“1 In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: 2 Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. 3 For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. 5 But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.”
What you see before you is pile of books describing the role of a pastor. We have The Pastor’s Handbook, Hearers and Doers, Shepherding God’s Flock, The Heart of a Servant Leader, Facing Messy Stuff in the Church, Finishing Well, and a host of others. This is an awfully big pile for a job that only requires one day of work a week.
What does a pastor do? Some people expect the pastor to be the moral police. These same people often avoid him as if he were the moral police. Some people expect him to somehow fix what has proven unfixable for years. Some people expect him to answer what is unanswerable in this life. Some people honestly don’t know what a pastor does, but they think it is good to have one around just in case.
What does a pastor do? What did you expect Pastor Sam to do? What did you expect Pastor Rich to do? What did you expect Pastor Bob to do? What did you expect Pastor Dave to do? If you have loved ones in a different church, what do you expect their pastor to do? What do you expect me to do? What does a pastor do?
Well we can’t answer that question in one sermon. We can, however, focus on the most important task of the pastor. The pastor is called to publicly remember the good news. The pastor is called to publicly remember the good news of what God has done and promised. The pastor is called to publicly remember the good news of what Jesus has accomplished. The pastor is called to publicly remember the good news of what the Holy Spirit can do. The pastor is called to publicly remember the good news. That is the claim of this sermon.
We will study this in two points. First: the pastor’s charge. Second: the times in which we live. We see the pastor’s charge in verses 1-2. We see the times in which we live in verses 3-5.
First: the pastor’s charge. The pastor is called to remember the good news in a public fashion. Even as he remembers the good news himself, he is tasked with helping others remember. We are all so prone to forget that God gives us pastors to help us remember. As Paul charged Timothy in verse 1, “In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: preach the Word.”
You can’t help but notice the gravity of this call. Paul wanted Timothy to recognize that this task of reminding others about God was so important that God would hold him accountable. Paul wanted Timothy to recognize that Jesus, who died for sinners, was adamant that this message about the sorrow of sin and the beauty of grace be told and retold.
The one who will judge the living and the dead is determined that people know how they can experience that judgment with tears of joy rather than tears of sorrow. That is why he tasked pastors with publicly remembering the good news. That is why Paul charged Timothy to preach the word.
None of us by nature remembers the good news. We are all prone to forget. You forget that God loves you. You forget that reality in dozens of ways every day. So do I. You forget that the best description of the one in charge of everything in your life is seen in the biography and character of Jesus of Nazareth. You forget that the Lord is your shepherd even as He shepherds you. You are so happy when you do remember. You are so content when you do remember, but you forget and so the apostle says to pastors, “in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: preach the word.”
This word that is to be preached is the good news of God. This word is always good news. Even when it includes bad news, it is for the sake of good news. Even its warnings are included in hopes of joy. Even its rebukes are included for your healing.
Now I have rarely, if ever, done justice this word. Please don’t take my fumbling efforts in this pulpit, in conversation, in leadership, and in all the rest as an approximation of the beauty of the good news of God. It is no challenge to find something wrong with me. The good news in this situation, of course, is that the word does God justice. The best I can do is reveal what God has said.
All of God’s word makes God clear. Turn back to verse 16 of the previous chapter and there you will read that, “all Scripture is God-breathed.”
Scripture is not humanity’s best thoughts about God. This is God’s revelation of Himself. The Scriptures are God’s means of opening Himself up to you. If you are part of reading the New Testament this year, you will be reminded of the good news in 27 different ways. We read the Bible not because good people read the Bible but because it tells us the good news.
The pastor is called to proclaim this good news. He is charged by God to preach this good news. He is called to do it in season and out of season. You see that in verse 2, “Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season.”
There are seasons of remarkable receptivity to the word of God. Consider Pentecost and its immediate aftermath. “Those who accepted Peter’s message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.” Shortly afterwards, Peter and John were arrested for preaching. They escaped, continued preaching, and, “many who heard the message believed; so the number of men who believed grew to about five thousand.”
You can study church history and read about times of rapid growth – times that were definitely “in season”. You can read about how Christianity came to Ireland. You can read about revivals decades and centuries before the Reformation. Even now more Iranians have come to Christ in the past twenty years than in the previous thirteen centuries since Islam came to Iran. There are seasons of remarkable receptivity.
There are also seasons of indifference and lethargy. In some ways, we live in a situation in which the word is out of season. Our time and place has Romans 1 written over too much of it, “they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.”
So what is a pastor to do if he finds himself in a highly receptive time amongst a highly receptive population? Preach the word. What is a pastor to do if he finds himself in a resistant time in the midst of a lethargic population? Preach the word. “Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season.”
The pastor is called to publicly remember the good news of God in order to, in the words of verse 2, “correct, rebuke and encourage.” First, let’s think about correction. Each of us needs correction. If we can’t get large scale agreement on what I just said—that each of us needs correction—then we are just playing games and there are far more enjoyable games to play than playing church. If we are coming into this sanctuary with the thought that we have it all together then we are blind and there is no one more blind than the blind man who thinks he can see.
We all need correction and the word corrects us lovingly. Many of us are so afraid of doing obedience wrong. I’m afraid of doing obedience wrong. Listen to Chris Rice. He gets it right; “like a newborn baby, don’t be afraid to crawl and remember when we walk, sometimes we fall. So fall on Jesus… fall on Jesus and live.” The word corrects with that sort of a spirit.
The word also rebukes. “Correct, rebuke and encourage” as verse 2 puts it. Now rebukes are not bad. If a man is in the gall of sin, he needs a rebuke. David had so blinded himself that he saw nothing wrong with killing a man and taking his wife. Nathan’s rebuke was the strong medicine needed to bring David to the point of saying, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your unfailing love; according to Your great compassion blot out my transgressions.” A rebuke is an act of tough love.
The word also encourages. “Correct, rebuke and encourage,” as verse 2 puts it. A God-fearing woman married to an unbelieving man needs encouragement. She doesn’t need a rebuke for marrying an unbeliever. She already wishes that her marriage were different. She would give anything for her husband to trust Christ. What she needs is encouragement to love her man as God has loved and is loving her.
A man in the midst of cancer needs encouragement. He needs to be reminded that “God is his refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” He needs to be reminded of that because what is happening in his body will provoke any number of questions. Trusting God day to day is difficult. We need encouragement and the word encourages us.
The word will correct. The word will rebuke. The word will encourage. Different situations will require the different medicines of the word. The husband who wants to love his wife well but is afraid to do so because that will require change needs encouragement. The husband who is oblivious to his need to love his wife in practical ways needs correction. The husband who is actively sinning against his wife with no remorse needs rebuke. The pastor is called to give the right medicine at the right time, “with great patience and careful instruction,” as Paul told Timothy.
People are different. Situations are different. What is remarkable is that what is needed by everyone in every situation is the good news of God. We are different people facing different trials, but in the end the dynamics at work are the same. We are sinners who run from grace and resist obedience who instead need to run to grace and walk in obedience. The word is able to meet each of us where we are at and guide is to where God calls us to be. This is why it is imperative that the pastor preach the word.
Now this word isn’t always welcome. We see that in our second point: the times in which we live. There isn’t much that is peculiar about our time. There is clearly a hard push without our culture against Christianity but rejecting the faith is nothing new. You see it all over the book of Acts and all over church history. You might bemoan the immorality in our culture but we who are alive today haven’t invented any new ways of sinning.
I say this in way of introduction to verse 3, “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine.” Paul wasn’t referring to some unique time period that was to come in the first century or the twenty-first century. He was preparing Timothy for the fact that some people will refuse to listen to the good news of God.
When you grasp the beauty of God’s grace, Jesus’ death and resurrection, and the power of the Spirit to change lives you will wonder why anyone would ever bother with anything less. Paul told Timothy that some people would run after anything other than the gospel. As he puts it in verse 3, “to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”
People desperately need to come to the light, but so often these same people resist the light. They love the darkness. The darkness is familiar. It gives the illusion of safety. It allows them to imagine that they are in control. Some people refuse to believe the good news of God and so they believe all sorts of self-destructive ideas. “When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything,” as one wit put it.
Our culture is full of pulpits preaching false gospels. These pulpits are not in churches. The teachers in them want nothing to do with church. Nevertheless, they do preach a gospel. They preach what they consider to be good news. People are desperate for good news, but the good news of God calls them to surrender themselves to Him. Those who don’t want to surrender themselves still crave good news and so they, “gather around themselves a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”
The world has always been filled with people proclaiming and subscribing to self-destructive lies as liberation. “[People] will not be satisfied with a few deceivers,” writes Calvin, “but… desire to have a vast multitude; for, as there is an insatiable longing for those things which are unprofitable and destructive, so the world seeks, on all sides and without end, all the methods that it can contrive and imagine for destroying itself; and the devil has always at hand a sufficiently large number of such teachers as the world desires to have.”
You might have the sense that this world is bent on destroying itself and that the people who live in this culture are self-destructive. That has always been the case. By nature, that is the case for us in this room. That has been the case since Adam and Eve sinned in the garden.
The devil is quite happy to supply as many myths and self-destructive assumptions and teachers to promote them as possible. Now very few of these teachers have any idea that they are being used to destroy lives. They honestly think that they are helping. People who promote immorality believe that they are liberating people even as they teach them ways to become further enslaved. What people need is truth. As Jesus put it, “you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” This is why the pastor is called to, “preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.”
The pastor must continue to publicly remember the good news of God to the church because this desire for self-destructive lies is not alien to our hearts. The best that can be said about Christians is that they know how badly they need to be reminded of the good news of God because they know they are so very prone to forget. Christians know how easily they fall for good news that isn’t really good news and so they continue to listen to the good news of God.
The pastor is called to remind people of God’s good news in an age of rival good news that isn’t good news at all. The myths of the world are destructive. Paul contrasts these lies with “sound doctrine” or “healthy doctrine.” Truth produces spiritual health. Confusion produces spiritual disease. Lies lead to spiritual death.
The pastor is called to teach what is spiritually healthy. To do so he must listen to the good news of God. Paul told Timothy that some would turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths, but you Timothy, “keep your head in all situations.” Other translations render this as, “always be sober-minded.” Other people would crave something different than the good news of God, but the pastor must keep his head about him and keep the main thing the main thing, which we all know is one of the hardest parts of life.
In order to keep his head in all situations, the pastor devotes himself to study. Study isn’t a luxury for a pastor. It is a necessity. Paul was in prison when he wrote this letter to Timothy and he ended it by telling Timothy to bring, “my scrolls, especially the parchments.” In order to remember the good news of God in his own situation and keep his head in that situation, Paul needed to study the word. Timothy would need to do the same. Pastors need to do the same.
Now given that people do not always put up with sound doctrine, as Paul put it in verse 3, there will be trials for the pastor. Elsewhere, Paul referred to these as fightings without and fears within. The good news of God isn’t always welcome and so Paul told Timothy, in verse 5, to endure hardship.
Now you might think the message of God’s love, Jesus’ death and resurrection, and the Spirit’s power to change lives would be universally welcomed, but if you are reading the book of Acts right now as we read through the New Testament, you know that is not the case. The apostles suffered hardship, and such is the lot for the pastor. The good news of God provokes a response and that response isn’t always positive.
Now some of a pastor’s hardships are self-inflicted. Some pastors are too angular. Some are naïve. Some have great zeal but are still growing in knowledge. That list can most likely describe every pastor at different times. The fact remains, however, that even if the pastor were perfect he would encounter hardship. Jesus of Nazareth is all the proof you need. He always said exactly the right words at exactly the right time, and they crucified him.
Given such hostility, the pastor might be tempted to take on a defensive posture and turn the church into a fortress for the saints rather than a hospital for sinners. Paul urged Timothy against this temptation saying, “do the work of an evangelist.”
Yes, the good news of God will provoke all sorts of responses including rejection but that is no reason to keep the good news of God to ourselves. The good news of God might attract people with very messy lives but that is no reason to keep the good news of God to ourselves. The good news of God might attract people that are so different than some of us that a church needs to change in the same way that a family changes when new babies are born but that is no reason to keep the good news of God to ourselves. When Deon Wynia comes to speak on hope and restoration I pray that people with all sorts of messes come and I hope they feel as if they could be a part of us even in their messes. I hope they are changed by the Spirit as I hope I am changed by the Spirit. This is part of doing the work of an evangelist. This is part of publicly remembering the good news of God.
Paul ended this charge to Timothy by reminding him to, “discharge all the duties of your ministry.” The pastor obeys God’s marching orders. The pastor isn’t a spiritual entrepreneur. He is a slave with a master. He has duties he is mandated to discharge. He publicly remember the good news in the presence of the God who made him. He publicly remembers the good news in the presence of Jesus who died for him. He must do as his master commands.
This obedience is what God uses to change lives. You see that in Jesus. Your life was changed because Jesus did what the Father called him to do. Your life was changed because Jesus discharged all the duties of his ministry. Now these duties might not have seemed necessary in our eyes. They didn’t seem necessary to Peter. He rebuked the good news of Jesus’ death. Yet this is what God used to change Peter. This is what God has used to change millions of people.
This public remembrance of the good news of God might not always seem all that essential to you, but this is what God uses to change lives. This good news is what God will use to change your life. The pastor is called to publicly remember the good news of what God has done and promised. The pastor is called to publicly remember the good news of what Jesus has accomplished. The pastor is called to publicly remember the good news of what the Holy Spirit can do. This is what a pastor is called to do. Amen.