¹¹ And God chose me to be a preacher, an apostle, and a teacher of this Good News.

¹² That is why I am suffering here in prison. But I am not ashamed of it, for I know the one in whom I trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until the day of his return.

¹³ Hold on to the pattern of wholesome teaching you learned from me—a pattern shaped by the faith and love that you have in Christ Jesus. ¹⁴ Through the power of the Holy Spirit who lives within us, carefully guard the precious truth that has been entrusted to you.

2 Timothy 1:11-14

Dear God, I wonder what happened to Timothy. He was a young leader. Did he live to be an old leader? I just searched the Internet and didn’t find an answer. I’m going to assume he continued to teach, grow, and lead. I wonder how often he referred back to these letters from Paul. What did he use as his “scripture” when it came to the “pattern of wholesome teaching” he learned from Paul? I’ll bet he read these letters a lot, and then offered them to his people and ultimately the church at large since we have them to this day as our Bible.

There is no way I can appreciate what it must have been like for all of the early church to develop theologically. They didn’t have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They needed them so those men wrote them, but they didn’t have them at first. All they really had was the Jewish faith and then the knowledge Jesus was the Messiah who had lived, died, resurrected, and ascended back into heaven. Even thinking about it now seems overwhelming. “Truth” was being passed through oral history. There must have been a lot of heresy. We get into heresy now with our own interpretations or misinterpretations of scripture and what we want it to say. Prosperity Gospel, for example, is just bad teaching out of scripture, but we want to hear it so we accept it.

Father, I don’t know where all of this is going as far as this prayer time this morning, but it’s a reminder of how precarious the early church was, how dependent it was on your Holy Spirit, and what a great thing Paul and the others did, even from prison (where Paul was when he wrote this particular letter), to make sure Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension were not just a blip in human history, but a turning point for the whole world. Now, I have a responsibility to do my part to be part of that ripple through time and then worship in eternity. Help me to be exactly who you need me to be for your glory’s sake.

I pray this in Jesus and with your Holy Spirit,

Amen