2 Timothy 2:14

“Remind them of these things...”

July 3, 2011

Remind them of these things, ...

There is a song that we used to sing in church when I was younger that goes like this: “Keep in mind that Jesus Christ has died for us and is risen from the dead. He is our saving Lord. He is joy for all ages.” Ministers need to help people to keep things like this in mind. Man is a marvelous creature. He can keep certain things in his mind. He can weigh one thing against another, recognizing that certain matters are of utmost importance for his life, while other issues may be true, but are more peripheral. Through hymns and through our repeated pronouncements of primary matters as part of our worship of God, we remind one another in the presence of God about those truths that we most wish to remember and live out. This is a good use of reason and speech.

and charge them before God not to quarrel about words, ...

How we use our words is of utmost importance in the church. There are ways of speaking and listening that will enrich our souls together in the presence of God, but not all speech is helpful. In particular, ministers must teach the people of God not to “quarrel about words.” The words that Paul is referring to are connected to our beliefs and practice of faith. Not all religious speech is good. Some of it is disruptive or even destructive. There is a need to speak clearly about the faith. That is commendable. But are our words generating unnecessary wrangling, even creating harmful divisions among people? This can take at least two forms that both need to be avoided.

1. Unnecessarily Provocative Speech: Some ministers teach their congregations by example to be unnecessarily provocative. They love the fun of being viewed as outrageous, alarming more cautious hearers. They attract attention and get laughs by starting fires, and then employ their reasoning skills and rhetoric to show why their opinions are right in line with the Bible and church history. They love to appear intelligent or witty, and they don't mind if their words start fruitless quarrels.

2. Defensive Fear Speech: Other ministers are so afraid of what might be viewed by their peers as unorthodox, that they use their words to raise unnecessary walls between different groups of Christians. They are not willing to charitably consider the ambiguity of a weaker brother's words or religious experience. They talk to be right.

which does no good,

Both of these ways of communicating create unnecessary strife and division among people. One may seem very liberal, and the other very conservative, but they are both bad. There is a way to speak plainly in defense of the truth as both Paul and Jesus did. These men did not set out to start trouble for fun or out of fear. They spoke for the purpose of love. They did not speak to start quarrels, but to end them.

but only ruins the hearers.

The word wrangling of the proud is not godly. That kind of speech ruins the hearers. Some will sense the proud spirit behind the speaker, and they will be moved further away from the truth of the faith. Others will be impressed by the intelligence or the obvious orthodoxy of the speaker, and become imitators of bad behavior. The second is probably worse than the first, but either way, it only ruins the hearers.

The ethical use of religious speech requires a careful consideration of what the words of the speaker will accomplish. Do you have any reasonable hope that your speech will produce anything other than a fruitless quarrel? What will your speech do to those who are third-party hearers? Will it help them to grow in Christian love?

The Lord Jesus did not use His words for His own entertainment or to pump Himself up in the view of those who would hear Him. If He spoke in a controversy, He spoke to end the quarrel, and not to continue it. See Mark 11:29-33. This was not only the way that He spoke. It was also the way that He lived. His death on the cross was not undertaken in order to start a quarrel about the substitutionary atonement, but first to bring peace between God and man, and then between Jews and Gentiles who would come to Him for forgiveness. “Keep in mind that Jesus Christ has died for us and is risen from the dead. He is our saving Lord. He is joy for all ages.”