Teaching Devotions: Passing It On - 2 Timothy 1:14

2 Timothy 1:14           Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you--guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.

In the midst of the present theological wars, it’s very easy to become weary with Church World. We never seem to have any peace because someone or some group somewhere wants things to be different, relevant, and post-modern instead of keeping things sacred, divine, and eternal. I know that I am struggling with this and so are many in the congregation that I serve. Christianity is a hard faith to truly practice and live by in today’s society.

I also find it intriguing that when Paul is writing to Timothy, he is urging him to guard the faith. This is only about 30 years after Christ was crucified and resurrected. With a faith so freshly born and the gospel so newly written, you would think people would be more secure with what they believed. However, it seems that the New Testament Church was also divided and so, to sustain Christ’s Peace, second generation Christians like Timothy had to maintain guardianship over the essential tenets of the new faith.

I heard a pastor once preach that if no one in the present generation shared the faith or spread the gospel, then within four generations Christianity would die. I don’t know if that’s true because it’s never been truly tested, but it does lay an onus on every Christian to pass on the faith to the next generation. What makes it all the harder is that we have to do this on Christ’s terms, and not our own.

So today the challenge is this: to whom, in the next generation, have we shared our Faith?

Prayer:                        Lord Jesus, sometimes we forget that the Christian faith is not a private or personal matter. You called upon Your followers everywhere and in every time to go out into the world to share the Gospel. Forgive us if we have failed to live up to that challenge. Help us, in the life time that we have left, to faithfully share Your Good News with the upcoming generations. In Your Holy Name, we pray. Amen.

John Stuart is currently the pastor of Erin Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. If you would like to comment or ask questions of today’s message, please send him an email to pastor@erinpresbyterian.org.

Today’s image is one of John’s latest Psalm drawings. It depicts a verse of Psalm 102. If you would like to view a larger version of the drawing, please visit the following link:

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5292/5519117740_cf1a7fa46f_b.jpg