Bible Challenge 2 Timothy 3: ‘All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work In this chapter of The New Testament The contrast is made between holiness and selfishness. Read 2 Timothy 3 online or look it up in your Bible. Going Deeper Before you start your daily reading, say a prayer asking God to guide your thinking as you read, and then read the Bible with the aim of learning something new. After the reading, consider how it may affect your life and relationship with your heavenly Father and allow your increased knowledge of the Scriptures to shape your character and strengthen your trust in God. Discussion notes on 2 Timothy 3 • v7, do you know anyone close who is always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth? • v8, Paul appears to have been referring in the preceding chapters to people who were actually considered to be teachers (presumably faith-related)....does this surprise you? • v16&17, how important and relevant do you think these verses will be for you and your faith in 2014? More on 2 Timothy 3 In his book, Half-Way to Faith, Lord Eccles records that the trustees of a museum were offered a tenth-century wooden crucifix, about three-quarters life-size and covered in paint. The villagers who had cared for the crucifix for a thousand years had painted and repainted it many times. When experts were asked whether the trustees should purchase the crucifix they replied that if the paint was carefully removed the cleaned crucifix was likely to astonish the trustees by its beauty, vigour and fife, which had been partly concealed by the loving care of a thousand years. Pauls catalogue of the evils which would disfigure society in the last days concludes with formal, powerless religion. How much this contributes to the other evils it is hard to say. What is certain is that lifeless religion can sometimes result from too many accretions which hide the pristine experience of Christ just as successive layers of paint encased the beauty of the crucifix. Our parable can be taken a step further. The vigorous tenth-century carving had been partly concealed by the loving care of a thousand years. The accretions which sometimes overlay essential Christian experience often began as expressions of devotion, and may even remain so for some. Periodically the Church has to undergo a process of simplification. So must the individual believer who desires to concentrate his limited energy on what is essential. Anthony Bloom, Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Ireland, hated Christianity in his youth. In order to check upon a certain lecturers arguments he asked his mother for a New Testament, counting the chapters in each Gospel so as to read the shortest. Describing his experience he says, While I was reading the beginning of Marks Gospel, before I reached the third chapter, I became aware of a presence. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. It was no hallucination. It was a simple certainty that the Lord was standing there and that I was in the presence of Him whose life I had begun to read with such revulsion and such ill will. This was my basic and essential meeting with the Lord. From then on I knew that Christ did exist. The primary purpose of the Bible, as in Anthony Blooms experience and in this assessment of Pauls, is to create a living relationship with Christ. This is what saves a man from sin and from himself. It is not faith in the Bible, much less knowledge of the Bible, which saves; only that trustful relationship with God through Christ which the Bible so often, and so astonishingly, creates. Yet how can reading of past events make possible a relationship with the living Christ? The answer is found in the work of the Holy Spirit. He makes Jesus our contemporary. Without Him Bible reading might make us students: it could never make us saints. *THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Dec 2013 05:57:08 +0000
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