Convinced and Continuing

Second Timothy and chapter 3. I’m not going to expound this passage. I’m not actually going to expound any passage. It’s going to be a little bit of a dog’s breakfast this morning. If you ever make your dog breakfast and you put a little bit of everything in from the previous night and from other bits and pieces—it’s going to be a bit like that. I say that so as to safeguard myself from any expectations and also to limit yours as well. But it will be thoroughly biblical; I can guarantee you of that.

Two Timothy 3:1:

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning [but] never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith. But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was that of those two men.

“You, however, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions and sufferings that happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra—which persecutions I endured; yet from them all the Lord rescued me. Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be [competent], equipped for every good work.”

Amen.

A brief prayer together. We use an old Anglican prayer:

Father, what we know not, teach us; what we have not, give us; what we are not, make us. For your Son’s sake we pray. Amen.

At a bar down in Dallas, an old man chimed in,
And I thought he was out of his head,
’Cause being a young man, I just laughed it off
When I heard what the old man had said.

He said, “I wish I was eighteen again,
To go where I’ve never been.
I’m three-quarters home,
From the start to the end,
And I wish I was eighteen again.”[1]

I don’t know why I woke up with that old song by Sonny Throckmorton on my mind this morning, but I did. I think it’s because, in a very similar and yet different way, when I come, as I come this morning, to an opportunity like this, I feel very much like that. This is not the nostalgia of an aging fellow, nor is it simply sentimentalism that is part and parcel of a Scotsman under the cool exterior. It’s neither of those things. It is that when I look out on you this morning, I have, I think, a rightful sense of jealousy—jealous of the opportunity that now falls to you to seize the moment to bring the gospel to this next generation. And if you want to be fit for that task, if you’re serious about taking up the challenge, it is imperative that you, like Timothy—as Paul addresses him here in 2 Timothy 3:14—that you are both convinced and continuing.

And essentially, this morning, you may respond to our study with the recurring thought in your individual mind, “Am I convinced of these things, and am I prepared to continue in them for all of my life?” Your generation is not marked by continuance. You don’t finish your cereal; you leave crumbs at the bottom of it. Boys never shine the back of their shoes. Their beds are often left unmade. And it’s not surprising, then, when the average pastorate lasts for about two and a half years, when the average marriage disintegrates within relatively short order, when the affirmations that are made in the great enthusiasms of a morning like this somehow dissipate with the challenges of time. It is imperative that you’re convinced, because even a casual reading of church history reveals the fact that when Christians, when the church loses confidence in the truth, power, and relevance of the gospel, along with that, it loses any compelling sense of mission.

If we close our Bibles, then the remembered Christ becomes an imagined Christ.

In 1952, the year I was born, James Stewart—a Scottish minister, a Presbyterian—was speaking to the faculty and students at Yale Divinity School. And over a period of five days as he taught there, he warned the faculty of the dangers of what he referred to as a “theologically vague and [a] harmlessly accommodating” Christianity, which he said was “less than useless.”[2] Half a century before him, William Booth, who had founded the Salvation Army, was asked what he thought were going to be the challenges of the church in the next generation, in the next century. In Booth’s day, of course, that was the challenge of the twentieth century. And this is Booth’s reply: “In answering your inquiry, I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Spirit, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.” His words, of course, were prophetic, as both the twentieth and the twenty-first century have now revealed.

Are you convinced about the gospel? Are you absolutely sure that the gospel centers on what God has done for us in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to save us from sin and from the devil and from death? Are you convinced that this message of the cross, which is foolishness to men and women,[3] which is an affront to their pride, is absolutely central to all that we say and do? For no presentation of the gospel is a gospel presentation without the cross being both proclaimed and explained. If we do not pay careful attention to this, then we may fall foul of all kinds of agendas. And if I may say to you this morning: Beware the political agenda of the Old Right; and beware the social, ecological agenda of the New Left; and bow underneath the lordship of Jesus, for under his lordship, we’re not free to believe whatever we like. If we close our Bibles, then the remembered Christ becomes an imagined Christ. And Augustine in his day said, if you believe what you like in the gospel and you reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe but yourself.[4]

[John Newton] writes a sentence or two that is quite chilling in the contemporary context. Listen to what he wrote: “To convert one sinner from the error of his way[s], is an event of greater [significance], than the [liberation] of [an entire] kingdom from temporal evil.”[5] “To convert one sinner.” Who converts sinners? Who softens hard hearts? Who opens blind eyes? Only God. And how has he chosen to do this? Through the gospel of his Son.

So here I am to say to you this morning: This is no time for watery substitutes. This is no time for weak-kneed Christians. This is the moment, and it is a time for us not to be caught on our back foot but to be able to say quite clearly—underneath the authority of the Bible and in a way that is imaginative and creative and engaging to our friends—a number of things.

Christianity Is Historical

First of all: that this story is historical—that the message of the Bible is historical. These things actually happened. These things actually happened.

You say, “Well, you’ve come all this way here to tell us something we know.” That’s exactly right. I discovered a long time ago that my job in life was not to introduce new ideas but to make sure that people didn’t forget the old ideas. These things actually happened. Paul in 1 Corinthians says, “I delivered to you as of first importance … that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, … he was buried, … he was raised … in accordance with the Scriptures.”[6] In other words, what Paul is saying is “The Old Testament Scriptures, as I’ve read them, now so clearly to me,” he says, “point forward to all of the reality that there is in Jesus.” Peter says the same thing: “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of [the] Lord Jesus, [because] we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”[7]

Sometimes, we’re a little too close to this to stand back from it enough to really allow it to grasp us. Peter, who wrote those words—“We didn’t follow myths”—was, along with his colleagues, completely demoralized on Good Friday. They were thoroughly bewildered on Easter Sunday. And yet, within a matter of weeks, they’re on the streets of Jerusalem declaring, “God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are … witnesses of the fact”[8]—not the idea, the concept, the construct, the notion. The fact. “We’re here to tell you that this actually happened.” And Peter and the others were clearly convinced that Jesus was alive. F. F. Bruce says, “If Jesus had not risen from the dead, we should probably never have heard of him.”[9]

Now, this is something of great importance, and I emphasize it for you and encourage you to go to your Bible and think it out. This is why, for example, Luke begins his Gospel in such a historical manner. Classically, at the beginning of chapter 3, it begins,

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias [the] tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of [the Lord] came to John.[10]

Now, some of you are thinking, “That’s great. I’m going to use that in one of my papers for my theology class. I mean, that’s a bunch of filler at the start, isn’t it? What’s all that in there for? That’s just ’cause he’s got to have 2,000 words, and he knows he’s only got about 1,650 on his best day. So he fills it all up: ‘In the year of Tiberius…’” No, no! The word of the Lord came to John not in a vacuum but in a place, in a time, in a moment, at a fixed point in history, when God chose to make it so.

Christianity does not exist for a moment or in any respect apart from the historicity of a risen Christ.

Young people, you need to lay hold of this. You need to ground yourself in this. Peter is not weaving together a flowery tale. He’s not offering some story of an impersonal God with whom you can engage. He is recording what actually happened. And, of course, Peter and Paul, they do the same thing; John does the same; James too. Paul says in his great classic chapter, from which I’ve quoted already, in 15 of Corinthians, that “this Jesus appeared to five hundred people at one and the same time”—and, he adds, “most of whom are still living.”[11] That’s important! You might be able to swing it by if they’re all already dead, but if they’re actually there, they can put up their hand and go, “No, I’m one of the five hundred, and that’s not true”—like if I came here, and I told you that I was personally acquainted with every member of the Beatles, and I knew all of them: “Bill, Reginald, Tom, and Harry—all four of them. I’ve known them a long time.” And now, even though you’re a hundred years behind me, you know enough of history to stand up and say, “No, you don’t know the Beatles at all. We know who they were. Two of them are still alive, although two of them are dead, and that’s not their names.”

That’s the point, he’s saying. Jesus Christ appeared. And we don’t need to go to our Bibles; we can go to secular Roman and Jewish historians, referring to the fact that the followers of Jesus worshipped him as God,[12] called him Messiah, that he was executed in Judea when Pontius Pilate was the governor.[13]

And when you give this consideration—and with this, you want to be talking to your friends—we’re left with no middle ground. Either, in Jesus, God entered into time, lived a perfect life, and died the death that we as sinners deserve, and rose again from the dead on the third day—either that is true, or the New Testament is the record of a lie. It is a monumental fabrication. It is an elaborate hoax. Unlike other religions—for example, Buddhism, which can get along fine without Buddha—Christianity does not exist for a moment or in any respect apart from the historicity of a risen Christ.

Are you convinced? It’s historical. These things actually happened.

Christianity Is Rational

Secondly, it’s rational. It actually makes sense.

Our friends may reject it, but not on account of its irrationality. Everybody starts from presuppositions. We all do. Everyone comes to the Bible with presuppositions. So it’s poor form on the part of Richard Dawkins—who’s gone into abeyance for a while now, I’m glad to see—but it’s poor form on his part, in The God Delusion, to pass over the question of the resurrection of Jesus without giving any consideration to the evidence for it. This is what he says: “Jesus probably existed”—but the idea that he came back to life after being dead is absurd.[14] You know, if you say things like that with that Cambridge accent, it carries a tremendous amount of weight: “Jesus Christ probably existed, but the idea that he came back to life from the dead, quite frankly, is ab-surd.” Well, thank you very much for your analysis. That was very good.

No, we can say this New Testament story of Jesus and the resurrection makes sense of the big picture of life. It answers the big questions. Gauguin—somebody just sent me a Gauguin postcard the other day, from Truth For Life. (Incidentally, if you don’t have the Truth For Life app on your phone, now’s your chance. It’s free, and it’s being used as a tremendous cure for insomnia all across the nation, so feel free. If things are getting you down, tune in to Truth For Life on your app, and fall asleep in moments.) Anyway, they sent me a Gauguin poster because I’d been passing myself off as interested in in Postimpressionist art. What I know about that could be put on a postage stamp; it’s not true. I was simply intrigued by the fact that Gauguin wrote on one of his paintings, which is in the Boston Museum of Fine Art. And in the postcard which I saw, the writing is up on the top left-hand corner as you look at it—the right-hand corner as it appears on the wall. And he wrote three questions up there:

D’où Venons Nous
Que Sommes Nous
Où Allons Nous

“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Christianity has an answer for each of these questions.

The panoramic story of the Bible is the good, the bad, the new, the perfect: that God in the perfection of his wisdom has created a world, set his creatures in that world; they have rebelled against him; the world becomes broken—maritally, societally, structurally, in every way. Into that brokenness, into that badness, comes Christ. “The time is fulfilled,” he says, “the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe … the [good news].”[15] The King has come. He walks on water. He raises the dead. He transforms the demonic. He sits with the woman at the well. He deals with the little cheat up the tree. And when we are brought into a living, personal relationship with Jesus, sin no longer reigns, but it remains. We wrestle on the three fronts: against the world and the flesh and the devil. The good we want to do we don’t do; the bad we don’t want to do we end up doing.[16] Romans 7 is a reality; Romans 8 is an encouragement. Romans 7 is the north side of the house, where it’s kind of chilly. Romans 8 is the south side of the house, where it’s a little warmer. And you live in both of those parts of the building, and you look forward to the day when it will be absolutely perfect.

That’s what we’re able to say to men and women. When they ask us this morning about all those migrants: “What is wrong with the world, where people find U-Haul vans parked with dead and decaying bodies inside them, as people run in search of freedom, as they run in search of hope, as they run in search of security?” Do we really have an economic, structural, political answer to this? And if we do, don’t you think that by this time in the development of the world, these things would have taken such hold that it would be just terrific?

William Booth was as committed to the care of the human body, to the engagement with the miseries of human life, as anyone in his day and age. He left his Methodist background to establish the Salvation Army in order that he might be amongst the women on the street, that he might engage with those who were lying on the steps of the closed churches. But he’s the one who said, “To get a [person] soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a [new pair of trousers], to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labour[s].”[17] “If the inside remains unchanged…” Who can change the heart like Jesus? Who can deal with the illness of our world? Who can deal with the brokenness that exists?

This story is historical; these things actually happened. It’s rational; it really makes sense.

Christianity Is Empirical

And finally, it is empirical, in the sense that men and women can put it to the test. It’s not true because it works; it works because it’s true. And the story of the gospel really answers the cries of the human heart.

You know, I’m not that old, but I am old. I remember when Kurt Cobain and Nirvana broke on the scene at the end of the ’80s and the early ’90s. I know that because of my one child convincing me—trying to convince me—that this was really amazing music. And he never managed to. But I, along with many of you, found deep sadness in the death of Kurt Cobain, and especially when they found the scribbles that he had left behind, and one of which simply read, “I am a stain. I am so ugly. I hate myself. I want to die.”

You see, the question of identity—which is what he’s addressing there—is addressed in Jesus. Because in Jesus, you don’t have to create your identity. It’s not a created identity. It’s a received identity. If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation.[18] And so it actually is an opportunity for us to say when the cry of the human heart is for meaning—when in the drama group here they finally strut the stage, and somebody trots out Shakespeare:

         All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women [are] merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.[19]

Or, you know, we could go on from there. But we won’t.

When these issues are addressed, then Christianity has an answer. It says we were created purposefully for a relationship with God—that Sartre… No wonder he was a gloomy old soul when he got up in the morning and writes a sentence or two like this: “Here we [are], all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and … there is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.”[20] “PS—Have a nice day!” You want to walk around with that on a T-shirt? “There is absolutely no reason for existing.” That’s Woody Allen. He believes that. He’s the poster boy for nihilism in the twenty-first century.

Well, what does Christianity say? Jesus says, “I have come that you might have life, and that you might have it in all of its fullness.”[21] The cry for freedom—freedom from self-pity, freedom from jealousy, freedom from resentment. “If the Son makes you free, you’ll really be free.”[22] The cry for forgiveness, for love, for hope, for God, to be set free from the suffocating distress which a man or a woman feels in being separated from God.

Are you convinced about this stuff? Oh, I know you signed up. You know, I know you have to fill in the form. And so you should! And I know you made testimony of your profession of faith. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking: At your core, at the things you would live for and die for, are you convinced of this? Are you convinced that these things actually happened, that this is historical? That these things really are rational—that you can speak to them with great confidence in our fragmented society and that you can say to people, “Listen, put it to the test. ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good!’”[23] Because not one line of the New Testament was written apart from the conviction that Jesus had defeated death and was alive forever. The symbol of Christianity is not the dead figure of a crucifix, but it is the triumphant Christ with the cross broken beneath his feet. And it is that which compels an individual to give up their small dreams and to take this to the ends of the earth.

Now, whether you stay in the realm of the arts or the sciences and engineering, in science, in mathematics, in nursing, in whatever it might be, don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not suggesting that if you really get ahold of this and believe this, then you’ll end up as crazy as I am, or you’ll end up, you know, with your collar turned all around wrong, or you have to go into some quasi world. Who knows where God wants you to go? You just need to settle this issue.

Do you know the name of Henry Martyn? Some of you who read church history will. He went to Cambridge; he was bright—St. John’s College, Cambridge. He intersected with Charles Simeon, who was also in Cambridge; Emmanuel College was his church, actually. But Henry Martyn was twenty-one when he heard this old minister, Charles Simeon, speaking about the impact of one solitary life in reaching India. He was talking about the life of William Carey. And it struck Martyn. He was only twenty-one years old, and he thought, “Wow!” Then he read the story of David Brainerd and his evangelism with the Native Americans, and he gave up his plan to become a lawyer, he became assistant to Simeon, and then he went, finally, to India, where, within short order, he died at the age of thirty-one.

Not one line of the New Testament was written apart from the conviction that Jesus had defeated death and was alive forever.

And Simeon, who was fifty-four years in the church in Cambridge, had a drawing, a painting, of Henry Martyn that was sent to him from India. Martyn had a portrait of himself sent to his beloved friend Simeon. Simeon placed it, apparently, above his fireplace in his study. So when people came to see Simeon, it was impossible for them to be in his room, but they couldn’t but be struck by this picture of this young fellow up behind the fireplace. And Simeon would show it to them and say, “Do you see that young man? No one looks at me as he does. He never takes his eyes off me. And he seems always to be saying, ‘The years are short. Be serious. Be in earnest. Don’t trifle. Don’t trifle.’” And then Simeon would add, “And I won’t trifle.”[24]

Are you going to trifle? Do you know how quickly you get from where you are to where I am?

Be convinced. Be continuing. Be prepared to allow this to frame your life, to form your convictions, to fashion your plans.

At a school in Ohio, an old man—a Scotsman—chimed in,
And I thought he was out of his head,
Because being a youngster, I didn’t pay heed,
Especially when I learned what he said.

He said, “I wish I was eighteen again,
To go where I’ve never been.

To tell all the people, all these lonely people, that this story is the story: historical, rational, empirical.

Well, may God help us.

Let us pray:

Father, how we thank you that we don’t have to invent some strange philosophical construct in order to have something meaningful to say! But we thank you that, God, you were in Christ reconciling the world to yourself, not counting their sins against them because you were counting them against your Son.[25] Thank you that we find in the Bible the story of the appeasement of the wrath of God by the love of God, secured in the gift of God—even the Lord Jesus Christ.

We pray for ourselves this morning, Lord, whether our lives are short or long, that we might give ourselves in whatever area and arena of life you set us to, to be those who remain convinced of what we have learned, knowing those from whom we have learned it, as we thank you for the impact of loved ones and parents and friends and teachers—even the teachers that are around us here in this institution in this day. May the fact that they have enabled us to be convinced result in our continuing. And thank you for the promise of your Word: that “[being confident] of this, that he who [has begun] a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”[26] So we give ourselves afresh to you, and we commend ourselves into your loving care. In Christ’s name. Amen.

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[1] Sonny Throckmorton, “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again” (1979). Lyrics lightly altered.

[2] James S. Stewart, A Faith to Proclaim (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), 16.

[3] See 1 Corinthians 1:18.

[4] Augustine, Contra Faustum 17.3.

[5] “Messiah Suffering and Wounded for Us,” in The Works of John Newton (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1985), 4:228.

[6] 1 Corinthians 15:3–4 (ESV).

[7] 2 Peter 1:16 (ESV).

[8] Acts 2:32 (NIV 1984).

[9] F. F. Bruce, Jesus: Lord and Savior, The Jesus Library (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986), 118.

[10] Luke 3:1–2 (ESV).

[11] 1 Corinthians 15:6 (paraphrased).

[12] Pliny, Letters 10.96.

[13] Tacitus, Annals 15.44.

[14] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam, 2006), 97.

[15] Mark 1:15 (ESV).

[16] See Romans 7:19.

[17] William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1890), 45.

[18] See 2 Corinthians 5:17.

[19] William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.7.

[20] Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (1964).

[21] John 10:10 (paraphrased).

[22] John 8:36 (paraphrased).

[23] Psalm 34:8 (ESV).

[24] Hugh Evan Hopkins, Charles Simeon of Cambridge (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), 149. Paraphrased.

[25] See 2 Corinthians 5:19.

[26] Philippians 1:6 (ESV).