If you have your Bibles with you and want to open up to 2 Timothy 4:6. It is a short couple of verses today. As you know, we have been going through the core values of worship, discipleship, outreach, and community. As I mentioned the last few weeks, we are winding down on those core values at least from the preaching aspect of it. In the summer, we will be kicking off a new summer series. Today, what I would like to do is give one more last look at this value of discipleship. Specifically, what it means to finish strong as a disciple. This idea of discipleship is not an end in itself but really a means to an end, a means to finishing strong so that by the time we get to the end of our life, the last years, like the apostle Paul, we too will be able to say that we fought the good fight, that we finished the race, and that we kept the faith. That is what we are going to look at today.
A little bit of background on this second letter to Timothy. This is the second letter to Timothy obviously, and it was written from prison in Rome where Paul spent the remaining years. It was during the time of the Roman Emperor Nero about A.D. 64 where an intense persecution came out against the Christians and Paul was caught up in that. He was arrested and taken off to Rome into a prison. Although this is believed to be his second imprisonment in Rome, the second imprisonment was a little bit more intense than the first. The first imprisonment was really considered a house arrest where Paul had a lot of freedom to kind of move around and even have a lot of visitors. This second imprisonment was a little bit more intense. He was actually in a dungeon and couldn’t see a lot of visitors. He knew that he wasn’t get out of this imprisonment alive. He knew that he was facing the executioners. That is kind of the setting there. He writes this letter to Timothy and asks Timothy to come visit him if he can and to bring his cloak and to bring his scrolls and his parchments that he would like to read. He also writes in the first few chapters an encouragement to Timothy to remain faithful to the word and to remain faithful to the truth in spite of all the opposition that is coming against them and in spite of all the false teachings of what they call the Gnostics and different people that try to twist the gospel. He is encouraging Timothy to remain true to the faith. So that is the setting. We are going to read through these four verses here and get a little bit of a feel for it before we go back and highlight a few.
2 Timothy 4:6 “For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.” Again, we have Paul sitting here in his death cell basically reflecting on his life. I suspect when he was reflecting on his life, he was reflecting on both the good and the not so good aspect of his life. If you have read the Bible and especially if you have looked at the book of Acts, you see the story of Paul who was actually at that time Saul. He was on the road to Damascus, and he was in the process of going after Christians, trying to murder Christians. It was in the middle of that situation where God got ahold of him, yanked him off of his horse, blinded him for three days, and he got a fresh revelation from God which came out of that experience with his whole life completely turned around now focusing on spreading the thing that he previously had tried to stop and that is this new thing called Christianity. So Paul is reflecting on his life and he is thinking about how his life went and that sort of thing. Out of that, he begins to make a few interesting statements. He starts out by saying “For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure.” This idea of drink offering sounds a little bit strange, but you may recall last week I think it was, when we looked at the book of Romans, Paul used similar sacrificial imagery. He talked about that we are all called to be living sacrifices. I believe that Paul saw himself as he lived his life and he faced all these different persecutions and these hardships in life that he was a living sacrifice. But again, now he is at the end of his life. Now it is not just sacrifice in his life. It is actually the extreme sacrifice of giving his life blood over to Jesus. Really that is what is considered a drink offering. It is the idea that before the lamb or animal was executed a glass of wine would be poured over this animal before it was executed. It is basically Paul giving the image he has lived a life of sacrifice and now he is taking the extreme sacrifice where he is giving over his lifeblood.
So he clearly knows, again, that he is at the end of his life. He is getting close to, as it says, his departure. The departure is an interesting word here. It is kind of a poetic word because really the underlying idea of departure is the sense of a sailing ship that lifts up the anchor and prepares to make its journey throughout the sea. Paul is possibly giving this seafaring-type imagery but also the word departure can also have the sense of a taking down of a tent such as in a military camp. You might recall that in the book of Corinthians Paul refers to the body as kind of a heavenly tent. When that body is destroyed that body will be replaced with a new glorified body. We don’t know exactly what he means here with departure. He could be referring to this sailboat going away or he could be referring to the taking down of a tent, but the bottom line is he knows that he is going to die and that he is in his last few days of life.
But then he gets to that one line that probably is the line that should give inspiration to all of us. He says “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” If you are familiar with Paul’s writings, you know that Paul would often use this athletic type of imagery. Imagery that would be found within the context of a gymnasium or an arena or Olympic stadium. That is really what he is giving here. The idea of I have fought the good fight could actually mean that he could have in view like either a boxing match or possibly a wrestling match that was taking place during that particular time. He is saying I fought good in this arena. When we think about Paul and when we even think about our own lives, we know that Paul didn’t always fight a good fight. I think if you look at some of his letters, it looks like he might have even hit below the belt once or twice, but for the long haul, you know, Paul could probably say that over his entire life he fought a really good fight. It is interesting, too, this word “good” given in its particular context has another meaning. It is the idea that it is an external good that reflects an inward good. In the context of actually an athletic event, it is kind of like an external beauty in motion like an athlete that performs very well or really somebody who gives their best. What do we say? We say good job or good game or we say that person put their heart into that event. What we are saying is there is a match between the external thing and the internal thing, the drive, the determination that was going on inside. Really, that is what Paul is saying. He says I put on a good fight. In other words, the battle that I fought is actually consistent with who I am inside. I fought a good, clean fight is what he is saying. In other words, what he is saying is I fought a fight of integrity. When you think of integrity you think of high, moral, principles, ethical principles, which is basically true. Adherence to those things. But it also has a sense of wholeness. Really I think that is the more complete definition. It has to deal with a wholeness or a completeness. It is where we get the word integer from which is the idea of a whole number. What Paul is saying is that we need this spiritual integrity where we have this outside action, this external thing that matches what is going on inside of us.
When we look at it in the context again of a fight, Christians are in a fight whether we know it or not, whether we seem like we are participating, or realize we are participating in it, we are all fighting for our faith or we should be. If we are not facing obstacles in the world then maybe we have to question whether or not we are really in the arena. Because when you are out in the world and you are trying to live the Christian life, you are constantly going to be fighting battles. You are going to be fighting for your children, trying to protect your children. You are going to be fighting for your faith. You are going to be fighting just for the right to have an opinion in the modern arena of culture. It is funny how lately it seems like people that don’t agree with the Bible are able to freely give their opinion, but when somebody gives an opinion that lines up with the Bible that becomes a hate thing. Something is not right there. That is an indication that we are in a spiritual battle. We are to fight a good, clean fight. The reason we are supposed to fight a good, clean fight is because we have the spirit of God in us, but really, it is because the world fights so dirty. I spent over 20 years in the business world before I became a pastor and one thing that I do not miss about the business world is how dirty sometimes they fought. How they would fight to get a contract, to get a sale, to get a promotion. It is a tough, tough thing for a Christian to be a business person in the world today. It is very tough. What happens in the business world, even though people have a conscience, they don’t always work in accordance with it. It is like it is relative integrity. I will do something according to my conscience as long as it fits my particular needs. If it doesn’t fit my needs, I won’t go that way. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t work and sometimes people get fired. A Christian, on the other hand, never has to worry about that as long as they are operating out of integrity, as long as they are fighting the good fight. There is a proverb that speaks of this that says “The man of integrity walks securely, but he who takes crooked paths will be found out.” What we are not talking about here is the idea of being some sort of a doormat allowing people to walk over you. What we are talking about is making sure that your talk matches your walk. The things that you talk come from your heart and that matches your actions in the world. So often it does not. We have people here that come to church on Sunday, attend Bible studies, and attend home groups. They get all this good information that they take in and it never reaches their hearts. When they leave church and they go back into the business world or the real world, or the schools, they completely have forgotten those things so their talk doesn’t match their walk. God wants to make us whole. God wants to make us complete, so God will constantly be testing our integrity all through life to make sure that we continue to fight the good fight. God’s goal, God’s purpose is to align us with his will and to line up the external us with the internal thing that is happening within us or that already has happened within us so that when we get to the end of that race we can say that we finished the race strong and that we finished it with integrity. That is the first thing I want to think about, fighting the good fight.
The next thing I want to consider is this whole idea of simply finishing the race. He goes on and says “I fought the good fight, I have finished the race.” Obviously you can’t finish strong unless you finish the race. Paul we know finished the race. The idea of race here, just to back up a little bit, is very similar to our idea of a track at an athletic field. Paul is saying I ran that race on that track and in spite of all the hardships, in spite of all the people that abandoned me, in spite of all the persecutions that I experienced, I finished that race and I got to the end. We know that there are Christians today that don’t finish the race for whatever reason. I think about people who actually started out very strong in their walk. We get people that leave the baptistery and are all excited. I am going to get into Bible studies. I am going to get into a home group. I am going to serve out in the community. I am going to attend every event that happens in the church. They are really into all this stuff. What happens is after a number of weeks, months, possibly a few years, they experience ministry burnout. A lot of times they fall away from their faith and you never see them again. You say whatever happened to that person? They were so busy and they were so active. What happens is that they made the mistake of seeing the Christian journey more as a sprint than a marathon. Really, the Christian journey is a marathon. It is not a sprint. If you try to make it a sprint, if you try to go too hard too fast, what happens is you will experience burnout. I believe that is why a lot of people don’t finish the race. Then you have some people who start out strong. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago when I talked about the idea of a kairos moment, they get to a point where they hit a severe life trial in their faith. They are going along fine and hit this trial. They fall into that pit and they can’t get out of that pit and they just go around and around in that pit and they can’t get out. Or they get out and instead of going forward and using that kairos moment as a learning lesson, they go backwards in their faith and so they never finish the race.
This is where I have to pick on the 50 and older crowd, which includes me. There are people who get to a certain age and they say it’s time to slow down. I’m getting close to retirement. I’m in retirement years. I just think it is time to slow down, hit that cruise control, and just cruise on down, or possibly even pull back because I have entitlement. I’m retired now so my time is my time. The problem is they retire from the work world, but there is nothing in the Bible that says retire from the church. I can’t find that. Retirement is something that is made up by the financial planners to sell those Roth IRAs and those 401Ks and stuff like that. There is nothing in the Bible that talks about retirement. With few exceptions. Granted there are health exceptions. But even people with health problems can contribute something. Really, your retirement years should be the years of greatest contribution into the church because you have that time available to do it. It is a time where you actually take all those life lessons, all that wisdom, all those skills that you have learned and you take it and you deposit it into somebody else’s life. We are always good about financial planning and planning for after we die. You know who is going to get all of our bank deposits and our IRA. We should be worried about who is going to get our life deposits. Who is going to get all the skills, all the wisdom, and everything that we learn over 60, 70, 80 years of life. Are we just going to let those go away? Preserve our financial assets and let all those things go away. We can’t. What we see in Paul is all the way up to his deathbed he is still writing a letter to Timothy instructing him on how to lead the church because he wants to know no matter whether he is alive or dead that church is going to stay strong. In other words, Paul is not worried about him just finishing strong. He is passing on his life skills, his knowledge, and his wisdom so that the people that come behind him will also finish strong. The idea again is that if you are going to finish strong, you have to make sure that you finish the race.
The third thing I want to look at is the whole idea of keeping the faith. He says “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” Think about this idea of kept. It has the underlying idea of something being held securely by someone who is in steward of some assets or whatever. Just holding onto something tight. I thought of the idea of a baton during a relay race. The worst thing to see happen in the Olympics is when somebody drops that baton. It’s like ugh. But really that is what Paul is saying here. Don’t drop that baton. Hold on to that deposit of faith. Hold on to all those beliefs that you have been given. That have been passed down to you to hold on to. The core teachings of the faith. Hold on to those things really tightly because we know from Paul’s first letter to Timothy, people weren’t holding on to the faith. People were abandoning the faith. There is a passage I think in 1:19 or something and it talks about two guys whose faith was actually shipwrecked. He referred to it as shipwrecked. There is one part that talks about a person who abandoned the faith who chased after Satan. All these people were abandoning the faith. They were letting go of the baton. Paul is saying I held on to that. I kept that thing very securely. I didn’t let it go. He expects the church to do the same thing. When we think about the universal church that includes all Christians, I say generally speaking the church has held on to the faith pretty well. In spite of all the differences, in spite of all the denominations, in spite of all our disagreements, generally speaking, the core teachings, the core traditions of the gospel, the oneness of God, the deity of Christ, the resurrection, salvation by faith, those types of things, they have been able to pass those along pretty well. Really those are the essentials that we talk about. Those are important to hold on to. So by holding on to those things tightly, the church is able to continue. Sure, we have had some churches shut down all across the world. It seems like the churches are shrinking, especially in America. What is happening is the church is just getting rid of a lot of the dead wood. What I think is happening given the culture we are coming into, what is going to be sparked here soon is a revival. I think what God is doing is preparing America for some sort of a new revival that is going to have to happen within this culture for the church to keep going. It has to happen. It is going to happen by holding true to those core truths. Especially the Christ-centeredness of the church. It is not just a church thing. What is true for the church is true for the individuals. The church is just simply the sum of a bunch of individual Christians. If you have a weak Christian, it is going to reflect on the entire church, so the Christians have to be strong. It means they have to know the word of God. I think when I look back over the eight months or so we have been going through these core values, we have had a lot of new interest in studying the word of God that has been very impressive. It has been very good, but I also noticed the last few weeks that interest is kind of waning a little bit. The class attendance is going down and down and down. I think the main reason is we are getting close to the summer months or possibly that maybe we tried to push too much too fast and maybe we need to pace ourselves a little bit more. I can’t emphasize enough the need to have a church full of people that are grounded in the faith, the core practices of the church. It only comes through Bible study. Again, we can get a lot from a Sunday sermon or a small group or that sort of stuff, but there is nothing that compares to the wisdom and the knowledge that can come through studying God’s word in the context of community where you are discussing and wrestling between each other about what is the meaning here? What is going on here? What you find out is after a while you become very well versed in the Bible. You become very well versed in just the basic beliefs. So when you go out into the world and you encounter all those things that come against you like the latest book from Oprah or somebody or the latest New Age book or The Secret or something comes against you or you read something on the internet or you hear something at work that is contrary to what you believe, you don’t panic, you don’t freak out. You just say my faith is secure. I don’t have to worry about that. I don’t have to worry about being sucked into one of those things. Again, your faith is secure. When you have that secure faith, when you have kept the faith, you are going to be able to finish strong. When you finish strong, when you run the race, when you fight the good fight, when you keep the faith, you have something waiting for you at the end. That is what Paul speaks of.
He speaks of the idea that there is a righteous judge waiting at the end to hand off the victor’s crown. He says “Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day – not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing.” It is interesting that this word crown is where we get the word stephanos which is actually where we get the name Stephen, Steve, which actually means crown of righteousness. Steve’s got a crown of righteousness. Glory he does. It means the victor’s crown. It is a great symbolism here because what he is saying is that the Lord is standing there ready to receive all those who fought the good fight, ran the race, and kept the faith with this crown. The victor’s crown back then would be made of oak leaves or ivy or whatever and hand it off to this person. It is like Paul is coming to this finish line waiting for this judge to hand him this crown. Even the idea of judge, Paul uses the word judge in a variety of context. Oftentimes he uses it in a form of a judicial context, a judicial judge. But here what he is talking about is more in the sense of an umpire. Somebody who is waiting at the end or even a judge in some sort of an athletic event that is sitting there watching and ready to again give that victor’s crown. We know that that judge is good. We know that that judge is righteous. That judge is going to be fair when we cross that finish line. It doesn’t just relate to Paul. It relates to all those who long for his appearing. The idea of long for his appearing is the sense that in the Greek culture they would use this word to describe the manifestation of all the Greek gods. Here it describes the manifestation of Christ as he comes back to get his children. As he comes back home. As a second coming of Christ. When he comes in to take home his children. As he comes back to take back the children again who have fought the good fight, who ran the race, and have kept the faith.
In closing, I was trying to think of an illustration like a person or something that would just kind of encapsulate this whole idea here of finishing strong. The person I came up with is an illustration I have used before, a person by the name of Eric Liddell. Some of you may know the name. Some of you may not. I have used the illustration before. Eric Liddell was a Christian but he was also a runner. He was a very good runner. His life was chronicled in the movie Chariots of Fire, a 1981 movie, which is probably one of my favorite movies, which shows how old I am. It was a great movie and won an Academy Award. It chronicled the life of Eric Liddell, the athlete and the Christian, more emphasis on the life as an athlete and as a runner. Eric Liddell was trying out for the 1924 Olympics. He was scheduled to run the 100-meter race but because the qualifying heats were on a Sunday, he refused to run. It had this Olympic committee in an uproar and they didn’t know what to do. Finally, what they had to do was say you are disqualified. You are going to run the 400 meter, which was really his second-best event. As the story goes and he got up to the starting line and an American came up to him and handed him a piece of paper and on that piece of paper it simply had a scripture verse from 1 Samuel. It said “Those who honor God, I will honor.” As the story goes, he went on not only to win the race but win it in a record time of 47.6 seconds for a 400 meter at that time was record and became a national hero overnight. But Eric Liddell knew that just because that race was over, his Christian race was just beginning because instead of sticking around Scotland to just bask in the glory and the fame, he went on to the Chinese mission field where he spent the remains of his life in an internment camp until he finally died in 1945. That is the brief story of Eric Liddell. What I am showing now is a movie clip from the movie “Chariots of Fire”. To me, it not only shows Eric Liddell and his desire to finish strong, but to me it is a good picture of what should be a Christian’s desire and determination to finish strong. (Movie clip played.)
I don’t know if you picked up the last line there by the coach. He said “It might have not been the prettiest quarter, but it certainly was the bravest.” We are not called to run the race in a pretty way, in a spectacular way, but we are called to run the Christian race in a brave way. We are called again to fight the fight. To be willing to enter that ring and to participate in a way that demonstrates integrity. That demonstrates a way of fighting that reflects the inner heart, the change that has happened inside of us. We are called to finish the race. In other words, we are not called to start off really fast and then burn ourselves out. We are called to pace ourselves. We are called to know that the Christian journey is not a sprint but a marathon, and we need to be in it for the long haul. We are called to continue, even though we know we are going to face all sorts of trials and all sorts of situations. In fact, we can expect those to come. When we hit those trials, those can be opportunities that push us back and push us out of the race or propels us forward. Finally, we are again called to keep the faith. We are called to take the things that have been passed down generation after generation to us, those core essentials of the faith that have been passed down through the church, to hold on to them tightly like a baton in a relay race and to pass them on to future generations. We know that when we do those three things, when we do those things well, we, like Paul, will receive that victor’s crown. We will be able to know that when we finish that line there will be that righteous judge standing there ready to hand us that stephanos. Ready to hand us that victor’s crown and to all those who rejoice or long for his appearing. Let us pray.
