Remain faithful to what you have learned and believed

  2 Timothy 3:14-4:2

You must remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know who your teachers were. Likewise, from your infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, the source of wisdom which through faith in Jesus Christ leads to salvation. All Scripture is inspired of God and is useful for teaching-for reproof, correction, and training in holiness so that the man of God may be fully competent and equipped for every good work.

In the presence of God and Christ Jesus, who is coming to judge the living and the dead, and by his appealing and his kingly power, I charge you to preach the word, to stay with the task whether convenient or inconvenient-correcting, reproving, appealing-constantly teaching and never losing patience.

There is just so much power in these few verses, not that all the Word doesn't hold a gift. I guess sometimes our hearts need or receive one gift better than another. I just turned 57 and I can tell you that sometimes you just get weary of the battle. You do need someone to hold up your arms to God in prayer. You do need to sit down on a rock and rest. Of course the rock needs to be the Lord. Now here, Paul reminds Timothy that he knows the truth. He challenges Tim and centuries later us, to remain faithful to what we believe and to what we know to be true. He reminds us that we have been given the power of Scripture from our infancy.
When we are young we are inspired to fight the good fight and to run with passion after causes that we know to be worthy.  After  more than a half century of journey, we sometimes grow weary of the cost of continuing to follow that passion, of continuing to be true to what we know with the heart of our hearts is true.

Christianity, actually any spirituality based on the truth of the Living God is not for wimps. Jesus wasn't kidding when he told us to follow him to the cross.  Truth at its crux is paradox, as we draw near to God, this becomes so evident and so costly. We are full of joy in the knowledge of the Teacher received in so many wonderful cups of God who have lead us on our way. Yet our hearts know sorrow too that so many often even those close to our hearts, do not open up to the grace already given. So many choose an alienation and a suffering completely unnecessary. As a physician suffering that is not necessary is oppressive, it goes against nature. It is challenge enough to try to be a cup of healing for the unavoidable suffering that is part of the journey. Trying to heal folks who choose their suffering and resist all manner of alleviation, yet decry life for their sorrow, is more than discouraging as well as perplexing.

Would that we as Church  might have incarnated the Good News of the Word a bit better by now so the world would not have much question about believing in the Love of God. As I wrote in another post, the words of Charles de Foucauld really do challenge my heart. He wrote that he wanted to live a life sufficiently good so that folks would meet him and say: If this is the servant, what must the Master be like? So, too, Paul cajoles : Remember what Jesus and all of us have taught you to be true. Remember the Word that awakened you, it's power is not diminished, it's promise has not dimmed. We as a JudeoChristian church have known the Scriptures "since our infancy" as  indeed a source of the wisdom of God. We know the Living Word of Scripture is a gift of the Spirit through which God speaks to us heart to heart reproving us, and correcting us as we need it, so to train us in the way of holiness to which we are called by our very creation.

We are  thus prepared by God to be "fully competent and equipped for every good work." Imagine! We are groomed to be vessels of the Living God, to be cups of the water of God for each other's thirst. God's word promises that the Spirit will prepare us and give us all that we need to serve well and to meet the challenge of all the good works to which we are called. We can fail miserably in many ways in the world or even in the organized structure of church. God does not promise us to be barons of the world. He does not promise us an easy or in many ways a "successful" ride. ( I believe Mother Theresa of Calcutta once said: God does not call me to success but to faithfulness. But he promises something much greater than worldly achievement. He promises he will accomplish his mission for our lives in the fullness of time if we will only cooperate with his grace, even a little. He does all the real work.

How many of us have jobs in which our bosses do most of the work for us? Yet so it is with our God and we who serve him. So we are asked to wait patiently for the will of God to be accomplished in us in God's own time and own way. We are called to preach the word with our lives, "to stay with the task whether convenient or inconvenient" (and the inconvenient I think has the upper hand.). We are called not to abandon hope, not lose patience no matter how weary or poured out we become. We are encouraged to use the word to lead each other home. We are to teach each other as the Spirit has taught us. We do know who our teachers are. Let us patiently remain faithful indeed to what we know to be true and more importantly to Who we know is Truth and Holy Love.
God bless.