1 Timothy 6:20

HOLD FAST!

‘O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust.’

1 Timothy 6:20

St. Paul’s time had nearly run its course, but he could depart in peace if he could be quite sure that according to the Lord’s will the precious ‘deposit’ could be handed on; it was meant for the future as well as for the present; it had in it the gift of power and life for all generations; it was meant for Spain, which he had hoped to reach; it was the secret of happiness for ‘barbarous Britain’; but it could not reach them unless by faithful hands, as careful as his own; it was received and guarded in all its entirety and handed on undimmed and undiminished and unaltered, to be the living spring and force of the generations which were yet to come.

I want to look at four or five truths in this sacred treasure, denied, and still worse, misrepresented, to-day, which I am certain St. Paul would tell us to hold fast to with all our force of faith and hope and love.

I. And the first is—the gospel of the love of God.—Owing to local causes in our branch of the Church, men are apt to-day, when they hear of Catholic truth, to think of some point of ceremonial or ritual; but we do well to remind ourselves that, important as all those things are in their way, St. Paul would have meant by the Catholic Faith something which would go back far beyond any ceremonial, to what was or was not taking place in the heart of God.

II. And that brings me to the second truth: How are we in effect to be sure of this?—It is impossible to take one truth and leave out another of the Catholic Faith; it is the one fatal thing to do. You can defend that faith as a whole; I defy you to defend it in fragments; and the second great truth of the Catholic Faith which fits into the first, and makes it possible to believe the first, is that ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life,’ or, as St. Paul in his four undisputed Epistles says: ‘God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law,’ and that this Son, ‘though He was rich, yet for our sakes became poor,’ that ‘He was declared to be the Son of God with power,’ and that ‘through Him were all things.’ Now you will understand why I lay stress on these passages and quote them again to you, familiar as they are: it is because we have to uphold that faith to-day in opposition to a counterfeit of it, proclaimed by earnest and good men, but which is indeed ‘a different gospel.’ ‘Jesus is God; so are we’—is the modern counterfeit. I have reason to know that its similarity to the old Gospel is deceiving not a few. Is it a true description of the Gospel of St. Paul or St. John to say ‘Jesus is God; so are we’? Is it not our faith that Jesus Christ was in an absolutely unique way the revelation of the Father, that it would be nothing but the most terrible blasphemy for one of us to say, ‘He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father’?

III. And that brings me, in the third place, to the nature of evil.—Is the devil only a vacuum? as asserted by some of the prophets of the so-called New Theology to-day. You will make the most awful mistake of your lives if you are persuaded into thinking that he is. The Catholic Church is committed to very few details of eschatology, and has never laid down that any one person is irretrievably lost; but what the Church is committed to, while it holds the Bible in its hands, is that evil is not an undeveloped form of good, but the contrary of good; that when God looked down upon His fair Creation, and saw the tares among the wheat, He said, ‘An enemy hath done this’; and that instead of some rose-water gospel by which good is going to blossom out of evil, in the trenchant words of Browning:—

There’s a battle to fight

E’er the guerdon be gained,

The reward of it all!

IV. But that brings us right into the heart of the fourth great truth of the Catholic faith—the Gospel of the forgiveness of sins. It is not enough to look upon the Atonement as an At-one-ment with God, worked by the melting of the human heart by the self-sacrifice of Calvary; and yet that is, so far as it is possible to put it into words, the vague Gospel of the Atonement as put before us in some quarters to-day. God forbid that we should deny the extreme difficulty of every theory of the Atonement which has been put forward, but we are not saved by any theory of the Atonement, but by the fact of it, and the fact of it must be preached by us in a way to satisfy the language of the New Testament. ‘The Son of Man is come to give His life a ransom for many.’ ‘Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world.’ ‘The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin.’

V. The last great truth on which I shall speak is ‘The Gospel of the Empty Tomb.’—We are face to face every day with dying people; they look up into our faces with their dying eyes and ask: ‘Is death the end?’ ‘May I believe that I am going anywhere?’ ‘Are you sure that there is a heaven?’ And I know not what to answer unless Jesus really died and rose again. It is not enough to believe in some vague apparition, if the sacred body lay dead in the tomb, and con his grave the Syrian stars look down.’ The Apostles believed that the tomb was empty, that He really rose from the dead, that His Easter cry was, ‘I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore. Amen. And have the keys of hell and of death.’ And it is this faith, oh Timothy of to-day, that I would have you hold fast for the comfort of the world.

Bishop A. F. Winnington-Ingram.

(SECOND OUTLINE)

TIMOTHYS LIFE AND MISSION

The text comes to us in one of the Epistles written by St. Paul to his tried friend and companion Timothy, and what do we know about that apostolic man?

I. His infancy.—He was the son, like the great St. Augustine, of a religious mother. It is a very familiar and a very charming picture, that of Timothy at his mother’s knee learning his first lessons in the Book of Life. But we ought not to think only of the grace and the tenderness of this little vignette of an old-world family party. See rather what it has to teach us.

(a) It is the right and the duty of parents to instil into their children that fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom.

(b) The ancient Hebrew Scriptures are able to make men wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

II. His ordination.—Timothy became the friend and the companion of St. Paul, and finally he was selected to be one of the great officers of the Church, or, as we say, he was ordained. It is important to recall the text which tells us about that fact to your memory. ‘Neglect,’ the Apostle says, ‘neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery’; and in another notable passage which we may couple with this—whether it refers to the same incident or to that later time when he was specially set in charge of the Church of Ephesus—St. Paul says, ‘Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands.’ Well, there you have first of all the prophet, the inspired layman, the representative of the Church whose voice was the voice of God, and through whom the Holy Ghost spoke, saying, ‘Separate unto Me this man or that for the work of My ministry.’ Prophecy, in the narrower sense of the word at any rate, has ceased, but in the place of the prophets stand all good Christian people. It has always been their part, and should be more emphatically and confessedly their part to bear their testimony. And then we have the solemn imposition of hands by those who were already priests and by the Apostle himself, and they also were witnesses and judges, expert judges, we might say, because they had been themselves leaders, and therefore knew the qualities which a good leader ought to possess, and, by the laying on of their hands, they ratified and confirmed the voice of the laity, using the authority committed to them for that purpose. That has been the method followed by the Church from that day to this. But those priests and that Apostle who ordained St. Timothy were something more than witnesses; they bestowed also a gift, which, like all God’s gifts, is not a blessing only, but a high and sacred responsibility. He who receives it must not let it sleep. He must stir it up, use it to the utmost, extract from it every drop of the rich possibilities with which it is stored.

III. His work.—What is it that divides the Church and therefore weakens it when it ought to be marching along as one body, conquering and to conquer, against all the evils that afflict the world? There are vice, drink, and lust and hatred and covetousness, those four sworn enemies of the human race which stand between man and his God, between man and his chance of earthly happiness. That ought to unite us all in a great holy war. The reason why Timothy was sent to Ephesus was that the Church there was torn by idle and profane questions. Timothy was despatched to that scene of contention not to plunge joyously into the fray, but to preach that there is one God and one Mediator between God and man. In that simple Gospel St. Paul knew that there was grace and mercy and peace.

—Rev. Canon Bigg.

(THIRD OUTLINE)

THE SACRED TRUST

We, who by our presence here proclaim our adherence to those Christian truths which we believe to be the expression of the teaching of our Church, are possessors of a glorious inheritance—an inheritance which may well call upon us to realise our responsibility, lest we should fail in keeping ‘that which has been committed to our trust.’

I. Great fundamental doctrines.—It may be doubted whether even those who call themselves Christians are always mindful of the great fundamental doctrines. A careful examination will show that they embraced the following important truths:—

(a) The supremacy and sufficiency of the Word of God as the guide in matters of faith.

(b) The total and absolute depravity of human nature.

(c) The Incarnation and the Atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ as the sole means of our redemption.

(d) Justification by faith only. Good works are the result and not the means of salvation.

(e) Conversion, or the personal and definite appropriation of the work of Christ, involving the turning away from sin, and the clear and conscious acceptance of Christ’s service.

(f) Sanctification, or the growth in holiness by the power of the Holy Spirit.

II. It cannot be said that these are new truths.—They have been written plainly in the formularies of our Church, but they have been allowed to become forgotten, or buried almost out of sight. But now they are proclaimed with a new earnestness and enthusiasm. The absolute necessity of a personal as opposed to a formal and mechanical religion is preached with an irresistible force and power.

III. We must maintain these principles.—From these we dare not swerve or shrink. To do so would be fatal. Here is ‘that which is committed to our trust.’ Let us strive to keep it. Steadfast in the faith, definite in doctrine, active in service, who is there amongst us who believes that we can fail? God grant that in these perilous times we may have grace given us to hold fast and to persevere, so that we may in these days kindle again the fervour and ardour of olden times, and by the vitality of the principles which are so precious to us, as well as by the self-sacrifice and self-devotion of our service, show that we are determined to keep that which is committed to our trust!

—Rev. Prebendary Kitto.