Letters to Timothy: Good Practical Advice - Build Relationships
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Letters to Timothy: Good Practical Advice - Build Relationships May 8, 2016 Dr. Tom Pace 2 Timothy 1:1-7 Let’s continue now with our worship this morning as we hear the Scripture read. We’re continuing in a series of sermons from First and Second Timothy on Practical Wisdom. Listen as we hear the Scripture this morning: Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus, to Timothy, my beloved child: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. I 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. Recalling your tears, I long to see you, so that I may be filled with joy. I 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. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self- discipline. (2 Timothy 1:1-7 NRSV) I hope you will take your Inside-Out handout and follow along, because I’m going to be looking at that Scripture kind of verse by verse later in the sermon. And I want you to be able to follow along with your eyes as well as with your ears. So last week we talked about the practical wisdom that comes from Paul’s writing to Timothy as he encouraged us to focus on character, not on success, not on acquisition or on applause or approval but on character. And we talked about David Brooks’ image that he shared recently in a book called The Road to Character. On the difference between resume values that you’d put on your resume and eulogy values which they’ll talk about you when you die, and that we spend too much time on resume values and not enough on eulogy values, on character. Today we want to talk about relationships. So we not only focus on character but second, we build relationships. Let’s pray together. O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see, our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel and then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen. I was reading again this week Ernest Hemingway’s little book A Movable Feast. It’s about his time in Paris in the 1920s and it was an amazing time there. It was a bustling city teeming with people and Pablo Picasso was there, and James Joyce was there, lots of great intellectuals. Hemingway also wrote The Sun Also Rises there. He writes this in A Movable Feast: “The people went to the big cafes because they were lost in them, and no one noticed them, and they could be alone in them and yet be together.” Sometimes when you’re with a lot of people, in a big city crammed with lots of people, you may feel more alone than any other time. It’s like “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.” Relationships. People everywhere yet not one significant relationship that feeds your soul in the midst of it all. 2 They’re all around you, and it seems like the more there are the harder it is. So I think that’s what’s happening when Paul is writing to Timothy. We’re trying to diagnose what’s going on in Timothy’s heart and soul. We don’t have the letter Timothy might have written to Paul, and I must say that we’re not really sure that Paul himself really wrote these letters. The language is kind of different than the language you find in the ones we know he wrote – Galatians, Romans. But it’s certainly written in his name, and perhaps a scribe has written it on his behalf. So Timothy is Paul’s protégé, and he’s traveled with him, and he’s been left in Ephesus to be the pastor there. And as time has passed, he’s suffered and struggled. Listen, that’s why Paul writes, “I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands.” You only rekindle something if it’s burned out. So Timothy is burned out. He’s been stuck in this city, and he feels isolated and alone and struggling. He has perhaps reached out to Paul to explain the struggle he’s having, and Paul is telling him, “Hang in there.” And he’s writing him in affirmation and support and encouragement. The philosopher Schopenhauer is admittedly a philosopher, and he’s kind of cynical as he describes the human race as a bunch of porcupines. He says: “The colder it gets outside the more we huddle together for warmth. But the closer we get together the more we hurt one another with our sharp quills. In the lonely night of earth’s winter eventually we begin to drift apart and wander out on our own to freeze to death in our loneliness.” 3 Okay, it’s over the top a little, but none the less it’s true that those relationships… You know I have a task list on my computer of things to do. I haven’t really learned to use it right, and I put too much on it for a single day, and it’s always there. You know when you don’t get the tasks done for that day it turns red, and they like yell at you, “You’re overdue! You’re overdue!” So you look at that task list, and you think, “I’ve got to do that! I’ve got to do that! Oh, man, I haven’t talked to my daughter in a long time… and oh, I’ve gotta do that, and I’ve gotta do that… I need to call my mom… Oh, I gotta do that, I gotta do that...you know, there’s that friend I haven’t talked to …” And when you get done with the day those thoughts have rushed through your mind, and you’ve accomplished a bunch of those tasks, but you haven’t done any of those other things. You haven’t invested in those relationships. You’ve been focusing on the tasks, on getting those things done because by golly you’ve got to get them done. They’re urgent! These other things aren’t so urgent. You know, your friend you haven’t talked to in a year or so, they’ll be there. So what happens is that we find ourselves lonelier and lonelier and lonelier. What I want to do right now is to really tell you two things. First, we need to focus on relationships, and second to take a look at what’s a part of them. There are three kinds of relationships that I think this speaks to. The first is of mentor and protégé. Paul is Timothy’s mentor and Timothy is Paul’s protégé. I don’t know if you have a mentor or not. You know the word mentor has kind of come into fashion, but in the church we thought of it a long time. We call people spiritual mothers or spiritual fathers. Six times in the letters to Timothy Paul refers to Timothy as “his child” or “my son.” It’s a way of saying that all around us we have spiritual 4 mothers and spiritual fathers who have nurtured us and who have cared for us. In our youth program, Rob Dulaney, our director of our youth ministries, says that he wants to have a one to five ratio between students and teachers. But that doesn’t mean one teacher, one adult, for every five students. Rather it means five adults for every one student, that every single student will have five adults who have invested in their lives. A Sunday school teacher, a youth counselor, a choir leader, someone else’s parent, a faith friend, a pastor. Somebody who knows their name and is praying for them and encouraging them and lifting them up. Because we all need spiritual mothers and fathers to care for us. In Romans 16 Paul writes something that I find so interesting. I love it when one little verse captures me. He writes: “Give my greetings to Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine.” Now some scholars think he’s talking about his biological mother, perhaps in Rome. But most believe he considers Rufus’ mother as also his spiritual mother that Rufus’ mother had put him up when he traveled, that he had a relationship with her, and she’d been a supporter. She was someone who had supported him financially and had written encouragement to him. Some of you may have friends’ mothers that you see as your mother. So we all need those spiritual parents. And the question I would ask you today is, are you investing in anybody? Are you either looking toward a mentor or looking to mentor someone, to care for them, to be a spiritual parent for them? 5 I have a mentor I meet with on most Tuesdays, because it means a lot to me.