KEEP AT IT
a sermon based on II Timothy 2:1-13
By Dr. David Rogne

On the nineteenth of July in the year 64 A. D. a great fire broke out in the city of Rome.  It burned for six days and seven nights, devastating the city.  The most sacred shrines and the most famous buildings perished in the flames.  It was believed that the Emperor, Nero himself, was responsible for the fire.  He had a passion for building, and it was said that he had given orders to burn the city so that from the ruins he could build a new and nobler Rome.  It is not possible to say with certainty whether this was true, but the rumor was very much alive.  The Roman government, therefore, had to find a scapegoat.  Tacitus, the Roman historian, tells how it was done:  "All human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the Emperor, and the propitiations of the gods did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order.  Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt, and inflicted the most exquisite tortures, on a class hated for their abominations, called 'Christians' by the populace."  It was from that event and that charge that the first great persecution of Christians began.

A young pastor by the name of Timothy, a close friend of the Apostle Paul, must have been wavering in his faith as a result of the persecutions, for Paul, who was himself a victim of the persecution, wrote Timothy a letter, the purpose of which was to bolster his faith and make him strong enough to endure whatever might befall him.

I believe that Paul's words to Timothy, a portion of which we read this morning, have currency for us, not because we are persecuted by the government or faced with the threat of death, but because our faith is often weak, our ability to live as Christians is uncertain, and we are frightened by costly choices.  We have difficulty standing for the right, even when we know the right.  We need some assurance that doing the Christian thing is ultimately going to be worth the price we may have to pay.  Let us see what Paul's words have to say to us.

The first thing Paul does is to remind us of the responsibility which each Christian has for passing on the faith.  Paul reminds Timothy to pass on what he has heard.  Religious values are best transmitted by people.  The things that we believe individually have come to us from a variety of sources:  prayers, hymns, liturgy, preaching, teaching, the Bible, and so forth.  But, for good or ill, people have the greatest influence on us.  A colleague of mine, Dr. Frank Finkbiner, published a study on the church drop-out.  His conclusion was that more people drop out of the church because it is impersonal and unfriendly, than for any other reason; not because it is too liberal or too conservative, but because of coldness and a lack of relationships.  Nothing has such an impact on the faith of a person as that person's ability to see faith at work in the life of another.  Every one of us, for good or for ill, is making a statement about the Christian faith.

The Christian faith has survived, not because its preachers have been so dynamic, or its theologians so perceptive, but because there have been Christian people in every generation who have been faithful.  They lived by faith and they passed it on.

Witnessing to our faith is not simply verbally sharing what we believe, though that is part of it; it is demonstrating that faith by our attitudes and actions.  I called a while back on one of our elderly members who recently entered a convalescent hospital.  She showed me a whole drawer full of cards from well-wishers.  Almost all of them were from members of our church.  She had had a visit that day from a member of our church.  That is love in action.

A young couple in a church I served previously had a young son with a spinal-cord injury.  It was imperative that his limbs be exercised three times a day, seven days a week.  People from the congregation volunteered to help in such numbers that each person needed to come only once a week.  That family was surrounded by love.  All of us are called to pass on the faith; some of us by words; all of us by action.

Paul indicates that this faith is to be passed on from generation to generation.  "What you learned from me...," he says, "entrust to faithful persons, who will be able to teach others as well."  Paul, Timothy, Timothy's contacts, and their contacts after that.

In 1858 a Sunday-School teacher named Mr. Kimball led a shoe clerk to give his life to Christ.  The clerk was Dwight L. Moody.  Moody became an evangelist in England, and in 1879 awakened the heart of Fredrick Meyer, who was, at the time, pastor of a small church.  Pastor Meyer came to America and, while preaching on a college campus, won J. Wilbur Chapman to Christ.  Wilbur Chapman became a YMCA worker and picked up a former baseball player to do evangelistic work.  That player was named Billy Sunday.  At a revival in Charlotte, North Carolina, Sunday so excited a group of local men that they engaged Mordecai Hamm to come to their town.  In the revival with Mordecai Hamm, a young man heard the gospel and yielded his life to Christ.  His name was Billy Graham.  Every Christian is an important link in the chain that ties generations together in the faith.

The second thing Paul does is to acknowledge that passing on the faith can be costly.  He tells Timothy, "Take your share of suffering."  Wherever faith has made progress in the world, someone has had to pay.  Some of us in this congregation had the opportunity to visit Rome last year.  We were taken to see the Coliseum.  Though it is now simply a tourist attraction, it is part of our heritage as Christians.  We could imagine what it must have been like for Christians to wait in the darkness of an underground cell for a jailer to come and lead them to their death in the arena above.  Witnessing to one's faith can be costly.

We should not be surprised, therefore, if in some way, it also costs us to be Christians.  It may not cost us our lives, but it will cost something.  Paul suggests that with several examples.

He says, "Share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus."  The Greeks and the Romans were both fond of picturing humans as soldiers, and life as a campaign.  Paul took this familiar picture and applied it to Christians.  In 1865, a man by the name of William Booth took leave of the Church of England in order to address himself more fully to the people in the slums of London.  Liquor and a dehumanizing industrial revolution were destroying the lives of England's poorest people.  Preaching salvation, sobriety, and soap, his ministry became organized along military lines.  He declared war on sin and his followers started calling him "Captain."  So began the Salvation Army, which for one hundred and forty five years has worked to lift people out of drunkenness, prostitution, crime, starvation, homelessness, and disease.  They say that in the office of General Booth in London these words were framed:  "Some wish to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell."  Another general, Dwight Eisenhower, said during the Second World War, "There are no victories at bargain prices."  The war against evil is similarly costly.

Paul turns to a different field of endeavor when he speaks of an athlete and reminds us that an athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules.  That was brought home to us painfully a few years ago when a number of our athletes were, in fact, crowned in the Pan-American games in South America, only to have their medals, or their crowns, if you will, taken back because they had not abided by the rules; they had taken steroids.  Paul is pointing out that the Christian has agreed to play the game of life by certain rules.  Contrary to the current philosophy that winning is everything, Paul is suggesting that how we play is the thing that is ultimately rewarded.  To live as Christians may often deny us the opportunity to take the easy way which other people are taking.

Then Paul goes on to compare the Christian with the hard-working farmer.  Being a farmer is not fun.  My brother-in-law was a farmer.  Sometimes when we visited him, he seemed to have nothing to do.  Other times he would be up for twenty-four hours at a time, irrigating trees.  Still other times he would be out in the biting cold, tying grape vines.  He was a farmer all the time.  He had to work nights and weekends.  He was married to the farm.  I think Paul was reminding Christians that we are expected to be Christian all the time, not just when it is convenient or easy.  What Paul is saying in all these examples is that, like the soldier, the athlete, and the farmer, the Christian faces stern necessities, and we are called upon, even in our day, to be faithful.

Perhaps sensing that the demands he has made are very stringent, the third thing Paul does is to assure us that those who persevere will be rewarded.  The reward for the soldier is victory.  The medieval mystic Thomas a Kempis advised:  "Always be ready for battle if you wish for victory; you cannot win the crown of patience without a struggle; if you refuse to suffer, you refuse the crown.  Therefore, if you desire the crown, fight bravely and endure patiently.  Without labor, no rest is won; without battle, there can be no victory."

In a magazine on psychoanalysis, Robert Coles tells of going to visit the family of Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old girl who was the first to integrate the public schools in New Orleans.  He asked the family, "How could you stand up to the hostility, the abuse, the spitting and the denigration that was heaped on you and not crumble?"  The mother responded, "We inched closer to God.  God sustained us and we became a little better ourselves."  They experienced victory, but not without struggle.

The reward for the athlete is the medal.  In 1976, at the Montreal Olympics, Shun Fujimoto earned the admiration of the world for himself and for his country.  Japan was close to winning the gold medal in gymnastics when Shun broke his leg during the Olympic semi-finals.  A doctor advised Shun to withdraw from the contest, put a cast on the athlete's leg, and ordered him to bed.  But, the next evening, Shun appeared for competition.  He performed a triple somersault and a twist in dismounting from the rings.  He held his final pose for the required instant and then collapsed in pain.  His performance was spectacular enough to earn Japan the Olympic gold medal in gymnastics.  "It is beyond my comprehension," said an Olympic doctor who treated Fujimoto, "how he could land without collapsing in screams.  What a man."  "Yes, the pain shot through me like a knife," said Fujimoto.  "It brought tears to my eyes.  But now I have a gold medal, and the pain is gone."  The Christian life may involve us in painful experiences, but it is also a rewarding life.

The reward for the farmer is the harvest, says Paul.  Planting, irrigating, pruning, thinning, harvesting all take time and effort.  I recently participated in a course designed to help people become tutors in adult literacy.  To motivate us, we were introduced to an older tutor and his younger student.  The young man had not learned how to read in school, and as a consequence, he had been withdrawn, embarrassed, and unable to advance in his work or social life.  Because the tutor had been willing to invest himself in the young man--to nurture him, to cultivate his potential--the young man had blossomed, and the tutor spoke glowingly about the rewards of the relationship.  We are called to invest ourselves similarly.

Paul becomes intensely personal at this point and reminds us that, even as he is writing, he is in prison, chained like a criminal for the sake of the gospel.  In Rome there is a church called "St. Paul's Outside the Walls."  In the reliquary of that church is a length of chain reputed to be the very chain which had bound Paul, the chain to which he refers in this passage.  In that same church, under an ornate altar, and surrounded by an enormous marble tomb, are said to be the remains of that man of God.  Whether his remains are in that tomb or not, the tomb reminds us that he did die as a martyr for his faith.  These words to Timothy, the last words he wrote, tell us something of the confidence with which he approached the end:  "I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus . . . . "  Paul was not dismayed; his suffering was not pointless; he was making the road easier for someone else.

A former Giants pitcher, Dave Dravecky, had a speaking engagement one night at a church, but he really didn't feel like going through with it.  He was still struggling over the loss of his pitching arm to cancer.  "I felt lousy that night," he recalled.  But he went anyway.  "I felt so unworthy to be standing there in front of all those people who looked up to me," he wrote.  "If they just knew what I was really like, what thoughts went through my head, what words came out of my mouth, they'd get up and walk out the door," he wrote.  Much to Dave's surprise, no one walked out that night.  In fact, one man came forward to learn more about Christ.  His life was a mess.  He wanted to change his life, but wasn't sure where to start.  He had been involved with another woman, but was in the process of trying to put his marriage back together.  There was something in Dave's message that night that spoke to this man.  He wanted Christ to come into his heart and change his life.  Faith stirred in that man as he went home to his wife.  In the weeks that followed, everyone around him noticed the change--people in the neighborhood, people he worked with.  No one noticed more than his wife.  Five weeks later, as that man went to get a tool from his truck, another truck hit him.  He died instantly.  A few months later Dave Dravecky was speaking on a nationally broadcast radio program.  During the call-in segment of the show, this man's wife called in.  She said those five weeks were the best days of their marriage.  "Choking back the tears," Dave writes, "she thanked me" (for having spoken the night I didn't feel like it).  Sometimes, God will use things we have had to endure to bring hope and help to others.  The salvation that takes place in their lives is our reward.

The ultimate source of strength for the person who chooses to follow Christ is Christ himself.  But there is no assurance that the way will be easy.  "If we have died with him, we will also live with him," says Paul.  The first one to live the Christian life did not escape the cross.  It is costly to have a different view of life and of what is important than those around us.  But Paul further reminds us that "if we endure we will also reign with him."

I once heard about a businessman who had a sign on his office wall which read, "Lord, the Fire and not the Scrap Heap."  This slogan was taken from the story of an old blacksmith who, because he was a Christian, had experienced much ridicule from his hard-living associates.  When the blacksmith was asked how he could possibly believe that God cared about him, he explained, "When I pick up a piece of metal, in order to make it into something useful, I put it into the fire.  And when it is red hot, I take it out and begin to hammer on it, and continue to hammer it until it is made into a useful article.  Unless I put it into the fire, it winds up on the scrap heap.  That," said the blacksmith, "is how I know God loves me.  Because he continues to shape me into someone who is useful, and doesn't throw me on the scrap heap."

In another place Paul wrote, "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us." (Romans 8:18)  Keep at it.  The best is yet to be.