2 Timothy 2:8-13
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
October 19, 2025
A decade ago, Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox, the cloud storage service, gave the commencement speech at MIT. He said, “The happiest and most successful people I know don’t just love what they do but are obsessed with [it].” With everything they’ve got, they throw themselves into what matters mightily to them. “They remind me,” he said, “of a dog chasing a tennis ball: Their eyes go a little crazy…and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in their way.” They swim through the coldest water, charge through the thorniest bushes, to get that tennis ball.
Fulfilling your life, Houston noted, is not so much “pushing yourself” as “finding your tennis ball, the thing that pulls you” along and onward, and propels you to pass through many a pain and obstacle.
The Apostle Paul found his tennis ball in serving Jesus and hoped every Christian would as well.
Just before this section of his letter, Paul had been exhorting Timothy to endure the costs of following Jesus – like a good soldier, like an Olympic athlete, like a hard-working farmer. Now it was time to recall the Reason for enduring all that toil and sacrifice: the Person who proved the gain would far exceed the pain. It was time to “remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David”, the God-Man who fulfilled heaven’s beautiful plan, triumphed over evil and saved everyone who would entrust themselves to Him.
Paul claimed Jesus as his good news. He called Him “my gospel, for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal”. Paul endured everything for the One who was his everything. For, to Paul, “knowing Christ” was, he said in his letter to the Philippians, “the surpassing value” of his life, and the blessing he couldn’t keep to himself. Thus, for Paul, knowing Jesus and making Him known was worth “the loss of all things”. For Paul, Jesus was “the good treasure” of which he spoke earlier in this letter, “the pearl of great worth” of which Jesus spoke in a parable whose main character sold all he had to buy it.
Serving Jesus and His unchained “word” or “gospel” meant so much to Paul that he declared, “I endure everything for the sake of the elect” – the “elect” being those whom God destined for “the salvation that is in Christ Jesus” and to whom He sent Paul to serve.
Paul’s acceptance of His hard labors in that high purpose reminds me of the hospital orderly who, while emptying another bedpan of human waste, overheard someone say, “I wouldn’t do that for all the money in the world.” “Neither would I,” she replied with a smile, “but I do it for all the riches I have in Jesus!”
Paul concluded this section of his letter by quoting what most scholars believe is a stanza of a church hymn of the time. The stanza speaks of our choices about following Jesus. It gives us a pair of two-part statements. Each two-part statement consists of two halves, and each of those two halves clarifies the other in a parallel expression of the same truth. The first truth speaks to the reward of being faithful; and the second truth speaks to the consequence of being unfaithful.
The first truth reads, “If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him.” Dying here doesn’t mean losing one’s physical life, but growing dead to self-centeredness and the concern to spare oneself toil and trouble. Dying with Christ and enduring the costs are complementary expressions of how to fulfill Christ’s call to take up one’s cross, deny oneself, and follow His example of self-sacrificing love.
The stanza’s second truth tells us that disowning Christ and being disowned are connected. It reads, “If we deny him, he will deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful.” The initial line of that statement echoes Jesus’ own words: “Whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.” But what are we to make of the next line: “If we are faithless, he remains faithful”? We want to take it as the comforting assurance that, even if we turn away from Christ, He will not turn away from us, for He is faithful in His love independent of our conduct. Certainly Christ is steadfast in His watchful and caring concern for everyone’s well-being. Yet, the logic of the hymn, with its complementary statements, suggests another interpretation. If “we deny him” and “we are faithless” are parallel ways of saying the same thing, then “He will deny us” and “He remains faithful” are also parallel ways of saying the same thing: namely, that He will stay true to His cautionary word about infidelity as much as to His comforting word about divine generosity. In other words, He will remain faithful both to the warnings He gave and to the offers of grace He gave. Because He “cannot deny himself” – that is, betray His true character – He will deny us if we deny Him, as He said He would. Due to His perfect integrity, He cannot act contrary to Himself by failing to fulfill any of His promises, whether they be those of blessing or those of judgment.
At any rate, to follow Jesus is to remain true to the One who remains ever true to us – and to Himself. That means that, if we live faithfully, we will remain true to the One who is our everything, and we will go to great lengths and endure many things to serve Him.
Consider hospital CEO Bill Adams. One day a woman whose mother had just died informed him that, at some point in her mother’s stay in the hospital, her wedding ring had gone missing. The daughter then told Bill that, unaware of that fact, her father had said he wanted, out of gratitude for fifty years of love-filled marriage, to re-enact his placing her wedding ring on her finger before they closed the casket. So the daughter begged Bill to help her find her mother’s missing ring.
Touched by her request, Bill promised that he himself would move heaven and earth to locate it. He right away visited the ward where the mother had spent her final days. The staff told him she’d lost a lot of weight and the ring could have easily slipped off her finger at any time. They’d looked on the floor, under the bed, in every corner of the room and in the bathroom; but hadn’t come across it. Bill was dejected, but refused to admit defeat. Suddenly, an idea struck him. He jumped up, scampered down into the hospital basement and ran over to the bin at the bottom of the laundry chute. He then dove into it to dig around through all those wet, dirty, infected sheets and gowns – until, at last, he found the ring.
Bill said that handing it over to the daughter and seeing her face light up was well worth the risks he took and the yucky-ness he endured.
We who follow Jesus have a purpose. We are to look to return the lost to the Person to whom the lost belong – and to bear in mind that every human being belongs to the God who created them out of love and endured the loss of his only Son for their sake.
Let us, to fulfill our purpose, endure everything for the One who has become our everything and who longs to become everything for everyone!
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