theologian with lots of opinions but zero involvement – just opinions.

D.L. Moody, a great evangelist a century ago, was confronted by some critics on one occasion who told him they did not like his methods of evangelism. And Moody’s very smart answer was, “I don’t particularly like them either, but I like the way I evangelize better than the way that you don’t.”

You know I rarely hear people who are actually on the job who have got time to criticize other people.

“Timothy, you are to focus on the task and that means you not only endure hardship; you must endure hardship with us. We’re doing it as a good soldier but no one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs, things that may not in themselves be wrong, but you have no time for those; you have got something far more important to be preoccupied with.”

Now you say, this is all very demanding, this is tough. And so it is but let me jump to 2 Timothy 2:8 where he has talked then about an athlete in 2 Timothy 2:5 and a farmer in 2 Timothy 2:6, and we’ll look at those on another occasion. But in 2 Timothy 2:8 he says,

“Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David.”

Why do you think he suddenly talks about the fact that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead? Because for every demand that God makes on us, for every discipline demanded of us, the risen Jesus Christ is the dynamic.

If he is going out saying, “Hey, be like a soldier, be like an athlete (wow); be as patient as a farmer.” I mean some say, “I’m not made that way”, and so you’re not.

But he says, “Now remember, Jesus Christ risen from the dead, alive.”

He began this section – 2 Timothy 2:1, notice – by saying this,

“You then, my son, be strong (he doesn’t put a period there), be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.”

What is grace? Grace is God giving us what we don’t deserve.

Now he says, “Timothy, be strong. I know that your natural inclination is not to be, I know you are timid, I know you get sick from time to time, I know you find it difficult to get courageous, it’s easy to feel ashamed. But Timothy I’m telling you to be strong, but not be strong, period - be strong where? In the grace that is in Christ Jesus, recognizing you do not have resources for this in yourself.”

You know, discipleship and disciples, such as you and me, need to understand two things in equal measure. We need to understand the internal presence of Christ by His Holy Spirit within our lives. And our response to that is dependence and I talk a lot about that. He is our life, He is our strength; our dependence is upon Jesus Christ, His internal presence within us by the Holy Spirit.

But the second thing in equal measure, we must understand, is the external disciplines of the Christian life. And those are expressed in obedience to Him. Dependence is on His indwelling presence; our obedience is expressed in disciplined, active, courageous, deliberate pleasing our commanding officer, as Paul puts it here. And these are not contradictory but they are complimentary. Dependence and obedience have to go together.

And I have said this before that obedience and dependence are like two wings on an airplane. Which wing is the most important wing on the airplane? Which can you afford to do without?

Our dependence is on the fact that we need to remember Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead. He is sufficient for us. We need to be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. That is where our dependence lies. Every demand God makes upon us, the Holy Spirit in us is the dynamic that meets that demand. We must never forget that. But we can remember only that. Just trust Him and that’s all – no, we obey Him.

And Timothy, by saying at the first, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, at the end remember that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead. In between he says, “And Timothy you had better get hold of the way you are supposed to live as an effective disciple. You need to be like a soldier. Endure hardship and leave the civilian pursuits that are not conducive to the goal of being a soldier of Jesus Christ.”

And I ask you as I finish, how is your soldiering? Are you willing to endure hardship, not grumble and complain, but allow it to be a means in which God is at work? Are you prepared to leave aside things that may not in themselves be wrong, but they are not conducive?

As the book of Hebrews says, (Hebrews 12:1) “Lay aside every weight which hinders us and press on.” And as you do so, remember Jesus Christ risen from the dead. Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus and He will equip us to grow and be increasingly effective and increasingly fruitful.

Let’s pray together.