The Power of Holy Memories

Bur continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which

are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. A.V.

But thou, stay thou in the things which thou didst learn and

of which thou wast made sure, knowing from what persons thou didst learn them; and that from an infant thou hast known the holy writings, those which are able to make thee wise, unto salvation, by means of the faith which rests in Christ Jesus. St. Pavuu comes here directly and explicitly to his dear son again. Full of the thought, which we can trace all through the Epistle, of the tremendous ‘under-tow’ around him — to use a term sadly significant to those who know the perils of our seashores — he appeals again to Timothy to keep his foothold on the Rock. For his soul’s life he must do so, and also for the sake of his work and witness. He is a ‘man of God.’ Like the great Angel (Luke i. 19) he is called to ‘stand in the presence of God, and to be sent unto’ men. So it is supremely important that he should ‘stand’ indeed, in his own soul’s inmost consciousness, sure of his Lord and of the truth.

With this in view, his friend and father here reminds him of two precious aids to steadfastness. The one is the remembrance of the holy teachers to

The Power of Holy Memories

whom he owed his Christian knowledge. The other 2 Tim. iii. is the recollection of the divine nature and virtue of 14, 15. the holy Book to which they first had led him as to

the oracle of God.

Timothy, in a world of religious flux, and in order Life in the to the good of that world, is to ‘stay in the things sera Se which he had learnt, and of which he had been made sure. The phrase is vivid and suggestive. He is not merely to ‘hold’ them as opinions. Only too often the ‘holding of views’ means a very poor thing indeed, a mental and spiritual state in which nothing better than a thin thread of sentiment, or a languid conservation of what has become habitual, attaches the man to the belief. He ‘holds,’ but he is not ‘held’; nothing in his opinions grasps him with a living force. The imagery here is of a very different sort. The man is to ‘stay in’ his beliefs, or rather ‘in’ the things believed. He is to find his home there, and to be always at home. He is to move and breathe among ‘the things’ which make up the sphere of his faith. The truths which are his creed concerning God, Christ, sin, salvation, repentance, faith, and ‘that blessed hope,’ are to be always around him, his inner circle, his immediate atmosphere, nearer than anything else. Then they too shall be in him; the faith and the believer shall be fused, as it were, into one reality.

Now, to help himself thus to ‘stay,’ he is to Timothy’s remember how he won his knowledge and his tly Home. convictions; he is to reflect that he ‘knows from what persons he did learn them.’ Here, we cannot doubt it, St. Paul refers in the first instance to

2 Tim. iii.
14, 15.

The Witness

of Holy Personalities.

Timothy’s home of old, in that turbulent Lystra where Lois and Eunice found it yet possible to live the calm life of faith, and where they taught the child of their hearts the lore of salvation; opening to him the blessed Book, Law, Prophets, Psalms, and telling him of the Lord in whom now all had been fulfilled. We seem safe in this assumption when we read, almost in one sentence, of ‘the persons from whom he had learnt’ and of the early childhood in which he had already begun to know his Bible. Taking these notices in connexion with the words of i. 5 above and with our study of that passage,! we are bold to say that the main reference here is to the dear voices which, in that long vanished home, as now most probably it was, had gently trained him into faith.

We need not exclude a reference to other helpers of his soul. St. Paul may have also in mind here his own instructions, given long ago to the young man he loved so well and used so much. But the reference, we cannot mistake it, is mainly to the earliest days and to the faces and voices of the dear remembered home.

We have thus before us an appeal to one peculiar and precious element of Christian evidence, the witness of holy personalities to the solidity of holy teaching. Let us not misplace that witness, as if it was the foundation-stone of faith; for holiness offers no absolute guarantee against mistake. But when, in the case of the Gospel, we have grasped by the grace of God the moral glory of its teaching, along

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The Power of Holy Memories

with the historic mass of its fundamental facts, and 2 Tim. iii. above them all the Fact of the Lorn, then it is a 14, 15- noble help to the heart, in its co-operation with

thought and conscience, to have seen in the very

teachers who led us to Christ the living illustration of

that power upon the life which Christ undertakes to

exercise. The Lois, the Eunice, beautiful because of

Him, are a breathing testimony to the existence of

the Cause of that fair Effect.

2 Tim. iii.
16, 17.
The Holy
Writings.