A Call to Holy Courage
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. For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God. A.V.
For which reason I remind thee to fan into flame the grace-gift of God which is in thee through the laying-on of my hands. For God did not give us a Spirit of cowardice, but of power, and love, and discipline. So be not thou ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me His prisoner; but suffer with the suffering Gospel, according to the power of God.
Tue Apostle approaches the special needs of his 2 Tim. i. ‘dear child.’ He has told him of his love, of his 6-8.
- tender memory, of his tears, of his ‘homesick yearning’ for yet another sight of him on earth. But the
main purport, the solemn burthen of the Letter,
cannot be satisfied thus; he must come to Timothy’s
call and his sacred duty, and in view of it he must
speak of Timothy’s weakness and of his strength.
In our prefatory readings we saw enough of the Timothy in character of Timothy, as it is sketched for us by face of Duty. narratives and letters, to understand every word here and its special point. St. Paul is writing toa man of the gentlest and most sensitive spirit, one to whom at the best of times difficult duty was a formidable load, and who was now about to suffer a deep bereavement, to face a hostile world alone, and to His Ordination. try to do his pastoral duty still. Timothy would be tremendously tempted to yield to the ‘cowardice’ which fails and sinks in prospect of the evil hour. The enemy of his soul, and of his cause, would whisper to his sick heart the hopelessness, the futility, of the struggle. The terrible world would seem indescribably hard to meet without succumbing to the ‘shame’ attaching to a seemingly lost and certainly hated cause, and to a leader utterly discredited.
What should he do? Where in his bewilderment should he turn for courage, and for the power to labour on? The Apostle takes a method perfectly practical; he directs him to a concrete fact, an event not only of his inner but of his outward life; he reminds him of the laying of his own hands on Timothy’s head and of the spiritual import and issue of that act. We cannot reasonably doubt the exact reference here; it is to Timothy’s Ordination to the ministerial office. Turning to the First Epistle (1 Tim. iv. 14) we find a manifestly illustrative passage. There he is similarly reminded of a ‘grace-gift,’ lodged in him ‘through prophecy,’ that is to say, through inspired preaching, ‘with laying on of the hands of the Eldership,’ the representatives of the ministry of the Church. We reasonably assume in the two passages a reference to the same occasion, having regard to the extremely similar contexts, in each of which occurs an appeal to Timothy to use his ‘grace-gift’ (charisma), which is connected, in
. each instance, with a laying-on of hands. And we
gather that the complete account of that memorable
A Call to Holy Courage
hour was that the Apostle, perhaps at Lystra, perhaps 2 Tim. i. at Ephesus, had called around him a circle of pres- 6-8. byters; that their hands with his had been laid on
the young designated pastor, and that a ‘ prophet’
of the Church, perhaps the Apostle himself in his prophesying character, conveyed the eternal Master’s
message of power to the ordained man’s soul, and,
it may be, foretold to him ‘what great things he
should suffer for the Name’s sake’ and what victories,
in the strength of the Spirit, he should win.
If I read that scene at all aright it meant no Its Signimechanical or as it were magical injection. Rather cance 274 it was what Richard Hooker says that the holy Sacraments are, a ‘moral instrument of salvation’; it demanded for its efficacy the yielded will, the living faith, the receiving action, of Timothy himself. But on the other hand it was no merely emblematical or pictorial performance; it carried with it a real efficacy to the man who really in his soul received what God, through just that ‘laying on of hands,’ then offered him. Such was that deed to Timothy that for ever afterwards he might say to himself that, in and through that Ordination, he held a perfectly definite guarantee that special spiritual power for special spiritual work was his; his to claim, to draw upon, to use. He possessed the warrant; let daily faith turn it into the current gold of ministerial power.
May Ordination to the ministry of Christ in His Church to-day be, by the man who bears it, ever viewed, and ever used, as St. Paul bade his son in the faith view and use his Ordination then. So the ministry will be a ministry of power indeed. It will be no mere discharge of a round of duties, however laborious, however important; it will be the conveyance of a divine influence to men through consecrated man, in whom the Spirit’s fire is ‘fanned into flame’ by faith. ‘Power, love, discipline’ of self, and a wonderful faculty for disciplining the lives of others for God and holiness, will work in and from such a ministry. It will be lifted above the misery of being ‘ashamed of the testimony of our Lord’ in a world which ignores Him. It will ‘suffer with the suffering Gospel,’ in a life of prevailing sacrifice, sustained from within its depths by ‘the power of God.’