Faith as a Family Tradition

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois and thy mother Eunice; and Iam persuaded that in thee also. A.V.

Getting a reminiscence of the undissembled faith in thee, faith which resided first in thy grandmother Lois and thy mother Eunice; yes, and I am sure that it doth so in thee too.

‘Tat I may be filled with joy.’ This was the wish, 2 Tim. i. the ‘homesick yearning, with which he thought of 5- seeing Timothy again; a beautifully human longing, * canny which the surest foreview of the coming heaven and tipo the eternal reunion there did not annul — taking from the eager heart indeed all sadness of despair, but only quickening, deepening, glorifying the wish for another interview on earth. And here we gather that the wish had in it not only the thought of simply seeing that dear face again, but of seeing in it the light of the Lord, the look of faith, the solemn brightness which means that the living Christ is indeed (Eph. iii. 17) ‘in residence in the heart, by faith.’

This I take to be the connexion of the words here, where St. Paul calls up the fact that Timothy had indeed believed, had received Christ with ‘undissembled faith,’ a reliance entirely genuine, and that in that faith he had lived to Him and overcome the world.

5.
Faith,

Holy
Memories.

This was a very ancient watchword with St. Paul. Who that has entered into the inner heart of his writings can ever long separate in thought St. Paul and Faith? We know what he meant by that well-loved word; no mere credence of the head, a bare mental acquiescence in the proof of historical or dogmatic facts, but far rather the trust, the reliance, of the quickened heart. Faith, in the thought of St. Paul, meant to embrace with empty arms Christ Jesus in His fulness. So. that we may describe faith, from the converse point of view, as Christ in His fulness embraced with empty arms. For in the Pauline Gospel faith is no independent saviour, if I may phrase it so; it is no secret i dtself for our deliverance from wrath, and sin, and death. It ‘saves’ only in the sense that it receives the saving Christ. And why, we ask, is He to be received just thus, by this mere reliance of the heart? Because it is precisely such a reception which gives to Him all the glory and leaves to the recipient absolutely none. Faith is the bare, the empty, palm of the mendicant, who possesses nothing but asks everything. Thus and therefore faith is ‘ capacious of Christ,’ alike for pardon, for holiness, and for heaven.

St. Paul thinks of his ‘dear child’ as the man of faith, and therefore as the man of Christ. Therefore, and only so, it will be a sacred joy, even on the threshold of eternity, to see his face again.

Then, thinking thus, his heart travels back into a dear past, antecedent even to Timothy. Years ago, in a strangely unlikely place, in superstitious and violent Lystra, he had found (Acts xvi. 1) the young

Faith as a Family Tradition

Lystrian believer, whose Jewess mother (her name is 2 Tim. i. given us in this verse only) was already ‘a disciple.’ 5- And her mother, the aged Lois, so here we learn, was a disciple too. They must have been ‘in the Lord’ for some years already at that date. For Timothy, when Paul called him out to be his missionary-companion, was of course an adul{, man. But these pious women, the mother and the grandmother, so we safely infer from this same Epistle (iii. 14, 15), had been teaching him the Word of God ‘from early childhood.’ They were very probably ‘original disciples’ (see Acts xxi. 16), fruits, more or less directly, of Pentecost itself; later, in the magnetism of grace, they had been drawn to St. Paul and he to them, so that their names were now among the treasures of his heart.

With what manifest tenderness he recalls them here! How their distinctive character as ‘ believers’ possesses him! He does not dilate on their moral beauty, their fine capacity for the friendship and fellowship of the Gospel; there is no necessity that he should do so : —

‘More need not be told than this;
They believed in Jesus.’

‘Undissembled faith resided in them,’ as in a settled home. And thus Christ filled their hearts; for we have seen that such faith means, in practice, Christ recewed. And thus they came to be for ever a part of the Apostle’s life; blended into it by the common possessiom of the one dear Lord.

And their faith, St. Paul is ‘sure’ of it, ‘resided’ likewise in their child; Christ filled him also. To see him, to see them reproduced in him, above all to see their Lord in him, will indeed be joy to his departing spirit.

O beautiful heredity, where the Lord has so blessed the influence of the holy elder life that its very type is repeated in the younger, so that in a certain sense the son has not faith only but the parent’s faith! So it was with Timothy, so it may be, so it shall be, in the generations of the faithful, even to the end of days.