2 Timothy 3:13-4:4 - Word-shaped Worship

Please turn with me to 2 Timothy 3.

This past summer, we’ve been studying the book of Judges, and how it helps reveal the wickedness of the human heart, and our need for a King to rescue us: King Jesus. In a few weeks, we’ll be kicking off our fall series through Ecclesiastes, which shines light on all the deep questions of the meaning of life and the seeming purposelessness of it all. We’ll see how God provides all the answers to those deep and resonant questions through Jesus Christ.

But for the next four weeks, we’re taking a look at four passages that form the core of our ministry here at Stonebrook. We’re calling it, somewhat playfully, is “What, in the world, are we doing?” We’ll be looking at what we are doing in the world, and why.

And to start that off, we’re going to take a look at 2nd Timothy. A letter written by the Apostle Paul to his protégé Timothy. In Paul’s first letter, Timothy was probably in his early twenties. By this second letter, he’s likely in his late 30s or early 40s—a pastor in the thick of ministry, no longer a youngster.

This is a letter that shows Paul passing the torch of ministry to Timothy. It is marking a shift from the age of the apostles to the sub-apostolic age of the church and its pastors. The church is growing up, and along with it, so are its leaders. This letter has meant a lot to me especially over the past five years.

Today, our passage focuses on Paul’s emphasis in ministry: proclaiming God’s Word. We’re going to see Paul urge Timothy to never give up on proclaiming God’s Word, even in the face of opposition, because of what it is: The Word of Life. God uses the Scriptures, Paul says, to create life, and to sustain life. It is the proclamation of the Scriptures that God uses to accomplish His mission, and so Timothy is to never give up on proclaiming it.

It is this exhortation, among the many others like it in the New Testament, that shapes the emphasis of our ministry here at Stonebrook.

Let’s read.

To set up today’s passage, this whole letter is Paul charging Timothy to carry out the ministry God has given him, warning him that he will face opposition for us, and encouraging him to stay strong in the midst of it.

2 Timothy 3:13-15a (CSB)
13 Evil people and impostors will become worse, deceiving and being deceived. 14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed. You know those who taught you, 15 and you know that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures…

These first few verses set up the context into which Paul is about to exhort Timothy to stay strong in the proclamation of the scriptures. And an important note is that the Scriptures Paul is primarily referring to here is the Old Testament. Which is what makes the next statement so noteworthy.

The Word Creates Life

2 Timothy 3:15b (CSB)
…the sacred Scriptures which are able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

It is noteworthy that Paul teaches that even the Old Testament is useful in the teaching and training of the church, and that they are useful in “making one wise for salvation.” This is the case because, as Jesus taught, all the Old Testament is about Jesus! When we, as a church, study the whole scriptures, including the Old Testament, with the understanding that they are pointing at Jesus, all the scriptures build the believer up in the faith, starting with the creation of new spiritual life, as unbelievers hear God’s Word, come to believe it, and so begin the life-long-process of salvation.

The Word of God in the Scriptures creates new life as it is proclaimed, and it sustains that new life as it grows.

The Word Sustains Life

2 Timothy 3:16-17 (CSB)
16 All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

That word “inspired”, theopneustos in the Greek, it shares roots with our word “nostrils”, it means “breathed-out”, some of your translations might even say that. It's the image of God speaking, God breathing out His wisdom and life to us. In Genesis 2:7, it says

Genesis 2:7 (CSB)
7 Then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.

Sometimes that breath feels like CPR—reviving us when we’ve lost strength. Sometimes it’s like the air we breathe normally, quietly sustaining us as we walk through our days. Other times, we need to cling to it for dear life when it is hard to breathe. I think of our dear brother Dean, who passed away suddenly on Friday night. Not all of you had the chance to know him. Still, you might remember him sitting in the second or third row, singing as loud as he could, and offering a hearty “Amen!” here and there, in the past few years, he needed a special machine, breathing into his nostrils, to help him in his struggle to get enough oxygen.

God’s word is that air supply. Like with Adam when he was still a pile of dust, breathing life into our nostrils.

As we read and proclaim God’s Word in the Scriptures, we find ourselves, verse 16 says, being confronted: sometimes we are rebuked, sometimes we are corrected, always we are trained by God’s word so that we are fully equipped.

Do you want to be equipped to respond well to every circumstance you’ll find yourself in in life? Immerse yourself in the Scripture.

The Word is The Word of Life

The Word creates life, and the Word sustains life, because it is the Word of life. From the very beginning, God’s voice brought creation into being (Genesis 1), breathed life into Adam’s lungs (Genesis 2:7), and sustained His people not only with manna but also His commands in the wilderness—“man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (Deut 8:3). The psalmist pleads, “Give me life according to your word” (Psalm 119:25), and Proverbs says His words are “life to those who find them” (Prov 4:22). Isaiah invites us to listen so “your soul may live” (Isa 55:3). In Ezekiel, dry bones live again by the Word of the Lord (Ezek 37).

Then Christ comes—the Word made flesh (John 1:14), declaring, “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). The apostles proclaim this same message as “the word of life” (1 John 1:1; Phil 2:16). From beginning to end, the Bible, the Scriptures, aren’t just ink and page—they are the very breath, light, food, and power of God!

Proclaim the Word of Life

Because it is the Word of God in the Scripture that creates and sustains life, as the Apostle Peter put it, “giving us everything required for life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3), Paul tells his protégé Timothy to Preach it! Proclaim it!And the charge couldn’t be more weighty:

2 Timothy 4:1-2 (CSB)
1 I solemnly charge you before God and Christ Jesus, who is going to judge the living and the dead, and because of his appearing and his kingdom: 2 Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and teaching.

In my all-time favorite sermon, Charlie Dates said: “There are only two times Paul tells Timothy to preach the Word.” In season, and out of season. When you feel like it, and when you don’t. When the timing feels perfect, and when it doesn’t. When people want to hear what you have to say, and when people don’t want to hear what you have to say.

It is absolutely crucial to preach the Word on those two occasions, because of the reality of the present spiritual battle.

Many Reject the Word of Life

2 Timothy 4:3-4 (CSB)
3 For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, will multiply teachers for themselves because they have an itch to hear what they want to hear. 4 They will turn away from hearing the truth and will turn aside to myths.

When Paul says “for the time will come…” he is not referring to some far-off end-times future. Every preacher of God’s Word recognizes the irony in this statement. “There’s coming a time when people won’t want to listen.” Timothy did not receive that word with a quizzical “hmm, I wonder when that will be? I better be on the lookout.” But I’m certain (and yes, this is a little speculation) that he received it as a knowing wink from his preaching mentor. “Yeah, that time is the next Lord’s day when I’m proclaiming your letter to the church,” or “Yeah, that time is tomorrow when I go to the marketplace of Ephesus to preach the futility of worshiping carved images of Artemis and to turn instead to the living Most High Creator God of Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham…”

We are all, every one of us, so prone to reject sound doctrine, healthy doctrine, healthy teaching. We don’t like being corrected, rebuked, reproved. We’d rather listen to people who reinforce our biases, not realizing that a little bit of error can turn into a full-blown spiritual infection if left unexamined. We must constantly be holding our ideas up to the Word of God for inspection and correction.

Christ is The Word of Life

One of the more subtle ways I’ve seen and heard people turn aside from the Scriptures into myths is to try to separate Jesus from His Scriptures. You see, this idea of the Scriptures being The Word of Life is not something Paul invented. It is something that he saw in Jesus.

Jesus, in his earthly mission, was a man of the scriptures. One who preached The Word. He was a faithful expositor, opening the book in the synagogue, reading it to the gathered congregation, and explaining its meaning. The only difference is that He got to say “This is about me.” And we say “This is about Jesus.”

When we center our worship in the Word of Life, we are following Jesus’s example. We are centering our worship on Jesus himself. When we preach the Word, we are echoing His voice. When we hear the Scriptures read aloud, we are hearing Him speak.

The Word of Life Shapes Our Ministry

And this is why everything we do on Sunday morning, and throughout the week in our small groups, bible studies, demographic groups like kids ministry, Campus Fellowship, our International Ministry, Women’s Ministry, Men’s Ministry is to be centered around the Scriptures; reading them, discussing them, teaching them, singing them, learning to integrate them into our whole life.

Expository Worship

And this is why we say that the core of our strategy is Expository Worship. That everything we do in our ministry is aimed at exposing the content of the Scripture so that we can be shaped by it. Exposition means “to expose” or “to draw out”—not to impose our own ideas. Our job is to accurately let the text speak, not bend it to the message we wish it had.

Now let me hasten to add that we believe that good churches come in all shapes and sizes, with different emphases and approaches. There are many ways that the word can be effectively proclaimed. As long as the Word is proclaimed accurately, Christ will be able to be seen, and people will be able to be transformed by His amazing grace! We recognize that we are making stylistic and preferential choices, even cultural choices about what preaching looks like. We are making them based on our understanding of the grace and gifts that God has asked us to steward here.

For Every Christian

Now, even though this charge was given specifically to Timothy—a pastor, a preacher, a leader in the early church, and while not all of us hold that same office, all of us hold the same treasure: the Word of God.

You may not be called to preach in the pulpit, but, Christian, you are called to hold fast to the Word, to speak it with your life, to teach it to your children, to counsel your friends, to encourage your Community Group, to endure trials, to proclaim Christ in your daily decisions.

In other words, the Word that equipped Timothy for every good work is the same Word that equips you. God didn’t breathe this Book out just for pastors. He breathed it out for His people. For you.

Our Expository Strategy

At Stonebrook, we believe that word-shaped worship, expository worship on Sunday is not the end of the Christian life—it’s the hub of it. It fuels everything else we do.

When we gather around the Word in prayer, music, scripture reading, preaching, and communion, and baptism, we are being formed together as God’s people. And that formation continues throughout the week through personal spiritual disciplines: Bible reading, prayer, solitude, meditation on God’s word, serving in the church and in the community in Jesus’s name, and more.

We invite you to join us not just on Sunday, but in pursuing these rhythms of grace that deepen faith and help us walk with Jesus daily.

The starting point and hub of our strategy to carry out our mission from Jesus (Matthew 28:18-20) to make disciples of all nations, is here:

• “Christ-centered, expository worship and spiritual disciplines deepen our faith.” In the coming weeks we’ll examine the other three core strategies:
• “Biblical community and discipleship sustain our spiritual health”because the Word forms not just individuals, but a family of families who care for one another.
• “Generosity and service expand our reach” — because Word-shaped hearts overflow with sacrificial love for our neighbors and the lost.
• “Hospitality makes room” because Word-shaped people love to welcome the stranger, inviting them into the family, just as Christ welcomed us.

Christ is the Word We Preach

All of Scripture—every chapter, every genre, every page—is ultimately about Jesus Christ. He is the true subject of the Bible, and the climax of its message. When we say we preach the Word, we are saying that we proclaim the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and return of Jesus. We preach that He lived a sinless life in perfect obedience to the Father, that He died on the cross for our sins as a substitutionary sacrifice, that He rose again in victory over death, and that He now reigns as King, interceding for us and calling us into His Kingdom.

When Paul says we are to preach the Word. He means we are to preach Christ, not a way of life. Not a set of moral aspirations. Not charity or service or even love for one another as stand-alone ideals. Because while those things are good—and even commanded—they must flow from hearts and minds that are fixed on Jesus, or they are useless in the end.

It is Jesus who shows us what a truly moral life looks like, in action. If we aim at the morality, we miss Jesus and lose both. But if we aim at Jesus, we gain both.

It is Jesus who shows us what true love looks like. If we aim at the love, we miss Jesus and lose both. But if we aim at Jesus, we gain both.

We are to preach Christ.If we preach anything else, even good things, we risk distorting them or turning them into ends themselves. But when we preach the Word to behold Christ, we are changed into His likeness, equipped for every good work.

The Word of God is living and active. It is not a relic or a rulebook. It is the voice of the living Christ, speaking by the Spirit, to His people. The Bible is not a self-help manual. It’s not a set of tips for personal growth, a religious to-do list, or a guide for how to live a “good Christian life.” It’s not even primarily a handbook for moral living.

If we treat the Scriptures as a pathway to self-improvement or moralism, we will miss the point—we will miss Christ. The Bible is the revelation of God’s redemptive plan. It confronts us with our sin, exposes our inability to save or fix ourselves, and then points us to Jesus. It is through the Scriptures that we meet the living Christ, and it is by His Spirit and grace that we are transformed.

The Bible doesn’t call us to perform; it calls us to behold Christ, proclaim Christ, follow Christ, and as we do, we find that we are changed, not by our great effort and devotion, but by his grace and power. Yes, effort will be required of you. It's just that it's not the effective agent. Christ is.

Preach the Word. Preach Christ.