What If?

 

Text: 2 Timothy 2:8-15

Focus: security

Function: to help people see that God keeps us

⁸Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David—that is my gospel, ⁹for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained. ¹⁰Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. ¹¹The saying is sure:

If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
¹²if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he will also deny us;
¹³if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
he cannot deny himself.

¹⁴Remind them of this, and warn them before the Lord that they are to avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening. ¹⁵Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.

Good morning to the beloved Children of God!

May the peace of Christ fill your hearts and minds always.

This passage of scripture is taken from a pastoral letter written by Paul to Timothy, his young apprentice and helper in the missionary work that he did.

As the intro states, Paul writes this letter from prison where God is allowing him to give a testimony about the sincerity of his faith through his imprisonment.

And he states that he is willing to do it because when he preaches about Jesus’s way of living people find the healing and restoration provided by God through the Holy Spirit. It’s a supernatural transformation brought about by God’s spirit inside of us.

And this text for today focuses on what appears to be a song sung by the early church. Each line starts with an IF, so I titled the sermon, What If? The song goes like this:

¹²if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he will also deny us;
¹³if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
he cannot deny himself.

This is a beautiful song. Let us unpack it a bit.

It is a song about the security we have in Christ since we have placed our faith in him.

In the first line: “if we endure with him…” Paul is comforted, it appears, by the song since he is in chains for the gospel, he is willing to endure because he believes that God has a reward for him based on his faithfulness.

Although the song is filled with grace that we will get to in this little speech of mine, it does come with a warning about denying Christ.

He says that if we deny him, he will return the favor and deny us. But as we unpack that concept, we remember grace and the fact that Peter denied that he knew Christ 3 times and Christ 3 times recommissioned him to establish a community that would care for everyone.

Still, grace aside, they sang that line as a warning to continue to trust Christ.

By denying him, I believe he is saying that we quit having faith in God’s provision and love for us. We quit trusting in him.

In coming to Christ, we place our trust and hope in what he taught us and now shows us through the Holy Spirit in our lives.

What he is saying is that prayers of faith, where we put our trust in God, reach God in a divine way. And when we don’t exercise our faith, we wane away spiritually.

At least that is the main point of the sermon I am going to preach at Kairos at the end of the month.

Now we get to my favorite part of the song that the early church sang.

They sang: “...If we are faithless, he remains faithful for he cannot deny himself.”

I don’t know if I can unwrap that any further. It speaks for itself.

When we were baptized, we made a covenant with God. Cool, we know that. But the neat thing is that God made a covenant with us.

I remember the prayer Jesus prays for the disciples in John 17 when he prays that we would be one with him just as he is one with the Father, we will all be one together.

The song is saying that we are now a part of God. We are in God and God is in us. I believe the mechanism for that is because we allow the Spirit to have control of our lives. We choose to allow the Spirit of God to lead us.

We can find comfort in knowing that we belong to God and God will not deny God’s own self.

I have experienced that mercy myself. In order to foster vulnerability at the prison, when we give a talk to the residents, we include personal stories that illustrate the point of the talk.

I am going to talk about how to keep the faith in the prison compound after the Kairos team leaves.

The sermon comes Sunday morning after we have cleansed ourselves with the forgiveness ceremony Saturday night.

In the message, I will mention my queer nature that I believe is a result of being violently raped by a stranger when I was 11.

As a teenager in a rigid home, and not knowing what my sexual identity was, I was covered with shame.

For a few short years I gave up on Christ because my prayers to end this what I was taught to be a sinful, and because we were Christian nationalists, anti-American, thoughts, wasn’t working. I became suicidal and got strung out on dope. I was self-destructive.

I completely rejected Christ for a season. I thought I could be my own god. I was faithless and denied Christ.

But God is faithful.

Even now, I can still sort of remember the feeling of being lost when I rejected Christ. I had known Christ since I was four and I felt something missing inside my heart. Deep down, I knew that if I just raised my hands and surrendered, God would restore me to that peace that Christ gives.

To keep the story short. While lost and away from Christ, at 18 years of age, I was promoted to Assistant manager of a Big Boy restaurant in Fort Wayne.

The 4^th night I was there, I was robbed and beaten by two men who tricked me into opening the back door. They beat me with a club on my head until I passed out and they locked me inside the walk in cooler. After they grabbed the cash, they opened the door to the cooler and discussed how to kill me since I could identify them. I heard one of them say that he wanted to stab me and make sure I was dead.

I wasn’t ready to die and I cried out silently to God: “Lord, Save me!”

And God did.

I actually heard inside me head the words: “You’ll be alright.”

And right here (point to right ear) I felt the Holy Spirit enter and flood my body with this overwhelming sense of peace. The presence of God was restored to me!

And then, miraculously, the other fellow said that he could kill me with the club. I counted 11 blows before I passed out. I woke up an hour later to a refrigerator door with no inside latch, shut from the outside.

Somehow, by the grace of God, I survived.

God saved me. The song that the early believers sang said that if we are faithless, he remains faithful is true.

God proved that with me and restored me.

Not only did God restore me, but God set me on the path to healing from the emotional trauma I felt when I was being formed psychologically.

I realize now that it wasn’t Christ that I rejected, it was bad theology that I rejected. In Christ’s healing, I found an inclusive theology that opens the door to everyone.

Through all of that the Holy Spirit has not quit working in the process of healing and restoring me. I see how God is faithful.

So, to answer the question what happens when we lose faith? God is faithful. Praise God!