The Apostle Speaks of Himself

Bur thou hast fully known my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, charity, patience, persecutions, afflictions, which came unto me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra; what persecutions I endured; but out of them all the Lord delivered me.

But thou didst follow side by side with my teaching, conduct, purpose, fidelity, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings; things of the kind which happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra; so as to know what kind of persecutions I endured; and out of them all the Lord rescued me.

2 Tim. iii. Iv is with a certain relief that we reach this paragraph

10, If. of the Epistle. For some time now we have been detained over the Apostle’s description and exposure of a propaganda of error, wilful or miserably misguided. We have had to breathe, as it were, the malaria of beliefs and practices which at their best were a vain substitute for the Gospel and at the worst its deadly opposite. Now with a confidence and frankness as healthy as it is holy the saint appealsto Timothy’s complete knowledge of his own life, motives, message, and work, and to Timothy’s resultant reasons for a renewed, a redoubled reliance on that Gospel which he beheld everywhere around him denied, travestied, derided, or ignored.

Speech about It is very much more often a man’s duty to be

Self. silent, than to speak, about himself. A great Christian of seventy years ago, Simeon of Cambridge, laid it down as one main rule of his life, Talk not

The Apostle speaks of Himself

about thyself. Nothing is more likely to hinder 2 Tim. iii. the transmission of our Master’s witness through us 10, II. than lightly to break that rule, and to allow it to be supposed by hearers or by readers that self is a favourite topic with ourselves and occupies a good deal of the thought behind our words. Yet this rule has its excepted cases, when just for once, just for a particular and grave reason, it may be our real duty to speak out, whether about inward experience or outward conduct. It was right for Samuel (1 Sam. xii, 3-5), under critical circumstances, to appeal openly to the people to bear witness that his motives and actions had been true and pure. And it was right for St. Paul, under circumstances exceptional for him, again and yet again to do the same, affirming with a noble emphasis and candour the absolute singleness of his purposes, the perfect disinterestedness of his deeds. When a man really is pure in motive, and when the self-spirit really is absent from his work, and that work really is so carried on that the self-sacrifice is beyond question, then a positive moral grandeur may attend an unaffected appeal to observers to bear him witness that he is at least what he professes to be. And such an appeal may pass, by a vital and natural connexion, into an appeal to them to respect his message and to put to the test its power for themselves. Rightly made, that is to say, made in the spirit of one whose purity of purpose and action refers itself always to the eternal MasTER and to His power on the will, such appeals become a testimony not at all to self but to the Gospel and to the Lord. Soitishere. St. Paul points Timothy back to that H 113

2 Tim. iii. bright yet often stormy ‘Christian spring’? of his

10, II.

when first he joined him as his youthful helper. He

The Force of reminds him of those old days of the highland home in

the Appeal.

Asia Minor; of his native Lystra and its neighbour towns, Antioch and Iconium(Acts xvi. ); of the wonderful scenes he had witnessed there, the preachings, the crowds, the glad enthusiasm, the offered worship, the fierce opposition, the battery and assault, the dreadful stoning; and he does this not at all that Timothy may think that Paul is great and good, but that hemaygrasp afresh the certainty that Christ is true. For that unique message, the Gospel of a supernatural redemption which is at the same time a living rule of love and of everlasting duty, would powerfully evidence itself by the force which it put forth in the life and conduct of its messenger. The converted Pharisee, toiling and suffering with indomitable gladness for the Messiah whom he had once persecuted with all his heart, was then, as he has been ever since, a grand evidence of Christianity; not by the mere fact that he had somehow come to preach it, but by the mighty phenomenon of his preaching it so, preaching it as what was his own inmost life, his own spiritual all in all.

Even thus it has been, in measure, all through the centuries. God be thanked for every reasoned argument for the faith. But ever and again, until the Lord’s Return, the crowning evidence in proof of Christianity will be the phenomenon of the veritable man transformed into the living saint.

1 “Thy name to name, Thyself to own,
With voice unfaltering,
And face as bold and unashamed
As in our Christian spring.’- — Bonar,