Well, we've reached the end of another week here on Tabernacle Tidbits, and we are in 2 Timothy 1 and verse number 7 today.
What we learned in the last episode was that Paul encouraged Timothy to stir up, to kindle afresh, God's gift of teaching, God's gift of His Word that he had given to Timothy.
And he says, Timothy, this, your spiritual gifts, there is a natural tendency just in our humanness that we allow it to kind of die out.
And he says, don't let your gift, don't let what God has called you to, don't let that just fade out of your life. Instead, I want you to kindle it afresh. Throw some more kindling on the fire.
And if you will, like, keep at it. Keep at the good work. Maybe if you've psyched off a little bit, dive back into it because it is worthwhile.
And that's where we come to in verse number seven. He says, for God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline. Okay, some great words that we can look at today.
He says, God has not given us a spirit of timidity. That is fear, shirking away from what we are supposed to do. The kind of antithesis to timidity is boldness.
That we would say, instead of boldness, which would say, God has called me to this, and so I'm going to be about it. Timidity says, I know God's called me to this, but I don't really know. Like, what are they going to say?
What are they going to do? What if this or this or this? And he says, God has not called us to timidity.
I need that reminder consistently as a pastor. There are so many moments in my life where it is easier to shut my mouth than to say what someone needs to hear.
It's way easier to just go with the status quo to maybe how things have been instead of saying, okay, God wants us to keep on pressing forward. He wants us, if you will, to kindle afresh what he has for us.
So God's not given us the spirit of timidity, and so instead, he has given us his Holy Spirit that has these three descriptors. He says of power and love and discipline.
Power would be realizing that if the Holy Spirit lives inside of us, then the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead now resides in us. And if God is for us, who can be against us?
And we can say with the boldness that David had in the Psalms, he says, even if there are 10,000 that come against me, I know that because God is behind me and before me, that none of God's purposes will fail. He will always be victorious.
And so I can walk forward in faith, and I don't have to have fear. Instead, I can say God plus me is a majority because God all by himself is a majority. And so I don't need to fear people.
I don't need to fear disapproval. I don't need to fear circumstances. I don't need to fear Satan.
I don't need to fear death itself because I know who my God is. And so that gives us power. Then there is a spirit of love.
We can think of 1 John chapter 4, Beloved, let us love one another because love is of God and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one that does not love does not know God because God is love. I can think of John 3, 16.
God loved the world in this way that he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him will not perish but will have everlasting life.
God has given us a spirit of love that we don't have to fear people's disapproval because the point is not to get them to love us. It is to love them. It is to love the Lord.
It is to love his church and so we operate not out of fear but out of love. I think also in 1 John 4 where it says perfect love casts out fear. Are you anxious?
Have a love for the people in your life. Have a love for the Lord. Have a love for the church.
Have a love for heaven. All of those things that would help to mold us that we're not operating in timidity and fear but instead we are operating in the love of God.
Then lastly, in discipline, this would be a sound mind, would be how some other translations would put it. That this discipline is, I'm not going to allow my brain to run amuck.
Instead, I'm going to tell my brain what is real and what is not real, what I choose to think about and what I choose not to.
And as we do that, as we discipline our minds, bring it into subjection, as Paul would say in 1 Corinthians 8, we can find great joy, boldness and love and discipline, a sound mind and not living our lives in anxiety and fear. Thanks for tuning in.
Hope you have a great day.
