Hello, and welcome back to Tabernacle Tidbits. Today, we are in 2 Timothy 2 and verse number 9.
And Paul is encouraging Timothy to stand fast in the faith, to not give up, to not buckle under pressure from Rome, pressure from the Jewish people, pressure from false teachers, the sinfulness of others, not to succumb to even the fear or the, I
don't want to say doubts that Timothy himself would have, but certainly at times, shame that he could feel and ways in which he would recoil from not wanting to come under fire for being a Christian. And so Paul told him, as we heard yesterday,
remember Jesus Christ, keep Jesus at the forefront of your mind. He says, risen from the dead and descended from David, according to my gospel, and then today in verse 9, for which I suffer to the point of being bound like a criminal.
But the word of God is not bound.
And here Paul says, I'm suffering, I'm going through hardships, I'm suffering misfortune, and it's even resulted, not just in suffering like the Jewish people rejecting him, not just in people telling him that he has betrayed the God of his
ancestors, not simply people making fun of him, or even physically abusing him, as happened several times throughout his ministry. But he says, now it is to the point of me being bound like a criminal, that I am being tied up, I've been restrained,
that I'm no longer free to do all that I would want to do. And he says that I'm bound like a criminal, someone that has done evil, someone who's committed gross misdeeds or serious crimes.
He says, I am being treated like I am this terrible person because I believe in the gospel and because I share the gospel.
And there will be times in your life if you are walking with the Lord, where you are treated very poorly by others because of your faith in Jesus. Now, that is not a 100% of the time normal occurrence.
For most of our lives, that is not how it happens. Even Paul, for the vast majority of his ministry, he was not placed in jail.
And the couple of times that he was, especially at the beginning, it was only because people went beyond the law and did some bad things. You can even think of Philippi, where they were not supposed to have beaten a Roman citizen and imprisoned him.
And they had, but because they had just naturally assumed that this mob in the city of Philippi were correct in how they were interacting with Paul and with Silas. And Paul tells them like, hey, I'm a Roman citizen.
And they got scared because they could have been in deep trouble because of how they treated Paul. And so, in Paul's life, it was only at the very end of his missionary journeys that he was finally arrested.
And it was only because he appealed to Caesar so that he could be sent to Rome so that he could share the gospel there in Italy. That was the reason why he was there as a criminal. It wasn't that he had done anything wrong.
He hadn't stolen anything. He hadn't lied to anyone, you know, if you will, under oath or anything like that. Instead, it was for the gospel that he was going through hardship.
And so, in your life and in my life, there will be times where people are unhappy with us sharing our faith.
There will be times when people are upset that we would perhaps hold to Biblical values, perhaps in marriage or in sexuality or in areas of gender, things that run afoul of what our current society says, much as it was back in Roman times there in
that first century. And when we encounter those, we can remember Jesus went through this. Jesus was persecuted not because he did wrong, but because he said and did the things that God wanted him to. Paul went through this.
He encouraged Timothy to go through it. And so we can go through hard times as well. But then I love where he ends verse 9.
He says, but the word of God is not bound. He says God's message is not being confined. It's not tied up.
It is not restrained or kept ineffective by people. He says, right now, you know what? I've got some cuffs, I say cuffs, of course, that's anachronistic.
But he says, my hands are tied or my feet are tied or they're in stocks and I can't really go where I want to go and accomplish what I want to accomplish. He says, but God's message is not like that.
And even though I'm tied up, God's message is going out. And you can look at the letter to the Philippians where he says, I've been able to witness to all of these guards and they've shared. They've accepted the Lord.
They've shared their faith with other guards, with other soldiers. And so the gospel has even reached into Caesar's own family, his household servants.
And what an amazing truth that the we encounter difficulty, the we sometimes are stopped from doing everything we want to. God's word is never like that. So let's faithfully share the word of God wherever we go.
Thanks for tuning in. Have a great day.
