Confidence

 

Text: 2 Timothy 1:1-14

Focus: Faith

Function: to help people have confidence in grace.

1:¹Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus,

²To Timothy, my beloved child:

Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

³I am grateful to God—whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did—when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. ⁴Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. ⁵I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. ⁶For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands, ⁷for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

⁸Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel, in the power of God, ⁹who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace, and this grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, ¹⁰but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. ¹¹For this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher, ¹²and for this reason I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day the deposit I have entrusted to him. ¹³Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. ¹⁴Guard the good deposit entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.

Good morning to the beloved children of God!

May the peace of Christ dwell within you now and forever.

This passage of scripture is filled with the kind of grace that builds our confidence in the faith.

And that confidence is not a result of our efforts but it is a result of the work of the Holy Spirit inside of us. The Spirit of God gives us the confidence to be bold before God and before people.

The passage indicates both.

We are bold before people because through God’s Spirit we proclaim Christ’s teachings as the path to peace for the entire world. We are not afraid or embarrassed because God has given us faith.

Faith is a difficult lesson to learn since I believe that faith is given to us by God. It isn’t something that we manufacture, but at the same time, God calls us to have faith. What God is calling us to when God calls us to have faith is to trust God, or to rest in them. To rest from our fears in God.

In many ways, faith is the opposite of fear. Or at least, fear is a force that is sometimes spiritual and sometimes physical. It is physical when our senses perceive beyond our conscious train of thought. That physical fear is important to pay attention to.

But spiritual fear, the lack of trust in the promises of God, is different from our bodies natural protection system.

Verse 7 from our passage is a promise that I hold on to. It says: God has not given us a spirit of fear, or cowardice, but a spirit of power, love and self-discipline or a sound mind.

The Spirit given to us by God is a spirit of power and love and the ability to discern good verses evil as we reject the way of greed that the world around us teaches and we embrace the generosity of God’s grace to us.

I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. There are three main areas of sin in the bible. One is idolatry, one is lack of concern for the poor and the third is a lack of faith in God’s promises.

God wants us to rest in the fact, the knowledge, that God loves us and cares for us. When we pray “Give us THIS DAY our daily bread,” we are symbolically reminding ourselves and God that we need God to provide for us and we rest in God not ourselves.

The Lord’’s prayer is that kind of prayer of faith.

Resting in God instead of relying on ourselves is difficult in this culture of self-sufficiency. But when we rest in God, our relationship to our wealth changes to the priorities of God’s purpose for humanity, which is to cease war, and then love and forgive each other.

So, Paul tells Timothy to be bold in proclaiming the grace, mercy and peace of Christ.

Be bold in the presence of mankind with our witness.

As the Spirit gives us confidence before others, it also gives us the confidence to be bold in the presence of God.

There are a few recordings in the scriptures of people who got to see the glory of God and survived. Job, when he finally got an answer from God and saw God’s glory said that he was completely undone. Daniel fell down as a dead man until the angel of God touched him and revived him. Paul saw a vision of heaven to glorious to explain to mortals.

Now, Paul opens the passage with his mention of worship toward God. Which he does that often. In his first letter to Timothy he is also worshiping God and it is recorded this way:, 1 Timothy 6:16 in the New Living Translation: He alone can never die, and he lives in light so brilliant that no human can approach him. No human eye has ever seen him, nor ever will. All honor and power to him forever! Amen

Because of God’s majesty, OT humans could not approach God. The theology around God states that God is so awesome and majestic that we as humans if we were in God’s presence would die except for the atonement of Jesus. As I mentioned, a few people saw God in the Old Testament and survived, barely, but all of them were transformed by their experience with God.

And we are taught that because of Christ, a way beyond our own sins, or failures, or selfishness is opened up to us to survive that fear and I believe, all of humanity, for us to be able once again to have the fellowship with God that Adam and Eve lost in the garden.

God commands us to forgive without exception. I believe it is because God has forgiven all of humanity. It is proven symbolically by the atoning sacrifice of Christ. Christ defeated death and the fear of death through the resurrection.

Through the resurrection, God makes all things new. And now that God has forgiven humanity, God’’s Spirit can dwell with us.

Jesus said that we will be one with God and him, just as he is one with God. John 17:21-23

That is pretty fantastic!

Instead of being afraid of God, the author of Hebrews tells us that we are now called to boldly go into the presence of God because God loves us and has forgiven us through Christ.

That forgiveness is felt when we trust Christ. Those who don’t trust Christ don’t yet have the blessing of that peace. But when we are near others who don’t yet rest in Christ, that same Spirit is near them, calling them to a new way of living and loving their neighbor. God is working through us in spite of us.

The promise is that we get to go boldly into the presence of God.

So, that brings us to verse 32. Paul gives the promise that I have relied on heavily as God has lead me through my faith development over the years.

The verse says that it is up to God to keep us in the faith.

Twice in my life I have heavily doubted and turned my back on what I thought God was. But God didn’t turn their back on me.

Instead, God drew me to the light.

As I rejected bad theology that was abusive and patriarchal, I thought I was abandoning the faith, but instead, it was the Spirit of God leading me out of abusive religious faith practices.

Here is the thing, when we are baptized, we make a covenant with God to follow God wherever God leads us.

But what is fantastic about that is that God also made a covenant with us. And God is not human like us. God is not going back on God’s promises to us.

Paul tells us that our restoration, our healing, our salvation is up to God and because God is able, God will not fail us.

In that we have confidence because God is love and we believe that God’s love will indeed transform the world. We are bold because of the Spirit inside of us. It is God who prevails, we can rest in that.