Do Not Be Ashamed Of The Testimony Of Our Lord #2

All right, so we're coming back to 2 Timothy. Last week was Father's Day, and so we took a week off. We're coming back to 2 Timothy 1. We started this passage, verses 8 through 14, two weeks ago. And in that sermon, we studied primarily verses 8 and 9. And in those verses, Paul taught us what we are to do. He called us to suffer. He exhorted us not to be ashamed of Jesus Christ or of his ministers, but to join with them. suffering for the gospel. Now suffering is a hard pill. It's not the sort of thing any of us look at and go, yes, please. It's the sort of thing we say, no, I'll pass. It's not an attractive thing. None of us by nature would choose it. And yet Paul calls us to choose it. He says, join with me in suffering, which is to say, you should suffer with me. Come on, jump on in. The water is warm. Except he doesn't say the water is warm. He says that we should join him. And so last time we studied this, we saw

what we ought to do. And this week, we're in need of the reason why. If I'm to suffer, I want to know why. And so in the verses that follow, the ones we'll be studying this morning, Paul gives us this reason. Our text is 2 Timothy 1, verses 8 through 14. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. Therefore, do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, or of me, his prisoner. But join with me in suffering for the gospel according to the power of God, who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was granted to us in Christ Jesus from all eternity, but now has been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher and an apostle and a teacher.

For this reason I also suffer these things, but I am not ashamed. For I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day. Retain the standard of sound words which you have heard from me, in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. Guard, through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, the treasure which has been entrusted to you. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. 8, but coming in 9, I'd say through probably 10, 9 and 10, maybe 11 as well. These are the sorts of passages that I think Reformed people really like because they're really theological. There's talk of calling and election and being saved and justification. There's lots of big words, big concepts, big doctrines in here.

And so I think it's the sort of thing that Reformed people like. We want to talk about how he's abolished death and how he's brought us to life and immortality to light through the gospel. These are very, on the face of it, very theoretical or theological things that happen that are good and necessary for us to understand. And yet I'm convinced that when Paul wrote this, he was not writing us something to entertain us or to simply instruct our minds. I don't think that he was speaking to Timothy in such a way as to say, remember these deep theological truths in your mind, and they're going to cause you to be able to suffer with me according to the power of God. Instead, what I think he was doing was calling to mind, or rather mind, he was calling Timothy's heart to action. That these words were not aimed at Timothy's head, but they were aimed at his heart. And so as we study them, I don't want us to be thinking, this is all just stuff I need to understand.

It's not just stuff you need to understand. It's stuff you need to believe. And you need to be moved by and care about. As we consider the things that Paul says, we shouldn't go, oh, isn't that interesting? And wasn't that nice of God? And isn't he good to us? We ought to be moved to action. That's what Paul's saying here. This why that he gives to Timothy regarding suffering is meant to move him, to move the needle so that he would be willing to suffer for the sake of the gospel. Realizing that none of us by nature, including Timothy, and Paul, would do naturally. We'd look at the cost and we'd say, no, no, no, I don't want to do that. And so suffering is not something that we process in our heads, though many of us do. When hard things come into our lives, when we have hardships, whatever the suffering might be, whether it's physical or relational or spiritual, we want to process. We desperately want to know why. Why should I suffer? Why should I continue to suffer? Why am I suffering?

Our heads ask these questions because our hearts don't understand. We're taught to believe that God is good and merciful and cares for his people. And yet when hardship comes, our hearts are the ones that struggle. Even as we suffer and even as we bear up under the burdens, it's possible for our heads to understand what's going on and to be content with not knowing or with not understanding. But our hearts are a different story. Our hearts are not content not to know. And so as Paul tells Timothy to join with him in suffering, he's dealing with Timothy's heart because he realizes that simple head knowledge isn't going to get the man to do what he ought to do. He's calling Timothy to faith and to trust in God. At the end, Paul says, for this reason, I've also suffered these things, but I'm not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I'm convinced he's able to guard what I've entrusted to him. And we're going to come to what he's entrusted to the Lord and why he's willing to suffer.

But for us to be able to do that, we have to engage our hearts with this work. You have to be willing to have the sufferings or the hardships that you endure for the sake of the gospel dealt with and not just suppressed or covered over. Maybe another way of saying it is we have to deal not simply with knowledge and facts, but we have to deal with feelings and emotions. The Bible tells us that with the mouth a man confesses, but it's with his heart that he believes. And the heart is the place where most of our struggles come from. That's why Scripture warns us to keep watch over our hearts with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life. Think in your own life how easy it is to become convinced of something in your head, that it's right, that it's good, that it's proper, that it needs to be done, and that we should be the ones to do it. We can look at a situation and go, I see it, I understand it, I comprehend.

And yet our feet don't move to action and our mouths don't open. And the reason is because we haven't made peace with the cost. We haven't made peace with the suffering. We could multiply examples of this, but I'll give you one. Have you had it happen in your life that you know that you ought to confess your sins and repent? And yet you've refused to do it. And I use the word refused on purpose. You decided not to do it because you thought that the other person that you were going to confess to would weaponize your confession. and that they would exploit your weakness or your vulnerability. And so you said, I'm not willing to suffer in that way. Things are bad, and I'm not willing for them to get worse by opening my mouth and saying, I did wrong, because you're afraid that they'll throw it back in your face, that they'll use it as a weapon to beat up on you. And all the while, you know you need to do that. It does need to be done. You did sin after all, but you're not willing to because you don't want to suffer.

I think this sort of thought and these sorts of things go through our heads daily. I think we're counting the cost all the time of our actions and saying, am I willing to risk the danger to myself by doing what I know I should do? Saying what I know I should say. Suffering really is something that we by nature avoid at all costs. In fact, often it's said that the only thing that will motivate us to do the right thing is when the pain of not doing the right thing is higher, becomes higher than the pain of doing the right thing, then and only then will we be willing to suffer. And even then, the principle that led us not to suffer previously is still intact and motivating us. I will do what causes me the least amount of pain, the least amount of suffering. And I fear that too often, this is how we negotiate our way through our lives. We look around, and the cost we're counting, the things we're tallying up is what's going to hurt, what's going to be painful, what's going to be hard.

Where can I find the least of that? That's where I'll go. And so when Paul calls Timothy to come and suffer with him, to not be ashamed of the testimony of Jesus Christ, he's calling him to a very, very difficult work. Scary and hard. And there Timothy is, right along with us, looking at it and going, why? Why would I do that? And so Paul says to him, you ought to do it because God has saved us and called us. with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity, but now has been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. Now I ask you, is he trying to convince him with theological truths? Yes, insofar as Timothy's heart is bound to those truths. I think many times in our lives, The thing that often motivates us to do something, or we think should motivate us, or that should motivate other people, is duty. Responsibility. You have a responsibility to do this. You ought to do this. You're supposed to do this. Whether we're talking to our wife, or we're talking to our husband, or we're talking to our children, or our employers, or our employees, we always think in terms of duty. What are you supposed to do? Well, do what you're supposed to do. I should do what I'm supposed to do.

And we remove any question of whether we want to do it. And we think it's sufficient to say, well, you ought to do it because you're supposed to do it. Now, is it true that you ought to do it because you're supposed to do it? Yeah, yeah, you should. But I ask you then, how well does that work? How well does it work for you to simply live your life doing what you're supposed to do because you know you're supposed to do it? It may work for a season or a short time. When the stakes are high, you may be faithful to your duty. But I'm afraid that the truth is too often as soon as we're out of the spotlight and as soon as the pressure is gone, we revert back to our former way. As soon as we can skirt our duties, we do. And the reason is simply because we don't want to do them. We don't want to suffer. And knowing that we should suffer doesn't move our hearts to do it, to endure. Duty is a cold obligation or an expectation placed upon us to do the right thing. How we feel about it doesn't matter. It just has to be done.

I want you to consider for a minute, if someone does something for you that you know they don't want to do, but they do it because they have to, it's miserable, isn't it? Like if you were to go in your annual review with your employer and they're like, well, you've been here another year, and I suppose that means I've got to give you a raise, though I don't really want to and don't think you've earned it, but I'm sort of obligated to so you don't leave. Like you understand how miserable that would be. You'd go, that's awful. Is there no gratitude in you at all for the work that I've done? I'd rather have you fire me than to speak to me this way. Don't give me a raise because you're obligated to. Give me a raise because I've earned it. Give me a raise because you're pleased with my work. Give me a raise because you like me and you're thankful and I've made you profitable. Give me a raise for those reasons and smile while you do it. Please. Duty is a cruel master and a poor motivator. And when it comes to suffering,

I fear that not many of us are willing to suffer out of a sense of duty. And so all of Paul's motivation here and reasoning is not a matter of duty. Well, you should suffer. I suffered, so you should suffer. Because misery loves company after all. No. When he speaks to Timothy, he says that you ought to suffer according to the power of God who has saved us. Who has saved us. From what? This is the great question. What is it that you've been saved from? What have you been saved from? That is what I'm convinced Paul is speaking to as he petitions Timothy to suffer with him. You've been saved. Out of what and why? What was it that Timothy was saved out of or away from? He was saved out of the wrath of God against his sins, which is true not just for him, but for all of us.

At the risk of this sounding like a little kid's Sunday school class, this is the truth that you may never outgrow. Never. Whatever you face in life, whatever hardships you endure, whatever trials and burdens that you carry, for however long you carry them, if you are a Christian, you have been saved out of death and brought into life because God chose to love you. And there is nothing lovely about you. Nothing lovely about you. When we sing nothing but the blood of Jesus, I think this is a kid's song, right? This is what we teach in our Sunday school and in our nurseries. But we need this as adults. Because all that song does is bring up, here's what you want to bring to God, but nothing but the blood of Jesus will suffice.

You can't atone for your sins. You can't make up for them. You can't please God. You can't make him crack a smile at you in the least. Only the blood of Jesus Christ can do that. And the blood of Jesus Christ has done that. There ought to be, in every Christian heart, just below the surface, a vital knowledge of your own sins and struggles and what God has done to help you and to save you out of. You should never forget. who you are and what you would be apart from his mercy. You should never forget it. Never forget it. And I'm not talking about, oh, this one time he was merciful to me. Way back when. Yes, that may well be true and that may be prominent in your minds and that's fine. But his daily love and mercy and kindness to you, you should be able to speak of.

in the midst of whatever trials you're facing, and you say, well, I don't know. I don't feel like it all the time. And I say, I understand that temptation, but I want you to see it as a temptation to forsake the Lord, because he has been good to you. And this is something that our heart has to understand, not just something that our head has to understand. Our heads can remember Romans 8.28, right? The Lord works good together for all those who love him and are called according to his purpose. We can know that, but when we hit the turbulence of life, That verse has to live in our hearts, not in our heads. Now, it may seem childish. You know, kids like to tell the same stories. You ever have kids come and tell you, and they say, hey, remember when? Remember when, Daddy? Remember when, Mommy? Remember that time we did this thing? And it was great, and they have these memories. And his parents were inclined to look at them and go, yes, I remember, but how many times are you going to tell me that story? And you ought to see what you see in that example is childlike faith.

they remember the good things. They just love them and they remember them and they tell you about them time and time again. Do you remember? And do you remember? And they're just delighted. Long after the event's over, they're delighted by the pleasure and the enjoyment of the thing, whatever it was. And the same ought to be true of us. We ought to be able to look at our pasts and our sins and the sins that we struggle with today and we ought to be able to say, thanks be to God that he's been so good to me and hasn't given me over to what I would choose on my own. But to say that, you have to have some knowledge of what you would choose on your own, and that's humbling work. Because if you've accustomed yourself to thinking that you always make good decisions and you always do right things and you never really screw up too badly, it's very hard to see how God's been good to you then because you've stolen all his glory for yourself.

And so you come to think, I've not been saved from much. And yet you have been saved from the fires of hell and given a father who loves you and will never fail you. Who's not distant or far off and who doesn't look on you and go, he'll have to learn that lesson the hard way. And so when Paul speaks these words to Timothy, he's not calling Timothy simply to his duty. You ought to do what you're supposed to do. He's calling him to love because God has loved him first. Love is the response that we ought to have to God's kindness in saving us from our sins. It's very easy and common for us to take for granted God's kindness and to forget how good he's been to us. That when we look at the tally book of our lives, we think, we only look on the debt side. We only look on the expense side. We only look at the bad stuff. And we forsake all of the Lord's mercy. I can tell you that when I became a Christian,

I'm convinced that if I hadn't come to faith when I did, if I'd gone just six more months or a year, my life would have been destroyed, absolutely destroyed, through drugs, through alcohol, through all kinds of sin. I was right on the edge of just falling into all of that stuff. And I hadn't been previously to that extent, but it was getting worse and getting worse. And the thing about our lives is we can't live them twice. You can't say, oh, I'm going to go satisfy all of my lusts and all of my sins and all of my desires and then see what that produces and then decide to come back and go, no, I'm not going to take that path. I'll take the other one. We have to live by faith. But that doesn't mean that if we wouldn't have made awful, terrible, destructive decisions for ourselves and the people around us, we can be assured that that's exactly what we would have done and would still do today if God hadn't saved us and plucked us out of it.

And so if you were to take for a minute and compare the consequences of your own actions, if you decided to just do what you wanted, and you could take the suffering and the hardship and the sorrow and the pain and the agony and all the mess over there, and compare it to suffering for the sake of Jesus Christ, which do you think is greater? I'm convinced that your suffering would be much, much worse if it came to you from your own hand. And that's because you would be suffering for the sake of sin. you'd been given over to Satan in such a way that your life would be miserable and awful. No joy, no peace, no happiness, no contentment, no rest. You often think of new believers as being refreshing, not because they're theologically astute, but because they're not, because they love God. And they say, what would he have me do? Oh, I need to do that? Okay, I'll do it. And we're looking and going, well, that's going to be hard. And they're like, well, that's okay. That's okay. Yes, you're right, it will be.

I won't be able to have those friends or have that comfort or entertain that lust anymore. But they're refreshing because they demonstrate an appropriate response to being saved. Their response is love, not duty. And so if you're inclined toward duty and to thinking, well, I have to do it because I need to do it, I want you to ask God to help you not think in terms of duty, but think in terms of loving because you've been loved first. As Christians, you have to be able to think this way and process your life this way. What would love have me do? What would God who's loved me and saved me from my sins have me do? So he saves us. And then Paul speaks to Timothy and he says, he calls us with a holy calling. Calls us to what? To suffer, to follow him. Maybe it'd be better to say it that way. He calls us to follow him wherever he leads.

He's called us with a holy calling, a noble and righteous and good calling. He's placed on our lives. And that calling does go through valleys of sorrow and hardship. But it's a good calling. They've often thought that the Christian life is often harder than the non-Christian life. It seems in some ways that we suffer more, that more hardships come, and more acutely and more particularly and more frequently than in the lives of non-believers. This is what Psalm 73 teaches us, after all. that Asaph was tempted as he looked on the lives of unbelievers to think that there's no pains in their death. They're not in trouble as other men are, nor are they plagued like mankind. And yet I'd ask you, if you watch a Christian and a non-Christian endure the same sort of hardships, the Christian is the one who has hope. And you might say, well, if you've been through it, you might say, there wasn't much hope in there. And I'd say, have you watched people who aren't Christians walk through the same thing? It absolutely...

destroys their lives. My wife's been telling me about these families that have, through friends of friends, that have had kids drown and end up in the hospital because of falling into the pool, and I don't remember the details. One of the family had two kids, and one of them passed away, and the other one has severe, severe brain damage. And they don't know if the kid's ever going to be able to talk or walk, and these are little kids. Very, very terrible, sad situation. And so your heart goes out to them because who would ever want anyone to have to suffer these ways? And yet God has brought that suffering into their lives. Now is an unbeliever who's not been saved from their sins and doesn't know Jesus Christ have anything in their toolbox to process that kind of sorrow and suffering? No, they don't. They don't. And that doesn't mean because the Christian does have those things at their disposal that they know how to use them and rely on them the way they should. We don't.

We're very weak and in need of God's mercy each day to bear us through these things, not just in the middle of the storm, but in the days and months and years that come afterwards. I remember when I was in pastor's college, you remember these sort of light bulb moments, these little snippets of things that are said. And so one of the things that we got told when we were talking about family suffering is they said, when a married couple loses a child, it is overwhelmingly the majority that they will end up divorced. It's just what happens. Because they can't bear the thought of it. They can't look at their spouse who maybe their child looked like their spouse. You had his eyes or her nose or whatever. They just can't bear it. And they end up divorced. Why? Because a tragedy struck their life. And unless they are rooted on Jesus Christ, They have no hope of bearing that storm and the wreckage that it produces in the future. No hope. None. It's difficult for Christians, and it would be impossible for them to bear it if they didn't know that God had been merciful to them and kind to them, and that they could trust God with their child that's no longer in their care. And so God has saved us and called us with a holy calling, given us his own son and given us...

himself to rely on in these moments of weakness and hardship. What a comfort it is for the scripture to say to you that when you don't know how to pray, the Holy Spirit intercedes with you with groanings. When you don't know what to say because you're that weak, that broken, that hard, suffering is that bad. God promises he doesn't sit there and go, I'm sorry, what did you say? What did you need? He comforts us and tells us that his spirit knows us and understands us and intercedes for us. and bears with us in the deepest sorrows that we face. That's a holy calling. That's a kind God who loves and cares for his children. Many of us would prefer that his love would come to us in the form of keeping us from those sorts of sufferings. And yet that's often not the case. He saves us from our sins. He calls us with a holy calling. And our response to these things ought to be love. And we ought to pray that God would help us to love him.

When we feel as though we can't go on or bear another day. There was a time in John 11 where Jesus had been in Bethany, the town of Bethany, and he'd gotten himself in trouble and kind of got ran out on a rail by the Pharisees. They wanted to stone him. They wanted to kill him. And in Bethany, Lazarus lived in Bethany, along with Mary and Martha, his sisters. And so it came about that at one point Lazarus got sick. And Mary and Martha send to Jesus, and they say, Lazarus is sick. We need you to come. And so Jesus and his disciples are together, and they see Mary and Martha, and they say, we should come. The disciples are going, and Jesus says, no, no, we're going to wait. So they wait. And what happens while they wait? Lazarus dies. And they get there when Lazarus has already been buried. And there's all of this.

this sorrow and this weeping and this grief. And so he comes. And the thing we note is that Jesus comes and they say, you can't open the tomb. He's going to stink. He's been dead a while. And that's the main point. But there's these little things that God gives us in the midst of these bigger stories that are very helpful to us. And one of them in this context is the disciples didn't want to go back to Bethany. Why didn't they want to go back to Bethany? Well, because they were afraid they were going to get killed. They said, Basically, we barely got out of there with our lives last time, and you want to turn around and go right back into the lion's den? And the answer was yes, they did. Out of love for Jesus Christ, they followed him where he led, right back into Bethany, right into danger. Now it's true that there wasn't any stones cast toward Jesus while he was back in Bethany that we know of. But there's this sweet statement in John 11, 16, where Thomas, doubting Thomas,

who's also called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, let us also go. Let us also go so that we may die with him. Let us also go so that we might die with him. They understood the cost. They were persuaded against it to the extent that they needed Thomas to say, let us go with him. If he's going to die, let us go die by his side. Let us go suffer with him. And it's instructive to us that we would love Jesus the way Thomas, in this story, loved Jesus. He didn't go because he was a disciple and he had to. He went because he'd seen the mercy of God, of Jesus, to him. And he wasn't done sinning against Jesus and living in some form of unbelief. You remember later when Jesus was resurrected, Thomas says, I won't believe unless I put my hand in his side and my finger in his palms. I will not believe.

And so Jesus, mercifully, you'd think, well, Thomas, that's a bridge too far. You've gone too far. You won't believe. And Jesus comes to him and he says, give me your hand. Put it here. And put it here. Now that you've seen, you believe. You see the love of God to sinners in the way that he deals with Thomas. Thomas was not the kind of guy you look up to and you say, oh, there's a man without sins and without struggles. Thomas was a bit of a mess, as are we. And it's no reason for us not to be willing to suffer for Jesus Christ. He calls us. He saves us and calls us with a holy calling, not according to our works, not because we're better than other people, but according to his own purpose and grace. If it's his will that his disciples would follow him back into Bethany and risk their own necks, what is he asking them to do that he himself hasn't done first? The centurion understood that all that

Jesus needed to do was speak to heal his servant. But Mary and Martha say, no, no, will you come? He's your friend. Couldn't Jesus have avoided the whole conflict by speaking and healing Lazarus and avoiding the tension and the conflict, the risk of suffering? Certainly he could have. And even more so, he suffered for our sakes on the cross. And so how difficult is it? Is it too much for him to ask us to do the same? He suffered, bled, and died, and bore the whole wrath of God that we deserve for our sakes. Is it too much for him to ask us to suffer for his sake? It ought not to be. He's called us according to his own purpose and grace, which was granted to us in Christ Jesus for all eternity, but now has been revealed by the appearing of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. And so this is the case that Paul lays out for us. Come suffer as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

Don't deny him at the points of personal risk and cost to yourself. He didn't do that for you. He prayed, Father, if there's any other way, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done. He went and bled and died for the forgiveness of your sins. And if he calls you to suffer in a similar manner, trust him and go. Like the disciples did unto Bethany, trust him and go. Paul doesn't call Timothy to do anything that he's not doing. You realize when he says that I'm the, you know, don't be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord or of me, his prisoner. He calls himself a prisoner because that's exactly what he is. In jail, preparing to die, be put to death for his devotion to Jesus Christ. And he calls Timothy to the same. And you might be tempted to look at Paul and say, Paul, you're like, hmm, maybe there's a better way, Paul. But Paul, toward the end of this, says,

What I've told you, Timothy, and what I want to motivate you, it was enough to motivate me. For this reason, I also suffer these things. I'm not calling you, Timothy, to do something I haven't myself done. For this reason, I also suffer these things, but I'm not ashamed. Now, why would you be ashamed? Well, you'd be ashamed because to be willing to suffer for Jesus Christ will get you mocked and scorned. And increasingly in our day, you're going to face this pressure. Is it going to be someone wanting to lop off your head? No, probably not. But you will face it in your workplaces. There will be times and occasions where there will be people sitting here who've lost their jobs and their livelihoods because of their commitment to Jesus Christ. They'll suffer in that way. They'll have family that hates them and won't invite them to family reunions or holidays or weddings or funerals because of their commitment to Jesus Christ. These are the things that I know and I'm convinced will come to us in our days.

and more. There may well be those among us who end up in jail for loving Jesus Christ. And will we be willing to suffer along with Paul and along with Timothy and along with Jesus when that day comes? Or will we have set our hearts against this work? May it never be. Paul says, for this reason I also suffer these things, but I'm not ashamed. He's not ashamed of the suffering. He's not ashamed of the scorn. He's not ashamed of the cost or the mockery or the apparent foolishness of his life's commitments, his faith. For I know whom I have believed. There are many, many truths and many, many pressures that swirl around us. Even when Jesus stood trial before Pilate, he could have potentially gotten himself out of it if he would have just backed off and said, no, no, no. Or Paul, or Peter, or John, or any of these apostles as they faced.

suffering, if they had simply refused, you know, gone along with what they were told, don't preach and teach in this name. And they said, okay, it's going to cost us our necks. Okay. And so should we expect in our lives that we're going to live without having to face the same sort of pressures to deny Jesus Christ? No, we really shouldn't. And more than knowing that that's likely in our lives, we ought to be prepared to do it. Our hearts ought to be prepared. But the only way that's possible is if we know whom we have believed and we're convinced as Paul says I'm convinced that he is able to guard what I've entrusted to him and so faith in God and trusting him is not this like thing that we feel it means your life do you trust God to care for you and to provide for you and to sustain you and bear you through this whole life and all of the troubles that it has do you believe that he will bear you through them

Are you convinced of it as Paul says he is? And which one of us is sitting here who can't say, I'm not convinced. I don't know that I'm convinced. I think I want to. And there are seasons when I want to more. You know, my desire, my conviction waxes and wanes. But it seems that Paul just speaks very absolutely as though it's simple for him. I'm convinced. He's convinced by faith. He knows whom he's believed. He's seen Jesus Christ in his work. and his mercy and his kindness and his forbearance, his tenderness and his provision. And so he's convinced whatever may come that the Lord is able to guard him, to provide for him and to sustain him. Now, these are things we can take hold of in our heads and say, yes, I do believe that that's possible, that the Lord is capable, but do you believe that he will and that he actually does? That when you're weak and when things are falling down around you, when you're suffering, not just for

the gospel, though that's our context here, but when you are suffering, do you believe that God's able to sustain you and care for you and bear you through these things? Do you fight to believe it? Because not one of us can say, I do. And so the question is really, do you fight to believe these things? When Satan would have you cast them aside, this is the question. The final thing I want to tell you is, brothers and sisters, we ought to believe these things. I've seen, and I know that a number of you have seen, the kindness of God to you when you least deserved it. When you've made a wreck of your life and the lives of the people around you. When you've sinned and you've seen his mercy. You've seen it. And you've forsaken it. And you've forgotten it. But you've seen it. And not just once, but multiple times. You've seen the mercy of God. You've seen him.

bear you through and other people through things that you go, there's no way I could do that. You look back after it's all over and you go, how in the world did we not just fall apart, just run away, just quit? I think too often we want godliness to be a nice, neat, tidy thing that comes to us in bite-sized manageable pieces. But you remember in the scripture lesson when I said Israel is just a big dysfunctional family. all kinds of sin, forsaking the Lord, claiming his glory, and doing every kind of wickedness they could dream up. And are we so different than them? Aren't we just as inclined to forget, to forsake, to become impatient, to grumble, to complain, to say it's not fair? But through all of it, God was merciful to them. You say, was he merciful to all of them? And I say, no. With many of them, he wasn't well pleased. But he was merciful to them and said he was pleased with.

And so we ought to make it our life's goal to be pleasing to God and to trust him. And when we don't feel like we can trust him, where else will we turn? Where else can we go? When everyone left Jesus, he asks his disciples, will you abandon me as well? And Peter says to him, where else shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life. And so if we reject Jesus Christ and we say, no, no, no, too hard, too difficult, too long, too painful, where will we turn? And actually believe that there's hope and help to be found. Where else can we turn? There is nowhere else. And God invites us and welcomes us. He's not ashamed to be called our father, even though we are quite a mess. We sort of realize our mess in the way that we've screwed things up over time. Sometimes it takes years for us to realize our sins that have been growing and spreading in our lives, bearing all kinds of bad fruit. It takes us years to realize it.

It didn't take the Lord years to realize it. And when we look back and we go, oh, look at the mess, look at all the weeds, look at all the mess, our hearts ought to be filled with gratitude that the one who saw that mess the whole while through bore with us and has been gracious enough now to show to us our weaknesses and our failures and to not look at them and go, I'm done and no more, but instead gives us still an opportunity to repent, an opportunity to turn to him and to forsake our wicked ways. I mean, how long suffering are you? How many times are you willing for someone to sin against you before you're like, done with that. You can go do that somewhere else. I'm not going to put up with that anymore. He wells up inside of you and you go, but it's not fair. When will they stop? How will they stop? And I say, the same way you'll stop. The Lord's loving kindness is what brings us to repentance. And too often I think we think that entering into judgment and...

Our own anger will bring about repentance and reconciliation. And it never will. Never will. So Paul followed Timothy, or Paul followed the Lord in suffering. Calls Timothy to the same, and today calls us to the same. That we would be willing to suffer, lose our names and our comforts and our money for the sake of Jesus Christ. Because he saved us. And he's been merciful to us. And if it's in his plan that we would... suffer in this life and die, that we will be grateful and satisfied with his settlement of our suffering and our sorrows. That we won't stand before him and go, that's all there is? For a lifetime of sorrow and suffering, this is all I get? So will you suffer for the Lord when the opportunity arises? I'm not telling you to go find a way to get yourself in trouble. There are plenty of ways.

many of them small and seemingly insignificant, that you shy away from right now. My exhortation to you is love God, trust God, and don't avoid those things, thinking you know better than him what's best for you. I've watched on more than one occasion a storm that was brewing finally cut loose, and then I've seen God work out peace and restoration and reconciliation in there, and I thought, well, this is what we wanted. We just didn't want it that way. We wanted there to be peace, but we just didn't want there to be a storm first. But God doesn't ever look at the troubles of our lives and go, oh no, I don't know how to fix that. When the Israelites were backed up against the Red Sea, and they're going, we're going to die. God says, oh, spreads the Red Sea apart, and across they go on dry land. And as soon as they get across, I'll take care of your enemies. You couldn't have written that story if you didn't know that that's what God could do. You would have never imagined it. You would have said, all hope is lost. And yet it wasn't.

And so is it too much to ask us to be willing to suffer when that's what's required of us? It's not too much. And our love for God ought to bring us to contentment and suffering if that's what is before us. Let's pray. Father, we confess to you that we've avoided in many ways the hardships that we see and we say, no, no, not for me. And in so doing, we've rejected Jesus Christ and we've been unwilling to follow him. thinking that we've known better how to live and conduct ourselves. Father, we pray that you'd help us to see where we failed in this regard and be willing to turn our hearts away from it. We are fearful often. We are unwilling to suffer. And we pray, Father, that you'd help us. Those of us who are suffering, Father, I pray that you would strengthen them, that you would give grace, that you would give wisdom and eyes to see that Satan would not be able to exploit

our suffering and compound it because of our unbelief. Father, help us to turn to you, believing that you are good, having saved us from our sins, Father. Help us not to live in unbelief of your kindness to us. Left to ourselves, we would make a terrible mess of our lives, and we would accrue such guilt and condemnation before you that we will cry out with the wicked. Let the rocks and hills fall down on us to cover us and hide us from you. Instead, Father, help us to love and to trust you and to not forsake you and your goodness to us. Help us to see and help us to believe. And give us peace, we ask in Jesus' name. Amen.