A Trustworthy Saying

I invite you to turn with me to the Bible, to 2 Timothy 2:1:

“You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you[’ve] heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also. Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. It[’s] the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops. Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.

“Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel, for which I am suffering, bound with chains as a criminal. But the word of God is not bound! Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. The saying is trustworthy, for: ‘If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful’—for he cannot deny himself.”

Amen.

The verses to which I would like to draw our attention this morning are verses 11, 12, and 13 of the portion that we read from 2 Timothy chapter 2.

As we turn to this, there is something that I find reassuring, and I hope you do too, in the essential ordinariness of just picking up from where we left off last time. I suppose there’s no value in just pointing out what is so obvious. But I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that the reason we do what we do as we work our way through books of the Bible is because of a conviction that has really underpinned itself, driven itself, into the heart of where we are here at Parkside Church. And it may be that you’re a visitor today and you wonder, really, about some of these things. The basic conviction is simply this: that God speaks through his Word. That God speaks through his Word. That the Word of God actually does the work of God through the Spirit of God in the people of God, so that that immediately moves the emphasis away from any notion of “Well, let’s see what Begg or anybody else has to say about this passage.” Who really cares about my views or my perspective? It’s not my task simply to introduce you to portions of the Bible that you have perhaps never read or never understood. It’s part, as a responsibility as a teacher, to make sure we do understand what it says, but far more than that, not simply to grow in an understanding of it but rather to be changed by it, and to be changed by it as we encounter God in a life-shaping way.

During the week some people were asking me, “Well, when you go back to Parkside, what will you do on Sunday?” And I said, “Well, I’ll do what I did when I was there the other Sunday.” “And what is that?” “Well, we were doing 2 Timothy, and we finished at verse 10, so we’ll start at verse 11.” They weren’t really familiar with that kind of approach to teaching the Bible, and so they were a little bemused, and they said, “Well, don’t you have the pressure of trying to think something up and come up with something really good?” I said, “No, mercifully I don’t, because I never really can think very much up. But I’m pretty confident that the Bible will do its work, that it will feed those who are in need of instruction, and that it will be used by God to open the eyes of those who don’t understand. And the Spirit of God may even soften a hard heart and bring the person to living faith in Jesus.” All of that and more besides is one’s anticipation in turning to these verses.

Now, those of us who’ve been following along know that this second chapter of 2 Timothy began with Paul reassuring Timothy of the resources that were his. That’s the significance of the phrase “Be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” He’s not calling for Timothy to try and reach into himself and find in himself the resources necessary for the fulfilling of the task but rather that he might rest and be strengthened by the grace of God. The resources then make possible the fulfillment of his responsibility, and particularly to make sure that he “entrust[s] to faithful men” this message that God had given to Paul, Paul had given to Timothy, Timothy was to give to others, and those others were to give to others still—thereby underscoring for us Paul’s great concern that the message of the gospel would be both proclaimed and preserved in the generations to come.

And once again, as a church family, this is uppermost in our thinking and our praying at the moment: that as we see these buildings emerge around us here, that they could never ever be an end in themselves, but hopefully they will tie in, they will be emblematic of, this same conviction.

And Paul has provided three very straightforward pictures in order to illustrate his point. First of all, in verse 3 and 4, the soldier; then, in verse 5, the athlete; and then, in verse 6, the farmer. And there’s going to be three more to follow. Later on in our studies, we will notice that he is reminding us of the place of the workman, of the vessel, and of the servant.

And right in the middle of all of that, he does what I’ve been known to do, and that is he quotes a hymn. At least I take it to be a hymn or a creedal statement. And these three verses that are before us are the last of five statements that you find in the Pastoral Epistles—that is, in 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus—that are introduced by the phrase ho logos pistos, logos being “the Word,” and pistos being that which is trustworthy or reliable. And you can look for them on your own. I’ll tell you that the first of them you can find in 1 Timothy 1:15, and then you can track the rest on your own.

But in each case, Paul is introducing a matter that is of supreme significance, a matter that may actually be quite hard to be believed. It would be patently wrong for us to think that when he says, “This is a matter of great significance,” or “This is a worthy statement or a trustworthy saying,” that somehow or another he was distinguishing it from all the other things that he had been writing and saying. Clearly not. All he’s doing by this means is providing it with emphasis, a sort of “Hey! Make sure you don’t miss this. Get ahold of this. Pay attention to this.”

And here in these verses you have four pithy statements or epigrams. You remember epigram from English, at school: a statement that would be a little incisive, that it may by the use of humor and in some striking way just drive it home. So, for example, Jefferson’s “Small strokes fell great oaks” is an epigram. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” would be an epigram. And classically, Oscar Wilde, in his cynicism: “I can resist everything except temptation.” That’s an epigram. And that’s a good one, actually, because it does just exactly what an epigram sets out to do.

Well, we have four of them. We’ll consider each of them in turn. I think that’s the most straightforward way to go.

Dying and Living with Him

First of all, then, “If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” The “him,” of course, here is the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And we might safely understand this in two ways.

First of all, in terms of the believer’s death to sin through our union with the Lord Jesus Christ. What the Bible teaches is that when we come to Jesus in repentance and faith and we enter into the benefits of all that he has provided for us, the death that he died we have essentially died with him, and the resurrected life which is now his is ours to share, because we are placed into Christ—hence Paul’s statement “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old is gone, the new has come.”[1]

If you are in Christ, you are no longer controlled by the pleasures, profits, and honors of our world.

And if you want to follow this up for yourselves, you can do so by reading, for example, in Romans chapter 6—I’ll just give you a hint of it and you can come back to it—in Romans 6:5: “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” Colossians chapter 2, Paul is doing the same thing, making this very same point of what it means now to be in Christ: “Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him,”[2] and then he goes on to say, “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. [And] this he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”[3]

And so, when Paul says here in Timothy, “If we … died with him, we will also [rise] with him,” he’s making the point that when a person is baptized, as we baptize here people routinely on a monthly basis, and they come down into the water here as the baptismal pool opens up, and they come down into the water, and then they go down under the water, and they come back up in the water, we always say to the people, “What is being portrayed here is not being performed here”—in other words, that this expression of dying and rising again is emblematic of what God has done in the life of this individual: that their gateway into life that is truly life has been through the passageway of death, dying with Christ to sin and rising with Christ to newness of life. And Paul reinforces this in Colossians, making sure that the believer understands that they are now dead to the condemning and the governing power of sin. Dead to the condemning and the governing power of sin. We no longer live under sin’s condemnation—Romans 8:1. We no longer have to be governed by sin. That is no longer the controlling influence in our lives if we are in Christ. It doesn’t mean that we’re free from sin; we’re clearly not. But we are not slaves to sin any longer, because we died with him, and so we will live with him.

That’s the first sense. The second sense is not in relationship to our union with Christ in that moment of conversion but rather our ongoing relationship with Christ, whereby because we’ve been made new, the things that once really appealed to us, the stuff that really drove us, the dimensions of our world that gave us significance, while not obliterated, no longer have the same appeal. If we were very proud of our religious background, we have now come to realize that it’s not our religious background that has brought us into faith with Jesus, but rather, it is by his grace. If we were very proud of our academics or our prowess in the world or whatever it might be, we’ve begun to say with Paul, “The things that I once considered as significant and as giving me identity, I actually don’t regard them in the same way anymore.”[4] They’re not insignificant. You still have been successful. You still are academically strong, but when you lie in your bed at night, you don’t appeal to these things. They no longer drive you as they once did—if you are in Christ—no longer controlled by the pleasures, by the profits, and the honors of our world.

Now, what Paul is saying here is simply an affirmation of what Jesus says when he speaks to his followers. You remember in Matthew 10, Jesus, with a crowd around him, says, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”[5] It’s a strange paradox, isn’t it? This whole notion that we must die in order to live, that death is the entrance into life.

Well, we leave it there. You can consider it further on your own. “If we … died with him, we will … live with him.”

Enduring and Reigning with Him

And then “If we endure, we will also reign with him.”

Now, what Paul does here in just a phrase is reinforce what he has provided for us in the opening paragraph of the second chapter—hence the pictures of the solider and the athlete and the farmer. They drive home for us this notion of endurance. And what Paul makes clear to Timothy and to all who are his readers is that the Christian life is not just a series of hundred-yard sprints engaged in intermittently, but the Christian life is, if you like, a cross-country run that starts and never ends until finally we breast the tape and are welcomed into the kingdom of God. But along the way, it’s “a long obedience in the same direction.”[6]

In many ways, if you think about it in terms of marriage, as many of you’ve been married for a long time—as my wife and I have (almost thirty-nine years now; it hardly seems possible)—but what is the key to making it to year thirty-nine or forty or whatever else it is? Is it a few sunlit evenings? Is it the odd bunch of flowers? Is it a trip to Hawaii? No! No! It’s a long endurance. My wife told me that. And I believe her. And unless we’ve got that clearly in our minds, if we start to think of it in other terms about “This is all about me, and this is how it relates to me, and this is why it matters to me, and this is what I’m getting out of it, and this is what I hope for, and I, I, I, I, I, I, I,” the chances of us making it very far are actually pretty brief. And the same way with Jesus.

That’s why Jesus is so clear when he speaks to his disciples and he tells them, “This isn’t going to be a walk in the park,” he says. “If you want to be my disciple, take up your cross, and then come and follow me.”[7] And when he says “Take up your cross,” he’s not talking about giving up chocolate for Lent. He’s talking about “Come and die to yourself on a daily basis.”

Pilgrim’s Progress, as you know, has become a favorite in my life for all of my life, and as I think about endurance, I’m immediately drawn to it. Somebody gave me a beautiful new copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, which my assistant has filed so successfully for me that I can’t find it. But this is just as good for my purposes. Let me just remind you of three characters who didn’t endure to the end.

On page 13, at the Slough of Despond, Christian and a fellow called Pliable find themselves in this mucky mess together. They’re in the mucky mess as a result of heading in the right direction. It’s not because they were going in the wrong direction. And as they find themselves “wallow[ing] for a time, being grievously bedaubed with dirt” and beginning “to sink in the mire,” Pliable says, “Ah, Neighbor Christian, where are you now?” To which Christian replies, “Truly … I do not know.” To which

Pliable began to be offended, and angrily said to his fellow, Is this the happiness you … told me all this while of? If we have such ill speed at our first setting out, what may we expect [between] this and our Journey’s end? May I get out again with my life, you shall possess the brave country alone for me. And with that he gave a desperate struggle or two, and got out of the mire on that side of the Slough which was next to his own house. [And] so away he went, and Christian saw him no more.[8]

“Oh, is this what this Christian thing is?” he says. “I’m not interested in that at all. Well, I thought everything would be splendid. I thought everything would be rosy. I thought everything would be absolutely fine and tranquil. I’m not up for this.”

You get to page 47, and you’re introduced to two other characters. One is called Timorous, and the other is called Mistrust. Interesting names. And Christian says,

[Sir], what’s the matter you[’ve] run the wrong way. Timorous answered that they were going to the City of Zion, and had got up that difficult place; but … the further we go, the more danger we meet with; wherefore we turned, and are going back again. …

So Mistrust and Timorous ran down the hill, and Christian went on his way.

It’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it? That’s what makes it such a compelling story. “If we endure, we will also reign with him.” If we don’t, we won’t. Pretty straightforward.

The writer of the Hebrews drives it home with great and consummate skill when he says to the people who are on the receiving end of his letter, “Take care, brothers,” or “brothers and sisters,” “lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart.”[9] Okay? So that’s the first thing: “Take care.” You’ve got to get up in the morning and say, “Now, I’ve got to make sure that I don’t have in me an evil, unbelieving heart.” The Christian is not somebody who gets up in the morning and goes, “I’m so thankful that I don’t have to be concerned about having an evil, unbelieving heart.” Because if we know ourselves at all, we know that we actually do have evil, unbelieving hearts. We’re tempted to doubt the truth of God’s Word. We have a propensity towards that which pleases ourselves. We are drawn to that which is offending against his law and so on. So, he says, “You better see to it, make sure that you take care of this, so that you don’t fall away from the living God.” All right? So, he’s not saying, “There’s no possibility of you falling away from the living God.” He says, “You better make sure that you don’t fall away from the living God.”

And then he says, “And furthermore, you better exhort one another every day, as long as it’s called ‘today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin”[10]—so that we have a relationship and a responsibility to one another to watch out for one another: husbands to wives, parents to children, brothers and sisters with one another, brothers and sisters within the framework of the church.

You see, we don’t simply come together in a morning like this and in a service like this simply to sing and to listen to the Bible. We actually come together in order to exhort and to encourage one another. We may do so by our songs. We may do so by our response to the Word. But even in having a cup of coffee together and asking about one another’s well-being, we may be surprised at the inroads that we have to each other’s lives in simply saying, “How’s it going?” And someone says, “Well, not so good.” So then we say, “Well, let’s make sure, the two of us together, that we’re not hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Because, he says—verse 14—“we have come to share in Christ.” “We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence … to the end.” All right? So he’s not saying that we keep ourselves by our hanging on by our fingernails. We are kept grounded in the work of Christ, having died with him. But the mechanism whereby that means of grace flows to us and through us is just exactly as has been said: “We have come to share in Christ, if…” “If…”

Denying and Being Denied by Him

“If we … died, we will … live.” “If we endure, we will … reign.” Thirdly, “If we deny him, he will also deny us.”

Again, Paul is simply reaffirming what we find in the Gospels in the record of the Lord Jesus himself. Jesus, who was a compassionate and kind and loving Shepherd, the most loving man and clearest of teachers who ever lived, when he addressed his disciples in Matthew chapter 10—and you needn’t turn to it, but I’m reading or referring to the section that begins with verse 26—three times he says to his disciples, “I don’t want you to have fear. I don’t want you to be afraid of those who come to persecute you.” That’s number one. Secondly, “I don’t want you to be afraid of those who can kill the body. That’s not as significant as the one who can destroy both the soul and the body in hell.”[11] And thirdly, “I don’t want you to be afraid of all the things that surround you and constrain you and constrict you, because I want you to know that you’re of more value than many sparrows.”[12]

Then, having said that—“Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid”—he says, “[Now listen:] everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.”[13] Do you get what he’s saying there? He says, “You might be tempted to think that the real issue of your life would be if someone were to take your physical life from you.” He said, “There’s a far greater and more dramatic prospect than that, and that is of dying not only physically but dying spiritually and eternally and being cast down into hell.” And so, in light of that, he says, “Make sure you get this: You acknowledge me, I will acknowledge you before my Father. You deny me, I will deny you before my Father.”

It’s solemn, isn’t it? Calvin says, “This doctrine has more need of being meditated [up]on than of being explained; for the words of Christ are perfectly clear.”[14] And I think they are.

When We’re Faithless, He’s Faithful

“If we [die], we … live.” “If we endure, we … reign.” “If we deny him, he … will deny us.” And fourthly and finally, “If we[’re] faithless, he remains faithful.”

Now, I take it that the way in which these epigrams come to us is in two twos, and that the first two are parallel, and I take it, therefore, that the second two are parallel—in other words, that they’re not saying two separate things. “If we’ve died, we will live. If we endure, we will reign.” They tie in with each other. And therefore, I believe that the second two are saying the same thing: “If we deny him, he will deny us. If we are faithless, he remains faithful.” You, of course, are immediately saying, “Well, how can that possibly be? Surely what we’re having here at the end is just a little bit of encouragement.” And that, of course, is the way in which it is understood by many. You’re sensible people. You have to decide for yourself how you think this plays out.

It’s pretty obvious that God is a faithful God. We’ve been singing about that this morning. We can be confident, as James tells us, that he doesn’t shift and change like shifting shadows.[15] And so it may be that what Paul is doing is distinguishing between the denial of apostasy—which is to deny him, to deny that his blood is a sacrificial offering for sin, to deny that he is the Son of God, to deny that he is the person he claimed to be, to deny him in every aspect, which would be apostasy—and to be faithless in the way that all of us are inevitably faithless. So, if that is accurate, then we derive the encouragement from the fact that although we have not apostatized, although we are actually faithless, we can be encouraged by the fact that God is faithful. Okay?

Now, that would be true. My question is, is that what he’s actually saying here? And I don’t think so. Because that would be to draw the sting out of it. It takes something away from the “deny,” the “deny,” and then goes, “Yeah, but don’t really worry about it”—instead of it being parallel: “If we die, we live. If we endure, we reign. If we deny, he denies. If we’re faithless, he remains faithful.” Faithful to what? Faithful to not only his promises but also his warnings—to the warning that has just preceded it: “If you deny me, I’ll deny you.” He has to be true to himself. God’s faithfulness explains not only his threats but also his promises.

Usually, when you’re with youth groups, they try and stump you with all kinds of difficult questions, and I admire our youth guys for being able to navigate their way through. But it’s not unusual for some bright spark to ask you on one evening, “Is there anything God cannot do?” Well, is there? Yes, of course there is. He cannot act contrary to himself. He cannot act contrary to himself. He can’t be faithless. Therefore, he can’t say one thing and mean another. He’s not like us. Numbers says that, Numbers 23: “God is not a man like us that he would lie or like a mere mortal that he would change his mind.”[16] God doesn’t do that.

God is faithful to not only his promises but also his warnings.

And so what is underscored here, I think, is that here, in this final statement, you have the truth which makes sure the condemnation of the unbeliever and the salvation of the believer. It is because God is faithful that sin must be punished. It is ’cause God is faithful that he has punished sin in the person of his Son, thereby bringing forward into time the judgment of the last day so that those who die with him may live now with him, live then with him; so that we may then endure this Christian experience—some delights and joys and often challenges and difficulties—in order that one day we will reign with him. However, if we turn on our back on him, if we deny him, there is no possibility that he will stand before his Father and say anything other than “I never knew these people.”

That’s the staggering thing about the parables of Jesus. “Depart from me. I never knew who you were.”[17] It’s dreadful, isn’t it? It’s strikingly, chillingly dreadful. And it runs absolutely counter to the increasingly prevailing notion in our culture that if there is a God and if he is a good God, he’s not going to do any of that stuff, because he just won’t. So we have a God in our own making who’s like a benevolent grandfather, who refuses to engage in any of the follow-through to the warnings that he’s given to his grandchildren. But God is not like that.

Someone asked me, I think it was just yesterday, they said, “Did you see the final of Wimbledon, the men’s final between Djokovic and Federer?” And I said, “Yes, I did.” And what a collapse by Federer right at the very end! He just didn’t seem to be himself. Certainly not the self of the first four and nine-tenths of the game. We often say that of somebody, don’t we? “I saw her the other day at the mall. Somehow or another, she didn’t seem to be herself. She was out of character from what I know normally of her.” You can’t say that about God. God is always himself. God is always himself. Therefore, his promises may be trusted, and his warnings may be responded to.

And it is this same God who has stepped over the boundary—that invisible boundary that exists between himself and ourselves—in the person of his Son the Lord Jesus Christ, calling out, as it were, “You do not need to face this judgment. I have sent my Son in order that he might die in your place. If you will die with him, you will live with him. If you will endure, you will reign with him.”

There are four ifs here in these three verses: “If … if … if … if ….” Makes you think of Rudyard Kipling, doesn’t it—or maybe? Made me think this week, as I was studying, of a sermon I heard many years ago by an elderly man. And with great aplomb he announced his text, and he said, “My text this evening is a very large door swinging on a very small hinge.” Well, I was excited. I didn’t know what that meant, but it certainly got my attention. And the hinge was “If,” and the door was “we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”[18] And he said, “Here is this great door of forgiveness that opens: ‘If… If…’” These ifs need to be paid attention to. If we die, dying to our sin, to ourself, to our secrecy, we will live.

That’s why the Bible always is essentially bringing us to a crossroads, always bringing us to a decision time. I wonder if you have decided these issues for yourself. Would you be able to say today, “Yes, I do remember. Somebody had been reading Basic Christianity with me. I remember I was a rebellious kind of character, and they said, ‘Why don’t we read Basic Christianity together?’ And I can remember very clearly the night that it suddenly dawned on me in a way that I’d never understood before, and I went home, and I knelt down by my bed, and (a) I admitted that I was a sinner, and (b) I believed from my heart of hearts that Jesus had died to be the Savior I need, and (c) I came to him like a child would come, asking him to be all that I needed him to be.”

Have you gone through the a-b-c of that? Have you admitted that you are a sinner? Can you point to a day when you believed in your heart of hearts that Jesus is the very Savior that you need? Have you come to him? Come to him? When you get married, you come together. Coming to Christ is very similar. “Do you take this sinner?” says the Father. Jesus says, “I do.” And then he says to you and to me, “And how about you, sinner? Do you take this Savior?” And we say, “I do.” Then if we died with him, we will live. If we endured, we will reign.

Father, thank you that every promise in your Word is reliable. Every warning is equally so. And so we pray that you will bring each of us, as individuals, to the place of confrontation with you, that the wonder of your love to us in Jesus, providing a Savior that we don’t deserve, may win our hearts, may woo them; and for those of us who are following the pathway, that you will help us to make sure that we’ll see to it that we don’t have an evil and an unbelieving heart; that we might exhort and encourage one another so that on that day when we stand before you, we may do so unashamed. O Lord, it would be ridiculous for us to anticipate reigning with you if we were unprepared to endure with you.

So then, work your work within our lives. As we said at the beginning, may the Word of God do the work of God. For we humbly pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

[1] 2 Corinthians 5:17 (paraphrased).

[2] Colossians 2:6 (ESV).

[3] Colossians 2:13–14 (ESV).

[4] Philippians 3:7 (paraphrased).

[5] Matthew 10:39 (ESV).

[6] Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), 13.

[7] Matthew 16:24 (paraphrased). See also Luke 9:23.

[8] John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).

[9] Hebrews 3:12 (ESV).

[10] Hebrews 3:13 (paraphrased).

[11] Matthew 10:28 (paraphrased).

[12] Matthew 10:31 (paraphrased).

[13] Matthew 10:32–33 (ESV).

[14] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, trans. William Pringle (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1856) 218.

[15] See James 1:17.

[16] Numbers 23:19 (paraphrased).

[17] Matthew 7:23 (paraphrased).

[18] 1 John 1:9 (ESV).