Andrew Jennings, Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Apologetics at Southwestern Seminary, preached from 2 Timothy 1:3-7, in SWBTS Chapel on March 11, 2025.
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Thank you. Dr. Caston and Dr. Lott, I’m amazed every time I come to chapel at the number of different groups, we have capable of leading worship. We have an embarrassment of riches that God has given us here at this institution through our School of church music and worship. So, thank you all for that. Dr Dockery, thank you for that gracious introduction. I do want to recognize some people that are under appreciated in here, and that’s the guy sitting behind the cameras. I got to do your job. When I was here doing my Master of Divinity degree, back 2009 to 2012 I sat behind the camera doing the back and forth.
I also say this by way of apology, because I’m what we call the walker, so that means I’m going to be moving around a lot, which means you have to go back and forth and back and back and forth with the camera. I’ll try not to make you seasick in the course of things. In Dr. Dockery’s introduction, he did neglect to mention one thing which I’m grateful he neglected to mention, and that is that I turned 40 this year. So, I went to the eye doctor yesterday, and it pains me, but she said, you know, based on the little like better, one better, two thing that you do. Have you thought about getting some readers? It’s like, no, oh no, I don’t turn 40 till later this year. Surely not. But it’s setting in, and I can feel it.
Here’s the deal. I don’t really care that I’m turning 40. It’s just you go on in life. The problem is that my internet algorithms know I’m turning 40, which means that all of the ads that come up when I do any kind of search on the internet are like, your life’s over. Everything’s going downhill from here. Here’s how much muscle mass you’re gonna lose. You need to start eating all of this stuff. Here’s where all these fun doctor’s appointments that you get to schedule that you never had to schedule before. Here’s how to do all of that stuff, and it just bombards me everywhere. So that’s fun, but I have put into my life certain habits that I hope lead to a long stretch in my life of health and wellness, and that I’m trying to set myself up as well as I can for success into the future when it comes to these things. Despite what the internet says about me, there’s a problem.
I’m Southern Baptist. And if you know Southern Baptists like I do, everything we do has to do with food. Everything we do has to do with food. You can’t do things as a Southern Baptist without food being involved. And it’s not nutritious food. It’s not nutritious. Nobody brings the veggie tray, and if they do, it never even gets opened, right? We specialize in unhealthy foods. We are a lot more like hobbits than we would like to admit, I think, and that is every Sunday morning, you get up, you eat breakfast, and you go to church, and somebody’s brought breakfast, and without skipping a beat, we eat second breakfast. It’s just, it’s just a weekly thing. It gets in the way. I’m trying to put into place these healthy habits that will lead to longevity, that will help me to succeed into the future when it comes to my health and my wellness.
And then I get around Southern Baptists, and I just lose all control, and donuts are the worst they I’m convinced there will be calorie free donuts in heaven. They are not calorie free here in this fall and broken world. I just I don’t have the self-control to keep myself from doing that. I don’t have the self-control not to eat something if it’s in front of me. And so, I have counter purposes in my life. I want to be this way, and yet I find that habitually, I tend to go this other way. So, what does that have to do with our passage today? Well, feel open with me to Second Timothy chapter one, Paul has a lot to say about the discipline, the virtue of self-control. As he begins this book. This is his final letter. This is his last canonical letter in the New Testament. Paul knows what lays ahead of him.
He’s in prison, probably in Rome, awaiting what is very likely his own execution, and he is speaking to Timothy, his child in the faith, this disciple that he has brought up, that he’s trained, that he’s taught, that he’s now handing off the next generation of ministry to and so second, Timothy is his letter to Timothy, telling Timothy everything that he wants him to know about how to lead a Successful ministry into the future. In fact, I can’t really think of a more apt passage to cover in a southwestern chapel, one more pertinent to what we’re doing here at Southwestern than one like this. And this is how he begins in verse three, he says, I thank my God whom I serve with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did when I constantly remember you in my prayers, day and night, remembering your tears. I long to see you that I may be filled with joy.
I recall your sincere faith that first lived in your grandmother, Lois, and in your mother, Eunice, and now I am convinced, is in you also. So, when we want to understand what Paul is trying to say, this is a normal pattern in his letters that he begins with this introduction and a Thanksgiving. But it’s also a normal pattern in Paul’s letters that he will drop vocabulary in these introductions that he intends to develop over the course of the letter. If you want to know what a letter of Paul is going to be about, pay attention to the vocabulary that is different from his other letters, or just vocabulary that sticks out as he begins his Thanksgiving and to set the tone for his letter, when we look at these verses, there are some things that stick out that help us to understand what he’s trying to get at with Timothy. Why is he writing this letter?
What does he hope it will accomplish, and particularly, how does it drive toward the final thing that he’s going to say about the spirit God has given us in which and by which we do ministry says, I thank God whom I serve with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did. That’s not something that he normally says. He doesn’t normally bring up his ancestors. He does sometimes talk about his his development and his education, but he usually does that to lay it aside and say, but now I’m in Christ. Now in Christ, I’m doing something different. He does this in places like the book of Philippians, but here he connects himself to his ancestors, and he says, I can serve God, and I can say I have served God with a clear conscience, just as my ancestors did. He’s attaching himself to a lineage of faith, a lineage of people who have faithfully served God in the calling with which they have been given by doing certain things throughout their ministry.
And he says, I’m just the next step in that. I’m just the next stage in that, yes, for Paul, that was something pretty new. Jesus had just been on the scene. Paul is part of the first generation of Christians, but he also sees this as just a continuation of what God has been doing, going all the way back to people like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and David and Hezekiah and Josiah and these others. He sees himself as just one more faithful worker in a lineage of ancestors, and then he looks at Timothy. Now, Timothy as an interesting lineage. We’re told in Acts that his mother was Jewish, but that his father was a Greek, and we really don’t know anything else about his father. We only learn his mother’s name here, and yet Paul brings this up. He says, remember your tears, and I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. I recall your sincere faith that first lived in your grandmother, Lois, and in your mother, Eunice, and I’m now convinced is also in you.
So, after Paul attaches himself to a lineage of faith, a lineage of people who are faithfully working and doing the ministry God’s called them to do, he points to Timothy and says, you also belong to a lineage of faith, in your grandmother, in your mother, and now I’m convinced it’s in you. So, this is an interesting way that Paul begins the letter. He’s trying to get Timothy in a mindset that what he is taking part in as he begins to take on his own ministry, as Paul hands the reins of ministry to this new, second generation of Christians, he says, while you are taking on responsibility for yourself. It’s not new responsibility. It’s not that you’re doing something new that nobody else has done before you. In fact, there’s a pattern of the past that you can follow and find success in the ministry that you’re going to have to do. It’s the same pattern that led to success in the ministry that I did and in the ministry that my ancestors did. It’s the same kind of success that you find in the faithfulness of your mother and of your grandmother that led to you becoming a Christian, so that you can now take up this mantle in the ministry God has called you for.
Paul, as he’s coming to the end of his life, he says that I remember your tears and I long to see you. He will call Timothy at the end of the book, come quickly and bring parchments in my cloak. It’s cold in prison, and I want to I want to study. I want to keep writing. I want to do whatever faithful ministry I can continue to do, and whatever time God has given me to do it, I’m going to do it to the end. So come quickly. My joy may be complete. Your joy may be complete, and I may give to you just whatever is left in my life to give to you. And then he says in verse six, therefore I remind you to rekindle the gift God, a gift of God that is in you through the laying out of my hands. Now it might be easy to think that word there is rekindle. Your version may say, fan into flames, but that’s the idea there to bring it up, to make it hot and fiery once again. But it could be easy to think that what he means by that is that Timothy has grown maybe a little bit cold, maybe a little bit distant, maybe he hasn’t been engaging in his ministry all that much.
And Paul’s saying, you need to bring this back. You need to be in this again. But that doesn’t seem to be what Paul’s talking about here. He just wants it to be constantly in front of Timothy that you have to be doing your ministry through the gift of God that is in you. This is not your thing. This is not something that you decided to do. This is not something that you figured out on your own. This is something given to you now we will celebrate this week our Founders Day. We as Southwesterners are stepping into a legacy of belief. And each one of you, I hope, feels that God has gifted you in some way for the Ministry for which you’re training. That may be, if you’re a Texas Baptist College student, that may be in the workforce, that may not be in vocational church ministry, you may not necessarily know at this point whether you’ve been called into vocational church ministry.
For those who are at the seminary level, at the grad school level, I hope that you have felt a gift of God, that you know there is a ministry purpose that He wants you to serve in, that he’s gifted you for, that you need to take on, that you need to be very active in, and that’s what you’re here training for. And on Thursday in this very building, you will be reminded of the legacy of faithful people who have gone before you, faithful men and women, ministers of the gospel, who have gone before you, who have set the tone, who have given you what you have now. I gained what I got from the people who came before me. I got my education back 15 years ago at this school with some faculty who are no longer here, some who are still here, but there’s a legacy.
I feel a responsibility being at this school to carry on that legacy that I’ve been given by mimicking the patterns of life that those who came before me had, and that’s one of the things we’ll recognize in here on Thursday, when we recognize our Founders Day. So, I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is in you through the laying on of my hands. This is something that actually got to experience when I was ordained to ministry. Some gentlemen, including one of our professors here, gathered around me and in a public ceremony, laid their hands on me and acknowledged that they saw me fit for ministry, that there was not this, this passage of any sort of power from their hands into my body, but it was a recognition from faithful people who have been doing ministry before that I have been called to do ministry into the next generation, and they are passing along that responsibility to me and acknowledging That gift within me. That’s a really important pattern.
It’s really, it’s not that you can’t do ministry without it. It’s just a very important pattern that Paul sees built in this recognition of generations who are currently serving, of the generation that’s going to serve, and acknowledging to them that I see this gift of God in you. I see that God has equipped you to do this ministry, and I want you to know that I endorse this. I am with you. I want to help you. I want to support you, however that can be done. That’s what I’m signifying through this laying on of hands. And then we get to the kicker, For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power and love. And in the Christian Standard Bible, it says sound judgment. There’s a bit of a textual there’s a bit of textual fun going on in this verse. There’s questions that we have to ask.
First of all, what does he mean by a spirit? Your translation may have capital S spirit, mine has lower case s spirit, so is he talking about the Holy Spirit that God give? It has given us the Holy Spirit. And with the Holy Spirit comes power and love, and in my translation, sound judgment, or is it that God has worked in our personal spirits, our spirits to produce power and love and sound judgment for the use in his kingdom, for the gospel purposes. And where I want to settle on that is to say, I don’t think it matters, because just a few verses later, Paul is going to give it all credit to the Holy Spirit, very overtly anyway. And so as you read commentaries, you can see it one way or another. The important thing is not whether it should be capital S or lower case s, but what the Spirit God has gifted to us gives us, that is power and love and sound judgment.
Paul’s talking about power has talked about power in other places, and he will mention it later in the book, but you might draw on passages like Romans chapter one. What is the power of God for salvation? It’s the gospel. And so the Spirit God has given us is one that carries the power of the gospel with it, because when we share the Gospel, the power of the Holy Spirit moves through us. Through that message into the hearts of those who are hearing it, in order that they might believe as well. It I have a tense relationship with people who say I heard a powerful sermon today, or this is going to be a powerful message of God. It’s not my words that are powerful.
The power does not come by the rhetoric. The power comes through the words that God has given us, and particularly through the gospel message. Any power and anything that I say, or any other pastor says, is not our power. It’s not our rhetoric, it’s not our way of styling anything. It is the power of God flowing through us, through His Spirit in us, to touch the hearts of people who are hearing and so anything you gain out of this message today, while I hope I’m helpful, is not because of me. It’s because of the power of the Spirit in me and the power of the Spirit in you, connecting the words to hearts and minds so that we might understand them and live by them. The spirit is also one of love. And Chandler Schneider, a few weeks ago, spoke very deeply on this, what does it mean to do the things that we do with love, love for one another, love for God. What does it mean to do things without love, right? And Paul says in first Corinthians 13, as we heard a few weeks ago, if you do any of your ministry without love, if you try to exercise the gifts God has given you without love, what’s the point? What are you accomplishing? Really?
That’s not the way that we’re supposed to do it. In fact, if you exercise even the most obvious gifts, like tongues and prophecy, and you do it without love, you’re nothing but a clanging symbol and a gong. It’s empty words. And so we have this power, this spirit of power and love, but it is this third, third element that we’re going to focus on today. And my translation says sound judgment. Yours may say self control. It may say sound mind. It may say self discipline, or just discipline. And it’s always fun. It’s always fun when you’re reading your Bibles, especially if you’re preparing a lesson to read other translations and to look for those times where the English word we use is different all over the place, because that means there’s something going on. There’s something going on with the original language underneath that that’s causing the translators of these various English versions to try to capture an idea with a variety of words, rather than there’s just being this one to one correspondence between the Greek word and an English word. And so self control. Self control is the idea is kind of the phrase that I want to use today, but Paul means something very specific by that.
The word that he uses here is not the same word in Galatians five, in the fruit of the Spirit. If you’ve been paying attention to the chapel series, you may have noticed we’ve kind of been tracking along with the fruit of the Spirit, and we it ends with self control. But it’s not the same word. It’s not the same word that Paul uses in Galatians chapter five. Instead, it’s a word that only appears here in the New Testament. It’s one we call the apex legomenon. Right? It only appears here, but it is part of a group of words. The root of the word is part of a group of words that there’s verbal forms and various other forms throughout Paul’s corpus, and it carries with it the idea of moderation, the idea of being moderated in our thinking, being able to look at a situation and discern what is the right thing to do here, what is the good thing to do here, what is the best thing to do here. How do I interact with the situations around me so that I am controlled and not giving in to the impulses that surround me. Ladies and gentlemen, ministry is full of opportunities for impulse.
A new book comes out every single day that says, here’s the magic key, if you just do your ministry this way, you’ll double your attendance, or you’ll see twice as many converts, or your budget will be doubled, or something like that. If you just do ministry this way, we figured it out. We finally figured it out, just do ministry this way. And if you haven’t noticed, ministry is full of trends, just like clothes, just like everything else, ministry is full of trends. And it can be really easy to just go with those trends, to think all I need to do is follow what the people who are seeing success in their church, at least success by my standard of how I would measure that, look at them and say, I just need to do that. If I just do that, then I too will be successful. And so when Paul talks about self control here, sound judgment, discernment, moderation, what he’s really pointing at is that a lifetime of successful ministry has to be a lifetime of intentional self-control in the way.
Do our ministry. It’s not just self-control writ large. We can import all sorts of meanings into the words that we read in Scripture. We can we can look at a word and we go, this is what I think this word means, or this is kind of the semantic range that this word has. And I like this part of that semantic range, so I’m going to import that meaning into whatever Paul’s saying here. If you want to know what Paul means by this, you just read the rest of the letter. If you read the rest of the letter, you’ll see what he’s talking about is how Timothy can go about doing his ministry well, so that over the course of his life, he can do the same thing that Paul gets to do at the end of his life, to look back and say, I did it. I did it. I did what God called me to do, and I did it faithfully. All along, I serve my god with a clear conscience, just like my ancestors did. I exhibited the same faith as those who came before me and instilled it in me.
That’s what I’ve accomplished. Paul wants Timothy to be able to do that, just as Paul is now looking back and doing that himself. And so when you want to understand, what does he mean by self-control? It’s not just I don’t drink a smoke or chew or go with girls who do right? That’s not, that’s not the idea here. The idea is not, there’s all these bad habits out there, and I restrain myself by just sheer force of will not to do those things, or like the Pharisees. There’s no external evidence that I’m doing these things. I’m not sleeping with my neighbor’s wife. I’m not murdering anybody. I’m not obviously lying to people when I tell them I’m going to do stuff. And Jesus interacts with that sort of idea in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter five, when he says you’ve heard it said, But I say to you what he’s really getting at there, the heart of what he’s getting at is when what is external to us is not aligned with what’s internal to us, we’re broken humans, and we don’t want that to be the case.
So, when Paul talks about self-control, these are the kinds of ideas that he’s bringing together. He wants us to be wise in our ministry so that we can have a successful ministry in the way that God counts success in ministry. So I want to take a little tour through the rest of Second Timothy and look at what does Paul mean? What does Paul mean when he says, we’re going to exercise self-control, sound judgment, moderation in the way we do ministry? And he starts right away, don’t be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord or of me his prisoner, instead, share in the sufferings of the gospel, relying on and there he brings up the word power, the power of God. He has saved us, right? So what does it mean to be self-controlled?
It means not to allow the fear of persecution or suffering being put to the side, being hurt, and let’s admit, let’s admit that today. What we really mean as American Christians by that is somebody said something on Facebook, somebody put something in my comment section that hurt my feelings. There is persecution going on in America. There’s like, real persecution going on in America, but it’s not what most of us are experiencing, certainly not on the level that many Christians across the world are experiencing as they try to live out their faith. Paul says, You can’t, you can’t be ashamed of that, to demonstrate shame toward that, to try to distance yourself from that, as though that’s something that shouldn’t be happening in ministry. Only those who do ministry poorly experience those kinds of things. Only those who have made a poor decision or executed their vision wrongly.
They’re the only ones who really would wind up in a situation like this. You think about Paul, his enemies used that regularly against him, the fact that he was in prison, they would regularly use that as an excuse to say, See, I told you he’s not doing ministry, right? God’s not pleased with him. Look at him. He’s languishing away in prison. God wouldn’t let somebody do that if they were really pleasing to Him. And Paul, in the letter to the Philippians, engages with these people. He says, some people, they’re trying to hurt me by using my imprisonment in that way. But what does it matter? What does it matter, as long as the gospel is being preached, I don’t care. These are the attitudes that he wants to bring out. What does it mean to be self-controlled? It means to rein in that feeling of aversion we have to people not thinking that we’re being successful or working against us or subverting our efforts. Ladies and gentlemen, this is going to happen in ministry. It doesn’t matter whether you’re domestic or overseas.
People are going to subvert your ministry, where two Baptists are gathered, there are at least three opinions. That was my church history professor back in 2009, right? If you lead a congregation, there will be people who don’t like the way you’re leading that congregation, who will try to point out markers of your ministry that says, see if you were doing it right. That wouldn’t be a marker of your ministry if you were doing it right. This wouldn’t have happened if we’d only done it my way. These things wouldn’t have happened in our church. We wouldn’t have had this fight, we wouldn’t have had this business meeting, we would have had more income. We would have been able to do this building project, whatever they’re going to do that. And you cannot let fear or shame about that go well, then I’m just not going to do my ministry. I’m just not going to do it or to drive you into doing whatever it is other people think is successful. Because you just want to please them, to make sure that they’re happy, and whatever makes them happy, that’s what I’m going to do in ministry, because what I get is validation from the people around me, not from the one that I’m serving.
Paul says, don’t be ashamed. You. Go down to verse 13 of chapter one. Hold on to the pattern of teaching that you heard from me in the faith and love. There’s that other word that he used in verse seven that are in Christ, Jesus guard the good deposit through the Holy Spirit who lives in us. And then he gives an example. He says, you know that all those in the province of Asia have deserted me, including for jealous and homogenies. May the Lord grant mercy to the household of onesiforous, because he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains. So, he gives a contrast here. I mean, how would you like? How would you like? For the only reason your name is remembered is because Paul called you out as a negative example in one of his letters, for all generations of Christians to read after that, because you were ashamed, and you didn’t, you didn’t want to affiliate with that kind of a ministry.
You were ashamed that Paul was in prison, and so you, you backed away. You said, I’m not, I’m not with that guy. Don’t put me in prison and don’t affiliate my ministry with that ministry. Paul says that’s it’s not the way that it works. If you serve Christ, this is the risk you take that the world won’t like it, and they’re going to react to you this way, but as long as God is for you, who can really be against you and all of that. So he gives this negative example of what it means to not be self-controlled when it comes to the impulse to be ashamed or to get away from anything that is shameful. Chapter two, verse one, you, therefore, my son, be strong in the grace of Christ. Jesus, what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, commit to faithful men who will be able to teach others also part of a self-controlled ministry is it’s not all about you. You need to be pouring into other people who are then going to pour into other people, so that the generations of ministers continue on.
You are not here to learn a bunch of facts, so that you go out into the world and people say, look at that guy, or look at that girl. They’ve got it down. They know the Bible. If only I were like that, if we need to get them here, if they were here teaching what they know, then everything would be so much better. We just need to get them here. We’ve seen over the last several years what happens when people make ministry about them. There was a TGC article that came out several years ago after the downfall of certain very public figures, and the author of that article labeled what he called the man of God syndrome. It’s the notion that I build this ministry around my persona and me and my giftings, and I tell people, bring everyone here to hear me and look at all of the great things I’m doing for the Kingdom. And then the insidious part sneaks in.
If I fall, think about the damage if it comes out that I’m doing things I shouldn’t be doing, think about everything that will happen, all of the splash damage that will happen because of that. You wouldn’t want to tell anybody that I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing right and you get this layer of protection around yourself of people who are not willing to call you out on your sin, because you’ve convinced them. If I go down the kingdom of God is going to be severely damaged. The kingdom of God, you can, you can be damaged. You can’t damage the kingdom of God. God is the one who grows his kingdom. You can damage your testimony. You can hurt the name of Christ, but you can’t stop God’s kingdom. And whether you rise or fall, it does not matter, God’s Kingdom will flourish. We’ve seen that you just don’t want to be a reason why the kingdom of God doesn’t get to flourish as a result of God moving through.
You and your giftings in your ministry, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to teach other people who you expect to go out and teach other people so that it’s not all about you. It’s not a personality driven ministry. It is a multiplication driven ministry where I am pouring myself out so that other people can pour themselves out, so that nobody gets this idea that the kingdom of God rises or falls on me. If anyone had the right to do that, it was Paul, and he’s coming to the end of his life saying, I’m ready. I mean, he was ready back in Philippians, sharing the sufferings as a good soldier, right? No one serving as a soldier gets entangled in the concerns of civilian life. He seeks to please his commanding officer. Look to God. What does it mean to be self-controlled? It’s never thinking of yourself more highly than you ought. In your ministry, you are a conduit through which the Holy Spirit moves from heart to heart, so that the power of God, by the Word of God, can affect the kingdom of God for God’s glory.
That’s what you are, that’s what I am, that’s what we are, that’s where we’re training to be here. What does it mean to have a self-controlled ministry? He says in chapter two, verse 22 flee from youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart but reject foolish and ignorant disputes because, you know, they breed quarrels. Ladies and gentlemen, do not get hung up on making sure that nobody on the internet is wrong. Nothing can hurt you more than sitting at the computer going somebody on the internet is wrong, and I am the guardian. I am the one who has been called by God to correct those naysayers. Just don’t do it. You’re not and arguing online gets nothing done. So I just want to urge us in that Paul, I think Paul wants to urge us in that don’t, don’t get wound up in these quarrels that don’t make anything you have to control yourself. I when I drive, I have a lot of thoughts for the people who drive around me, and I say those thoughts out loud in my car. Oh, you’re really going to do that? Okay? Wow. No turn signal. All right, thanks. Appreciate that.
I don’t think you can fit in there, but by all means, give it a shot, right? I don’t know how my wife feels about that. She’s never told me, but it’s what I do. You know how? You know how much that changes? The driving of people around me? It doesn’t they don’t care. They don’t even hear me, right? This is for my own self. I don’t know self-benefit. It’s to get to blow off steam or whatever, right? This is what arguing online is like. You’re just screaming into a void. Nobody cares, nobody’s reading, nobody’s convinced. 140 characters are left. Never convinced anyone of anything, unless it’s 140 characters in here.
So that’s what Paul says. This notion of self-control is just so important because there are just so many things, so many things in ministry that draw us away, that divert our attention, that drain our energy away from the one thing that we’re supposed to be doing, making disciples of all nations. It’s the one thing we’re supposed to be doing, and we find so many other things to do. And Paul says, you’ve got to be self-controlled. You’ve got to rein that in. You’ve got to rein in the impulses that push you in these directions. Right? He says, I know hard to chapter three, verse one, I know hard times will come in the last days for People will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, proud, demeaning, disobedient to parents. Which is the odd one out? You’re like, yeah, boastful, demeaning, disobedient to parents. Whoa, okay, ungrateful, unholy, unloving. You’re like, still disobedient to parents.
All right, without self-control, brutal, without love. For what is good? Traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure, rather than lovers of good, holding to the form of godliness but denying its power. This is what happens when you lack self-control. And then he talks about gossips. He talks about the need to preach the word in season and out of season. Chapter four, verse one, that famous thing, I solemnly charge you before God and Christ, he was going to judge the living and the dead, and because of his appointing in his kingdom, preach the word be ready in season and out of season. What does it mean to be self-controlled? It means you don’t go with the flow of the seasons.
There’s one thing you’re supposed to be doing, and you do it. You. Just do that when people like it and when they don’t like it, when they’re receiving it and when they’re not receiving it, you just preach the word. That’s what it means to be self-controlled, be self-disciplined, to have sound judgments. I will tell you something about myself that I am ashamed of when I was a seminary student. I remember this very distinctly. I don’t know why God seared this into my memory, but it was my third year here, and my wife and I were walking around our neighborhood, and I remember looking at her and saying, you know, I just get this feeling that God’s got something big for me, that I’m going to get to be part of something really, really big. I don’t know why I said it. I don’t know really what I was feeling at that moment. I just that’s what I thought.
Now you can spiritualize that and say, Well, yeah, getting to do anything in the kingdom of God is a big thing. Getting to participate in any way in the kingdom of God as being part of a big thing. But that’s not what I meant. That’s not what I meant. You can’t Obi Wan Kenobi this thing and say what I said was true from a certain point of view. What I meant was, I think I’m going to be a big deal someday, and God has spent the last 13 years of my life rooting any remnant of that thought out of me, and I can tell you how he’s done it. It’s not pretty. I’ve been through a lot over the last 13 years that have repeatedly shown me I’m not anybody I’m not anybody special, not not by the world’s eyes, at least, what I am is a minister called by God to focus and be self-controlled, to reign in the impulses and walk this lane and it’s led me here.
And I could not be more grateful. I could never have gotten here on my own. I would not be a professor at this seminary if I’d done it my way, I would not have the ministry legacy I have. If I had done it my way, I would not be preaching this chapel to you right now. If I had done it my way, I it would not have happened the path that I have gotten to walk, and I do think I have gotten to walk, it not had to walk. It is a path that can only be explained by God leading every single step of the way, even sometimes despite what I wanted to do, and I’ve learned over the years how to rein in those impulses to be self-control.
I’m still working on it. I’m not there yet. I’m not even 40 yet, right? But I wouldn’t even be able to be a rabbi if I were in Jesus’s day. So I’m not there yet, but God is doing that work in me. I hope he’s doing that work in you. I hope through your time at the seminary, he’s doing that work in you. And here’s why, what does it matter, right? What does it matter? Well, I have to get some philosophy in today, so I’m going to talk about Plato.
Plato wrote a dialog called the Phaedo, and in that dialog, he records the death of his mentor, Socrates. What Socrates does in the Phaedo is he’s meeting with a group of his students just before he drinks hemlock he has been falsely arrested and accused and tried and convicted of corrupting the youth and teaching atheism and various things like that. Really, he was just irritating. That’s what he was. He was an irritating person. He called himself the gadfly of Athens. That’s what he was before he drinks the hemlock and dies. He tells his students a story, and it is a story about what is going to happen to him when he dies. He says the way that humans work is we are a soul in a body. We are a soul. We’re in a body, but your soul is the real thing about you. And when you die, your soul goes into this perfect realm where it gets to see everything that’s real, but then it’s going to be re-embodied. You will be put back into a body, and you just go through this cycle over and over and over again. Your soul goes up into perfection and then comes down and is comes down and is re-embodied, and you forget it all, and then it goes up into perfection. You get re-embodied, and you forget it all. But Socrates says, not me. I’ve lived the life of a philosopher. I’ve contemplated life, and so what I know is going to happen is I’m going to escape this cycle of reincarnation. I’m going to escape this cycle of re-embodiment, and my soul is going to go is going to go to this perfect realm, and it’s just going to stay there because I’ve lived the life that you need to live in order to get there. And his students look at him, one of his students looks at him and says, That’s a great story.
Do you really believe that? And it’s not that sarcastic, like, that’s weird, right? It’s, do you really believe that? And Socrates sort of smirks. I mean, this is my vision of what he does. He smirks, and he goes, it’s comforting to believe it, and then he drinks the hemlock and dies. Everything that he’d done in his life, everything he’d hoped for, everything he’d tried for and. In the end, it was just well, you know, it makes me feel good to believe it. Contrast that with what Paul says in Second Timothy, when you ask, what was it worth Paul, that whole life of self-control, that life of discipline, that life of moderation, what did it get you? And he says, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith, and there is laid up for me, the crown. That’s not just for me, but for everyone who loves the Lord’s appearing. That’s what it’s worth. It doesn’t just help to believe it. It’s not just a comforting thought, it’s reality. And if you want to experience that the way that Paul wanted Timothy to experience it, we have to live a life under the power love and self-control, a ministry of self-control that God has called us to. Because, ladies and gentlemen, it will be worth it. Would you pray with me?
Father, we are so grateful as we close today, that you have given us the spirit of power and love and self-control. I pray for our students. I pray for our faculty. I pray for our seminary that we would exhibit these attributes every day, that we meet together, that we teach one another, that we talk with one another, so that we may be a glory to you, that we may bring glory to your name and not our own. It’s in Christ’s name that we pray amen.
