Travel Tips


Sunday, October 17th, 2004
20th after Pentecost
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, 15 and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. 4:1 In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: 2 proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. 3 For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. 5 As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.

This message is really more of a letter, and though you’re all welcome to listen in, it is directed primarily at Hannah.

Hannah, I don’t remember all that we talked about that evening in April of last year when you told me and mommy that you understood what it meant to give your life to Jesus, and make him Lord of your life, I wonder if you do. I DO remember telling you that you’ll come up on times when you’re not sure. So let’s start from there.

The passage we all read from responsively a few minutes ago was part of a letter written by the Apostle Paul to a young pastor named Timothy almost 2 thousand years ago.

We need to stop before we go on and talk about what that means. ‘The passage’ means that what we read is part of a larger piece of writing. In this case, the larger piece of writing is a letter that the apostle Paul wrote to a friend of his named Timothy. Timothy was kind of like Paul’s son, but not in the normal way. Paul adopted Timothy as a son in Christ. That is, in a way, Timothy was probably more like a younger brother to Paul.

Anyway, there are several letters and writings that were put together a long time ago into what we now call the New Testament. The New Testament is divided into the first four books, which are called the gospels, which is short for ‘the Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’, and then comes the book of Acts, which is short for ‘The Acts of the Apostles’ which tells us about what the early church was like – how the first followers of Jesus Christ lived together and began to form the Church. It is followed by 21 letters and one apocalyptic book. Some of the letters, most, in fact, were written by the apostle Paul, like this one to Timothy, others were written by other people, some named and others not. When you open any of those letters to read them, never forget that someone, somewhere, a long time ago, was writing to someone else, trying to help them understand a little more about what it means to follow Christ.

We’ve been talking about the New Testament, and as you know, there’s an Old Testament as well.

The Old Testament is a lot longer than the New Testament, and a lot older. The Old Testament is full of stories of gardens, floods, battles and miracles, kings and prophets, poems and songs, and sayings, and laws. The first section is called the Pentateuch, which is the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, which tell of the forming of the world, and the giving of the law to Moses. There are parts of those five books that move along really fast, like a good movie, say, The Prince of Egypt. But there are other parts that just go on and on and on, and seem to not really have any relevance to today, to what it means to follow Christ today, with things going on today, with the way your friends are acting today towards you. It’s going to be hard sometimes to find what it is exactly that sections of Deuteronomy say about life today. But hold on. That day will come. In the meantime, read some in the book of Psalms.

There are other sections of the old testament as well – the poetic, or wisdom books, which include Psalms and Ecclesiastes, and the Major Prophets and the Minor Prophets. They may sometimes run together, those Minor Prophets, and it may be hard to pronounce some of their names, or the names of the people they were speaking about and to. In fact, you’ll find that to be the case in a lot of the Old Testament. But please don’t let that stop you from reading it. I know you love to read, and if that love of reading extends to the Bible, so much the better.

The important thing to remember about them all is that they were all written under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. One way or another, God had a hand in this. Not only in how it came together, but in how it was first put down. What you are going to find is that the Bible is sacred not because of who wrote it, or because someone says it is, but because of what it is about.

You see, when Paul wrote to Timothy and said,

“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”

He wasn’t including the letter he was writing right then in the ‘All Scripture’. He was talking about what they already had and accepted and understood to BE Holy Scripture – it’s what we call the Old Testament. There’s a connectedness between the Old Testament and the New Testament, though, that you can see when you step back from it some. There are places in the Old Testament that talk about things that, when you go to the New Testament and read, you find THAT was what the Old Testament was telling about. Here’s the thing: the latest part of the Old Testament and the earliest part of the New Testament were written about 500 years apart from each other.

We belong to a tradition that honors the Bible as the inspired word of God. As you get older, you might hear arguments about what ‘inspired’ means, and you may hear the word ‘inerrant’. Right now, all you need to worry about is this: God speaks to us through this book. Through these words, whether they are in the Old or New Testaments, God touches our lives, and changes us. It doesn’t always happen in the same way. That’s the neat thing about it. As you go through life, and read a particular passage, it may mean one thing to you at one age, and a few years later, you’ll go back and read it and it’ll mean something different. You see it from a different point of view. Neither I nor anyone can predict just how that will change, because it is the moving of the Holy Spirit that changes you by reading and by living it.

That was kind of what Paul was telling Timothy when he said that “the sacred writings … are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Jesus.”

Paul goes on to tell Timothy to DO some things: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching.

So proclaim, be persistent, convince, rebuke, and encourage. But what do you think he was talking about? He was talking about the gospel. The Good News that Jesus Christ was God with us, reconciling us to God’s self and teaching us to live life fully – as fully as he did, as fully as God intended us to live it in the first place.

That means not backing away, not hiding, not avoiding something hard. I think you learned that from Mrs. Collins, practicing and working on your bridges and tick-tocks, and other gymnastic moves. It means always being willing to listen, willing to talk, willing to forgive, willing to hold out your hand and hold someone ELSE’S hand to pull them through a hard time they might be having. It means recognizing when you’ve done something wrong and hurt someone and going to that person and sincerely, honestly, apologizing and telling them it will not happen again and mean it.

It means not being worried about what other people think about who you sit with, talk with, are friends with, eat with, and share your life with. It’s about knowing that God loves everyone, and you doing the same thing.

It means not being afraid of the hard questions, and not being afraid of not getting an answer, because sometimes that’s what faith means – it means waiting patiently for an answer that might or might not come in this lifetime.

You’ll come across people in your life who will tell you they have it all figured out, that the Bible is not a mystery to them. They can give you an exact date for when the world was created, and for when it will end. They will tell you that things that are happening today or have happened recently are in the book of Revelation, written right at 1,900 years ago. There are people that will tell you that their answers are the only answers. I would caution you about them. Living out what we read in the word of God involves an active following of the Spirit of God. It means ‘checking in’ on a regular basis with the author. It means carrying on a conversation with God each and every day of your life.

Please don’t ever let God be boxed in by what someone tells you, that he was only active in a certain way thousands of years ago. The Bible is an overall testament to God’s being in relationship – God’s pursuing a relationship – with humanity. Do you know what pursue means? It means chase. God chases after us.

And the best example of that chase is Jesus. God sent his only son to love us and show us the way. And that is why we are called Christians, because we follow Christ. And following Christ means giving yourself up for the sake of Christ. It means putting others’ needs in front of your own. (You may want to remember that as you and Caleb and Judson get older.) It means loving your family – blood relatives or not – whether you like them or not, seeing them as God sees them, as worthy of the life of God’s son Jesus Christ as you are.

Never forget that the family of God is bigger than just the people in this room. Do you remember what we read last week in our Wednesday night Bible Study on Mark, where Jesus was told that his Mother and brothers had come to see him? He asked who his Mother and brothers and sisters were – and he said ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’ Don’t forget that the family of God is going to look as different from each other as you and I are different, even more so. And never, ever, ever forget to love them. Because that is how people will know you’re a Christian – by your love.

I love you Hannah.

Let’s pray.