Come To Me Soon #2

Now, before we come to the sermon this morning, I have an announcement for you. A while back at our congregational meeting, we gave you guys a budget, and in that budget there was a salary for an assistant pastor in that budget, or another staff member. We told you at that time that we were in discussion with a man named Eric Bierbauer. about coming up and working toward being an assistant pastor. And so we've been working with him over the last couple of months. And we did extend a job offer to him, which he has accepted. And so he will be coming. His first day, officially, will be July 1st. So in just a few short months, he and his wife will be up here. And so just a word of background about Eric. Eric and his wife, Ruthann.

are expecting their sixth child. He is a graduate of Reformed Evangelical Pastors College, which probably doesn't mean anything to you. Suffice it to say that he was trained in the same way that I was trained in a local church that has a program very similar to New Geneva, where I graduated from. That was up in Toledo, Ohio, and he's currently serving as an intern. at Grace Redeemer Presbyterian Church down in Florida. So they have a lot going on in the next couple of months or weeks. And they've got a house in Toledo that they're selling. They've got a house in Florida that they're selling. They're trying to buy a house here. They're pregnant. They're trying to fulfill their responsibilities there. And so there's a lot going on. And so I'd ask you to pray for Eric and Ruthanne as they transition up here. And be praying also that God would be preparing them and us for...

fruitful ministry together. I'm very thankful for this answer to prayer. I know if you've been here a while, you know that this has been a need and a desire that we've had for well over a year. And so it's very sweet to see God answering our prayers. Personally, I've known Eric for probably 10 years. I've known him since he was young. When we first planted this church, Taylor Bailey and I spent a lot of time up in Toledo, Ohio, painting their church building when we both worked for the company that John and James worked for. And so I met Eric at that time. Obviously, it was very different circumstances. He was much younger, wasn't married, didn't have kids and the like. But I've appreciated him, and I hope that you will as well. So I just want to let you guys know that. We're thankful for it, and so please be praying for them and us as that day comes, as they get closer and they work out all of the logistics of moving cross-country again. If you have any questions or anything like that, feel free. You can talk to me or one of the elders afterwards. We'd be happy to talk to you about it.

All right, so now we're going to move into our sermon, and we're going to be returning this morning to 2 Timothy 4, verses 9 to 16. The last time we studied this passage was a few weeks ago. It was before Palm Sunday. And in that sermon, we compared three of the men that Paul mentions in this text, Demas being a man who's deserted him. Mark, who is a man who had abandoned them or been unfaithful at some point, but then repented and returned, and then also Luke, who was faithful and who stood by Paul through whatever troubles or hardships he endured. Today we're going to be focusing just on verse 13, which if you read it by itself, it seems sort of incidental. It seems like it's just a by-the-way sort of verse, and you kind of scratch your head and wonder, why do you think to write that? Well, that's what we're going to seek to...

answer this morning is, why did Paul put that in there? And my hope is that it will be a good help and comfort to us as we process and endure our own suffering in our lives. And in the midst of that suffering, that we would seek to love God and to serve him. And so I hope that God will use our time of study this morning to help us persevere, not just to grit our teeth and grind through life, but to persevere with hope and integrity. especially when we suffer. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord? From 2 Timothy chapter 4, verses 9 to 16. This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. Make every effort to come to me soon. For Demas, having loved this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me. Pick up Mark and bring him with you, for he is useful to me for service. But Tychicus I have sent to Ephesus.

When you come, bring the cloak which I left at Troas with Carpus, and the books, especially the parchments. Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm. The Lord will repay him according to his deeds. Be on guard against him yourself, for he vigorously opposed our teaching. At my first defense, no one supported me, but all deserted me. May it not be counted against them. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. And so just to get the sort of context of what's going on here, Paul is writing this letter. This is his final letter as an apostle before he's put to death. He writes it from prison, from a Roman prison. He's very close to being beheaded. And so he is in what we would understand to be on death row. And yet I want us to understand that the situation Paul was in as he's in prison, when we think of being in prison, I wonder what our point of reference is in our minds. What's that like? Maybe you've known someone who's gone to prison. Maybe you've watched a movie about people who go to prison. Maybe you've watched old movies that depict what dark, dreary dungeons are actually like. But what was it like for Paul to be in prison? Well, I can tell you, whatever our conception of modern prison is, what Paul was enduring was nothing like that. If you go to prison today,

Even if you end up on death row, you will be fed. You will be clothed. You'll be made comfortable. You'll have things to do, read. You'll have something to occupy your time. You won't just be locked in a room by yourself with no light, no food, no clothing. And so by comparison, prison today is much nicer than it would have been in Paul's time. Nowadays, we have a commitment to not harming the prisoners. We don't want them to die. There's people whose job it is to work and keep them from harming themselves, harming each other. They're supposed to make sure they eat, to make sure that they're healthy, to make sure that they're taken care of. In Paul's day, if they had come to his cell one day and found him laying on the ground dead, they wouldn't have thought anything of it. Well, he was going to die anyway, and they would have picked him up and cast his body aside. There was no concern for...

The circumstances of his imprisonment, his exposure to cold, to wetness, his having food or water wouldn't have been a concern of his prisoners, of his imprisoners. And so I think we can rightly assume that Paul was in a cold, dark, damp sort of prison without proper food, water, or clothing. There was no one that was concerned about his welfare except perhaps Luke, who was with him. And it would have been Luke's responsibility to bring him food and to bring him water and to care for him. And I want us to get this picture into our minds as we consider what he asks Timothy to bring him. He's writing from this context, and he says, hey, come to me hundreds of miles. Do it quickly. And when you come, bring me my cloak and my books and parchments. And so the first thing I want to do is we're going to look at this sort of just as two halves of a whole. First, the cloak.

What's that about? And then the books and the parchments. And so he says, when you come, bring the cloak which I left at Troas with Carpus. Now where is Troas compared to Rome? It's about 600 miles away. It's a long, long, long way away. In our day, we can say, oh, I can drive 600 miles and it won't even be like a long day. Maybe a 10-hour drive and we'll be 600 miles away. But the trip that Timothy's going on is weeks long across the sea. Dangerous. And Paul tells him, stop by. As you go through Troas, as you get on the boat, get my stuff. Bring me my cloak. And so you're left wondering, what's significant about this cloak? Of all the things that Paul could ask for, he asks for his cloak, his jacket. Why would he ask for that? You guys have any guesses as to why Paul would ask for his cloak? You guys are sharp. Because he's cold. It's that simple. It's because he's cold.

He needs it to keep warm. Now, there is something significant about him asking for his cloak, which is 600 miles away, and is going to be work for Timothy to get and to bring. Why wouldn't he just ask Luke for a cloak? Luke's right there. Can I have your cloak? The testimony of Paul's life is that he's not willing to be a burden to those around him. He's not willing to place undue responsibility or expense on the people with him. By asking them, would you lend me one? Would you buy me one? Would you find me one? Perhaps it would have been dangerous for Luke. He may have went and spent his last money on a cloak for Paul only to have it taken or seized by the Roman guards. Maybe he didn't have the money to get a cloak for Paul. Maybe he did get a cloak for Paul and Paul refused it and said, I'm not going to take that from you. Go and sell it so that you have food. We don't know.

what the circumstances were, but we do know that Paul's plan, what he wanted was his cloak from Troas 600 miles away. And you're left wondering what kind of principle or what kind of commitments does Paul have to request this as he's dying? He could have said, I'm about to die and it doesn't matter. But he says, no, no, I want my cloak. Bring me my cloak. I think one of the things we, the lesson I want us to learn from this is that we should be very careful about what we presume or ask of other people. You realize we live in a society where if we don't have things, we presume that it's other people's jobs. This is sort of just the normal, if I don't have what I need, I presume that somebody else needs to give it to me. And not if I need it, necessarily, though it does apply to our needs. This even extends to our wants. I want something.

Therefore, somebody else needs to provide it for me at their expense or at someone else's expense. The idea that if we can't afford or don't have the ability to get something we want by our own means, that we can't have it, that's lost on us as a society. The idea that we would go without if we can't get it for ourselves. Now, I realize I'm walking a bit of a knife's edge here talking about independence because there's also an independent vein that runs in Americans that, on the one hand, we expect to have the things we want, and if someone else has to pay for it or provide it, then we don't mind that. But on the other hand, we are unwilling to be helped in some ways, and we sort of flip back and forth between these things.

But instead of sort of bouncing back and forth between these two things, I want us to just look at Paul for a minute and a couple of things he said about himself and his life and say, this is given to us as a model for Christian life. In Acts 20, when he meets with the Ephesian elders, he's on his way to be imprisoned, and he's saying goodbye to them. So he meets them on the shores at Miletus, and he gives them instructions. And toward the end of his instructions to them, he says, my hands ministered to my own needs and to the men who were with me. Now, what is he saying there? He's saying, we did not become dependent on you. We didn't show up and say, you guys need to take care of us. He says, we worked hard with our hands, and we provided not only for ourselves, but for those who were with me. And again, in 1 Thessalonians 2, he says the same thing. He says, for you recall, brethren, our labor and hardship, how working night and day, night and day,

So as not to be a burden to any of you, we proclaim the gospel of God. And so Paul had a commitment throughout his whole life, and that's what we see surfacing here at the very end of his life, is that he understood it was his responsibility to provide for himself. And so he wasn't willing for his belonging. It seems inconsequential, this cloak hundreds of miles away. He wasn't saying, oh, well, that's gone and that doesn't matter. He says, no, Timothy, please bring me my cloak so that he's not a burden to Timothy or to the other Christians around there. And we ought to have a similar commitment with regard to our own needs to provide for our own needs. We live in a time that is very entitled, very entitled. And we look around and we just think, I want, I deserve. Why can they have it if I can't have it? And we would rather that they go without it than that we would go without it. And brothers and sisters, that's not how it should be.

there are things that you don't have in your life. And it may be because the Lord's withheld it from you. It may be that you don't have it because you're not old enough and haven't worked hard enough or long enough to have those things. We often tell, to get at this point sort of very commonly, we'll say to young couples or those who are buying their first home, we say, you're not going to buy the house or live the standard of living that you lived, that your parents lived when you left their home. They've worked for decades. They didn't start out like they are now. How many of you know how your parents started out? Is it how they lived when you left their house? No, no, no. I see this problem in America, not just with liberals, but with conservatives and with libertarians. And everyone has this idea that somebody else has made my life hard and has kept me from having the things that I want.

And I think it's all a rejection, a repudiation of taking responsibility for your own life. We look to somebody else to fix our problems. If you don't have money to buy the things that you need, there's a really simple, biblical, like beyond biblical, it's just a common sense answer to it. If you don't have the ability to buy the things you need, you should go to work. And if you go, well, I do work. And I say, you might not be working enough. Paul said, I work night and day. He said, I can't work night and day. Young people want to buy a house, and they say, well, I have to have a social life. Okay, we can have a social life, but the cost of having a social life is you won't have a house. You won't have the ability to buy a house because it turns out they're really expensive, and they cost a lot of money, and it's not the sort of thing you get overnight.

And so when we don't have the things that we want, when they're not readily available to us, we think, well, it's someone else's job to make them available to me. Someone else has to pay for it. Is that our houses? Is that our food? Is that our health care? Somebody else has to foot the bill. And when they do, we don't even see it as a kindness. We just think, well, that's just what they're supposed to do. I needed the thing. I wanted the thing, so it's mine to have. You see this sort of thing when people come into a new job or into the workforce, and they come to that job thinking that the job is supposed to provide them with something. They don't come thinking, how am I going to earn and make myself worthy of the salary I'm being paid? They come saying, you owe me a salary, and it's this much money.

And whatever that means for you as the business owner or the corporation or whatever, that's your problem. Right. John said, why don't I get the perks of the guy who's been here five years? Why does he get three weeks of vacation and I only get five days? Because he's made the company a lot more money than you have. That's why. He's earned it. And I know there's a sentiment in our society that takes the things I'm saying and says, that's just not how our society works anymore. And I realize that there is actually a pressure away from the things I'm saying that says, society's not functioning like you're saying anymore, Pastor. That's just not how it works anymore. And I say, I know. I live in the same society you do. But it's a shame that it doesn't work this way. It's not a good thing that people aren't responsible for their own lives. It used to be in America to be able to vote.

that you had to own property. Now, could you imagine trying to get that sort of legislation passed today? Just as an example, if you don't own property, you are not allowed to vote. You're not allowed to elect the people who will make decisions for society. That would be a monstrous thing as it would be perceived in our society. That's not fair, would be the cry. Now, why was that ever a rule? Why was it ever a rule that you had to be a landowner? To be able to vote. Have you ever thought about it? Yeah, you say skin in the game. You say you're invested, and that's precisely it. People who sacrifice themselves and have an actual stake in the community because they put their money to it by buying land there, they care more about what happens in that area than people who haven't done that yet. Now, is it possible that those landowners will oppress the people and make it harder for others to buy land? That's a danger.

Right? That's a danger. But is it not also a danger for the people who've invested their time and energy and their lives and their money to have what they've worked for stolen away by people who haven't? That's a danger as well. And so we have to pick the dangers that are most biblical or appropriate. And I think it's better to have people who are invested in taking care of themselves having more say over decisions. People who understand what Paul's getting at here, which is I have a cloak. It's over there. Please bring it to me. I'm very cold. I'm not going to be a burden to Luke or to those around me. I want what's mine. Something my wife's been helpful to me in learning over the years, given how we grew up differently, different paths, is she's taught me that we should take care of the things that we have. It's a really simple lesson. It's a lesson I've had to learn. It's a lesson I know some of you need to learn. We should take care of the things you have. Why?

Because you worked to get them. Whether that's your house or your clothes or your belongings or whatever, you've worked to acquire those things and you ought not to just expend them willy-nilly and let them be destroyed through lack of maintenance or upkeep. And she's been very helpful in teaching me that. We should take care of the things we have. They're ours. We worked for them. And Paul says, I have a cloak and it's over in Troas with Carpus. Please bring it to me. I would like what's mine. It would be a comfort to me. to have what's mine, that's familiar. I was reading Charles Spurgeon's sermon on this text, and he had a couple of things to say about this independence that I'm getting at. He says, let the Christian man be quite as independent, for though independence is not a Christian grace, meaning he's not extolling it without reservation, we should all just be independent of each other. He says, though it's not a Christian grace, yet it is a common grace, which when wreathed with Christianity is very beautiful.

and befits the character of a son of God, that they would not be dependent. And so we ought to be very careful not to expect others to provide for our needs. And so Spurgeon goes on at length in this sermon. He talks about begging, people begging. And he basically says, it's very unbecoming of Christians to beg. Though if a man's reduced to begging, because he really has no other choice, then he should beg. If there's really nothing else to do, he should beg. But it shouldn't be his outlook or his perspective on life. And he warns against the dangers of people presuming on others, and he says this. He says, I wish many of the poor would not damage the charity of others by being so ready to beg on every presence of necessity. Did you hear what he said? Those who presume upon others damage the people they borrow from. They tempt them not to want to be generous, because if you work for your money, and I say, can I have $5?

your natural thought should be, I worked for that $5, and you would say, well, what do you want it for? I'd say, well, I want it because I want to go buy a soda. I think you should tell me no. No. Go to work and get your own $5, and then you can go get yourself a soda. Right? Because if we could ask that question enough times, can I have $5? Can I have $20? Can you give me something? What happens to the person who's always being asked to give? They become embittered. They get sick of being asked all the time. They don't want other people mooching off of them. And so Paul doesn't want to mooch off of people here. And so he says, bring me my cloak. Spurgeon goes on and says, a Christian man would do well to remember that it is never to his honor, though it is not always to his dishonor to beg. It's better to go without in some cases than to presume upon the wealth or the resources of other people.

And there have been times I've been good about this and times I've been bad about it myself. Here's a way to negotiate this. Let's say you need a tool or something and you want to borrow it from somebody. How should you give it back to them? Murmur, murmur, murmur. In better condition than you borrowed it. I'll tell you, if you borrow somebody's vehicle, and I don't care if you got it and it had an eighth of a tank of gas in it, if you borrowed their vehicle, their truck, because you needed to haul something around, You ought to give it back to them with more gas in it than you borrowed it with. And you say, well, I don't have the money to do that. And I say, well, then maybe you shouldn't presume to borrow their truck if you don't have the ability to give what you're able. You may need a truck. Maybe you've got some money so you can help them. Should they just absorb all of the cost of you borrowing it? Maybe you should just go rent a U-Haul. I don't want to spend the money. And you start to realize how quick we are to depend on other people and let them foot our bills.

Now, am I saying that if you have a need, you shouldn't ask, ever ask? I'm actually not saying that. As I was preparing and I was thinking about this, I'm like, people already never ask our deacons for help when they need help. And here I'm going to preach this sermon and then our deacons fund is never going to get a request ever again from the people. And that's not actually the lesson I'm trying to teach you. I'm just trying to teach you to be aware of... your responsibility to provide for your own needs. And that if you don't have the ability to provide for your own needs, that does happen to us. And not always as the result of unfaithfulness. If you need to ask for help, then you should ask for help. But it shouldn't be a way of life with you. It shouldn't be a way of life. You shouldn't presume that other people are going to just pay for and assume the costs of your desires with their money, with their time.

with their belongings. And so ask if you have a need, truly have a need, something you can't go without, but be careful not to make it a way of life. In addition to asking for the cloak, Paul also asks for the books, especially the parchments. And so there's two things here. There's books and there's parchments, pieces of paper or something. The books were probably books, probably weren't scripture, were probably some sort of Greek or Latin works that Paul had accumulated or held on to. over time. And we know that Paul read things, that he was in a habit of reading and being aware of what was going on around him. When he couldn't be teaching and preaching, he was reading and studying. In Acts 17, when he's preaching, he says to them, your own poets have said, for we also are his children. Now this is just seamless in the sovereignty over all things, and that we are all obligated to him as his creation. We're his children. We have responsibilities to him. And just seamlessly, he says, and even your own poets say it. Now, how did he know that their own poets said it? But to have read what their poets said. And again, in Titus 1 verse 12, he says, one of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. Where'd he learn that? But to have read.

One of their own prophets. And so when Paul reads, and we're going to get to the point of what should Christians be reading and studying and learning, the first thing we learn is it's not just the Bible. We're going to come to it. I would say the parchments are the Bible, and we're going to come to that. But we ought to be reading other things. We ought to be knowing what's going on around you, what people are saying, what people are reading, what people are believing, what people are saying. This is what's true. Maybe a month or two months ago, Tim Dukeman told me, he says, you need to start reading more widely. It's really good advice. He's like, once or twice a month, you should go read something other than the people that you agree with. You should read what generally is passing for Christian teaching. It's really helpful. It wasn't encouraging to read what's passing, but it was helpful to know this is what's being said. This is what Christians are being taught. That was helpful to me. It was good advice.

And that's what Paul's doing here. Some of you may know a philosopher. His name's Karl Barth. And I'm not quoting him as saying he's great, but he did say something that was helpful one time. He said, you should keep your Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Now, that thought's not original to him. I think he stole it from Spurgeon. The idea originated with Charles Spurgeon, where he would read the newspaper, and he explicitly did it. He picked up the newspaper because he said, I want to know what the people I'm preaching to are reading, what they understand, what sorts of analogies, what's going on in society that I can use as illustrations and touch points for them. And that's why he read the newspaper. So he can say, you remember, they said this and that and the other. But here's what the Bible says about it. He wanted to be able to teach them.

The Scripture. And he knew that an essential part of them being able to process and understand and engage with what the Bible said was him being able to connect it to what was going on in their society. So Paul read outside of the Scriptures. Spurgeon read outside of the Scriptures. And we should read outside of the Scriptures. Now, that's dangerous, and it needs to have a warning come along with it. Because not everything that glitters is gold. And not everything that says it's true is actually true. And so when you read, you have to read with discernment and with discretion. Maybe another way of saying it is you can't only read the newspaper. Or you might be inclined to think that everything they're selling you is true and how it should be, that their interpretations of what's going on is the correct interpretation. But we should be reading, and not just the Bible and not just Christian things. You ought to be reading and seeing what other people say.

Every once in a while, someone comes to me and they say, you know, there was this study that came out and it said such and such and blah, blah, blah about whatever it's talking about. Child, parent, rearing, marriage, economics, whatever it is. Such and such said so, you know. Oh, did they? That's good to know. So that we know how to engage with it and say, yes, that's true. No, that's not true. Run from that. You ought to be reading. It's not sufficient for you to say, I'm not interested in that. If you say, I'm not interested in that, I don't want to read, I don't want to learn, I don't want to think, though we wouldn't say it in those words. I'm saying if that's what your actions tell you is true, you leave yourself very vulnerable to being lied to and misled. That's the result of it, is that you won't know the truth. You won't know what's going on. Someone will say something, it'll sound good. A lot of what passes for truth today is not a blatant, outright lie.

It just omits the parts that are difficult. And so it's true insofar as it goes, but at the points where it's most costly or difficult or hard to say, it's just left unsaid. We say, well, they say a lot of good things. And I say, they say a lot of good things, but they don't say the most helpful good things, the most important good things. And so we need to be reading. Paul read. Bring me the books. I can't preach. I can't teach. I'm in prison. I would like to read. I would like to study. I would like my mind engaged. And I'm afraid that in our day, we have the exact opposite desire. Having our minds engaged is the thing we run away from. We don't want to sustain a thought or an argument. When was the last time that you wrote somebody a letter?

or wrote them a long email that had some concern, some issue, something you were trying to process with them. We don't do it anymore. We think and we write in sound bites because that's what we're fed. Do you ever notice when your news articles or whatever, every time the link to something to read pops up, what comes along with it? It tells you how long it takes you to read it. Why do they tell you how long it takes to read? So you can decide if it's worth it. So you know what kind of commitment you're making. And so then you'll make a comment about it. I see this all the time. People don't read the article and they start their comment off with what? Yeah. Don't all say it at once because it's very confusing. TLDR. Raise your hand. Do you know what TLDR means? You know what it means? Too long, didn't read. And I'm left thinking, then shut up. You didn't do the work of reading the thing that somebody said, but you want to comment on it. That at least shouldn't be your habit.

If it was too long for you to give your time to read it, why should anybody care what you have to say about it? Maybe we should come up with a new thing. Too lazy, not interested. And that's what we should put at the end of their comment. You're too lazy, I'm not interested in what you have to say. You have to read. You have to think. About what? Whatever you're interested in. And generally, the younger you are, you kids, read what you're interested in. If you like history, Read history. If you like sports, read about sports. I don't care what it is. If you like studying maps. I knew a kid one time who loved studying maps. And he's never been overseas, but he could tell you how to get from A to B in London. He was like a map quest in his head. Because he'd studied a map. And he'd never been to London, but he could tell you what roads and how you need to get there. Because he was interested. That's good. You have to read.

In addition to the books, Paul also wants the parchments, and those were likely original letters that he had written, what we would consider scripture, the epistles that he had written. Nowadays, we don't think about this because everything we write, there's automatically a record of it. You just go in your scent box. There it is. You just go in your text thread. There it is. But before we had all those things, having a copy of what you said of correspondence would have been a normal practice. Before email, I know of a pastor, an older pastor, who's got filing cabinets full of correspondence, and they're categorized by year. These are the correspondence from this year. And you go in there, and you look, and you see the letters, because they didn't used to have emails. And there's letters that went back and forth. And so he'd write a letter, and then he'd photocopy the letter, and then he'd put it in the file. So he could remember what the correspondence, what the conversation was. That's all that was going on.

Bring me the parchments. Bring me the copies of the things that I wrote, the epistles. I'd like to read them. And so when we read, there should be a constant diet of Scripture in it. We shouldn't be prioritizing men's words over God's words. I'm afraid that when we read Scripture today, if we read Scripture, it's used in one of two ways. It's either background noise. It's something we listen to while we're doing something else, which is to say it does not have our full attention. or we only read it devotionally. We look for little nuggets and little helpful tidbits in it to encourage us for the day. And I'm not here to say those are wrong and you should never do them, but I'm saying those really shouldn't be all you do with Scripture. You actually need to read it and think about it and engage. It doesn't have to be a big chunk, but you should read it and say, why did God say that? Why did he do that? And what you'll find are questions you don't...

have the answers to in your head, and that's fine. How would we ever grow or learn if we couldn't ask questions that we don't actually know the answers to? The whole point is to read, have questions, and then go find the answers. But if our minds are not engaged to the point where we can say, why did God say or do that? Or what should I believe and do in response to this? We're just threading words through our eyes. We're not reading. It's as if we're having a conversation with God and we're sitting there on our phone. It drives me nuts. when people are on their phones. I have a habit. If I'm talking to you and you get on your phone, I just will stop talking. And you'll always say to me, no, no, it's okay, I'm listening. I'm just going to wait until you get off your phone. Because it's incredibly rude. It's as if the conversation we're not having, you clearly have something that's more important than our conversation, so by all means, attend to that and I'll wait. You ought not to treat Scripture that way. If you'll treat me that way, okay, I'm not God. But you ought not to treat God's Word that way.

Paul wants the parchments. He wants to read. He wants to study. This is what he could do with his time. If there was anyone who could rest, and we could say, you've fought the good fight. You're done with your work. You can just relax now. It would have been Paul. And he did say of himself, I fought the good fight. And then just a few verses later, he says this, bring me my parchments. He wanted to read. He wanted to think. He wanted to learn. He wanted to grow. And this is the only way that you will grow. Have you ever considered whatever you've been trained in, whether it's sports or it's academics or it's a job, have you ever thought for a second how many hours, how many months, how many years you've spent learning something you weren't that interested in? How much you said no to so that you could get your project done or your work done or whatever it was.

You ask college students, you ask high school kids, students, do you like your class? What's your favorite class? Oh, my favorite class is, you know, what's your least favorite class? But what we should ask afterwards is, do you do the work in your least favorite class? Like, do you commit yourself to learning the thing that you don't particularly understand or enjoy? And we'd hope the answer is yes. So why is it that we would spend hours and hours training ourselves, reading, studying, to provide a living or to save ourselves money because we're going to figure out how to fix it or build it or do it ourselves or to cultivate a hobby. But when it comes to being a student of God's word and prioritizing, we say, I don't have the time. When really what we mean is, I don't have the will. And so Paul stands out to us as an example, as a man who's about to die and yet wants his mind engaged in the things of God.

Because he understood that that was his preparation. Another way of looking at it is there's no better thing to be doing as you're about to go stand before Jesus than to be attending to his word. And so if you won't read and engage and study, how do you expect to grow? How do you expect to grow? You mothers, you want to learn about how to take care of your baby or how to do this or how to do that. What do you do? You start studying. Good. That's good. I'm glad. Apply that principle across your life. Paul's a good example to us here of providing for himself, not being a burden to other people, and being devoted to learning and to growing. And I realize in our society, that's not what people are doing. I've told you before, when you look at the way people were trained and what education has become, it's nothing like it was in the past. We're much more modern, we're much more evolved, but we're not nearly as...

intelligent. Before we had smartphones and computers to look everything up and to be our memory and to do all that work for us, education used to be memorizing huge, huge, huge amounts of scripture, of stories. You're just expected to learn it, to memorize it, to engage with it, to carry it in your mind. And we've lost that in our society. And we as Christians ought to be working to recover that. If you're not curious, if you don't have in your mind a desire to grow and to learn, and I'm not saying you have to decide. If you're sitting here thinking, oh, he means I need to be reading philosophy or I need to be reading these really like, not interested. That's not what I'm saying you have to do. All I'm really arguing for is make time to read your Bible with your mind engaged in it and know what's going on in society around you so that you're not surprised.

when it smacks you in the face. That's all I'm arguing for. And I don't think it's not too much. As Paul laid in this prison waiting to die, these are the things he was doing. And they're the things we ought to be doing. So take care of your own needs as much as you're able. As much as you're able, take care of your own needs. If you need help, ask for it. When people have asked for help from the deacon's fund, it's common that they'll say, well, I'll pay you back. It's a loan. And I smile at them and I say, our deacon's fund doesn't give loans.

We just don't. If you have a need, we'll meet the need. And if in time you're able and you want to, just contribute back to the Deacons Fund, whatever it is that you're willing and able to contribute. If they pay a $500 bill and in two years you've got $500, write a check and give it to the Deacons Fund. That's great, but it wasn't a loan. Because if you never pay it back, no one's keeping track of it, you know? Work to take care of yourself. to meet your own needs, and be a student of God's word. These are the things that were on Paul's mind as he awaited his death, and they ought to be on our minds as well. Let's pray.