Families, Church & Discipleship (v) II Tim.1:1-5 & 3:10-17

Now about your love for one another we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other.  And in fact, you do love all of God’s family throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more...                     

 (I Thess.4:9-10)

 

Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.

(Heb.2:11)

 

Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.  And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.

(I Peter 5:8-10)

 

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about this series is the realisation of how deeply committed Christ Himself is to embedding these structures in the life of the Church and the family.  At no point is there a guarantee.  At the end of the day, children grow up into adults and make their own decisions.  One of the horrors in reading the Gospels is how many people choose to walk away from Jesus, even as they grasp the truth of who He is. It’s not everyone, but a lot of people do (see the end of John 6 for a particularly dramatic example).  A parent can faithfully fulfil all that Scripture teaches (OK, theoretically), but at the end of the day, a child will make their own decisions as they reach maturity.

That said, Jesus remains committed, and has structured Church life to resonate with the goals of family life.  And more than that, to compensate to some level for the places in which family life may fall short of a (perceived?) ideal.  Take Timothy.  Paul is bequeathing his ministry to Timothy, and there is clearly a deep relationship that is rooted in their shared faith in Christ.  There is a genuine poignancy in Paul’s address to Timothy as ‘my dear son’.  It’s easy to miss the significance of this.  We can easily forget that phrase by the time we get to 1:5. Paul reflects on Timothy’s spiritual heritage, which is traced through the maternal line!  We know from elsewhere that Timothy’s father wasn’t a believer (Acts 16:1).  It isn’t difficult to imagine the tensions his mother (and grand-mother) navigated seeking to bring her son up as a Christian in a family with ‘split loyalties’.  At times she must have felt in an uphill battle... 

Eunice had two (three is we assume prayer!) critical weapons.  The first was her diligence in teaching her son the Scriptures (3:15) with the full spectrum of what the Spirit designed those writings to achieve: teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.  Thus Timothy was made ‘wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ’.  She must have been a woman who herself had a deep grasp on the Word of God, for Timothy was already a mature believer, well-spoken of by other believers when Paul met him (Acts 16:2); and his schooling in the Scriptures prepared him for a lifetime of ministry and teaching, in what was a pretty demanding context.  But the second is a porous boundary between her own family, and her Church family.  It was this that allowed such influential relationships to develop with spiritual ‘fathers’.  Paul isn’t being at all patronising here.   Elsewhere he speaks of Timothy as ‘brother and co-worker’ (I Thess.3:2); a ‘servant of Jesus Christ’ (Phil.1:1); and as a ‘man of God’ (I Tim.6:11).  But here, and elsewhere (e.g. Phil.2:22), Paul styles the relationship in father/son terms... not because Paul had lead Timothy to Christ, but because Paul had ‘adopted’ Timothy.  The spiritual lack in Timothy’s own family is mitigated by the wider Church family.

Many of us have to negotiate the painful realisation that our own family experience is in some way dissonant with the vision for family life that is portrayed in Scripture.  Families can be complex, blended, bereaved, fractured, spiritually divided.  When we see the Bible’s vision for family life we can be tempted to feel angry, resentful, frustrated or even hopeless.  We end up focussing on all the things we can’t do.  But that is to lose sight of the redemptive heart of our God, and it is to forget the resources God has put within reach to support us in what we can do.  If Eunice had simply capitulated to the idea that because her husband wasn’t a Christian, there was nothing she could do for Timothy, the Church would have lost one of her most incredible pastors.

Questions

Read I Tim.3:2-4 & Titus 1:6-7

Why is the qualification for Church leadership linked to a proven ability to lead a family?  What qualities would this lead you to expect in a pastor (see also: I Thess.1:11-12; 2:7-8 etc.)?  Is this how you see Church leaders and pastors?

 

What does Paul mean when he says the Church is ‘God’s household’?  How should that affect our engagement with the Church we are part of?

 

Have you ever left a Church (or remained in one) because of the behaviour of a pastor’s children?  Can you explain why / why not?  Do you think if someone isn’t able to fulfil these criteria they should step down from Church leadership?

 

Read II Tim.1:1-5 & 3:10-17

What does Paul mean when he talks about Timothy’s faith as ‘sincere’ and as living in Timothy?   How would you recognise such a faith in someone?  What would characterise it?

 

Do you think persecution is an inevitable result of living faithfully as a disciple of Christ?  Can you envisage a situation where Christians would be persecuted in the UK?  How – as parents and as a Church – can we prepare the children and y.p. for such an experience of Christian living?

 

How has Timothy’s heritage of having ‘known the Holy Scriptures from infancy’ equipped him for his own discipleship, his involvement in mission, and his experience of persecution?  How can MIE ensure that children and y.p. gain such knowledge and continue in what they have learned?

 

How does knowing the Scriptures so deeply equip us for every good work?  Can we be so equipped without this knowledge?  What about Christians who don’t know the Scriptures well, but who do a lot of good?

 

How is Paul’s own experience (see II Tim.3:10-13) a vindication of what he says about the Bible in II Tim.3:16?

Memory Passage

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

II Tim.3:14-17

Going Deeper:

Rhetoric can easily outstrip reality of experience when it comes to Church life.  Perhaps that is nowhere more self-evident than when we speak of the Church as ‘family’.  Think of the way that families celebrate Christmas.  It is one of the most profound Christian festivals of the Church year, and yet for many Christians it is also the most lonely.  And this while other Christians prioritise celebrating Christmas ‘as a family’.  Making the boundaries of family life ‘porous’, especially at such key moments, might be one of the most difficult things we have to learn as Christians.  The old saying that ‘blood is thicker than water’ isn’t true if the water involved in the water of baptism.  I love the way the relationship of the early Church is described: Peter and John went back to their own people (Acts.4:23).  That is quite powerful.

It is too easy to think only of the sacrifice such a change in mentality might incur.  Of course, to be part of a Church that operates as a family will be costly, but don’t lose sight of the blessings and benefits of putting our families so consciously in the context of Church family (and putting Church family in the context of our own families).  When families are siloed, everyone suffers.  Such sharing of life brings structures of support and encouragement, challenges sinful patterns of life in all concerned, fosters unity and fellowship, heals fractured backgrounds, gives a place to the lonely, the widowed, the deserted, the broken (Ps.68:6).  Sharing life (not hosting!) gives you a way to contribute, to serve, to support – from both sides of the equation.  God means for us to be adopted into this family, with all the vulnerability that entails.  Holding ourselves apart is to refuse His vision for community that reflects the life of the Trinity.