2 Timothy 1:3 – Five Reasons to Look Back with Grace
I thank God, whom I serve with a pure conscience, as my forefathers did… 2 Timothy 1:3, New King James Version
Lifeline Productions provokes a lot of thought in precious seconds of radio time. In one of their sketches, a character greatly announces he is changing his name. When a friend charges this character with dinging his car, the reason for the new name and identity shift becomes clear. He can blame the fender bender on who he used to be, even seconds before, rather than humbly coming to terms with his wrongs.
Paul could do something of the same thing and tailor his message much more neatly to our thirst for novelty. He is a new man, after all. He charges us that we are new creations and that old things have passed away. He tells us to forget that which lies behind and press on toward the high calling of Christ Jesus. We have, it would seem, Scriptural sanction for self-serving amnesia.
Maybe not, at least considering the whole counsel of the Word of God. For, one beat after declaring that he serve the Lord with a clear conscience in 2 Timothy 1:3, about the time we would expect him to distance himself from everything that has gone before, Paul will not do so.
As Carlo Levi discerns, the future has an ancient heart. Paul phrases this rooted sense that God's grace is older than our individual experience by declaring that his forefathers also served the Lord with a pure conscience.
Let's look at five reasons why inspired Paul might have modeled looking back on the past with grace:
(1) Looking back with grace allows us to see the pattern of Christ's bigger work. If your experience is contemporary with Moses', the reality that he struck the rock instead of speaking to it and was thereby not allowed to enter the Promised Land is going to overshadow the narrative. It is probably going to be in the first paragraph of his obituary. If, however, you have the privilege of looking back through the length of what Christ has done over generations, your perspective is entirely different.
From that Gospel vantage point, even the flaws of men in their times point to Christ. What to his peers in time was the pique of temper and probably a stop of self-justification becomes, generations later, a picture of Christ. Paul says that on the other side of the cross we can see Christ as the Rock which needed only be struck once to effectively produce living water. Pausing to look back, we can see even in the failures of our forefathers connected dots of Christ's glorious portrait.
(2) Looking back with grace allows us to get a hint of the power of the Holy Spirit community in the present. On George Friedman's principle that it takes generations to build a naval power because of the accumulated experience necessary to develop admirals, my friend Gerry seemed to me the sort of grandfather it would take generations of progressively better models to perfect. He is wry at the right times, and tender at the right times.
Knowing that his parents didn't model these particular characteristics, I asked him about looking back with grace. I expected him to quickly absolve his parents with the whitewash that they were doing the best they knew by their conscience, but he didn't. Instead, he inadvertently pointed to a different aspect of Paul's 2 Timothy 1:3 look back in grace. In Gerry's case, others, grandparents, filled in by demonstrating aspects of God's love that might have been expected of parents.
I can see the glory and grace, then, in Paul's plural. His forefathers, collectively, served the Lord with a pure conscience. Where one fell down, surely, another picked up. Christ the One Who promised to be a Father to Solomon past David's limitations and death once again proved sufficient on the whole. The fuller dispensation of His character sometimes takes generations. Knowing and expecting this can help us look back with more of a wide-angle lens.
My father didn't, but my grandfather did. My biological family didn't, but He provided others to parent me in aspects of His Spirit in which my particular family was not strong. His grace overflows what one single person, or role, or generation can hold.
(3) Looking back with grace frees us from presentism's snobbery and assumptions. In a New Yorker profile from the 1960s, Roger Daltrey commented on how striking the generation gap was in America. The rocker said it wasn't so in Britain. "Our parents spent six years in air-raid shelters while their houses were being blown up over their heads," he said. "They built up a sense of humor. We respect them, and they respect us."
Even without a world war in common, looking back with realistic expectations on our parents and ancestors as we age can be similarly helpful. We begin to realize that the virtues we are cultivating by Christ's grace did not begin and end on the current stage, that people have been striving after His likeness since long before the Internet. We are likewise buttressed against despair as we realize, again with Scripture, that there is nothing new under the sun. Our parents fought similar battles, all the while pundits were simultaneously proclaiming either the inexorable progress of man or the hopelessness of our condition.
(4) Looking back with grace allows us to exchange bitterness for the promise of God. We owe Paul's faithful, inspired quill for another aspect of the benefit of looking back with grace, as he reminds us that honoring our father and mother, and presumably having a similarly charitable attitude toward forefathers and foremothers in their turn, is the only command with a promise. The literal, one-generation payback of not stifled condescension but due honor is connected in the alchemy of the Word with long life.
If the word warily can be used of God's actions with men, it might be used for his apportionment of our days. In Genesis it says that He will not forever strive with fallen man because even the intentions of our hearts are wicked. He thereby limits the span of life that we would not drift too far, and He sent the flood. Sure enough, when He extends Hezekiah's life, the king uses this time to brag to the Babylonians on his blessings. When corrected that this arrogance will cost his children dearly, the complacent King is content that it will be well in his own days.
But, as we learn to look back with grace, to honor our parents for acting as the Lord revealed to them, perhaps our perspective deepens and softens enough that we can make better use of longer time on Earth. As we let go of trying to live our days to come in the flesh, prove a point to those who came before us that we can live life like Frank Sinatra, our way, perhaps He gives us more days to spend to better in and justifying our own ego and justifying our own bitterness in more decades of splenic screed.
(5) Looking back with grace grants us the patient perspective on others' progress in His likeness. How much of Paul's tenderness toward Timothy as he is and not as a clone of the mature Paul, is rooted in Paul's peace with the chosen, slow speed of God's processes? The succeeding verses as Paul grounds Timothy for the work ahead by reminding him what God has planted in Timothy's life through his mother and his grandmother suggest a link between gracious discipleship and a long, loving, forgiving view of the past.
So it is, then, that He has given us generations to look back upon in His Word and to see similarities with our present, relational experience. When those we would influence disappoint us, we can surely find outbursts of the flesh like there is in the Scriptures, and see that God prevailed in their lives, anyway. When those we would influence do make progress, we can look back at the patterns of His work and rejoice in every reminder that He is faithful to finish what He has started.
Lifeline Productions provokes a lot of thought in precious seconds of radio time. In one of their sketches, a character greatly announces he is changing his name. When a friend charges this character with dinging his car, the reason for the new name and identity shift becomes clear. He can blame the fender bender on who he used to be, even seconds before, rather than humbly coming to terms with his wrongs.
Paul could do something of the same thing and tailor his message much more neatly to our thirst for novelty. He is a new man, after all. He charges us that we are new creations and that old things have passed away. He tells us to forget that which lies behind and press on toward the high calling of Christ Jesus. We have, it would seem, Scriptural sanction for self-serving amnesia.
Maybe not, at least considering the whole counsel of the Word of God. For, one beat after declaring that he serve the Lord with a clear conscience in 2 Timothy 1:3, about the time we would expect him to distance himself from everything that has gone before, Paul will not do so.
As Carlo Levi discerns, the future has an ancient heart. Paul phrases this rooted sense that God's grace is older than our individual experience by declaring that his forefathers also served the Lord with a pure conscience.
Let's look at five reasons why inspired Paul might have modeled looking back on the past with grace:
(1) Looking back with grace allows us to see the pattern of Christ's bigger work. If your experience is contemporary with Moses', the reality that he struck the rock instead of speaking to it and was thereby not allowed to enter the Promised Land is going to overshadow the narrative. It is probably going to be in the first paragraph of his obituary. If, however, you have the privilege of looking back through the length of what Christ has done over generations, your perspective is entirely different.
From that Gospel vantage point, even the flaws of men in their times point to Christ. What to his peers in time was the pique of temper and probably a stop of self-justification becomes, generations later, a picture of Christ. Paul says that on the other side of the cross we can see Christ as the Rock which needed only be struck once to effectively produce living water. Pausing to look back, we can see even in the failures of our forefathers connected dots of Christ's glorious portrait.
(2) Looking back with grace allows us to get a hint of the power of the Holy Spirit community in the present. On George Friedman's principle that it takes generations to build a naval power because of the accumulated experience necessary to develop admirals, my friend Gerry seemed to me the sort of grandfather it would take generations of progressively better models to perfect. He is wry at the right times, and tender at the right times.
Knowing that his parents didn't model these particular characteristics, I asked him about looking back with grace. I expected him to quickly absolve his parents with the whitewash that they were doing the best they knew by their conscience, but he didn't. Instead, he inadvertently pointed to a different aspect of Paul's 2 Timothy 1:3 look back in grace. In Gerry's case, others, grandparents, filled in by demonstrating aspects of God's love that might have been expected of parents.
I can see the glory and grace, then, in Paul's plural. His forefathers, collectively, served the Lord with a pure conscience. Where one fell down, surely, another picked up. Christ the One Who promised to be a Father to Solomon past David's limitations and death once again proved sufficient on the whole. The fuller dispensation of His character sometimes takes generations. Knowing and expecting this can help us look back with more of a wide-angle lens.
My father didn't, but my grandfather did. My biological family didn't, but He provided others to parent me in aspects of His Spirit in which my particular family was not strong. His grace overflows what one single person, or role, or generation can hold.
(3) Looking back with grace frees us from presentism's snobbery and assumptions. In a New Yorker profile from the 1960s, Roger Daltrey commented on how striking the generation gap was in America. The rocker said it wasn't so in Britain. "Our parents spent six years in air-raid shelters while their houses were being blown up over their heads," he said. "They built up a sense of humor. We respect them, and they respect us."
Even without a world war in common, looking back with realistic expectations on our parents and ancestors as we age can be similarly helpful. We begin to realize that the virtues we are cultivating by Christ's grace did not begin and end on the current stage, that people have been striving after His likeness since long before the Internet. We are likewise buttressed against despair as we realize, again with Scripture, that there is nothing new under the sun. Our parents fought similar battles, all the while pundits were simultaneously proclaiming either the inexorable progress of man or the hopelessness of our condition.
(4) Looking back with grace allows us to exchange bitterness for the promise of God. We owe Paul's faithful, inspired quill for another aspect of the benefit of looking back with grace, as he reminds us that honoring our father and mother, and presumably having a similarly charitable attitude toward forefathers and foremothers in their turn, is the only command with a promise. The literal, one-generation payback of not stifled condescension but due honor is connected in the alchemy of the Word with long life.
If the word warily can be used of God's actions with men, it might be used for his apportionment of our days. In Genesis it says that He will not forever strive with fallen man because even the intentions of our hearts are wicked. He thereby limits the span of life that we would not drift too far, and He sent the flood. Sure enough, when He extends Hezekiah's life, the king uses this time to brag to the Babylonians on his blessings. When corrected that this arrogance will cost his children dearly, the complacent King is content that it will be well in his own days.
But, as we learn to look back with grace, to honor our parents for acting as the Lord revealed to them, perhaps our perspective deepens and softens enough that we can make better use of longer time on Earth. As we let go of trying to live our days to come in the flesh, prove a point to those who came before us that we can live life like Frank Sinatra, our way, perhaps He gives us more days to spend to better in and justifying our own ego and justifying our own bitterness in more decades of splenic screed.
(5) Looking back with grace grants us the patient perspective on others' progress in His likeness. How much of Paul's tenderness toward Timothy as he is and not as a clone of the mature Paul, is rooted in Paul's peace with the chosen, slow speed of God's processes? The succeeding verses as Paul grounds Timothy for the work ahead by reminding him what God has planted in Timothy's life through his mother and his grandmother suggest a link between gracious discipleship and a long, loving, forgiving view of the past.
So it is, then, that He has given us generations to look back upon in His Word and to see similarities with our present, relational experience. When those we would influence disappoint us, we can surely find outbursts of the flesh like there is in the Scriptures, and see that God prevailed in their lives, anyway. When those we would influence do make progress, we can look back at the patterns of His work and rejoice in every reminder that He is faithful to finish what He has started.
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