The Christian Life is a Dedicated Life

The following three posts come from a recent sermon on 2 Timothy 2:3-8.

First we see in verses 3 and 4 that the Christian life is a dedicated life. Let’s read those verses together. Paul tells Timothy and us what to expect from being a Christian in verse 3. What word does he use? Hardness! Paul was not seeker sensitive tv evangelist. He didn’t tell Timothy, send me money, touch the screen and all your worries will go away. He tells Timothy that his life will be full of hardship if he’s serious about being a Christian. For Paul it meant a number of things that you and I will probably never suffer. 2 Corinthians 11 talks about his beatings at the hands of the Jews, his shipwrecks, the trouble he faced from his enemies every day, and soon he knew that this hardship would end in death. At this point in Paul’s life he was completely isolated from the outside world, chapter 1:16-17 tell us that Onesiphorus had to search diligently for him when he came to Rome, that, coupled with the fact that later on Paul describes himself the lowest ranked of all Roman prisoners, show us how much hardship Paul was undergoing as he wrote this letter. Timothy was suffering as well. He was living in Ephesus, one of the most sinful and difficult cities in the ancient world, he would have been tempted every day to give up on his faith. He was being attacked from within his church by false teachers and people who said he was too young to lead them.

You and I will probably never suffer life Paul and Timothy did, either in what we suffer from, or how much they make us suffer, but we face hardship as a Christian nonetheless. Maybe it’s the hardship of looking on helplessly while loved ones are sick, maybe it’s the hardship of seeing someone in your family fall away from the Lord. Maybe it’s the hardship of being the only Christian in your workplace. Whatever it is, sometimes, maybe even most of the time, our faith makes our life more complicated. But Paul tells Timothy, and us, that we have to endure this hardship. Why is that?

We have to endure because we are dedicated to Christ. Look at verse 4. Paul tells us that no soldier is entangled in civilian life. The word entangled is the same word used for a braid in a woman’s hair, and that’s a great picture isn’t it. When a girls hair is braided you can’t really tell where one braid begins and the other ends. Paul says we are not to be this way in our relationship with the world, we’re not to get caught up in it. Paul would have had firsthand experience of this, the solider guarding him never left him to go and sell bread at the market, he was dedicated to his post.

One of the hardest, but most rewarding activities is getting my Grandad to talk about the war. It’s hard because he doesn’t want to talk about it. When the war was over he put his medals in a box and got on with his life. But it’s rewarding to get these stories out of him because they illustrate the dedication that Paul was talking about. None of his stories involve him taking some time off to go shopping when the marines were invading Italy, or enjoying a week at the beach when he was in the northern Atlantic or stopping for pictures when he was preparing to invade Japan. Of course he got some leave to go and see his family, but while he was on duty, nothing stood in the way of his dedication. It was actually worse for his brother, who left home in 1939 and didn’t come back once before the war was over in 1945. Why did he do all this? Paul says, ‘to please him who hath chosen him as a soldier.’

Paul isn’t saying that Christians withdraw from the world and live in a monastery, but that we get our priorities the right way around. We live our lives to please not ourselves, but our saviour who enlisted us in the army. If we’re more interested in making money that please Christ, or sports that pleasing Christ, or celeb gossip than pleasing Christ, or our family or our kids’ grades then pleasing Christ, then our priorities are out of order. Paul said he counted all things as loss for the sake of knowing Christ. All things includes good things. There’s nothing wrong with your family being a top priority, but it must be the top priority. It must be put to one side to serve Christ. We must be dedicated soldiers of Him. A dedicated life is a life of loss. A life where we say no to good things so that we may say yes to better things. A life that is dedicated to Christ as our one passion.