Youthful Lusts

Fuxzx also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. A.V.

But the lusts of youth fly from, and pursue righteousness, fidelity, love, and peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.

Timotuy, at the date of the Epistle, was probably about thirty-six or thirty-seven years old. This was an age advanced enough for high and responsible office; the historical Church allows of episcopal Consecration at even thirty. But it was an age at which he must have been considerably the junior of many of the ‘elders’ of Ephesus, the men whom he had now in some measure to lead and to direct. And this was just such juniority as might tempt him to certain ‘lusts ’! — anything but sensual indeed yet full of spiritual and practical peril — which would be less likely to beset a sensor leader. The necessity for just such an assertion of his position as would avoid a dangerous look of slackness and indifferencetoorder might easily glide, and not least in a nature like Timothy’s, not of the strongest fibre, into a harsh assertion of himself. The ‘youthful lust’ of having his own way, of being ‘in evidence,’ of posing as the centre of attention — in short, that fatal ‘love of having the pre-eminence’ which St. John saw in

1‘Tust’ was*a far more inclusive word in old English than it is now, including every sort of strong tendency.

Youthful Lusts

Demetrius (3 Joh. 9), and which has been so lament- 2 Tim. ii. able a bane in the Church all along, might easily get 22. hold of him little by little. The ‘lusts’ which show themselves in the short temper, in talk about the man’s self, in slowness to recognize the claims of others, in the throwing of life and labour, so to speak, into an attitude, were very possible at his age and in his circumstances. Well, he was to ‘fly from’ them, as from a mortal peril to his soul and to his mission. There was to be no compromise or parley. In a closer walk with God, that holy secret of a maturity of thought and view which can make the young saint ‘understand more than the ancients’ (Psal. cxix. 100), he was to find a secure refuge from ‘the lusts of youth.’

Meanwhile his soul’s energies were to be spent in Pursuit of following as well as flight; he was to ‘pursue’ the Holiness. graces most opposite to the ‘lusts,’ and to seize them for his own. He was to covet, so as to develope it into a settled habit, the ‘ righteousness’ which scrupulously regards every claim on self from others, which is ready to take sides with others against self, which will rather surrender a personal preference than act in mere self-will. He was to seek and find the spirit of habitual ‘fidelity,’ that steady, unobtrusive devotion to the smallest duty entrusted to him in the Lord, without which no amount of energy, or even of pious devotion, in Christian labour can ever be quite to the Master’s mind. And these good things were to be sought along with holy ‘love.’ His was not to be a hard and angular rightfulness: no, let it be suffused with the warm sympathies of a heart opened to the hearts of others by the presence within it of Christ

2 Tim. ii.
22.

Jesus. And this would specially exhibit itself in a large delight in union and fellowship with all to whom the Name of the Lord was supreme, all who ‘called upon Him out of a pure heart’ — taking Him in deep simplicity as their Object of adoring invocation and as their Watchword in duty and in suffering. With such as these Timothy was to ‘ pursue peace.’ It was to be his dear aim and quest to join hands with them, and to co-operate with them, and to give them all generous honour. He was to see to it that no ‘lusts of youth’ on his part spoiled the possibilities of peace; no crude narrowness of spirit, no incapacity to see patiently their points of view on details where there might be difference between them and him. A holy jealousy against spiritual inconsistency, in himself first and then in others, was to be adjusted (as it could be adjusted, in a gracious reality) with a deep desire for a brotherly unity of spirit with all in whom the Lord’s image was visible, and to whom His blessed Name was entirely dear. Is it not a noble and winning ideal, thus set by St. Paul before his comparatively youthful ‘son’? It was attainable then; it is attainable now, in Christ, by the Holy Ghost. In the mercy of God may it be more and ever more developed in the men who correspond to Timothy to-day, the junior leaders of our broken Christendom, men called by character or office to any sort of primacy among their fellows, while yet comparatively early in their manhood. Then shall they see, before they fall asleep at the long work’s end, a brighter day in the Church of Christ than we have yet enjoyed.