In verse 2 of chapter 1 of 2nd Timothy, Paul opens this epistle with these three words, which is pretty much how he opens just about every epistle, with these three words, grace, mercy, and peace. And a lot of times I think when we see these words, we kind of take them for granted, you know. We kind of say, well, we all know what that means. But you don't understand sometimes that we need to be reminded of the scope and the depth of these three words as it pertains to our salvation. It's not just a head, you know, like dear so-and-so. I wish you well. I mean, those are all fine things now. But I mean, it's more than that. This is an expression of truth. These are expressions of truth and salvation and fellowship. The grace of God, the mercy of God, and the peace of God. And I want to go into that just a little bit, but I wanted to focus on that as we open up this letter.

This is Paul's second letter. to Timothy. We just finished his first letter. He wrote this one from prison in Rome. This is called one of the prison epistles. And one of the main things that he wants to encourage Timothy and for Timothy to encourage the people at Ephesus, which was where Timothy was in the church at Ephesus, was that even though Paul was in prison and he was there by the providence of God. He called himself God's prisoner. He didn't say he was Caesar's prisoner or the Pharisee's prisoner. He said, I'm God's prisoner. I'm where God put me. And I know, you all know, I know too, that that's hard to do sometimes. Our first reaction to bad things like it is, God, why did you put me here? You know? instead of recognize that well God put me here for a reason and he's going to be glorified in the lives of his people well he's actually he's going to be glorified in the lives of his enemies too God's going to be glorified and for his people sinners saved by grace who know Christ who are disciples of Christ made so by the grace mercy and mercy of God who are at peace with God through Christ It's gonna be for our good.

Now we may not see it at the moment because we're shortsighted. We're hindered because of sin and the contamination of it. But you know a lot of times in my life I can look back and I can see things that I thought were so bad and I see now that they were so good. But I didn't see it till afterward. It's kind of like in Hebrews 12 when he talks about chastisement. That when you're going through that chastisement, it's not a pleasant thing. You don't have to pretend. But it's only afterward that it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness. And what I believe that means, that peaceable fruit of righteousness, is you don't come out on the other side feeling good about how well you did. But you come out on the other side feeling better about your Savior. closer to Christ, cleaning Christ even more. And that's what chastisement is all about anyway.

So look at verse one, he says, Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, now you know an apostle is an office that God had ordained for that time. Now the word apostle just simply means messenger, I know that. But these apostles, and there were 12, we know Judas was a false apostle, I believe Paul ended up being the 12th apostle. and there were 12. 12 is a number that symbolizes the government and completeness of God's church, Christ's church. It sort of tells us that there's not going to be any empty seats in the kingdom of heaven. And just like in the Old Testament, you had 12 patriarchs. In the New Testament, you have 12 apostles. And it was through these men whom God gave that office, the patriarchs and prophets, that God gave them the word to give to the people. The apostles in the New Testament were given the word to give to the church. And that's why the Bible says in Ephesians 2.20, it says, the church today is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone.

Now that doesn't mean that these apostles were the foundation of the church themselves because Christ is the foundation. I always think about it this way, the church is a living body. made up of individuals, sinners saved by grace, who are justified, forgiven of all their sins by the blood of Jesus Christ and justified by His righteousness imputed and regenerated by the Holy Spirit to be given faith and repentance and perseverance looking to Christ. Now that's the church. It's called His bride, His wife, the church, It's called his brethren. There's all kinds of names for his sheep, the sheepfold. That's the church, okay?

Well, church, if you look at it as a building, you remember Christ told Peter when he made that confession about Christ being the head of the church, the foundation upon this rock. That rock wasn't Peter. That rock was Christ, what he spoke of. And he said, upon this rock, I'll build my church like a building. Paul used that analogy in 1 Corinthians chapter one, when he talked about he came in and he sowed the seed, laid the foundation, and other preachers came in and built upon that foundation. Well, what did they sow with? What did they lay the foundation with? What did they build with? The word of God that God gave to the people through the prophets, the patriarchs, the 12 apostles.

So when he said it's built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets in Ephesians 2.20, he's not talking about those men personally, he's talking about the word of God that was given them that they relate to the church. And Paul used it greatly in the Gentile world. He was the apostle to the Gentiles. Now Peter preached to Gentiles too, but he was mainly used in the Jewish realm. God has a people out of every tribe, kindred, tongue, and nation.

So this office of apostle, we don't have apostles today. We don't have men who God speaks to directly and gives them new revelation. That's what I'm saying. And whenever you see these preachers on TV, they say, well, God gave me a word today. And well, if he did give you a word, he gave it to you through this, the Bible. because there is nothing new now. And he revealed some new things to Paul. Paul talked to him and what he was talking about is the bringing in of the Gentiles, things like that. But the message of the gospel is complete. The message of the doctrine of Christ is complete, how God saves sinners. And that came before we had a Bible. And that's why God used this office of apostle.

And he says, look in verse one, he says, Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ. He's not apostle of Paul. He's a follower of Christ. Christ is the king. Christ is the leader. Christ is the omnipotent one. He is the living word of God. The written Word of God that Paul was used by the Spirit to write much of it was of Christ and His person and His finished work. And it was by the will of God. Paul didn't put himself in that office. He didn't wake up one morning and say, well, Judas is gone, I think I'll take his place. No, he didn't wake up one day and say, I think I'll be an apostle today. I'll never forget when we first moved to Albany, there was a guy down there on South Slappy who called himself an apostle. It's wrong, you know? Paul wasn't, I'm not an apostle. I'm just a teacher, I'm a pastor, a preacher of the gospel. And a lot, much of what I preach, I got from the apostle Paul who got it from the Holy Spirit, which means I get it from God. So anything I tell you that God has told me, you can find it in the scripture. And if you can't find it in the scripture, you better get away from me.

And that's why, you know, I'll never forget, I can't remember who it was, there's so many false preachers, I forget their names. But there's one preacher standing up there preaching to people and all of a sudden he's talking about something and all of a sudden he looks up and he said, what? What? What, God? Oh, I'll get to that later. And I thought, you fool. I mean, and people buy that and swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Isaiah said it 700 years before Christ came into the world. Isaiah said it in Isaiah 8 20. To the law and to the testimony, if they speak not according to this word, there's no light in them. And that's what the whole thing about testing the spirits is about. You check it out. You test me by the word of God. And I don't mind being questioned. Now I know you probably run into a lot of preachers who do. But I don't. Because if I can't back it up with scripture, what good am I? For you. For your soul. We're here to feed upon his word.

So it's by the will of God. Paul was made an apostle. And Paul, when he was saved, regenerated, and then eventually made an apostle, remember he wasn't on the Damascus road seeking the Lord. He wasn't on his way to a prayer meeting. You know what he was doing. He was on his way to arrest believers and put them in jail, kill them. What a testimony of how God saves sinners. When I was, I wasn't seeking the Lord, I was trying to disprove the preacher who was preaching the Lord. And that's the way it is. Those who seek God, they find out real quick that God sought them first. And that's what he did, he seeks his sheep.

All right, so he says, by the will of God, according to the promise of life, that's eternal life, spiritual life, not physical. Now we have physical life. One of the best funeral sermons I ever heard, preached by my old pastor, had four points. And he said the four points had to do with life, death, judgment, and eternity. And he said, first point was we have a life to live, and we do. Now for some it's short, for some it's a little longer. But here's what we need to be concerned with about our life. How are we gonna live it? We're gonna live it trying to satisfy ourselves or trying to please God. I'm gonna deal with that in the 11 o'clock message. We're here to please God. And we know we can't please Him of ourselves. How do we please God? By looking to, resting in, and following His Son in whom He's well pleased. Outside of Christ, there is no pleasure from God to us. We must have Christ. That's how we ought to live our lives.

Now that doesn't mean that, as one preacher said, we become so heavenly minded that we're no earthly good. I mean, we've got to do things in this life. You've got to work, you've got to raise your family, take care of them, all that. Many things. But our main cause in life is the glory of God in Christ Jesus. And the second point was we all have a death to die. It's coming. Now, you may live as long as Methuselah. I don't think you will. But even if you did, remember the last three words about Methuselah in Genesis, and he died. Somebody said, I wish I could live 969 years. Do you really? You know, there is a thing called wisdom. But we got a death to die. How are we going to die? The Bible says that precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.

Now death is something we dread naturally. We all do, naturally. And I know that as we get older or even if we get sick, the Lord has a way of weaning us away from this life to the point where we would beg for death. Death is something we do want to avoid naturally. But think about it. The Bible tells us, God's word, God who can never lie, that when I die as a sinner saved by grace, dying in the faith, dying in Christ, that's precious in God's sight. And if you know the Lord, same for you.

So we have a death to die. Then we have a judgment to face. How are we going to face it? You know there's only one thing that matters at judgment as far as the difference between eternal life and eternal damnation. How do I stand with Christ? Do I come before God washed in His blood to the point my sins cannot be charged to me? Do I stand before God clothed in His righteousness that I'm justified? Do I stand before God pleading the merits of His Son? That's the only way to face judgment and be found not guilty, righteous. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. That's what that's to. That's not talking about how well you did in life. I hope you do well in life. But that's not what's gonna be brought up in judgment.

And then, fourthly, we have an eternity to spend. How are we going to spend it? Well, the Bible says this is life eternal. They might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. As sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. That's eternity. Now that's the promise of life which is in Christ Jesus. Christ, who came to this world as the surety, the substitute, the redeemer of His people, who obeyed the law perfectly and the only one who ever did, who went to the cross and died the death that you and I deserve and earned, our sins imputed to Him, that was buried and arose again the third day, and ascended unto the Father, and now lives eternally to make intercession for every one of his people, for whom he died and was buried in a rose. That's life. Life eternal. Somebody said, well, that doesn't have anything to do with the length of it, but the quality of it. Well, eternity's pretty long to me. But it's not just the length of it. It is the quality of it. What a life. What a life.

All right, now look at verse two. To Timothy, my dearly beloved son. And remember, Paul had a special relationship with this young man, Timothy. Timothy learned the gospel from his grandmother and his mother. Lois and Eunice was their name. So they raised him in the gospel. Timothy, I think he was a Greek. He was an uncircumcised Greek. You remember, Paul had Timothy circumcised before he took him out into the Gentile world because he knew the Jews would challenge him. Paul didn't do that because he thought circumcision was necessary for salvation. He did it with Timothy just so the subject wouldn't even be come up. But you remember when, was it Jude or Titus? It was Titus, he was challenged in a place about his circumcision, and Paul refused. He said, I wouldn't give him five minutes. But Timothy was a Greek, but he learned the gospel, and then he was tutored, God put him and Paul together, and Timothy was tutored by Paul. Well, you know what we're doing right now? We're being tutored by Paul. We're being tutored by the Holy Spirit, I know that. But don't you thank God for the apostle Paul? No man can save us. But I sure thank God for the men that he used in my life and the women, my mother, to get me to the gospel and where God saved me by his grace.

And then he uses these three words. He calls Timothy his son because he tutored him. He was like a spiritual father to him. We know God is the only father, ultimately. But Paul was like a spiritual leader Tudor to Timothy. So he says, grace, mercy, and peace. These three words encompass the all of our salvation. We know about grace, for by grace are you saved through faith. That not of yourselves, it's the gift of God. Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, not because of, which God hath before ordained. we should walk in them and this grace is as old as eternity.

Paul's going to later on in the next lesson, he's going to talk about, well just look over give you a little preview, he says verse eight, be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord nor of me his prisoner Be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God, who hath saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, look at the next line, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began. Boy, doesn't that float your boat. That's amazing, that's amazing grace.

And never forget, now, grace is God's gift that we don't deserve and cannot earn. And it involves the whole of salvation. But grace cannot be given without price, without cost. And that's why I mentioned last week how sometimes people use that acrostic of grace, God's riches or God's righteousness at the expense of Christ. or at Christ's expense. And that's what it is. All of God's riches. We talk about all grace here and all glory hereafter. And that's why when I was preaching last week, I wanted to make sure that people understand that just because a person talks about grace or names their church grace, that doesn't mean they preach grace and know grace. We have to be discerners. Sometimes people will talk about grace this way, God helps those who help themselves. That's not grace. That's a leg up. That's not grace. God does his part, now the rest is up to you. That's not grace. God loves everybody, Christ died for everybody, now you make the difference. Is that grace?

Well, look in the Bible and see what it says about us naturally. The natural man. Is he ever of his own will going to choose Christ? No. Grace is salvation in all that's included based upon what Christ did. His righteousness alone. And all the spiritual blessings that we are given, freely given, the Bible says, they come by virtue of the merits of the obedience unto death of Jesus Christ, His righteousness alone. That's why the gospel of grace is the preaching of the righteousness of God and not the righteousness of man.

And then mercy. You know how Christ is sometimes called the mercy seat? The seed of all mercy. There's mainly two words for mercy in the Bible, both Hebrew and Greek. Number one is God's compassion. That word in Romans 9, I'll have mercy on whom I, that's compassion. That involves the love of God, the mercy, the compassion of God. And then the second word for mercy is propitiation. That's the word the publican used when he beat on his breast and said, God, be merciful to me, the sinner. I need a propitiation. I need someone to take my place and satisfy the justice of God for my sins. And that's the mercy of God.

Mercy mainly, as a little bit different from grace, they both end up in the same category. But grace is God giving us freely all that we don't deserve or earn, all blessings. Mercy is God not giving us what we do deserve. Lord have mercy on me. What do we deserve? Well, we deserve death and hell. God doesn't give that to us. He's a merciful God. God delights to show mercy. Isn't that great? But his mercy is in no one, nowhere but in Christ Jesus, the mercy seat. And you remember that mercy seat back in the old covenant in the holiest of all, how the high priest would come in one day a year and sprinkle the blood of the lamb on that mercy seat, that covering that covered the Ark of the Covenant. That was a picture of Christ shedding his blood so that God would justly be merciful to sinners like us.

And what's the result of grace and mercy? Peace. Now obviously the main thrust here is peace with God. Look what he says. To Timothy, my dearly beloved son, grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. At peace with God. The Bible tells us that when we fell in Adam, we fell into a state of sin, spiritual death, depravity, ignorance, unbelief, and enmity. You know that word enmity? Well basically, you could say it this way, we became enemies of God and that's the state we existed in when we first were brought into this world.

Unregenerated, not If we ever become regenerated, born again by the Spirit and brought to faith in Christ, we can't say we were unredeemed because Christ redeemed us. But we were in our minds by wicked works and those wicked works were our efforts to get ourselves in right with God by our own works. But we were enemies in our minds by wicked works. we declared war on God, you could say it that way. We didn't know it, probably didn't know it because the God that we worshiped then, we thought was the true and living God, but he wasn't.

But when God revealed himself in grace and mercy in Christ and showed us that he was reconciled to us already, that's what the book of 2 Corinthians teaches, God was reconciled to us in Christ. How could he not be when he gave us grace in his sovereign mind before the world began? We were vessels of mercy prepared under this state. And what he does, he sends his spirit, brings us under the gospel, the gospel of peace, the gospel of reconciliation, and he gives us spiritual life. a new heart, new life, new mind, to where we are reconciled to him on the basis of the mercy seat, Jesus Christ.

Now, that peace with God works out to peace with one another in the gospel. And I've often said, I said, now that doesn't mean we're gonna agree on every little thing. We're not. But we're gonna agree on the gospel. We're gonna agree on who Christ is and who we are and how he saved sinners. We're gonna agree on the doctrine of Christ. Because if anybody doesn't walk in the doctrine of Christ, they have not God. How peace comes about. Now look at verse three. He says, I thank God whom I serve from my forefathers with pure conscience, Now a pure conscience is a conscience cleansed by the blood of Christ. It's the application of the truth of the blood of Christ given to us by the Spirit through the preaching of the gospel.

The conscience is the seat of government, the seat of judgment in the mind. It's that quality by which we judge what is good and what is evil. By nature, our conscience is defiled. And you're going to hear this again because I'm going to deal with it in 1 John 3. But we need to hear it. The conscience is that our natural conscience is defiled by self-righteousness and ignorance. And so we don't know right from wrong when it comes to God and a right relationship with him. We think by nature that we can do something to either attain or merit God's favor. That's a defiled conscience. And if we derive any pleasure or any assurance from that, that's the defiled conscience.

So the conscience has to be cleansed, it has to be convicted by the Spirit to know that we're sinners and if God ever gave us what we deserve or earned it would be death and hell and we have to be convicted of righteousness that we find in Christ, His blood. So he said, I serve with pure conscience, I serve it looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of my faith. that without ceasing I have remembrance of thee in my prayers night and day." He was a praying man, prayed for Timothy.

Verse four, greatly desiring to see thee being mindful of thy tears that I may be filled with joy. Timothy was in sorrow because Paul was in prison. And verse five, he says, when I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, that is the sincere faith. That's what that means. It doesn't mean perfect. Which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois and thy mother Eunice, and I am persuaded that in thee also. So Paul commends Timothy for the faith and the diligence that he had in following the gospel and preaching the gospel.