I want you to take your Bible
and turn with me to 2 Timothy, 2 Timothy chapter 4. And the passage that has been
assigned to me is really what I would regard as the signature
text for expository preaching. If you are aware of what it is
to preach the Word of God, this is a text no doubt with which
you are very familiar. But I think it would serve us
all well just to be reminded again, one more time, of what
is contained in these verses. I want to begin by reading the
passage. I want to set it before your
eyes and your heart, and we will spend our time together walking
through this wonderful text. 2 Timothy chapter 4, beginning
in verse 1. The Apostle Paul writes, I solemnly
charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who
is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and
His kingdom, preach the Word. Be ready in season and out of
season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort, with
great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they
will not endure sound doctrine. But wanting to have their ears
tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance
to their own desires and will turn away their ears from the
truth and will turn aside to myths. But you, be sober in all
things. endure hardship, do the work
of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. The year is 67 A.D. and the Apostle
Paul has come to the end of his life. For 30 years, he has preached
the Word of God, but now there will be no more sermons. He finds
himself imprisoned in Rome. and a hole in the ground, in
the dreaded Mamertine prison. He is contained like a caged
animal. And within weeks, if not days,
his head will be severed at the outskirts of Rome on the ocean
way. These are the last words to come
from the Apostle Paul, arguably the greatest Christian who has
ever lived, arguably the greatest preacher who has ever lived other
than the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. This is his last communication
with the outside world. This is the last chapter of the
last epistle he will ever write. This is no time to mince words. This is no time to address secondary
matters. This is a time to put out what
is primary, not what is peripheral. This is the time to speak to
Timothy regarding what is most important. Last words should
be lasting words. And the main thing is to keep
the main thing the main thing. And what Paul says to Timothy
is the main thing. He has to preach the Word. For
three decades, Paul has been unashamed to preach the Word
of God and it has cost him dearly from the very beginning. He preached
in Damascus and they tried to do away with him. He preached
in Jerusalem and they attempted to put him to death. He preached
in Lystra and they stoned him and dragged him out of town and
left him for dead. And he came back to consciousness
and went back into Lystra and preached again. Everywhere Paul
went, he was unashamed to preach the Word of God. And wherever
he went, it seemed like he created a riot. Whenever he went into
a town, he might as well have just gone straight to jail because that's where he would
end up. As Paul writes these last words,
the baton of gospel preaching is being passed down from one
generation to the next, from a spiritual father to a spiritual
son to Timothy. And also to every young Timothy
who is among us here today and every elder Timothy who is here,
in passing down this baton, nothing must change. The mission remains
the same. The message remains the same.
The method remains the same. It's just the messenger is changing. As Paul has been unashamed to
preach, so now must Timothy be unashamed to preach. And I want
you to know that this gospel baton that was passed down from
Paul to Timothy has now been passed down through the centuries
to you and me. It was passed down from Paul
to Timothy, to Athanasius and Augustine, to Wycliffe and Hus,
to Luther and Calvin, to Ridley and Latimer, to Bunyan and Owen,
to Edwards and Whitfield, to Spurgeon and Ryle, to Lloyd-Jones
and Sproul. And this gospel baton, if you've
been called to preach, has been placed squarely in your hands,
and it has blood, sweat, and tears on this baton. As a great
price has been paid to advance this message, down to this present
hour, and we must not drop this baton. We must own it, we must
embrace it, we must herald the Word of God, and with our dying
breath, pass it on like Paul to the next generation." These
final words come in the form of a charge from Paul to Timothy. These are Timothy's marching
orders for the rest of his life. It is binding upon Timothy's
conscience and upon his life, just as it is you and me. I want us to walk through this
passage yet again, and I want to divide it out into four headings,
and I want you to track with the mind and the passion of Paul
as he passes this down to Timothy. I want you to note first the
seriousness of this charge. That is in verse 1, and this
charge could not be any more serious. It comes with a forceful
and urgent tone. Paul begins by saying, I solemnly
charge you. This verb is drawn from the world
of the military. It is an order. It is a command
from a higher officer to a lower subordinate. And it comes to
Timothy in such a way that it's not an option. It is not a suggestion. It is an authoritative imperative
command. with which Timothy is being charged.
And then to heighten this seriousness, he adds, in the presence of God
and Christ Jesus. Could anything be more gripping
than this? In the presence of God and Christ
Jesus as though this has come down from them through Paul to
Timothy? There is a divine authority about
this. as it comes with apostolic authority,
as though God is watching on, as though Jesus Christ Himself
is watching this mantle of preaching being passed down, as it were,
from Elijah to Elisha, from Paul to Timothy, with the Trinity,
the Godhead, observing this, and then to heighten the seriousness
of this even more Paul then weights it more heavily by saying, who
is to judge the living and the dead? Not only is Jesus Christ
observing this in God the Father, but Jesus Christ will judge the
living and the dead. And this includes Timothy. Whether
Timothy is alive at the time of the return of Christ or whether
he is dead and will appear at the end of the age, it will be
Jesus Christ who will judge the preaching ministry of Timothy. This word, judge, krino, it means
to separate. There will be at the end of the
age a separation in Timothy's ministry. There will be a separation
of the good from the bad, the true from the false, as Timothy
will stand at the divine tribunal. And then to heighten the seriousness
of this even more, Paul continues to add weight to this charge. And he says, and by his appearing
and his kingdom. Certainly, referring to the appearing
of the Lord Jesus Christ who could come at any moment. For
the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with
the trumpet of God and the voice of the archangel, and the dead
in Christ shall rise first, and we who are alive and remain shall
be caught up to meet the Lord in the air. This could happen
at any moment for Timothy. There is no room for procrastination.
that this comes with a sense of urgency and the immediacy
of the moment that Timothy must give full compliance to what
will follow. And after the return, Christ
will establish His kingdom here upon the earth and then usher
in the eternal state. And what Timothy will do for
God and for Christ, it must be done now. It cannot be put off
until later. This verse, verse 1, establishes
the seriousness of this charge, and every preacher who is being
effectively used by God feels this weight upon their shoulders. There is a sense of gravitas
that every preacher must face and feel. that there has been
entrusted to him a stewardship for which he will give an account
to God and to Christ on the last day." James 3 verse 1 says, "'Let
not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing as such
we shall incur a stricter judgment. Unto whom much is given, much
will be required. And for those who have been called
by God into the ministry of preaching the Word of God, there will be
a stricter judgment on the last day, as we will be held accountable
for far more than others. Same standard, but a stricter
accountability, because what God has called us to do affects
so many lives. When the shepherd is struck,
the sheep will be scattered. And how you and I carry out our
task affects untold numbers of people at the highest level of
their soul and their life before God. In 2 Corinthians 5.10, Paul
writes, we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.
The we referring to every believer. And there's a divine necessity
about the language here. We must all appear before the
judgment seat of Christ so that each one may be recompensed,
be paid back for his deeds in the body according to what he
has done, whether good or bad. Understand this, we are saved
by grace, we will be judged by works. And on the last day, as
preachers of the Word of God, we will be judged. Every sermon
will be audited. Every doctrine will be inspected.
Every interpretation will be checked. Every teaching will
be examined. Jesus said in Matthew 12, 36,
but I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they
shall give an account for it in the day of judgment. In an
argument from the lesser to the greater, how much more so will
we give an account to Christ for the words that we speak? In 1 Corinthians 13 verse 12,
Paul writes, if any man built on the foundation with gold,
silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, Each man's," referring
to the minister, each man's work will become evident, for the
day will show it, because it will be revealed with fire, and
the fire will test the quality of each man's work. Not the quantity,
the quality. I would rather have a handful
of gold, silver, and precious stones than a truckload full
of wood, hay, and stubble. And He will test the quality
of our preaching, of our doctrine, of our exhortation at the highest
level. And what this says, men, to each
and every one of us, beginning with myself, we must be God-fearing
men. God-fearing men as we stand in
the Word of God, as we stand upon the Word of God and preach
the Word of God, and we must seek the approbation of God,
not the approval of men. We must seek our amens out of
heaven and not the applause of this earth. So that's number
one, the seriousness of this charge. Second, I want you to
note the substance of this charge. Beginning in verse 2 and extending
through verse 5, there are nine consecutive imperative verbs. They come in rapid-fire succession,
in a staccato fashion. And the first verb of these nine
imperative verbs, It's like the topic sentence of a paragraph.
It's like the umbrella over the whole, and it is the verb preach. Preach the Word, and everything
that will follow will spell out how you are to preach the Word.
And it matters to God how you preach the Word. It matters to
God not just what you say, but how you say it. But he begins
with this first verb, which is the substance of this charge. He says, preach the word, not
chat the word, not share the word, not gab the word. He says, preach the word. And to preach the word, there
is a sense of...there are elements of fervency and intensity and
urgency and authority that are bound up in this word, preach.
Caruso is drawn from the culture of the day. There in Rome, where
Paul is being held, Caesar It was in a palace, his palace,
and he had heralds. And when he would issue an imperial
decree, he would summon his heralds to come into the palace, and
he would issue to them his eternal decree or his royal decree, and
he would dispatch them out into the empire, and they would travel
from city to town to village, and they would go into what would
be the equivalent of a town square and gather the people around
them. And they were to cup their hands and lift up their voice
and to say something like this, hear ye, hear ye this day, Rome
has won a great victory or Caesar has a son. There is now an heir
to the throne. They were not to enter into negotiation
with the people. They were not allowed to add
anything to the message. They were not allowed to withhold
any part of the message. And once the message had been
delivered, and they were to deliver it in the manner and in the tone
that reflected the high authority of Caesar himself, they were
to then report back to Rome. There would be witnesses that
would travel with the herald, and they were to give an account
to Caesar for their faithfulness to discharge the message that
had been entrusted to them. And if they had tampered with
the message in any way, they were to be put immediately to
death. It's the very word that is used
here, preach the word, karuso. And it was the herald's responsibility
to publicly proclaim with a loud voice the message entrusted to
them by their master. In the Theological Dictionary
of the New Testament, Gustav Friedrich has written the article
for the word herald. It's a very authoritative, multi-volume
Greek theological dictionary. And he writes that the preacher
or the herald was to, quote, deliver their message as it was
given to them. The report they give must not
originate with himself. Behind the herald stands a greater
authority. The herald does not express his
own views. He is the spokesman for his master. Heralds adopt the mind of those
who commission them and act with the authority of their master.
It is not for the herald to act on his own initiative. The herald
is bound by the precise instructions of the one who commissions him.
The herald does not become involved in lengthy negotiations, but
returns to his master once he delivers his message. He is simply
an executive instrument. Being only the mouth of his master,
he must not falsify the message entrusted to him by adding his
own opinions. He must keep strictly to the
words and the orders of his master." Close quote. That is exactly
what Paul is saying to Timothy, you are but an instrument in
the hand of God and you have been entrusted with the message
of heaven and you must preach the message exactly as it has
been given to you and you may not deviate from this message
to the left nor to the right. This is nothing new. If you were
to pick up this book, the Bible, and you were to read it from
cover to cover, one of the threads that you would discover that
runs through the entire Bible is the fact that God has sent
men after men after men to preach the message that has come from
heaven. The entire Old Testament was
the account of wave after wave of prophets who said, thus says
the Lord. When we come to the New Testament,
it's just more of the same, more preachers. In fact, the Messiah
was preceded by John the Baptist, who was a voice, crying in the
wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord. And God had
only one Son, and He made Him a preacher, and He sent Him into
this world. And when we read Mark chapter
1, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom. Jesus
spent three years training 12 men to be preachers, and in the
Great Commission, He charged them to preach repentance for
the forgiveness of sins. When you read the book of Acts,
the book is really mistitled. It's not the Acts of the apostles.
It is the preaching of the apostles. One out of every four verses
in the book of Acts is a sermon. or the equivalent of a sermon.
The first century church was on fire and lit up because that
fire was being stoked by the preaching of the apostles. The
pastoral epistles are filled with admonitions and charges
to preach. The book of Hebrews is but an
evangelistic sermon that is a word of exhortation, that is a sermon
that was given. It would be impossible to read
the Bible and not see the primary method by which the message of
God has gone forth, but as preaching. Paul tells Timothy to preach. It's the primary means of grace. And he says, preach the Word.
We understand what the Word is. He tells us in chapter 3, verse
16, all Scripture is inspired by God. Scripture there, graphe,
it refers to the written Word of God, not to visions, not to
dreams, not to feelings, not to impulses, but to Scripture. In chapter 3, verse 15, it's
referred to as the sacred writings. In chapter 2 and verse 15, it
is the Word of truth. In chapter 2, verse 9, it is
the Word of God. In chapter 2, verse 5, it is
the rules by which the athlete is to compete. In chapter 1,
verse 13, it is the standard of sound words. Again and again
and again, it is reinforced that the written Word of God is to
be the message that we bring The preacher has absolutely nothing
to say apart from the Word of God. He understands that when
the Bible speaks, God speaks. And he is to meet the means by
which God is to speak to His people and speak into this world. Man, this is the charge that
is laid at your feet. If you have been called by God
to preach, for heaven's sake, stand up like a man and preach. Lift up your voice. Speak with
authority. Let there be fervency and urgency
within you as you herald the message. Now, I want you to note
third, the specifics of this charge. What follows now are eight imperatives. These define how you are to preach. It is not left up to any one
of us here today to reinvent preaching. We may not come up
with our own approach to preaching. It has been set for us right
here in these verses. And obviously, the rest of Scripture
will have more to say. This would be the regulative
principle for preaching, that the Word of God is to regulate
our preaching of the Word of God. And with these eight imperative
commands, this is not a multiple choice where we can pick three
out of the eight that will match up with me and be distinctive. Each one of these is like links
in a chain, and if any one of these breaks, the entire preaching
chain breaks. Each one of these are like a
leg of a table that upholds the whole surface. And so these each
are strategic and important. I want to say it again. It matters
to God, not just what you say, but how you say it. So let's
look at these. The first is be ready. Be ready
in season and out of season. And be ready again is a military
term. It pictures a soldier who is
ready for battle at a moment's notice. His sword is always drawn,
ready to be thrust. And what Paul is saying to Timothy,
Timothy, you must be always at your task of preaching. You're
not to be just a weekend warrior. It's to be your lifestyle. It
is to encompass your entire ministry. You're to be always preaching
the Word, so much so that He says, in season and out of season.
That's a colloquial expression for constant readiness. There
is no season other than in season or out of season. It's a way
of saying to always be preaching, both in good times and in bad
times, both when it's convenient and when it's inconvenient. Both
when people want to hear what you have to say, but also when
they do not want to hear what you have to say. Both when it
is welcomed and when it is not welcomed, when it is received
and when it is rejected, when you will be applauded and when
you will be arrested. You're to be always preaching
the Word. Then second, reprove. The word
reprove here means to expose. to expose what is wrong. It's
used in Matthew 18, 15 to show a fault. It's used in John 3,
20 to expose deeds of darkness. In John 16, 8, the Holy Spirit
will convict the world concerning sin. In Ephesians 5, 13, it says,
all things will become visible when they are exposed. And it
is the ministry of the Word of God to expose sin. It is the ministry of the Holy
Spirit to expose sin. And in our preaching, it must
be a focus that we have to be continually and always exposing
sin. It means to expose the heart,
to expose the mind, to expose the mouth, to expose the deeds. To expose actions, to expose
reactions is one of the chief aims of our preaching. And if
there is no reproof, there is no preaching. Hebrews 4 verse
12 and 13 says, for the Word of God is living and active and
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing as far as the division
of soul and spirit. of both joints and marrow, and
is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. For there is no creature hidden
from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare, open
and laid bare before the eyes of Him with whom we have to do."
This must be a part of our preaching. that we address sin, that we
expose sin in the lives of those to whom we preach. No one will ever be saved until
their sin has been exposed. No one will ever be sanctified
and grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ until sin is exposed. It is one of the primary ministries
of the Word of God to expose sin. Romans 3 verse 20, Paul
writes, through the law comes the knowledge of sin. He writes
in Romans 7 verse 7, I would not have come to know sin except
through the law. And this is in the New Testament
in the book of Romans. that one of the principal ministries
of our preaching the law and the imperatives of Scripture
is to expose sin. So, do you expose sin as you
preach the Word? Do you cut to the bone with the
Word of God? Is there a filleting of the soul
as you exposit the Scripture? And then He says, rebuke. Rebuke
is to issue a threatening command. It's to warn of negative consequences. It's a call for repentance. It
is a call for a change of attitude and of action. I mean, Jesus
preached with reproof and rebuke. And when we read the Sermon on
the Mount, you have heard that it was said, you shall not commit
murder, but I say unto you, if you have hatred in your heart. You've committed adultery, I
mean, you've committed murder already in your heart. And there
is a probing of the soul and then a warning that if you continue
with this, you will be cast into hell. There must be rebuke in
our preaching. And then the word exhort, parakaleo.
It is to call, to summon a response to what has been said. It's not
enough just to be right. It's not enough just to put the
truth out there. There must be a call to respond,
a begging, an entreating, a pleading for a response, an urging of
the listener. to win them over to the truth. Again, it's not enough that what
we say is right and accurate. We cannot adopt an attitude as
a preacher that we just toss it out there and they can take
it or leave it. No, we are exhorting. We're calling. We're inviting. We're beseeching. We are entreating. In our preaching,
we must be like a lawyer in the courtroom. We must present our
case. We must make our argument. We
must put the witnesses on the stand, Matthew and Mark and Luke
and John, and extract from them their testimony and enter it
into the public record. We must present our evidence,
Exhibit A, Exhibit B, the resurrection, Exhibit C, the ascension and
exaltation of Christ. We must then cross-examine the
other witnesses and expose the fallacy of the world's philosophy. But when we come to the end of
the trial, having presented our case, we must stand before the
jury. And we must call for the verdict.
And we must be as persuasive as we can be as we rehearse what
we have presented and to call for the favorable verdict from
the jury. That's what it is to exhort.
I think of Jonathan Edwards, the great preacher, arguably
the greatest preacher who's ever lived on American soil, and he
preached in a puritanical fashion and often had the same three
headings for his sermon. It was like an overlay for a
text. And Roman numeral number one
was the exposition. as he would interpret and explain
what this text is saying and teaching. And then Roman numeral
number two was the doctrine. Every text of Scripture has theology
in it. And he would bring out of this
text the sound doctrine that is taught here. But then there
was the third heading. which Edward called the uses,
which would be the exhortation, which would be the implication,
which would be the application. And one Edwardian scholar has
said that in the first two headings, all Edwards was doing was putting
the ammunition into his cannon. But it was with the third heading,
the uses that he fired his cannon. And it made me think, how many
preachers, how many sermons are spent simply putting the ammunition
into the cannon, but they never fire the cannon? It is filled
with word studies, cross-reference, historical background, parsing
of verbs, sentence structure, etc., etc., but there is never
a so what in the sermon. The exhortation is the appeal. The exhortation is the persuasion,
the Greek word paitho, which means to win someone over to
a favorable response. Like Paul says in 1 Corinthians
9, that he seeks to win all men. In 2 Corinthians 5, verse 11,
that Greek word pitho, therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord,
we persuade men. If there's no persuasion, there's
no preaching. And if there's no persuasion,
the reason is there is not the fear of God in the heart of the
preacher. Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade
men. Read through the book of Acts
and see how many times you see that Greek word, pytho, as Paul
would go and persuade his listeners to win them over. But notice how he is to do this.
At the end of verse 2, with great patience, macrothymia, to remain
under. in the face of great resistance,
to remain under with a forbearing spirit and long-suffering under
trial because we will be met with indifference. We will often
be met with rejection and resistance. I have, I'm sure you have as
well, but it must be with great patience. and instruction, didache. There must be more doctrine and
more teaching and more theology. 1 Timothy 3, 2, we must be able
to teach. Titus 1, 9, we must be able to
exhort in sound doctrine. Acts 20, verse 27, we must preach
the full counsel of God. We must be, as Martin Lloyd-Jones
said, we must be theological expositors. What is preaching? He said, it is theology on fire. And so, all of our preaching
must be filled with teaching. R.C. Sproul once told me, all
of my teaching is preaching and all of my preaching is teaching.
I mean, they just all are interwoven together. The more we preach,
the more we must teach sound doctrine. And as we preach sound
doctrine, we can't just be a lecturer or a professor. We must be a
persuader and a preacher and seek to win men over to the truth
of the theology that we preach. As we come to the next imperative
verb, it doesn't come until verse 5. And there is a setup for the
beginning of verse 5, and it is verses 3 and 4. And so, in
verses 3 and 4, Paul is almost, if you will, baiting the hook
before he pulls on the line at the beginning of verse 5. And
so, in verse 3, he says, for the time will come. Oh, that
time will come within Timothy's ministry. That time will come
as soon as Timothy steps into ministry without Paul standing
there with him. for the time will come when they
will not endure sound doctrine." They will not put up with it.
They will reject it. And the they, at the beginning
of verse 3, refers to not those outside the church, it refers
to those inside the church. They are the problem. They are
the biggest problem, those inside the church who will not endure
sound doctrine. But wanting to have their ears
tickled. that these professing, believing church members who
are religious but lost, they want to have feel-good sermons. They want to have their ears
tickled. They want to have honey poured into their ears. And it says, they will accumulate
for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desire. They'll
just stockpile preacher after preacher after preacher. until
they get the one that will tickle their ears. The indication here,
almost in a modern-day setting, is that they manage to work their
way onto pulpit committees. And they don't want a physician
of the soul who can practice medicine. They just want someone
with good bedside manners, just someone who can come and make
them feel good about their illness. And so, they accumulate and stockpile
for themselves. They handpick according to their
own desires. What they want, they don't want
the expositor. They don't want the theologian. They want the communicator. They
want the life coach. They want the guru, the life
guru. And so when you show up, Timothy,
and you preach the Word, and you bring instruction and teaching,
it says in verse 4, and Paul's giving Timothy a warning of what's out there for
him. They will turn their ears away from the truth. And turn
away is a Greek verb, ektrepo, that means to to throw a bone
out of joint, that when you preach the truth, it will be metaphorically
as if they so turn their head away from what you are saying
that they will throw their neck out of joint. They'll sit on
the back pew. They'll stare up at the baptistry
in the wall. They will pull out their cell phone. They will do
anything they can but make eye contact with you, and as you
preach the Word of God, they will be so evasive, Timothy,
it will be like you are invisible to them. And this is the kind
of preacher that they do not want what I'm charging you, Timothy,
to be. They have become such an expert
in their own eyes. They're on elder boards. They
have worked their way into the infrastructure of churches that
they will try to control the preacher. And they will tell
him what to preach and how to preach. I'm reminded of the story
of Mart Lloyd-Jones and people came to him when he went from
Wales to London to the Westminster Chapel. And they were trying
to tell him how to rebuild this church, and they wanted all these
different programs and all these different gimmicks. And Lloyd-Jones
had built the church there in Wales on the sound preaching
of the Word of God. And so Lloyd-Jones, who had been
an eminent physician in his 20s already in England before he
was called into the ministry, he said to these church members,
when I was a physician, I never let the patient write the prescription, and neither will I start today."
You are God's man, and you're bringing God's Word and God's
message. And if they don't want it, give
them more. That's what Paul is saying. With
patience and instruction, double down on the instruction. So we
now come to the imperative verb. Verses 3 and 4 is just a setup,
what he will begin verse 5 with. He says, but you, and you can
almost see Paul as he is writing this, it's almost as if Timothy's
not there, but he's almost like pointing at Timothy. But you,
this couldn't be any more emphatic. Be sober. The word sober here
carries the idea of being unintoxicated. And he's not talking about a
physical sobriety, he's talking about a mental sobriety. You need to be unaffected by
all of this, Timothy. You need to remain level-headed.
You need to not overreact to their pressure that they will
bring to bear upon you. And do not become intoxicated
by the spirit of the age. Do not become intoxicated by
their pleas for you to alter the ministry that you would bring.
Do not let them supplant the primacy of the preaching of the
Word of God. You remain sober, Timothy. and
do not become sucked in to their demands. And the same happens with all
of us. I don't have time to walk you through my stories, and I'm
sure we don't have time to hear all of yours, but they're real.
As people will do everything they can to pull us away from
the primacy of the preaching of the Word of God, and in so
doing, to preach the full counsel of God with the standard of sound
words and sound doctrine. You stay sober, young man, and
do not tickle their ears. Preach the truth. And then the next imperative
verb, he says, endure hardship. It means to suffer evil. It means
to endure affliction. It means to persevere through
difficulty. And this clearly anticipates
the adversity that awaits you as you preach the Word of God. Paul is, in essence, saying to
Timothy, Timothy, you are going to be both the most loved and
the most hated man in town. There are going to be people
who name their children after you, and there are going to be
people who name their dogs after you. And that is the paradox of ministry. When I used to play football,
I remember practices where, I mean, it was aggressive. It was just
head-on collisions. And one day, one guy just had
his head almost taken off and his blood was just coming out
of his mouth and out of his nose. And I remember our head coach
going over to him and just rubbing his hand in his blood and then
wiping it all over his jersey and then saying to the trainer,
go get him a game jersey. Nobody gets a game jersey. who
doesn't have blood on their practice jersey. And there's a parallel
in ministry. You don't get a game jersey until
you've been bloodied and suffered and had to endure adversity. Let me remind us all what I said
to my breakout group at 1 o'clock. Calvin only lasted two years
in Geneva. He arrived in 1536, they ran
him out of town in 1538, only two years because he was preaching
the Word of God and fenced off the Lord's Supper. Jonathan Edwards,
arguably the leader of the Great Awakening, he along with Whitefield,
after 22 years as the primary pastor and theologian of the
Great Awakening, the greatest movement of the Spirit of God
ever on American soil, after 22 years he was run out of his
church by a 90% vote. Endure hardship. Oh, he endured
hardship. He stayed to be the interim pastor. He did. Man, he had so much blood
on his game jersey, and then he goes to Upper State New York
to work with missionaries after David Brainerd has all but died
in his arms in his home, and the Williams family follows him
out to the frontier and brings all kinds of charges of embezzlement
against Jonathan Edwards. And he does his greatest work
out there, writing some of the most profound theological treatises
and volumes that have ever been written in America. No, that's
just the way ministry is. And Charles Haddon Spurgeon,
who among us would not want to be the prince of preachers like
Charles Haddon Spurgeon? He suffered through that downgrade
controversy and basically died of a broken heart. I mean, he
dies in France. under the weight and the suffering
and just the agony of just dysfunctional people in the church. Endure hardship. Wherever it
is that God's going to send you, there is no easy place. You know
why the grass is greener on the other side of the fence? There's
more manure on the other side of the fence. That's why it's greener. It's
the only time I got clapping in the whole sermon was for the
scuba line. Wherever you go, the devil is
going to be waiting on you. Wherever you go, the forces of
darkness are there. I mean, we just have to make
a decision while we're in the locker room that we're not going
to give up till the game's over. We're going to have to endure
hardship. And then the next imperative,
he says, do the work of an evangelist. The verb do means to pursue a
course of action, poeo. It means the work. It is hard
work. It's the work of an evangelist. An evangelist is one who wins
souls to Christ. It is one who preaches the gospel
and calls for repentance. and calls for faith every... I remember the time I hit this
pulpit on, give us some men who know the truth. The dust came
up like an atomic bomb. They've never vacuumed this pulpit.
They've got some of MacArthur's hair in here, you know. If you want to know where it
went. It's like the guy who had a crew
cut and then the crew bailed out. Anyway. All right, settle down. Settle down. Hear this. Look at the context. Every expositor
must be an evangelist. You cannot be a true expositor
if you do not try to win souls to Christ through your preaching
and the exposition of the Word of God. Make Jesus the model
for your preaching. It was Jesus who said, enter
by the narrow gate. It was Jesus who said, come unto
me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give
you rest. Take my yoke upon you, learn of me, for I'm meek and
lowly in heart. You shall find rest for your
souls. It was Jesus who said, if any man thirst, let him come
unto me and drink. Those are gospel appeals. It
was Jesus who said, if anyone will come after me, he must deny
himself, take up a cross, and come after me. You need to have
the verb come in your preaching vocabulary. You read Spurgeon. You read Whitefield. You read
Ryle. You read these great men of the
past. They were continually calling, pleading, entreating men to come
to Christ. Do the work of an evangelist.
Listen to Martin Lloyd-Jones. Listen to his own testimony.
This is from the doctor. For many years, I thought I was
a Christian. when in fact I was not. It was
only later that I came to see that I had never been a Christian,
and I then became one. What I needed was preaching that
would convict me of sin, but I never heard this. The preaching
we had was always based on the assumption that we are all Christians. He wasn't even converted until
he was in his 20s. He was in a doctrinally sound
church. And then when he left the medical
community to enter the ministry, he marries Beth Ann, and one
of the first people to be converted under his preaching in Wales
was his own wife. He married an unsaved woman. He didn't know it, she didn't
know it, but she had never sat under soul-searching preaching. And as soon as she did, the light
of heaven was shined into her darkened heart, and she realized,
I have never been born again. I love what Bethann once said to
some men about her husband, Lloyd-Jones. They wanted to know about her
husband. And she said, you'll never understand
my husband and his preaching unless you know two things. Number one, he was a man of prayer. And number two, he was an evangelist. And he used his exposition to
win souls to Christ. When Lloyd-Jones on Monday would
get on a train and then go out into England and Scotland and
Wales to preach, to stand in the pulpits of other young men
to help bolster their ministry by his presence in their pulpit,
Lloyd-Jones did not pull the Friday night series through Romans,
put that in the briefcase and go out on the road to preach
that. And he didn't take the Sunday morning exposition which
was directed to the spiritual growth of the believers. He pulled
the Sunday night sermon and put that in his briefcase more times
than not because he was an evangelist at heart. Jesus did say in Matthew
4, verse 17, follow me and I'll make you fishers of men. If you're
not fishing, you're not following. That is why we're still here
on the earth, is to take as many people to heaven with us as we
possibly can. Do the work of an evangelist.
This leads us to the last imperative verb, and I want to give it its
own heading, and it's the summation of this charge. Here's the bottom
line of everything that he has just said. Fulfill your ministry. Bring to the full, literally.
To make full your ministry. Fulfill everything that I have
just said to you. Which is to say, Timothy, if
you are to fulfill your ministry, you must do verses two through
five to this point. To fulfill your ministry, you
must preach the word. You must preach the whole word.
You must preach nothing but the word. Timothy, to fulfill your
ministry, you must reprove, you must rebuke, you must exhort. Timothy, to fulfill your ministry,
you must have a clear head and enduring resolve, and you must
preach the gospel, and you must seek to win souls to Christ. And the people in verses 3 and
4, it'll be amazing how the trouble will be cleaned up in your church
with a few conversions. And you get some of those on
the back pew who are nitpickers after you, when they come to
faith in Christ, it will be amazing the difference it will make in
your church and in your ministry. And one reason we have the troubles
that we have in some of our churches, and especially in smaller churches
where one voice can have a disproportionate influence in a church like that,
is because we have not been doing the work of an evangelist. And
we're allowing the devil's children, we're allowing unconverted church
members to have way too much sway and influence in our churches
where if we did the work of an evangelist, much of the difficulty
would be dissipated. So, my fellow preacher, does
this describe your preaching? Is this how you exposit the Word?
Are you unashamed as you stand in the pulpit? Do you feel the
weight of responsibility to be the voice of God crying in the
wilderness? Do you call for repentance? Do
you call for saving faith? Are you fulfilling your ministry
of preaching the truth? I will end with this, and I have
shared this before at a Shepherds Conference. After Luther stood
at the Diet of Worms, and after Luther had translated the Bible
into the German New Testament, and as Luther now was beginning
to make waves in Saxony, Germany, and that was affecting even Rome,
some people came to Luther and said, how have you done this? You're turning Europe upside
down. The potpourri is being shaken
at its foundation. How have you done this? And Luther
said this, hear it again, I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's
Word. Otherwise, I did nothing. And then I slept. And the Word of God so greatly
weakened the papacy that never a prince and never an emperor
inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing. The Word did it
all. May this be our testimony that
they write on our tombstone. May it just have the date of
your birth and the date of your death. And over the top, may
it just say, the Word did it all. God bless.