Disciples in the Church
Disciples in the Church (2 Tim. 3)
Jason Procopio
We’re taking a break from the gospel of Luke for a couple of months; next week we’ll be entering our annual Advent series.
We had a two-week gap between the two, and so we decided to stay in the theme for our church retreat last week and see how the Bible would have us pursue being disciples of Christ.
Last week we saw that fundamentally, we cannot be disciples of Christ without the church: we need the church to be effective disciples of Christ.
It is by the church that God plans to show the universe his manifold wisdom, and he will do it through giving us the power to work together towards the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and towards maturity as the body of Christ. That’s what we saw last week.
That’s what we mean when we speak of discipleship—it’s the process of learning to live as disciples of Jesus Christ.
But it’s sometimes difficult to know what that looks like in practice.
So to see that, we’re going to make our way through 2 Timothy chapter 3.
False Discipleship in the Church (v. 1-9)
At the time Timothy receives this letter, he is the young pastor of the church in Ephesus. (So Timothy is now the pastor of the church to whom Paul was writing in the letter we looked at last week.) They were very close: Timothy was Paul’s protégé, and Paul had left him in Ephesus to care for the church he had planted.
Paul is in prison when he writes this letter, and clearly he anticipates that his death will come soon. So this, for all intents and purposes, is his goodbye letter to his young brother in Christ: his final exhortation to keep the faith and to minister faithfully.
In chapters 1 and 2 Paul exhorts Timothy to guard the deposit of the faith which has been entrusted to him. He encourages Timothy to live faithfully for Christ and to transmit that faithfulness to his church.
And then, in chapter 3 he makes a bit of a turn. He warns Timothy of the danger ahead of him in the church (which has already begun to make itself apparent), and he tells Timothy what to do in response to that danger.
The danger in question is that of false discipleship.
Let’s read starting at v. 1.
But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. 2 For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, 4 treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.
There’s something that we can miss if we skim over these first verses too quickly, but I’ll confess that the first time I saw this, it shook me.
In v. 2-4 Paul describes the kind of people who will start showing up in the church, and he makes quite a list. Self-centered, greedy, arrogant, abusive, disobedient, ungrateful, no self-control, and so on. He describes everything that none of us want to be.
But here’s the surprising thing: these self-centered, proud, arrogant, abusive, slanderous, unholy, brutal people…have the appearance of godliness (v. 5). You would think that with the kind of list he describes before, these people would be easy to spot, because Christians aren’t supposed to act that way. Surely if there are people this corrupt in the church, you could see them coming a mile away.
But no—Paul says they have the appearance of godliness. These verses alone should disabuse us of the moralistic gospel so many of us have grown up hearing: “Do these things, don’t do these things, and God will be pleased with you.”
Clearly it doesn’t work that way, because these people were doing everything right—at least on the outside—but were still suffering from broken, twisted hearts. They had the appearance of godliness, but lacked the power of godliness, which is rooted not in right behavior, but in hearts transformed by the Holy Spirit.
In everything Paul has just listed, he is not talking about patterns of behavior which are readily apparent, but dispositions of the heart which can be easily hidden.
But as unsettling as that reality is, it’s not the main point Paul is trying to make here.
The main point, which he will get to in due course, is what he says at the end of v. 5: these people have the appearance of godliness, but deny its power.
What is the power of godliness? It is the working of God in and through the lives of his people. For there to be power in godliness, and not just the appearance of godliness, you need two things: you need the Holy Spirit working in you, and you need obedience working out of you.
Paul’s going to come back to this later, but for now he wants Timothy to see what happens when you don’t have that. What do you get when you have people in a church who seem to be good, solid Christians, but who have not actually been transformed by the Holy Spirit? You get false discipleship.
V. 6:
6 For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, 7 always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. 8 Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith. 9 But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was that of those two men.
Now just to clear up a misconception real quickly: Paul is not saying that women are more easily led astray than men. Anyone who’s ever known a godly woman knows that’s not true. More than likely, Paul is almost certainly responding to an actual recurring problem in the church in Ephesus, in which men who fill the bill he described in v. 1-5 preyed on those who would be easy targets in that culture.
His point here isn’t whom they are targeting; he wants to reveal the deeper truth in what they are doing.
First of all, they are looking for easy prey. These women are burdened by sin, and they are led by their own sinful desires. They are always learning, and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.
So often people think, If I can learn the right thing, if I can figure these things out, then I’ll love God more and I’ll be able to live for him. So they’ll read books, and they’ll listen to sermons, and they’ll even go to Bible school… They’ll do all these good things, and never realize that their problem is not in what they know, but in what they want.
It’s so important to see this: because they are burdened by their sin, and led astray by their own sinful desires, they are always learning, and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. Now matter how smart these people seem to be, they are led by their gut, and their heads follow suit.
And this is true for all of us.
What we know—what we do with the things we learn—is led by what we desire. No matter what evidence we have in front of us, if we want to see something different, we will see something different. If we desire sin more than the truth, no matter how brilliant we are, we will remain totally ignorant concerning the things that actually matter—we will be, as these men and women are, corrupted in mind.
Let me give you a really quick and concrete example of what this might look like in practice. Take the example of sex. The Bible tells us that there is one proper framework, not just for sexual intercourse, but for any activity that you could characterize as sexual in nature—and that is marriage between a man and a woman.
Now, many people aren’t aware of this when they meet Christ, so they keep on doing what they’ve been doing because they don’t know any better, and the culture sells sex as something that should be totally open and free.
But many unmarried Christians, who know perfectly well what the Bible says about sex, still find themselves playing games with it, asking questions like, “Well, where’s the line? Can we do this? Can we do this? It’s not intercourse; it’s not oral sex; so it must be okay, right?”
The Bible’s answer is obvious: no! God created sexuality for marriage, as a gift for marriage, and as an expression of the intimacy of the union between Christ and his church. (We saw this in our series on sex last summer.) And if we know our Bibles, and think about it for two seconds, we know perfectly well, not only what is acceptable, but what is wise for our holiness. If we think about it even for a moment, we’ll know that being together on a sofa in an empty apartment is probably not going to be helpful in maintaining our purity.
But here’s the thing. When we’re with someone to whom we’re attracted, with whom we’d like to share that intimacy, everything we know goes out the window. Our brains totally shut down. We put ourselves in situations in which sexual activity outside of marriage is possible, and because we want it, we give ourselves latitude to play all kinds of crazy games, to make what the Bible clearly says is unacceptable seem like not such a big deal.
When we allow ourselves to be led, not by the Word of God, but by our own sinful desires, we oppose the truth of the Word, and we find our minds corrupted. Not because we don’t know any better, but because at that moment, we don’t want to accept what the truth is telling us.
And the danger is that, no matter if the context is sex or money or power or false ideology or whatever, if we let this opposition to the truth continue, we may find that our faith was a sham, and find ourselves disqualified concerning the faith.
That’s what’s happening here.
These men are looking for easy prey, and they are exploiting the weakness of these women—their own sinful desires. We don’t know exactly what they’re doing or how they're doing it, but it’s definitely shady: Paul says they creep into households and capture these women. In other words, they see a weak spot which they themselves could benefit from, and they exploit it.
Here’s the point.
If we Christians do not do the work of discipleship, someone else will do it for us. If we, as a church, are not in each other’s lives and homes, helping one another to grow in a knowledge of Christ, out of a sincere desire to glorify God and know him as he has revealed himself in Scripture, someone else will come into our homes and lives and lead us away from Christ. (The Internet does an incredible job at false discipleship.)
That’s what Timothy has already been seeing in his church, from all appearances. That’s what he’s up against: the false discipleship of people who say they know Christ, but who have no desire for Christ, so end up opposing the truth and leading people away from Christ.
And this danger is present in every single church which has ever existed.
So if that’s what will happen if we do nothing, what can we do to counteract it?
The good news is that we can—Paul’s not pessimistic about this. Notice he says in v. 9: But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all… He’s realistic about what’s going on, but he’s not worried.
And he’s not worried because true discipleship, empowered by the Holy Spirit, is more powerful than false discipleship.
True Discipleship in the Church (v. 10-15)
And there are two main domains in which this true discipleship plays itself out.
The first domain in which discipleship plays out is our lives with other Christians. Paul explains this by speaking of his own experience with Timothy.
V. 10:
10 You, however, have followed my teaching...
Now let’s stop there for a second. We need to recognize that, especially in our connected age, most Christians stop right here.
We live in a really great period in history. Bad teaching abounds, absolutely, but so does good teaching. Christians will listen to sermons (at church and online), they’ll listen to podcasts, they’ll read blogs, they’ll listen to conference messages. We have a wealth of good teaching at our disposal, and many Christians make the most of it. And that’s good.
Timothy spent years hearing Paul teach and preach. And Timothy learned well. He took that teaching to heart. He learned it so well, in fact, that he became able to teach it to others. Right teaching is essential to growth in Christian maturity.
But it cannot stop there.
How many Christians have spent countless hours listening to wonderful truths in the faithful teaching of the Word…and found themselves still unable to conquer their sin, or to grow in their affection for Christ? How many Christians spend hours consuming right teaching, but remain, for all intents and purposes, unchanged?
Let me put this as bluntly as I possibly can, because I love you.
For some of you, your passion for faithful Bible teaching amounts to little more than a stimulating hobby. You love it because it’s interesting, but you find yourself perplexed as to why, for all the time you spend exposed to faithful preaching of the Word, you still love John Piper more than Jesus.
I’ll tell you why: because as essential as right teaching is, teaching alone is not enough. What we learn must be lived. And if we are to live it, we need more than our ears and our brains.
And thankfully, the teaching of Paul is not the only thing Timothy followed.
V. 10 again:
10 You, however, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, 11 my persecutions and sufferings that happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra—which persecutions I endured; yet from them all the Lord rescued me. 12 Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, 13 while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.
So you see: Timothy didn’t just learn from listening to what Paul said; he learned from watching what it looked like for Paul to live out his faith.
Timothy and Paul spent a lot of time together, both in and out of ministry contexts. He heard him teaching—both in the church and one-to-one—and he saw him in action.
He saw his behavior. He saw when Paul lived what he believed, and he surely saw Paul repent when he failed.
He saw his single-minded passion for the gospel and for other believers. (He saw his tears as he said his goodbyes in Ephesus, cf. Acts 20.17-38.)
He saw Paul’s faith to believe in this incredible gospel despite hardship.
He saw his patience with slow believers.
He saw his love for the brothers and sisters under his care.
He saw everything Paul suffered for the gospel—at Antioch, at Iconium and at Lystra—and how he persevered in the midst of that suffering.
Now, the question is, what might that look like today?
One way to begin is through what we call discipleship groups. We encourage people in our community groups to get together with other people of the same sex in their group to form a discipleship group—a group of three or four people who will meet regularly to read the Bible and pray together.
Again, we all need this. We all need to read our Bibles with one another. We all need to take time to not only listen to the Word preached, but to actually walk through the text with another Christian, to help us learn to read the Bible well. We all need people to whom we are accountable. This is an essential part of growing in our knowledge of the Word.
But while it’s a good start, discipleship groups cannot be the whole of our experience of discipleship.
If we’re reading the Bible together, but never get to see one another vulnerable, see one another suffering, see one another displaying patience in a stressful situation, see one another love despite opposition, then we are not seeing all we need to see.
Brothers and sisters, the church isn’t an organization; it’s a family.
When you live in a family, necessarily you will see each other in these kinds of situations, and you’ll learn from each other.
But the thing we so often forget is that if you don’t actually live under the same roof, this kind of “family discipleship” takes time, and effort, and intentional openness—in our homes, in our daily activities, in our schedules. It takes effort to make this happen—because in our connected society, it’s really easy to feel like we’re doing this, when we’re actually just sitting in front of our computer screens.
So let’s get really specific.
One of the most precious things God has given to Loanne and me has been the family of Philip and Rachel Moore. When we were interning with Philip’s church before coming here, they invited us over on a regular basis: not to do a Bible study, or even to talk about anything specific, but just to be there. To hang out with them. To watch them doing ordinary things. To learn from how they spoke to one another. To learn from how they loved and disciplined their children. Just to observe what the Christian life looks like in an ordinary setting.
Mature Christians, you need to be inviting younger believers into your lives—and not just for a Bible study. They need to see what the Christian life looks like. You need to be inviting them into your lives, into your homes, to watch and participate in your life.
If you’re married, you need to invite them into your home, to be there during the time you spend with your spouse, and with your kids.
If you’re single, you need to invite them into your home, to watch and participate in your life as your younger brothers and sisters.
They need to see you living well. And they need to see you repent when you fail.
Don’t just tell them about it: show them what it looks like.
And younger Christians: you need to be knocking on the doors of your older brothers and sisters, asking to be let in. Seriously—impose yourselves on us. Sometimes it may not be possible for us to get together at a given time, but we will commit to finding the time.
And it's not just so that you can watch us. Believe it or not, Christians who are mature in their faith need younger Christians too.
We actually saw an example of this very recently.
Yesterday we had a baptism service. What I'm about to say, I could say about more than one of the people who were baptized, but for one of them, baptism was actually a painful experience. He knew that his parents disagreed with him on this topic, and when he told them that he was going to get baptized, they said that if their son believed things that were in such sharp contrast with what they believed, then he shouldn’t live in their home anymore. From one day to the next, he had to move out.
Loanne and I had him over for dinner a couple days after this happened to talk it over, and he was obviously shaken. This was profoundly painful to him, because he loves his parents and didn’t want to hurt them. But at the same time, he felt convinced that this was what God called him to do, and stayed firm in his conviction.
Here’s why I mention this. Later that evening, in our community group, he shared his story again. And ALL of us got to see firsthand what perseverance in suffering looks like. We all got to see God’s grace to him, to give our suffering brother the strength to suffer well, and to remain obedient in spite of that suffering. We got to see it, and we all learned from it.
That’s what Paul is saying here. This is what discipleship looks like.
That’s what discipleship looks like in the body of the church. And for many people, that’s where it starts.
But for some of us—and Lord willing, for more of us as time goes on—it will and should begin, not in the family of the church, but in our actual families, at home. And that’s the second domain of discipleship Paul mentions.
At the beginning of his letter, in chapter 1 verse 5, Paul mentions the faith of Timothy’s mother and grandmother. He says,
I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well.
And now, in chapter 3 verse 14, he comes back to that heritage:
14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it 15 and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
Timothy is a young man who was raised in the faith. He grew up in the gospel. His grandmother and his mother were both Christians, and they shared their faith with Timothy.
And what we don’t see Paul doing is giving Timothy the impression that his own discipleship of Timothy was more valuable than the discipleship of his mom and grandma.
That is simply incredible. This is the apostle Paul talking here— but even so, Paul never gives the impression that “Yeah, your mom was okay, but you really learned the faith from me.” He talks about Timothy’s childhood, and says, Remember from whom you learned the Scriptures.
Parents (and those of you who hopefully will have kids one day), you need to know this: when your kids are young, the church is not the main vehicle for their discipleship. The home is.
Not because the family is holier than the church, but rather because we grow in holiness through experiencing the gospel lived out with other brothers and sisters; and nowhere is that more possible than in the family. Because you’re together, under the same roof, all the time.
So everything we said before about what young Christians need to see from more mature Christians applies first and foremost in the home.
Parents, you need to disciple your kids.
I know this kind of talk is frightening in our day, because many people in our society will fight vigorously to make sure this doesn’t happen; they’ll equate discipling your kids with intellectual child abuse.
So just to be clear: discipling your kids does not mean forcing them to be Christians, or brainwashing them into believing what you believe. That’s not faith, so it’s pointless to do that anyway.
They’re the ones who will have to choose, at the time of their choosing, what they believe and why concerning Jesus Christ.
But until that day, we have the responsibility to show them—not only by our words but by our acts and attitudes and transformed hearts—why following Jesus is worth it. We don’t try to convince them of anything; we try to show them, through our day-to-day lives living out the gospel, why Jesus is better, so that we won’t need to convince them, we won’t need to force them, but that they might be convinced by what they’ve grown up seeing in us.
So even if we must tell our kids what we believe, so that they can make a thoughtful choice when the time is right, it’s not enough to tell them.
We have to show them.
Your kids need to see your behavior. They need to see you live what you believe—in the most ordinary contexts, when you’re washing the dishes or getting ready for bed—and they need to see you repent when you fail.
It is not the church’s job to disciple your children. It’s not the Sunday School teacher’s job, or the youth worker’s job, to disciple your children. It’s your job. (And dads, lead in this. Don’t pawn this responsibility off to other “dads”, and do not force your wives to shoulder this responsibility alone. Don’t count on a Paul to come in from the outside—be Paul for your kids.)
Now, really quickly, a word for singles and for single parents.
If you’re single—you’re not married and you don’t have kids—this kind of talk can be depressing, because for many of you, you dream of doing these things, but right now you can’t.
You still need to take these things to heart while you’re single, for two reasons.
Firstly, because you are still our brothers and sisters in Christ, and we need help. Don’t assume that just because a person is married with children, that person doesn’t need what you have to give him. Parents need to be discipled too, and not just by other parents.
Secondly, as far as your own future family goes, take my word for it: if you're already clear on what kind of home the Bible calls you to have, before you get married, before you have kids, you will be much better equipped to actually do it when you have one.
And in the meantime, remember that our nuclear families—moms and dads and kids—are not eternal. Our family in Christ is eternal. So if you are not married, if you don’t have kids, no matter how much you want those things, in reality, you are lacking nothing which is essential. You already have the one family you actually need. So rather than spending your time lamenting the nuclear family you don’t have, pour yourself into the church family you do have.
One last thing: single parents. If you’re a single parent—and particularly a single mom, which is sadly more often the case—the weight of this burden can seem almost unbearable. How are you, one person, supposed to do something that two people are supposed to do together?
Notice what we see in this letter. Paul talks about Timothy’s mother, he talks about Timothy’s grandmother…but he makes no mention of Timothy’s father. So more than likely, either Timothy’s father wasn’t a Christian, or he was simply absent.
Being a single parent in no way means that you can’t do this.
It’s more challenging, for sure—but when the ideal is lacking, God’s grace abounds all the more. The vacuum left by the father or mother that should be there is filled in other ways. It is filled first by the church—by the big brothers and big sisters who come along and help disciple our kids in ways we can’t.
And ultimately, it is filled by the Holy Spirit—you don’t bring your children to faith; God brings your children to faith. All he asks of us is to obey him as faithfully as we can, to disciple our kids as faithfully as we can, and trust him to save our kids. We plant, we water, but God gives the growth. So you can do what he has called you to do, even in a less-than-ideal situation.
Now finally, what is the goal of all this? We’ve talked a lot about what discipleship looks like in the context of the church—but what's the endgame?
Paul has already said that Timothy learned Scripture from his mother and grandmother, and that this Scripture is able to make us wise for salvation in Jesus Christ.
But Scripture doesn’t just bring us to salvation in Christ; it brings about growth in Christ, through the experience of living out the gospel in community.
The goal: Growth in the word (v. 16-17)
16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
This is the key passage for speaking about the divine inspiration of Scripture: it is the key text we turn to when we want to speak about the inerrancy of the Bible. And these verses absolutely do affirm that.
But when we read these verses, we still very often make the one mistake we’re always warning against: we forget the context. The context of these famous verses is not that of preaching, but of discipleship: Paul’s discipleship of Timothy. It’s only following these transition verses that Paul turns to his charge that Timothy “preach the word” (4.2).
So what do these two things—discipleship and the sufficiency of Scripture—have to do with each other?
Two things: firstly, these verses reassure us that we need nothing but the Word to disciple one another effectively. We don’t need a program. We don’t need a theology degree. We don’t need to be a pastor. Every man, woman and child can do this, because we have the Word, and the Word is enough.
Secondly, these verses remind us that this sufficient Word of God has to be lived.
After God revealed himself to his people through the law and the prophets, he revealed himself to us in Christ: God in the form of a human being, showing other human beings what it looks like to live out the Word of God in practice.
And after his ascension, he sent us his Spirit, to live in us, to make us new and to bring us into a body, in which we can live the Word of God in practice.
Human beings, living out the Word of God, showing other human beings what it looks like to live out the Word of God.
Discipleship is not a means to be more spiritual, or to feel more connected to other people, or to grow in life experience. Discipleship is a means by which we get to take the Word of God we know, and live it out together, in order to grow in it.
And if our discipleship is firmly based in the Word of God, which is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, then that discipleship in the Word will make us men and women of God—complete, equipped for every good work.
