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We are in a verse-by-verse study of 2 Timothy, a book so appropriate for our day. Chapter one – Guard the Truth. Chapter two – Teach the Truth. Chapter three – Apply the Truth. Chapter four – Preach the Truth. Today we come to verses 13 and 14.
2 Timothy 1:13-14, Retain the standard of sound words which you have heard from me, in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. 14 Guard, through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, the treasure which has been entrusted to you.
From that prison cell in Rome, Paul cries out to Timothy through this letter with words that echo all the way down to 2024 – “Guard the truth! Hold fast what I’ve taught you!” It is the greatest treasure on the planet and God has entrusted it to the church, especially the leaders of the church, but also to every believer. John MacArthur said in a message on these verses, “We are, as a church, the guardians of the truth. That’s our primary function. We are to guard the truth. We are to secure the truth. We are to hold to the truth.” In a world of lies, Paul says, guard the truth!
Just before Francis Schaeffer died in 1984, he wrote with sadness his last book titled The Great Evangelical Disaster. He recounts how seminaries and church leaders were accommodating and softening the truth to make it more palatable to the world. He warned us:
There are hard days ahead of us–for ourselves and for our spiritual and physical children. And without a strong view of Scripture as a foundation, we will not be ready for the hard days to come. Unless the Bible is without error, not only when it speaks of salvation matters, but also when it speaks of history and the cosmos, we have no foundation for answering questions concerning the existence of the universe and its form and the uniqueness of man. Nor do we have any moral absolutes, or certainty of salvation, and the next generation of Christians will have nothing on which to stand.
He was saying more than he knew. Thirty years later we had the Supreme Court legally approving same sex marriages and now just ten years later (two weeks ago) the Methodist Church in the United States approved by a huge majority (692-51) the ordination of LGBTIQQ people to be pastors and the rights of churches to marry same sex couples.
We have become untethered from any divine standards. We are now enforcing the “civil rights” of men to compete with women and to use their locker rooms, not to mention surgically changing men into women and women into men and debating how many months is okay to murder unborn human beings. In 1980, just before he died, Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached “Why Do the Heathen Rage?” from Psalm 2. Here’s what he said: “It’s an age of vileness, an age of raging. It’s an age in which men and women are breaking every rule and every law, and the whole world is in a state of confusion.” He may as well be speaking in 2024 – “The state of the world is organized insanity.” Isaiah 59:14 says, “Truth has stumbled in the streets.”
Powerful words. Let’s look at our text from five angles in relation to this charge that holds sway over each of us to guard the truth, to be guardians of the truth.
#1 We are in a fight for the truth of God’s Word.
To guard in verse 14 implies there are enemies, and whether we like it or not, those enemies are not only in the culture but inside many churches that claim the name of Christ. Verse 13 says we are to grasp it, like men holding a rope for others coming up behind. It’s a present imperative – keep on holding, keep on grasping the pattern of truth God has given us. Don’t let it go. Get a grip. Remember Eleazar? He was the son of Dodo who chased the Philistines with his sword until his hand “froze” to the sword (2 Samuel 23:10). That’s the idea. Refuse to let go. Don’t give in. Don’t compromise. Don’t drop your weapon. Hold fast!
Paul charged Timothy with the same thing in 1 Timothy.
1 Timothy 6:20, O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called “knowledge”–
Grasp and guard the truth of God’s Word. Christ had no sooner launched the church in the first century when vicious wolves attacked the truth of Scripture. Arianism came in denying the deity of Christ. There have been constant deviations from that truth through the centuries. Philosophies, rationalism, and church traditions trumped the Scriptures. False teachings like infant baptism, purgatory, indulgences, sacrificing Christ over and over with transubstantiation, salvation through the church, and many other deviations flooded into the church. Truth has always been under attack, and never more so than in our days. In fact, today in our post-Christian culture, we’re told there is no ultimate truth. Irwin Lutzer said the great lie of our age is this, “Live by your own truth and you can be whatever you want to be.” We’re in a fight for the truth.
#2 God has entrusted the treasure of His Word to us for safe keeping.
Paul describes this treasure in two ways.
1) The Word is a pattern in verse 13 — a model, blueprint, skeleton. The Bible defines the playing field. It is the standard, the measuring rod for all truth. It’s kind of like our bones — everything hangs on the Bible. Bones are essential for our bodies, and the doctrines of God’s Word are essential for the church. We are not free to adjust the pattern of truth to fit our likes or cultural demands. God told Moses to be sure to make the tabernacle according to the pattern – same word – which was shown you on the mountain (Hebrews 8:5). The same is true of God’s Word. It is “God-breathed” and not subject to our whims and reason.
2) The Word is a precious treasure in verse 14. “Guard the good deposit.” When you take your money to the bank, you expect the banker to take good care of your deposit. God has entrusted the precious treasure of His Word to us. Revelation 22:18-19 pronounces a curse for taking away or adding to this precious God-breathed book. It is the most precious commodity we have in this world. It is the “good deposit” (vs. 14). “Good” is kalos — excellent, most valuable, beautiful, perfectly proportioned. Even Job understood this. Job 23:12, “I have not departed from the command of His lips; I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my necessary food.” Jesus said in Matthew 4:4, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Thank God for this book. It is a precious treasure, telling us where we came from, why we’re here, where we’re going, and how to get there. Without this treasure we are in total spiritual darkness.
You and I may not agree on everything it says, but we believe everything it says, right? If God’s Word teaches it, I believe it. If God’s word teaches that the flood covered all the tops of the mountains of the entire earth, I believe it. We don’t need all the evidence of a worldwide flood to believe it happened, but the evidence of fossils and all the layers of stone (e.g. Grand Canyon) simply says “Amen” to the truth. Guarding this precious treasure means you accept it as it is and prayerfully interpret it. That’s why we take a literal, historical, grammatical, and contextual method of interpretation. Second Timothy 2:15 calls us to accurately handle the word of truth.
What do we believe about this precious treasure, the Bible? 1) God-breathed — inspired. 2) Inerrant – without errors. 3) Authoritative – God is the author. 4) Sufficient – we have all we need in this treasure chest to live for God’s glory. God didn’t need Freud or Dr. Phil to equip His church. 5) Necessary – you can’t know anything of God’s redeeming plan apart from the truths of this book. 6) Exclusive – sola Scriptura. This and this alone is the Word of God. Sola scriptura, the battle cry of the Reformation! Sceptics attack it as full of errors and myths. That creation story, is it a myth like the myths of other ancient writings? Jesus Himself quoted from Genesis 1 and 2 when speaking of the creation of male and female and marriage. He also referred to Jonah in that big fish, the great flood of Noah’s day, and from the Law and Prophets. 7) Truth – John 17:17, “Your Word is truth.” Psalm 119:160, “The sum of Your word is truth.” The New Living Translation put it like this, “The very essence of Your Word is truth.”
#3 Guard the truth because it is exactly what we need.
“Sound words” in verse 13 means healthy or beneficial words, just what we need. When people go into the Bible and change and cut and delete what isn’t comfortable for our culture, our age, our sensibilities, what we really do is cut our own throats. We come to the Bible to learn about who God is, how He created the world and man, what happened when Adam and Eve defied God, who Christ is, why He came, what He accomplished on the cross, how He defeated death, how we are reconciled to God, born again, given that new life, that resurrection life of Christ, how we can live for God’s glory, what’s coming up ahead – that glorious millennial kingdom and then heaven and God’s presence, or the lake of fire and eternal punishment for our sins. We need to know these things! All these truths are exactly what we need.
We don’t accommodate the Bible to our culture. This was Francis Schaeffer’s strong rebuke, “The mentality of accommodation is indeed a disaster.” This is exactly what we are witnessing over and over – accommodating to the world spirit, accepting the lies of our culture. Schaeffer’s last chapter in his book is entitled “Radicals for Truth.” We need to stand firm and lovingly confront all that is wrong and destructive in the church, the culture, the state. How dark our beloved country has become by accommodating to all the woke winds of error and lies, from Black Lives Matter to transgenderism to climate change.
Praise God, we have an eternal, unchanging standard, rules that never change, a playing field with immoveable boundaries we can depend on. How do we ferret out the lies of our world, lies from the White House to the universities, to the local library, to the nightly news, to the churches? In his blockbuster book, Ashamed of the Gospel, John MacArthur said this. “Scripture alone can fully equip us to discern between truth and error.” We must keep our “truth sensors” up to sniff out truth from error. Even professing Christian leaders are conned by the lies of evolution, calling it “theistic evolution.” Pride doesn’t want to be scoffed at by fellow “experts in the field.”
Kevin Swanson in his book Epoch refers to Charles Darwin like this, “No single philosopher was more influential in mainstreaming a materialistic, godless view of the universe. The entire civilized world with all its universities, schools, museums, media, and governments followed Darwin. More than any other single person in the worldview shift of the last millennium, Charles Darwin successfully deceived ‘the nations’ – with almost no exceptions.” To question evolution today makes you a moron. And yet there isn’t a shred of evidence for evolution. The whole evolutionary scheme is worse than a house of cards. Evolution cannot answer these questions: How do you get something from nothing? (You don’t.) How do you get life from non-life? (You don’t.) How do you get higher forms from lower forms? (You don’t.) And how do you get man from apes, monkeys, or gorillas? (You don’t.) The Bible is a pair of glasses to see and discern truth from lies.
We need healthy, life-giving doctrine, words, truth. This is why Paul is charging Timothy to lay hold of and guard the truth.
1 Timothy 4:6, In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine which you have been following.
2 Timothy. 4:3-4, “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine.
Paul says, “Timothy, (and all of us) keep on teaching the Word and sound doctrine over and over, whether they want to hear it or not.” God’s revealed Word in the Bible is exactly what we need.
#4 The truth brings us in faith and love to Jesus Christ.
Verse 13, “In the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus.” Here is the purpose for this fight for truth. It isn’t to puff up our heads with knowledge and abstract thoughts. Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that bear witness of Me” (John 5:39). We fight for the truth because it is this book of truth, this message of the gospel, which brings saving faith and love for God and others. The Bible deepens and firms up our convictions about God and His great plan of redemption.
We fight for this truth because it is from God and for our good. The Bible teaches us how to be saved and how to live to please God. The Bible teaches husbands to love their wives like Christ loves the church and to live with their wives in an understanding way, granting them honor, not putting them down. The Bible teaches wives to develop a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in God’s sight and to do their husbands good and not evil all the days of their lives (Proverbs 31:12). The Bible teaches parents not to provoke their children to wrath but to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Scripture teaches us how to replace anger with kindness, anxiety with peace, depression with hope, bitterness with forgiveness. The Bible is where we learn that God truly is sovereign over all of life, even the trials and tragedies.
God’s truth brings blessing to those who will humbly submit to God’s authority in His Word. Jesus declared, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” The truth of God’s Word applied to your life will transform your heart first, and then your responses and relationships. Here’s Jeremiah embracing and digesting God’s Word. Jeremiah 15:16, “Your words were found and I ate them, And Your words became for me a joy and the delight of my heart; For I have been called by Your name, O LORD God of hosts.”
I love the story about Zwingli announcing on a Saturday night, January 1, 1519, that he was going to preach through the New Testament using the Greek New Testament, starting in Matthew. It took him about six years to get through the New Testament. A student named Thomas Platter was so thrilled by Zwingli’s powerful preaching of God’s Word, he said he “felt like he was lifted by his hair and suspended in space.” That’s what the exhilarating truth of God’s Word can do in our hearts and our heads. Instead of just accepting the lies of our culture, whatever they are, we need a steady diet of the authoritative Word of God to strengthen us in our faith and nurture us in love for God and others. Paul said in 1 Timothy 1:5, “The goal of our preaching is love from a pure heart, good conscience, and sincere faith.”
If your Bible hasn’t brought you in faith and love to Jesus Christ, you’ve missed the whole point. Why are we such sticklers for the Word? This is how you come in faith to Christ and grow in love for Him and others. The purpose of my lawnmower is not to wash our clothes. The purpose of our microwave is not to vacuum our house. The purpose of the Bible is not to be simply a book of morality or interesting stories. The first purpose of the Bible is to bring you in faith and love to Jesus Christ.
#5 God will enable us to guard the truth through His Spirit within us.
“Guard through the Holy Spirit….” Paul knows we are weak in our flesh. We need the power of the indwelling Spirit to fortify our souls. The Spirit’s greatest role in our lives is to enlighten our dark hearts to understand God’s truth and then motivate and energize our slow wills to obey what we learn.
John 14:26, “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.
SO WHAT?
Guard the truth. Be faithful to this treasure of truth we know as the Bible. Anything less is treason and betrayal of our Savior. Grasp and guard the truth. Look to Jesus Christ and His indwelling Holy Spirit to give you the strength to stand for His truth in our day. Has it brought you to faith and love for Jesus Christ? Do you love the Word?
You probably won’t outright deny it, but you may question it. Some bend it to accommodate their behavior, picking and choosing what they like. Others don’t think it is sufficient or necessary. But for you – do you believe it? Read it? Every day? Or do you leave it? On a chair, a shelf, the coffee table, the nightstand, or the back seat of your car until next Sunday? This Bible really is the Word from God Almighty! Highly value it! Grasp and guard it! And yes, by God’s grace, guard it even to the point of being willing to die for it. As John MacArthur said, we are called by God to be “guardians of the truth.”