Sustained By Grace in Order to Sustain By Grace
From 1 Timothy 1 – 1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope,
2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord.
3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification…
My wife and I have been catching up on Out-Daughtered, the reality show featuring all girl quintuplets who are now two years old. This stretch has been a retrospective, revisiting the girls' gestation and birth. The precariousness of this., No doubt, is easy to overlook amid the present bustle, so the obstetrician's German-accented sobriety is a shift in mood as well as time. In the womb, he was very concerned for the safety of the quintuplets and had to deliver them when he could no longer determine if each was getting the necessary blood flow and nutrition.
By degrees, the nurse in the NICU who took over once the girls were delivered was more optimistic, albeit in a stolid, professional, guarded fashion. Calculating how premature these babies were, she reasoned that they would need time in the hospital to develop the capacities they didn't get to develop in the womb.
This is the sense I get from the church at Ephesus as Paul describes it to Timothy in the first four verses of 1 Timothy. Paul is the grave obstetrician, describing objectively the threats to the new life in Christ there in the womb which is the church. Fables and genealogies are choking off spiritual sustenance as seriously as multiples in the womb may be competing with one another for the elements necessary for physical life. Serious as the situation is, there is also an element of the nurse's practical intervention. This is the situation as it is, Paul says, and the alternative is edification. Rather than allowing time, and thought, and conversation to be wasted on fancy, Timothy's charge is to build up the flock as he finds them. As vulnerable as our these little-underdeveloped preemies in the Word, the charge in the here and now is not to lament them but to undertake to sustain and build them up.
There we are. The opportunity to edify is why staying power has been stressed to Timothy, working backward from him to Paul his spiritual father, and backward from Paul to Christ Who called and still sustains him, and backward still to the Father Whose pleasure the Son willingly serves. We are firmly rooted and well positioned in order to reach out and rescue those undernourished and distracted from their vulnerable state. Blessed as we are, the enemy of our souls who cannot disconnect us from Christ the Vine will perhaps try the other tack to over-convince us of our preciousness. You, he might lure, are too good for this. You, he might contradict Scripture while borrowing from it when convenient, only get to go around once. Do you really want to be identified with these people in this place, with all the deficits he can readily supply as the accuser of the brethren?
Where we see that edification isn't taking place, then, we can simultaneously sense our calling. As we have been fed, let us feed. As we have been convinced, let us convince. There but by the grace of God we go, entirely subsumed by whatever fiction catches our fancy, or whatever human heritage grants us an inch more stature in the eyes of men. As we identify with Christ and Christ's, may our worship in action be compelling to those subsisting on cultural drivel.
2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord.
3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification…
My wife and I have been catching up on Out-Daughtered, the reality show featuring all girl quintuplets who are now two years old. This stretch has been a retrospective, revisiting the girls' gestation and birth. The precariousness of this., No doubt, is easy to overlook amid the present bustle, so the obstetrician's German-accented sobriety is a shift in mood as well as time. In the womb, he was very concerned for the safety of the quintuplets and had to deliver them when he could no longer determine if each was getting the necessary blood flow and nutrition.
By degrees, the nurse in the NICU who took over once the girls were delivered was more optimistic, albeit in a stolid, professional, guarded fashion. Calculating how premature these babies were, she reasoned that they would need time in the hospital to develop the capacities they didn't get to develop in the womb.
This is the sense I get from the church at Ephesus as Paul describes it to Timothy in the first four verses of 1 Timothy. Paul is the grave obstetrician, describing objectively the threats to the new life in Christ there in the womb which is the church. Fables and genealogies are choking off spiritual sustenance as seriously as multiples in the womb may be competing with one another for the elements necessary for physical life. Serious as the situation is, there is also an element of the nurse's practical intervention. This is the situation as it is, Paul says, and the alternative is edification. Rather than allowing time, and thought, and conversation to be wasted on fancy, Timothy's charge is to build up the flock as he finds them. As vulnerable as our these little-underdeveloped preemies in the Word, the charge in the here and now is not to lament them but to undertake to sustain and build them up.
There we are. The opportunity to edify is why staying power has been stressed to Timothy, working backward from him to Paul his spiritual father, and backward from Paul to Christ Who called and still sustains him, and backward still to the Father Whose pleasure the Son willingly serves. We are firmly rooted and well positioned in order to reach out and rescue those undernourished and distracted from their vulnerable state. Blessed as we are, the enemy of our souls who cannot disconnect us from Christ the Vine will perhaps try the other tack to over-convince us of our preciousness. You, he might lure, are too good for this. You, he might contradict Scripture while borrowing from it when convenient, only get to go around once. Do you really want to be identified with these people in this place, with all the deficits he can readily supply as the accuser of the brethren?
Where we see that edification isn't taking place, then, we can simultaneously sense our calling. As we have been fed, let us feed. As we have been convinced, let us convince. There but by the grace of God we go, entirely subsumed by whatever fiction catches our fancy, or whatever human heritage grants us an inch more stature in the eyes of men. As we identify with Christ and Christ's, may our worship in action be compelling to those subsisting on cultural drivel.
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