Letters #11
When did you first fall in love with the Word of God? When was the last time you were amazed to be reading God’s thoughts designed for you? When have you discovered something in the Bible and it changed the way you think and act? As a teenager, I remember having a discussion with my mom about some decision I was facing and my mom telling me that fortunately life came with an instruction book. Just like the car we were riding in had an owner’s manual, God had given us His Word, the Bible as our instruction book for life. Basic Instruction Before Leaving Earth. It is the answer for every question. Everything you need to know about life can be found there, she told me. But, the thing is, it wasn’t the words that she was saying to me made that moment memorable. No, it was the way that she said it. She believed this down to the core of who she was. She had found it to be true and she was living her life as though it was true. I knew that from watching her. In that brief interaction I knew that my mom’s thinking and living were being shaped by what she was learning in God’s Word, not the other way around. If there was a discrepancy between her life and the way the Bible said to live life, she was going to default to what the Spirit revealed to her in Scripture.
Does God’s Word have that role in your life? Does it still have that role in my life? Am I willing to let it shape me? Do I bring the deepest desires of my life and submit them to God’s Word, revealed through the Spirit in a relationship made possible in Christ? Changing the way you think, changes the way you live.
Today, we look at Paul’s letter to Timothy as he was pastoring the church in Ephesus. Paul’s encouragement to Timothy is to STAY there in Ephesus and lead this church through a battle for the gospel. Paul knows and has known that this group of leaders in this church in this great city are being challenged and will continue to be challenged to hold onto sound, healthy beliefs about God and the Good News of Jesus. Paul wants to strengthen and embolden Timothy in the presence of these church leaders to understand again how what we think about God shapes how we live out our faith. In his letter, Paul writes to his son in the faith this truth, “Healthy doctrine is the foundation for a Jesus-infused godliness which provides the resilience that is necessary for faithfulness, and is crucial to the proclamation of the gospel to a lost world.”
Big Idea: Jesus-infused godliness provides the resilience that is necessary for faithfulness, and is crucial to the proclamation of the gospel to a lost world.
In this letter, our coach Paul lays out three key ideas about godliness. Not a self-sustained, try harder, godliness, but a godliness that is modeled and sustained by Jesus. It is Jesus-infused! The first of these key ideas about godliness is that it grows from good gospel teaching.