Advice No.3 Be Warned

♪ Lord, help us live in the light of your coming, Striving for purity, fleeing from sin, Catching a glimpse of what we are becoming, being transformed to your likeness within. Lord, help us see there is hope beyond measure, joy beyond suffering, justice restored. Fixing our eyes on the heavenly treasure, Jesus our Saviour, Redeemer and Lord.

The trumpet shall sound, look to the skies, for Jesus is coming again. Then through the clouds His children shall rise to share in His glorious reign. Lord, fill our hearts with a real expectation as of the promise our destiny sealed.

Praising our Saviour with glad adoration, when in your glory you shall be revealed. The trumpet shall sound, look to the skies, for Jesus is coming again. Then through the clouds His children shall rise to share in His glorious reign.

The trumpet shall sound, look to the skies, for Jesus is coming again. Then through the clouds His children shall rise to share in His glorious reign. Available by the welcome desk as you leave, there are copies of a very special challenge newspaper, which has been customized to give some indication to folks who live in the area of the tab, its services and certain news items which we think they'll find of great interest.

Both the front and back pages are really composed by the team who put this together from the tab and we're going to be distributing quite a few hundreds in the neighborhood and you're welcome to take a copy but not just for your personal reading. If you take a copy then you're making a commitment to give this to someone who might find it of interest, to your neighbor, to a friend at work or so forth and just pray over it. This is one of four mass distributions that we'll do of this paper during these next 12 months.

I commend that to you by the welcome desk area as you leave. Also some people asked if they could have further copies because we ran out of the notes from 2 Timothy and the first study, those are available by the welcome desk and also there's a digest of what I'm going to share in a moment or two, some outlines that you can take unless you want to make your own notes as we proceed. So let's turn to the Word of God, 2 Timothy and chapter 3. The chapter that's full of a great deal of teaching, some is very somber, to compress it within 30 minutes is not easy in terms of explanation because each of these four chapters could well merit a series of addresses on their own.

But here is the Apostle Paul and he's writing to Timothy Paul, just to put you in the picture, those of you who are not along here regularly and didn't pick up there for the study last week, Paul is in jail. He's not only a prisoner, he's a very old man. He's restricted in his liberty and he's restricted by advancing years.

And he wants more than anything else for someone else to come along and to take up the cudgels, to run with a baton, just to shift the metaphor, to ensure that when Paul is no more on this earth, when he's in the everlasting presence of the great God and Father of our Lord Jesus, the work that he commenced will continue. We spent several hours yesterday as elders considering the affairs of this church and I guess if you could summarize all that we were endeavoring to grasp, to achieve, it is the continuation, the succession of the ministries and their various facets in this fellowship. So we read this chapter with these thoughts in mind.

Paul, writing one of his final letters to a young, somewhat shy man, and he says, mark this, make special emphasis in your mind to grasp, Timothy, what I am about to tell you. There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power, have nothing to do with them.

They are the kind who worm their ways into homes and gain control over weak-willed women who are loaded down with sins and swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth. Just as Janese and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these men oppose the truth, men of depraved minds who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected, but they will not get very far because, as in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone. You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecution, sufferings, what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra, the persecutions I endured.

Yet, the Lord rescued me from all of them. In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil men and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of because you know those from whom you learned it and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, training in righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. The last hymn that we sung together was written, if memory serves me correctly, by an Elim pastor. The Elim church has given some wonderful hymns to the body of Christ as a whole.

There was a man in that denomination whose name was John Dyke. He helped to pioneer and to build up a most remarkable church in the center of Birmingham by going back to the 30s and 40s. He was a miner, one for Christ, and with the bluntness of a miner, he became a preacher.

And in the bullring in Birmingham, on one occasion, some smart aleck, of which there are often many when you're hauling an open-air service, suggested that Dyke ought to do something worthwhile, wasting his time as a preacher. Why didn't he do something constructive and help towards the good of society, the good of the country? John Dyke said, What I am doing, and what my colleagues are doing, is a work that this country needs more than anything else. We are endeavoring to produce good men and good women.

And that's basically what the gospel is all about, introducing sinful people to God, helping them to find forgiveness and faith in Jesus Christ, becoming new people with a determination to live for the glory of God, to be good people. What does the church need more than anything else? What in the first century did the Apostle Paul require? What if you drew alongside him and you said, Paul, here's a wish, man, what is it? His response, what do you think it would be? That he might be given a man of God. That from the churches that he had helped to birth, men and women of God might be produced so that they could continue to do what he has done.

And so here you see, Paul is writing to a young fellow, and he says to him, my goal for you, Timothy, verse 17, is that you might be the man of God, thoroughly equipped for every good work. What does this tab need more than anything else? It needs men and women of God. What does Worthing need? What does British society need? Not clever people, not people of ingenuity.

Maybe that that will be part of the package, but fundamentally, basically, down to its essence, we need men and women of God. And so the apostle writes these instructions to Timothy, and Paul, who is always an honest man, as he endeavors to hand over the charge of his ministries to Timothy, will also tell him that what he is up against is great difficulty. So if in chapter 1 Paul tells Timothy to be brave, to be courageous, if in chapter 2 he tells him to be strong, so I suggest as a summary statement, in the third chapter he tells him to be warned.

To be warned about what? To be warned that there will be difficulties that he will have to face. In effect, from verses 1 to 8, what you discover here is the apostle Paul telling Timothy about the stresses which he predicts this man will have to face. There will be terrible times in the last days.

Now, let's just pause for a moment and say that when Scripture refers to the last days, it's not speaking of those days immediately before the coming of our Lord Jesus. That term, last days, is used symbolically. It's dispensational.

It refers to the whole period between the downpouring of the Holy Spirit and the second advent. Now, during that period which has lasted for nigh on 2,000 years, the church has known some very, very difficult times indeed. When you become a Christian, you have to realize this, that suddenly the whole world has not become Christian, and your commitment to Jesus Christ might run you into a lot of difficulty, terrible times in the last days.

The word, actually, that the apostle uses when he speaks of these times is the same term as is used to describe the demons of Gadara, these monsters of men who terrorize their locality until Jesus came along and set these men in their right minds. Well, that's the sort of situation, one which will trigger terror, that the apostle says is in store for Timothy, and indeed for all God's children at some stage. There will be those who will be opposed to the church.

And this is what is going to bring the greatest stress. The apostle lists from the second verse right through to the end of the ninth verse 19 characteristics of people who seem in one sense to be religious folk, but actually they are enemies of the gospel. And the interesting thing is that when you read that catalog of doer terminologies, of doer descriptions, it in a remarkable fashion seems to predict the so-called new morality of the 20th century.

But let's remember that the new morality is basically an old immorality. The same sort of pressures, the same sort of temptations that pressed on the church in the first century, they're here in the 20th century. They were there at the time of the Reformation.

When an unsophisticated Catholicism had swept over Europe and brought superstition, and had turned men and women from the simple truth of the gospel. There you found in that particular era the days of Luther and Calvin, a pseudo-religion which was creating a lot of difficulty for those who were true to the faith. You read the story of John Wycliffe, those men who lived before the Reformation and the difficulties through which they went.

You think of the church today in certain areas, in certain countries. Think of the pseudo-gospel that is produced by some people. Think of the cults that are burgeoning at their seams.

And some of the descriptions that the Apostle has here of the problems that Timothy will face are incredibly relevant and up-to-date, as well as reminiscent of things that the church has had to go through during its history. There are those, says the Apostle Paul, who will have a form of godliness. Verse 5, with forceful zeal they will knock on the doors and they will give their religious wares.

Religious commercial travelers is what John Starr calls them. They will pray particularly upon women, knocking at times when womenfolk are more likely to be in than menfolk. And as Eve was deceived and then Adam, so you'll discover in many of the sects that the larger proportion are womenfolk as opposed to men.

There were those in the days of Moses, says the Apostle Paul, who does not blush to liken himself to a new Moses, who too were contesting the truth that Moses was to bring. Look at verse 8. There are supplied names that you can't find in the Old Testament, but the incident is there. The magicians who came before Moses, you remember? He's coming to the court of Pharaoh.

He's pleading for the release of the people. He's asking for their physical salvation. He's demonstrating that he has been in the presence of God, that he has the authority of God behind him.

And along come two Egyptian magicians, Yanis and Jamres, and they oppose Moses. Men of depraved minds, endeavoring to stop the work of God, endeavoring to staunch the truth of God. Now, says Paul as he's writing to Timothy, you'll have the same difficulty.

These men who have been dogging my footsteps, interfering with my preaching, they, in effect, have been the same in principle as Yanis and Jamres were. Here I am, a New Testament Moses, so to speak. The law of God, the gospel of God's grace that has been committed to me.

I received it from him, and what I've received from him I want to show other people. I want to teach other people as Moses is in Sinai and receives the law of God and wants to declare the law of God to the Israelites as Moses in the backwoods of the desert comes forward into Egypt in an earlier time in his life and wishes to lead the people out of bondage and ignorance. As Moses was frustrated by opposition, so says Paul, I have been, and Timothy, you will be, and the church in the 20th century will be.

The Anglican church, for which I have great respect, is in a state of crisis for this very reason. Things which are obviously opposed to Scripture are being embraced by some of the clergy, and it's very difficult for some of our evangelical brothers like Dr. Stott and Dr. Packer to hold up the tide that is bursting through the dams and endeavoring to sweep the Anglican church from its historic position of being a Reformation church and true to the Scripture. Well, says the apostle, Timothy, when you have these sort of problems those created by heretics peddling their wares, endeavoring to beguile weak-minded people, remember this, they will not get very far.

Verse 9, why not? Well, you see, God's truth will always stand. His word is not chained. You can chain Paul.

You can chain, as I said the other week, Joseph Ton. You can prohibit Bibles being sold on the streets of the cities of northern China, but you cannot stop God's word from getting through. The word of God is not chained.

Heresy eventually runs out of steam and is seen for what it always was, a pseudo-religion, a farce. The third century, the church nearly became Jehovah's Witness. If you think Jehovah's Witness teaching is something new, then you're showing you don't understand anything about church history.

It's been there before. There's nothing new. Nothing new under the sun as far as the sects are concerned.

It's been there. It ran its course. God had his men to repulse the heresy and to proclaim the truth.

And the church survived. The church will always survive because it's the church of Jesus Christ bought with his precious blood. The gates of hell cannot prevail against it.

Timothy be warned. These are some of the stresses which Paul predicts Timothy will have to cope with as he responds to the challenge of taking on where Paul has left off. Well, if those are the stresses which he predicts, let's move on to the strictures which he prescribes.

And those you find in the 10th verse and onwards to the 14th verse. There is a contrast. The contrast is obvious from your immediate reading of the 10th verse.

You, however, you see here are these people and they've moved away from the truths of the gospel. They've become pernicious in their reasoning. They have beguiled other people.

They are living godless lives. These are people who are, verse 2, lovers of money instead of, verse 4, lovers of God. Now, over against that, you've got Timothy.

You, therefore, Timothy. As for you, verse 14, here is the contrast. You see, there's always a contrast to be drawn between the man, the woman, who is humbly endeavoring to follow the truth as it is in Jesus and those who are using religion for their own ends, those who have cloaked themselves with a blanket of hypocrisy.

So, here is this contrast. These people, they go from bad to worse. Verse 13, while evil men and imposters will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived, but you, continuing what you've learned.

And you've got the picture. You see, he's a timid man. And we identify with him, don't we? I mean, if it's a question of Paul or Timothy, and what category do you fit, then the majority of us would say Timothy.

We are timid. The things that we've done that were wrong, some of us find it hard to look in a mirror in the morning, a bundle of contradictions. Tell me that God can use you? No.

I can believe that other people, but me, that God can use me? He could have me as a leader. He could have me to communicate His gospel, to do this, to do that. No, no, no, no, no.

Yes, He can. He can bring you from the timerity. He can bring you from a weak faith to a strong faith, to an even stronger faith.

He can make something out of you. And even when you let Him down, He takes you back, so that you can say, Rejoice not, O mine enemy, when I fall, I shall arise. When I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto me.

Don't trade your failure as being the reason why this message doesn't apply to you. If you're a failure, then the message applies. You qualify.

Here is Timothy. And Timothy is spoken to by the apostle. The apostle makes a clean statement to him.

He doesn't deceive him. There are stresses, Timothy. And there are various strictures, which I want to bring to your attention.

You are to be different from these people from the 2nd to the 5th verse. You are to be an example, like I have tried to be an example, Timothy. And this is what Paul unblushingly tells us in the 10th verse, doesn't it? You know about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings, what kind of things happen to me.

The apostle is saying, Timothy, you are a determined follower of myself. That's what the word unpacked from the original, which is translated with the expression, know all about my teaching, really means. Here is Timothy, and he wants to stay close to Paul.

And Paul does not in any way dissuade Timothy from so doing. Such is the spirituality of Paul that he can write to the Philippians and the Thessalonians and say, be ye followers of me as I am of him. That's a goal that I would love to achieve, but have not.

But Paul has, and so he says to Timothy, be followers of me, be a follower of me. Here is the example. You know, you know what I went through, Timothy.

You know what happened at Antioch. In fact, Timothy, two cities later on, when I got there, that's where we met. And you know that they stoned me at Antioch.

I was left for dead. I limped into Iconium and then on to Lystra. Timothy, you be like me.

Timothy, don't be like them. Timothy, as I had difficulty in terms of my Christian faith, you will, everyone who wants to live a godly life, Timothy verse 12, in Christ Jesus, will be persecuted. If they rejected the Christ of the cross, the Christ of the cross, they will reject Christians who follow that Christ, because the blood of the cross trickles down and is applied to your life and to my life.

If he was abused and misunderstood, the predictions are that you will be misunderstood and possibly abused. But as far as Paul is concerned, it's worth it all. Oh, that will be glory for me when by his grace I shall look on his face.

That will be glory, glory for me. I sometimes think that when the Apostle Paul had his first vision of Jesus, that vision never left him. You know, the Christ on the Damascus road.

Here is Paul hovering between life and death, clinging to some driftwood, because several times he was shipwrecked. How did he continue? How did he get the energy to go on? I think the answer is he had such an understanding of Jesus and the glory that was beyond, that the present life with all its restrictions and problems were not that important. Now, don't misunderstand me.

I'd be the last person in this congregation to minimize physical affliction. I've seen too much sickness, been at too many bedsides. But if you can just get beyond the concept of physical pain and suffering and peer through a glass, even nonetheless failing to focus properly, but you can get some patchy idea of what lies beyond, then you can cope with the restrictions of this present time, the glory that is still in store.

And this is what Paul knows, and this is what inspires him as he writes to Timothy. Yes, yes, you will know persecution, so have I. But nonetheless, Timothy, it's going to be worth it all. And so he moves on to the point of his assurance.

What is it that Timothy needs more than anything else? What is it that you need to know more than anything else? And so he makes reference to the Scriptures that he proclaims. Timothy, what is the basis of our assurance? Well, he'll tell it from the 15th through to the 17th verses. The basis of our assurance, the thing that you can fall back on, is not your knowledge of me, not your friendship with me, but those Scriptures, the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation.

Those Scriptures that your mom and your grandmother unpacked in the first part of the Bible while you were just an infant. Timothy, don't you realize that your faith, my faith, is based on those holy Scriptures? What are the Scriptures? I want to say that in one sense there is no more important a question that you can ask than that one. What is this book? What is this Bible? Why in the center of this lovely church building do you have a pulpit so high? And the answer is this, not because of man who comes into the pulpit, but the pulpit contains the Bible, and the Bible is reckoned to be in this church the Word of God.

Truth unchanged, unchanging, all Scripture is God-breathed. What does Scripture do? Well, it makes you wise. Wise for what? For salvation.

How? Through faith in Christ Jesus. The Old Testament foretells Him. It works out the implications of His coming, and in the Gospels there is delineated the life of Jesus, and then the epistles that follow, they evaluate it, and they tell you the glory of the achievements of Jesus Christ.

All this has been recorded for your benefit, Timothy. All Scripture is God-breathed. Its origin, God breathes it out.

The Holy Spirit comes upon men in Old Testament times and men in New Testament times, preserving their individuality, but as a result of what they write, Scripture is given to the church. Impossible? Well, yes, at the human level it is, but speaking of the divine level, no more impossible than for a woman to bear a child and for this child to be kept absolutely sinless. I refer to the virgin birth.

The Spirit of God comes upon Mary. That which is conceived within her is holy. It remains impeccably holy.

You have a holy man on the cross. So God, in a parallel miracle, works on the minds of men and women, and Holy Scripture is the result. All Scripture is inspired.

When the Apostle Paul makes reference to his own teachings, as he does in 1 Corinthians 1.13, he says that what he had received is as a result of the Spirit of the Lord coming upon him. Later on in Corinthians, he says, what I received I gave to you. The Bible, it does not blush to look upon Paul's epistles as being on the level of Old Testament Scripture.

When the Apostle Peter refers to the letters of Paul, he does on the basis that they are of equal importance. The origin of Scripture, the function of Scripture, what's it for? Well, it's for teaching, it's rebuking, correcting, training in righteousness. You see, it's not just what you know.

It's what Scripture compels you to do. It's not just believing, it's activity. This is the function of Scripture.

What does Paul want? He wants a man of God, as far as Timothy is concerned. Why does he want a man of God? Well, because the church needs men of God. The world needs men of God.

How do you get men of God? And the answer is by responding to the Gospel of Christ. The Word of the Lord and the Spirit of God working on that Word, and that Word being written into their personalities so that it's helping to shape them down the track of their lives. This is what Paul is seeking.

This is what he is praying for, and he says it's fundamental, as far as this production is concerned, for Timothy to look at the Scripture, Scripture which he was taught, as I say, as far as the family was concerned, by his mother and by his grandmother, Scripture that he was taught also by the Apostle himself. And the result of that, the consequence, the last part of verse 17, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. The same is true today.

That's the reason why Scripture is given. This is the abiding message of the Gospel, of the Bible, for every century. Mark this, brothers and sisters.

Let this be engrafted on your mind. Realize this, that in being a Christian there will be stresses, tremendous stresses. And being a Christian brings to you strictures.

There are things that you will not want to engage in. But being a Christian puts you in touch with God's own infallible and holy Word, the Scriptures themselves. And any man, to quote a great Scottish preacher, who has the Scriptures in his hand, and the Spirit of God in his heart, is able to cope with anything that time will bring, and positions him well for eternity.

Do you know the Scriptures? Do you know the Lord? Is the Lord Jesus your Savior? Have you embraced Him? Are you living for Him? Can you say as an older person, or anticipating your older years, anticipating your moment of death, My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. In that final hour there's nothing to cling to, but the infallible Word of Scripture, the promises of God, when they've done with the doctors, and they've done with the surgeons, and they've done with the consultants. I want to tell you this, there's only one person who can help, the one who is slipping into eternity, the man and the woman who have the Scriptures, who can remind people of the truth of God.

There is only one belief that makes sense of life, and sometimes it's cut short. The person in their forties is brought face to face with the jaws of, placed in the jaws of death itself. It's the gospel, the blessed gospel, of the everlasting God, which at least gives you this realization, that whenever the moment of death comes, there is a wondrous life still beyond, with texture and purpose.

You slip away not into nothingness, you slip into the presence of God. How do you know these things? Through the Scriptures. What evidence is there that the Scriptures are true? Well, they are self-confirming in many respects.

But bring the Apostle Paul, bring Richard Wurmbrand, bring Wang Ming Tao, bring the saints of the ancient times, and the middle times, and the modern times, see how they die. And the answer is they die well, because they know the Scriptures. They may have been bruised and battered, they may have been butchered, like the Apostle Paul was on several occasions, but face to face with the last challenge, they're okay.

They know the Scriptures. They've already passed from death into life. They're just here temporally, waiting for the great moment of being with Him.

Aye, says Paul. Be warned, Timothy, of the difficulties, but be informed also. God has given you a greater grace than any difficulties can ever be.

This side of eternity. Let's listen to that delightful song being sung again, then we'll go to how sweet the name of Jesus sounds to Crisper Waters' tune. Lord help us live in the light of your coming Striving for purity, fleeing from sin Catching a glimpse of what we are becoming Being transformed to your likeness within Lord help us see there is hope beyond measure Joy beyond suffering, justice restored Fixing our eyes on the heavenly treasure Jesus our Savior, Redeemer and Lord The trumpet shall sound, look to the skies For Jesus is coming again Then through the clouds His children shall rise To share in His glorious reign Lord fill our hearts with a real expectation Heirs of the promise our destiny seals Praising our Savior with glad adoration When in your glory you shall be revealed The trumpet shall sound, look to the skies For Jesus is coming again Then through the clouds His children shall rise To share in His glorious reign The trumpet shall sound, look to the skies For Jesus is coming again Then through the clouds His children shall rise To share in His glorious reign The trumpet shall sound, look to the skies For Jesus is coming again Then through the clouds His children shall rise To share in His glorious reign 2-5-1 Let's stand All sweeter men In the name of Jesus Christ In unbelief and fear In stupid sorrows He heals his wounds And drives away his fears It makes the wounded spirit whole And combs the troubled breath To the hungry soul And to the rich I build My shield and hide in heaven Jesus, my shepherd, brother, friend My brother, friend and King He gives the effort of my heart And called my voice nearly as a heart Till then I would my love proclaim With every pleading, praying, music I would sing