It is a joy if you find yourself in the privileged position of giving someone good news. You know that the person you're speaking to is going to want to hear the news you have for them, and so it is a pleasure to be the one to say it. If you work as a midwife and you get to say the words, “Congratulations, you have a healthy baby boy or baby girl” — what a joy to be the person to deliver that news. Or perhaps you've interviewed someone for a job and you find yourself having to phone that person back and say, “I would like to tell you that we would like to offer you the job.” And you know that the person you're talking to on the other end of the phone will be smiling as they hear the news. What a joy to be the bringer of good news.
Sometimes we have to bring people bad news. If you work as a police officer or as a doctor, it pretty much goes with the job — it is part of the job that sometimes you have to be the person to bring tragically bad news to people. And that's really hard to do, because you empathise and you feel the pain of the person you're talking to, and you know this is not something they will want to hear.
But how about the Christian message? What's it like to deliver that piece of news? Well, it is good news indeed — the word gospel, to slightly oversimplify, translates as good news. And yet here is the paradox: often we find that when we share the good news about Jesus with people, they don't want to hear it. Good news, and yet received as if it were bad news — because of which, telling other people about Jesus sometimes comes at great personal cost to ourselves.
If you were here last week, that was what Pastor Lee was talking about, from the first seven verses of 2 Timothy chapter 2. You can catch up with that on YouTube, the church website, the podcast feed, whatever, if you weren't here. We thought about how it's costly to tell people about Jesus. Today Paul is asking the question: what do you do when you share the good news of Jesus with somebody and it costs you to have done it? How do you keep doing that? How do you keep on offering out something when you've been bruised the past few times you've done it? The answer, in summary, is you need to hold on to the fact that the message you're sharing is good news. The answer is to get really clear on what the message is.
Now, it's not true to say that everybody who is not yet a Christian hates hearing about Jesus. Many people who are not Christians are intrigued, and enjoy hearing about Jesus. And if that's you — you're here this morning, you're still looking into Jesus's claims — my guess is you're glad that people are going to tell you something about Jesus. Otherwise you wouldn't be here.
But then, even so, you must find yourself wondering, why? Why do Christians tell other people something that they don't want to hear? In some parts of the world it's legal to be a Christian, but it's against the law to tell somebody else about Jesus who is not a Christian — against the law to try to persuade somebody to become a Christian. Why would some Christians actually lose their lives for doing that? Why not just keep quiet and live another day to tell another person? If you could not tell someone and live, maybe there's ninety-nine more people that you get to tell who won't hear if you get killed. The answer is: because it's good news, and because we love people enough to tell them something even if they don't want to hear it.
So, as we look at these verses from 2 Timothy, Paul has two things to say to Timothy — who was a local church leader in a place called Ephesus — two things to say to Timothy about the word of God. Things that we need to hear and know, that Timothy needed to hear and know, things that we will need to remember. Here's the first of those two: God's word is not chained.
God’s word is not chained (verses 8-10)
God's word is not chained. Here's verse 8: “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.” Paul is suffering for the gospel. The extent of his suffering is such that he is currently, physically, literally in chains — he is shackled and chained. He says “chained like a criminal.” That word criminal is a really strong word; the only other place you find it in the New Testament is speaking of the two people who were crucified with Jesus — according to Luke's gospel, two criminals were crucified with him. So this was not just that Paul had done a couple of little naughties and upset some people. He's not on the naughty step, or told to stand outside the classroom for five minutes. No — Paul is perceived of as an extremely dangerous person, on a rank with insurrectionists, terrorists, murderers. He's been interviewed at Paddington Green Police Station. He's being held in a supermax prison, in isolation twenty-three hours a day, guarded round the clock, right there with the worst of the worst. His crime was to tell people about Jesus. Chained like a criminal — and yet he does it willingly.
Verse 10: “I endure everything for the sake of the elect” — that is, God's people. He does it so that God's people might gain salvation and eternal glory. Listen to how verse 10 goes on: “I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory.” Paul wants the people that God wants to receive salvation to be saved, and that salvation comes in Christ Jesus. Jesus died on the cross and rose again from the dead, so that we can trust him today and be forgiven for everything we've done wrong. We can have God's Holy Spirit live within us, to change us from within, and to be with us until one day, in the future, we live on a renewed earth — a life free of pain, free of suffering, free of everything that is broken, living with God and his people forever. That is salvation. That is being saved. It comes through Christ Jesus. And Paul wants people to have that. He says it comes with eternal glory — which means that future hope is not something that just lasts for a season. It lasts for eternity. It lasts forever. Paul endures short-lived pain in a Roman prison for eternal glory.
Notice, when we say the phrase today “no pain, no gain,” what we usually mean is: I must go through some pain so that I can gain something. If you want to get fit, you will need to exercise — it can't be done by proxy, you have to do it. People can do all kinds of things for you, but they can't do your exercise for you. You have to do it. And if you haven't exercised at all for fifty-seven years, it's going to hurt. But no pain, no gain — that's how you get fit. With Paul it's different, isn't it? With Paul, no pain, no gain — Paul suffers, it hurts — not so that Paul can gain anything, but so that other people can gain. That's why I say it's about love.
Notice the little sentence in the middle — the sentence that links Paul's endurance with his suffering. Why does Paul, the suffering Paul, keep on telling people about Jesus? The point: “suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal” — verse 9 — and then here's the little sentence: “but God's word is not chained. Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect.”
What a beautiful thought. Here's the apostle Paul — he carries the gospel, and you might think if you lock Paul up, the gospel then has no way to get out. But it's God's gospel, not Paul's. Paul's just the messenger, and locking Paul up doesn't stop it. It's almost as if Paul personifies the gospel, treats the gospel as if it were a person — you can lock up Paul, but not the gospel. The gospel still carries on.
How does all of this land for us in daily life — this truth that the word of God is not chained? Two things. Firstly, it's really liberating. If you think that everything depends on you to tell people about Jesus, it is so stressful — the weight of that responsibility on your shoulders. As a pastor, the danger is I start to think: what happens if I get ill? If I get flu that wipes me out for a week, or some other illness that starts with C — but we don't need to talk about that anymore — what if I get that? Who's going to tell people about Jesus? If I take a holiday, how are people going to hear? If I don't work enough — if I don't do a few extra hours a week, and then a few months later a few more hours a week — people aren't going to hear. It's on me. That crushes you. But it's not just pastors — we all feel that pressure. We start to think, “Unless I'm around to tell this friend about Jesus, they won't hear. Unless I'm available to tell my unbelieving husband or wife about Jesus, they won't hear. It's all on me.” And Paul says: God's word is not chained. You can be taken out of the equation for a while — it's fine. God will still reach the people he wants to reach with the gospel. It's not all on you. How liberating.
The other thing it does for us in practice is it builds endurance — knowing this is why Paul endures everything. Pragmatism is really tempting. In case that's a long word, and it's too early in the morning, and you don't know what pragmatism is — let me tell you, pragmatism is simply doing what works, not particularly doing what is principled and deciding it's the right thing to do, but just trying to work out what will work in practice and doing that. But if you bring that into living for Jesus and telling people about Jesus, what happens is you start to hide the truths that people might not want to hear — the bits that could be a sticking point. Maybe you tell people that Jesus loves them, but you don't tell them there might be a judgement, because that could be awkward, that might put people off — mustn't put people off. So you manage the message to leave out the bits that might make it work less well. But God's word isn't chained, so we're free from that attempt to manipulate things. We don't think, “If I'm locked up, people won't hear, so I mustn't do anything that takes away my platform.” No — the gospel will spread. So we don't need to be fearful at all.
We're all familiar with the idea of celebrity culture. It is everywhere we look, where it all hangs on one key star person — whether it's the star player in sport, the star manager, the star presenter in the media world, the star businessman at the helm of some large trendy company. You identify the brand with that person — the star fund manager. But then what happens if the person you hope was going to score the goals against Manchester City is taken off the pitch injured ten minutes in? You go, “Oh no, we've not got our star scorer.” Or the batsman who always gets you the century, so you're off to a decent start in the test match, goes out for five runs in the first over — that's it, we've lost, it's gone. Or the presenter of your favourite TV show chooses to retire and move on to something new, and you think Countdown will not be the same ever again — and you'll be right, it wasn't. Or the boss of that big brand hands on to somebody else — Tim Cook not in charge of Apple, no one's going to buy an iPhone ever again, it won't be as good.
And we can bring that into church life, can't we? Pastor Lee is not here this morning — Pastor Lee is in Sheffield. As well as serving as one of our pastors, Pastor Lee is a bishop in our little diocese that David kindly prayed for — thirty-five odd churches. Lee has gone to Sheffield because there's a church there called Christchurch Central. Christchurch Central was planted about ten, twenty years ago by someone called Tim Davis. Tim has pastored that church for its whole life — two decades of Tim's wise and godly leadership. Tim has now moved on from that role; he's now our new diocesan bishop full-time. As a result, the church has appointed somebody new, and Lee has gone to install and license Kenny as the new minister of Christchurch Central. Just imagine what it's like to be in that church in this season of change. You've not known anybody but Tim at the helm for twenty years — no one there remembers, because there isn't another minister, there never has been. What are they thinking? How will we manage without Tim? It won't be the same.
If things get really ugly for Christianity in this country, and Lee and I start to think, “What if I get arrested for preaching certain messages — who's going to pastor the church?” Or maybe all of us can find ourselves thinking like this: “If I lost my job, if some of my friends didn't want to talk to me anymore, who would tell them about Jesus? It won't be as good.”
Now, sometimes that is true — it does all hinge on one person. It shouldn't, but sometimes it does. But often it's not true. Often life does go on, because of something called teamwork — around the star player there are others who can step in to fill the gap, and things can go on. But Paul is saying much more than just “do some teamwork.” I mean, he is saying that, but it's much more than that. He's not just saying there are other people who can preach, it's all right. He's not even saying the Holy Spirit that empowered his preaching, that same Spirit is in the hearts of others and the Spirit will carry on — that's true, but it's not what he's saying. The message Paul preached was the word of God, but he's also saying that the preacher was the word of God — and you can't put that in a prison. Which means Paul can do what God calls Paul to do, and he can trust the outcomes to the Lord, and the word of God will continue to spread. God's word is not chained.
God’s word is trustworthy (verses 11-13)
And then second: God's word is trustworthy. This is verses 11 to 13. “Here is a trustworthy saying: if we die with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we disown him, he will also disown us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself.” That little phrase — “here is a trustworthy saying” — literally, the word is trustworthy, the word is faithful. It's not just saying these few verses are laid out in our Bibles like poetry, they are faithful and trustworthy. Paul's saying: I've just told you that God's word is not chained; the other thing you need to know is God's word is trustworthy, and these few verses will unpack for us how that is. What we've got here is four short sentences, each of which comes as a pair — if we do this, then that will follow.
Let's take the first two of those: “If we died with him, we will also live with him. If we endure, we will also reign with him.” These two sentences deal with what happens if we are faithful. When you become a Christian, one piece of language the New Testament uses is to say that you die when you become a Christian — not literally, not normally, but in this sense: Jesus died on the cross, and when you become a Christian you are joined to him by faith, and you died with Christ, is the language that is used. You died to self — your old self, who lived just for you, for your selfish interests, that self is not around any more, the old you has gone. And then, because living for Jesus is costly, especially if we're going to speak about him, we will need to endure and keep going. Paul says, if you do that, we will live with him — not might, we will live with him. On the horizon is absolutely certain everlasting life, and we will reign with him — we won't just survive for eternity, we will be royalty. God is faithful. The word is trustworthy. So the things that God promises us for the future are not like that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, where you go chasing it and when you get there there's actually nothing there, there's nobody behind the curtain. No — the future that God promises is real, and he will deliver.
So that's the first two of those little sentences — what happens if we are faithful. The last two deal with what happens if we are unfaithful to God, and there are two sides of the coin. Firstly, we get the result for us, in verse 12: “If we disown him, he will also disown us.” Maybe these words remind you of some words of Jesus in Mark 8:38: “If anyone is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father's glory with the holy angels.” Or maybe that word disown reminds you of Peter's denial — just after Jesus was arrested, the apostle Peter, Jesus's closest follower, is asked three times if he's connected with Jesus in some way, and every time Peter says, “I don't know the man.” Now, Jesus later lovingly restored Peter, but Paul is saying: if you make that the trajectory of your life, where you persist in saying of Jesus, “I don't know him,” then the day will come when he will say to you, “I don't know you, I don't think we've met, who are you?” That's the result for us.
But then here's the result for God, in verse 13: “If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself.” The thought here is similar to the gospel being unchained. If we are unfaithful in our calling to spread the good news, we can't take God down with us. God's promises stand. The gospel will go to the ends of the earth. God will save his people. God would love us to serve his purposes, but he doesn't need us. He will win anyway.
Here's a date for you — anyone remember what happened on the 18th of June, 2023? There's a picture to jog your memory: Titan. This was a company called OceanGate, led by a sixty-one-year-old gentleman by the name of Stockton Rush — not much of a gentleman, it turned out. The pitch here was: we will take a small group of people, just four people, on a dive in this submersible craft down to view the wreckage of the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. It's so hard to find the Titanic — so dark, so far down — that it wasn't even guaranteed you'd find it; there was a possibility you'd dive in slightly the wrong place and miss it. And so it went on, until on the 18th of June the submersible craft never came back to the surface. I can remember — it doesn't feel like it was three years ago — people anxiously replaying the sonar audio, trying to find some clue as to where they were and what was happening, how much oxygen would they have left, all of that. Eventually they found the wreckage on the seabed — the whole craft had literally just imploded, crushed by the pressure of the sea. And I'm told that those on board would have died instantly, would have felt nothing — literally nothing, in that the water pressure would have killed them in so few milliseconds that it wouldn't have even been time for the brain to process the signals from the pain receptors. They literally would have felt nothing, which is a mercy. But what a tragedy.
What's come to light since is that Stockton Rush was warned again and again by many experts about this. The craft was never given what's called a rating — a sort of certificate from an insurance or maritime agency to confirm that it's safe for a certain number of people, in certain conditions, to a certain depth. That was never done — short-circuited. Here is an email he was sent by a submarine maritime expert, five years before the disaster: “I think you are potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic. Ironically, in your race to Titanic, you are mirroring that famous catch-cry: she is unsinkable. Having dived the Titanic, and having stood in a coroner's court as a technical expert, it would be remiss of me not to bring this to your attention.” This wasn't the only expert he ignored. And here is an email that Stockton Rush sent back to that same expert: “I have grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market. Since Guillermo and I started OceanGate, we have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult.”
What a catastrophic mistake. It cost that man his life. But not just him — it cost him the craft, he took the ship down with him, four others lost their lives, his entire business collapsed, and indeed the entire submarine adventure-exploration industry lost all of its credibility, and will possibly never recover it. All because of his mistake.
Now, here's the thing that Paul says — and be liberated by this. Paul says: if you turn your back on Jesus, he will turn his back on you, but you don't get to take the ship down. God is faithful. Jesus will still save his people. You hurt yourself, but nobody else. This is so liberating. There are so many stories of church leaders who have abused their positions of trust and responsibility in God's church, to do horrendous things in the name of Jesus, and it eventually comes to light that they've done this — there was a case in court just this week — and you think, how awful. Isn't it reassuring to know that those people, when they do those things, do not hurt the purposes of God one bit? God and his good purposes still go on. They've hurt themselves, they've hurt their victims, and those victims must be front and centre, because there are people scarred and injured by the way they've been treated by some bearing the name of Christ. But they have not hurt or sunk the purposes of God.
So whether we persevere in telling others or not, God's word can be trusted — God will keep his promises to his people, and the gospel will do its job faithfully.
Remember Jesus
So there's the perspective we need if we're going to tell people about Jesus: they might not want to hear the good news, but we have to remember the word of God is not chained, and the word of God is trustworthy.
What do we need to do with this, as we go out from here into Sunday afternoon, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? What are we going to do as a result? What's Timothy going to do with these perspectives? You might think the thing to do is to keep on telling people about Jesus — but that's not where Paul goes. It's very striking: there's only one explicit command in this whole passage, and it comes in verse 8: “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel.” What we need to do, if people may not want to hear what we want to share with them about Jesus, is this: remember Jesus. Fix your eyes on him and don't take them off. Keep looking at him.
And he tells us which Jesus — it's the Jesus who suffered and died. Notice he calls him Jesus Christ — everywhere else in 2 Timothy he's called Christ Jesus. Here he flips it round: Jesus first, not his title, his royal title, Messiah, Christ, but his name, his human name, the name given to him at his birth — Jesus. Jesus, who suffered and died as a human being like us. Remember that Paul endured all things not for his own good, but for the good of other people — and we can only do that if we fix our eyes on Jesus, who endured everything not for his own good, but for ours.
The Jesus who suffered and died. The Jesus who rose. “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead.” God's promise of eternal glory is not just a dream, not just a wish — Jesus has already been raised in glory, and all of the others who are with him will one day follow suit. This is really going to happen. It's been done once already. So everything we might suffer for him is worth it.
And then, Jesus, descended from David — that's to say, vindicated as God's chosen king over the world. In him, all of God's ancient purposes come true. God will keep all of his promises, God will fulfil all of his purposes, and he'll do it in Jesus.
So remember Jesus. You might think it's a strange instruction for Paul to give Timothy, the most senior church leader in Ephesus — to remember Jesus. How can you, if you're a Christian, how can you forget Jesus? Really easily, is the answer. It is so easy to forget Jesus and take your eyes off him. Life is full of pressures, gospel ministry is full of pressures — it's so easy just to focus on the to-do list, the people, the tasks, the anxieties, and to take your eyes off him. So we need to be told to remember Jesus.
God's word marches forth. It cannot be chained. God's promises will come true. Everything it might cost us to follow Jesus will be more than worthwhile. God is faithful to his purposes — nobody can sink his ship. So, brothers and sisters, remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. Fix your gaze, fix your eyes on him.