1 I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom;
2 Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine.
3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;
4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
5 But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.
Introduction
A Methodist minister said sometime ago as he described the multifaceted responsibilities of the modern minister, that the modern ministry has to make as many visits as a country preacher, shake as many hands as a politician, prepare as many briefs as a lawyer, see as many clients as a specialist. Paul is talking about that multifaceted responsibility of the ministry in 2 Timothy 4:1-5. He says, “I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick [this is an old English word for alive] and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom. Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine. For [and here is the reason for it all] the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.”
The book of 2 Timothy is a pastor’s manual. The whole book is a charge. It is a challenge by the apostle Paul to Timothy.
When Paul wrote these words he was at the end of his life. In fact in the very next verse he is going to say that the time of my departure is at hand and I am ready to be offered up. I’ve fought a good fight. I’ve finished the course. I’ve kept the faith. Now there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness and not for me only but for all those who love his appearing. Paul is at the end of his life and he is come to lay the responsibility for the leadership of the church and the preserving of the truth on the shoulders of young Timothy. And he is going to challenge him and charge him with that solemn responsibility finally in this passage of scripture. He has been doing it all along. He comes to his final challenge and charge here.
There are five specific challenges in this one charge. There is one in the first four verses. There are four in verse 5. What Paul has to say here can have application to the lives of all of us. But in particular one of these challenges is for us. In verse 5, Paul says, “Do the work of an evangelist.” And there is in that a challenge and a charge for every last one of us be we a preacher or deacon or Sunday school teacher or plain vanilla member of this congregation.
I want you to look at this overall charge and challenge and then we will zero in on that word from Paul, “Do the work of an evangelist.”
He begins by saying, “I charge you before God and the Lord Jesus Christ who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing, when he comes again and his kingdom.”
Daniel Webster said the most solemn thought that can occupy a person’s mind is their accountability to God. And Paul begins by reminding Timothy, “You shall one day stand before the judge, the Lord Jesus Christ, when he comes again, at his kingdom. And in the light of that solemn occasion I want to remind you of your responsibility.”
And then he launches into that series of challenges. The first is this: “Timothy, preach the word.” And then for the next several verses Paul amplifies upon this one challenge, “Preach the word.”
When we say “preach,” it calls to mind the picture of an ordained minister standing behind a pulpit like this at 11 o’clock on Sunday morning and delivering a sermon to a congregation. That is not what the word called to mind in Paul’s day. It is a word that describes an imperial messenger who comes into a community and assembles the people and delivers a message that he has just received from the emperor. And he delivers that message with all of the formality and the authority and the gravity of his office. And when Paul says preach, that is the idea. Someone standing to speak a message directly from the emperor.
He says, “I want to tell you what to preach. You are not free to choose your own message. You preach the word.” And that suggests to us the whole of revealed truth. Timothy, it is not your responsibility to do a book review. It is not your responsibility to give people a discourse on politics or on economics. You are not there to tell them how to be a success in business. You are not to choose your own message. Timothy, you are to preach the whole of revealed truth, preach the word.
In the doing of that you are to be instant in season and out of season. That word instant means “to be ready.” The word season means “opportunity.” You are to be ready at every opportunity. When the time is right and when the opportunity is not exactly right, you are to be ready at all times to preach the word.
It is said of John R. Mott, a great Christian leader of another generation, that he was the master of opportunity. We may very well be the bunglers of opportunity because doors of opportunity are open to us daily. Both in our private lives and in our work as a nation. Doors of opportunity are open for us to preach the word and when the world is screaming for answers the people of God are stuttering with nothing to say.
Timothy, you are as a messenger from the emperor to proclaim the whole of revealed truth, you are to be ready to do it at every opportunity. You are to preach God’s word.
Paul says you are to rebuke and to reprove and to exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine in every way possible. Using every means, you are to bombard iniquity, and you are to set forth the truth of God.
The reason for that is that there would be people who will gather around the teachers and these people will have itching ears. It carries with it the idea that these are people who want to hear what they want to hear. That they are listening for mere gratification. And so they are going to be looking for someone who will tickle their ears, who will tickle their fancy with what they have to say.
They are not really interested in what God has to say if it cuts across the grain of their life, if it is unpleasant, if it is challenging, if it is convicting. That is not what they will be looking for. They will want someone to tickle their ears. So, Timothy, you stay with the truth. Don’t reduce yourself to saying what people want to hear.
In my lifetime I’ve never known of a time when people were looking so much for somebody to tickle their ears. They will run here and there to listen to this one and that one to find somebody to say what they want to hear.
That is not our job at all. It is to tell you what God says whether you like it or not. Whether you want to hear it or not. Whether you intend to do it or not. And so Paul is challenging. His charge to Timothy is stay with your calling. Stay with your work.
Preach the word. Be ready all the time to do that. Do it in every way. Reprove, rebuke, exhort because the time is going to come when people will desperately need to hear that word from God so they can anchor their life to it. All of that is a part of one charge, one challenge.
And then in the next verse Paul moves rapidly through a series of other challenges as he says that Timothy is to endure affliction. He has been telling him all along that it is hard work. There are threats and there are dangers in your work and you are to stand up to them, endure affliction. You are to be watchful in all things, to be alert.
And in the last part he says, “You are to make full proof of your ministry.” Which means you are to bring it to fulfillment. You are to become everything that God called you to be. Everything God created you to be. There may be a temptation to be lazy, to stop short, to be less than your best. Timothy, you make full proof of your ministry. And in the midst of that there is this challenge, “Do the work of an evangelist.”
An evangelist is a bringer of good news. So Paul is saying, “Timothy, I want you to always be bringing good news to people.” In the original language there is an absence of the definite article “an” in that verse. It ought not to read, “Do the work of an evangelist.” It ought rather to read, “Do evangelistic kind of work.” Timothy, it is your job to ever and always be a bringer of the good news. You are to always be bringing men and women to Jesus Christ. Paul is not exhorting Timothy to become an itinerant preacher and to travel from place to place and preach evangelistic crusades. He is rather saying that right where you are, in your church, in your town, always be bringing the good news to men, always be bringing men and women to Jesus Christ in your message and in your method. You be evangelistic.
I think that challenge is a good one for the church today. We need ever and always to know that we are here as the people of God. From the pastor in the pulpit to the deacons who pass the collection, to the Sunday school teacher who sits with her class, to the last person in the sanctuary, we are here for one great calling and that is, that we might bring men and women to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. And as long as people are lost, as long as hell is in operation, as long as God leaves us here, we are to ever and always be about the work of evangelism, bringing men and women face to face with the Lord Jesus Christ with the hopes that they will be saved.
How are we to do that? In a practical sort of way. How can we carry out this charge to do the work of an evangelist? There are at least three ways. There are probably many others that you could add. There are at least three. If you are taking notes on the sermon these are the things you might want to write down.
First of all, we can do the work of evangelism through public proclamation. Second, we can do the work of evangelism through planned visitation. Third, we can do the work of evangelism through personal invitation.
Public proclamation, planned visitation, personal invitation. Those are at least three ways that we can fulfill this one injunction that the apostle Paul lays upon every one of us, preacher and layperson alike.
1. Public proclamation. We begin at perhaps the simplest and the easiest place to fulfill this commission—public proclamation. That’s one way that we can do the work of an evangelist. That is one way that we can keep bringing people to Jesus Christ.
Sometimes people say to me, “Preacher, you are too evangelistic.” Let me tell you, I have set the course in my life and I intend to stay on that course as long as God keeps me alive. As long as I am in the ministry I will ever and always be trying to bring men and women to Jesus Christ. That is a part of what God has called the preacher who stands in the pulpit to o but also the teacher who stands behind the lectern in the classroom. Every last one of us who has an opportunity to speak publicly to people ought to try to use that as an opportunity to bring people to Jesus Christ.
Paul said that it pleased God that through the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. Jesus is the Savior and through faith and trust in him, all men everywhere can be saved. But they must know about Jesus. They must understand the way to salvation. And it is through public proclamation that men and women are brought face to face with the truth so that they might trust Jesus who is the Savior.
Someone asked, “Do we need an institution and do we need a person who is continual crying out souls, souls, souls?” And the answer is ever and eternally, “Yes, we need that in this world.”
D. L. Moody often preached on the text, “You must be born again.” One day someone said to him, “Why are you forever preaching on the subject, you must be born again?” He said, “The answer is simple. You must be born again.” That’s the only way you can enter into the kingdom of God. Apart from that no person will be saved. And because that is true, and because people are lost and they are being born by the thousands upon thousands every day, and they will live and die without salvation unless we tell them about the Savior, we must evangelize and we must do it through public proclamation. But that is not the only way to do it.
2. Planned visitation. There is a second way that enlists all of us. Not everybody has a pulpit. Not everybody has a classroom. Not everybody has a TV program. Not everybody has a radio ministry, but we can all be a part of this great admonition to do the work of an evangelist. And we can do it through a planned visitation program.
The work of evangelism is not the pet project of the pastor. It is rather God’s plan. It is God’s strategy for the ages. And it involves more than the man who stands in the pulpit preaching the sermon. It involves every believer who has come to a knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Somebody said that the Christian army is the only army in the world that trains only its chaplains and its band directors. So often they are the only ones that we expect to march off into battle, to conquer new territory for the kingdom of God. It ought never to be that way. God didn’t intend it to be that way. The Lord Jesus, when he called to himself the 12 disciples and later the 70 followers, didn’t leave things to chance. He didn’t just say, “Go when you want to and say what you want to say. Take what you want to take.” No, he gave them specific orders, trained them, organized them, and sent them out. If we are going to reach our world and our community, we must invest that kind of planning and develop that kind of sending, obedience, and submission. Otherwise it can never ever be done.
Many years ago Theodore White was commenting on presidential elections and he drew a comparison between Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. Barry Goldwater beat out the much better financed Nelson Rockefeller in the primary election to gain his party’s nomination for the presidency of the U.S. And as Theodore White explained how he did that he said that even though Goldwater didn’t have the financial resources that Rockefeller had he enlisted college students all over America. They went throughout these communities from house to house, door to door, speaking to people face to face and asking them to vote for their candidate. Then Theodore White said that in the future the political campaigns of America would be determined at the doorsteps of America.
Let me tell you that not only will our elections be determined at the doorsteps, so will the salvation of most people at their doorsteps or in their living rooms. If we wait until they come here, we will wait forever. For they are not now nor have they ever since the early 1950s come to any house of worship in any sizeable number to hear the Gospel. People are lost and when they are lost they don’t realize their condition. They don’t realize where they are. They don’t realize where they need to be. And somebody must go and point that out to them and show them the way to life. And unless we do it in some kind of planned way, it will never ever be done. And one way that we can fulfill this scriptural injunction to do the work of an evangelist is through planned visitation.
The church of Jesus Christ is today the lost battalion of God in the way against sin. And it is not because training is not available. It is not because prospects are unknown. It is not because the challenges are not laid out. It is because we choose not to respond to the challenge and the call and we need to know that it is God who said, “Do the work of an evangelist.”
3. Personal invitation. We do it through public proclamation, we do it through planned visitation, but we also can do it through personal invitation.
Do you realize that we have more than 100,000 people in Tyler, and 14,000 members of this congregation? That means that one out of every seven people in Tyler is a member of this church. That’s awesome. And in a week’s time we must touch almost every life in Tyler. They must come through your grocery store, or they must pump gas in your service station. Or they must buy a shirt or hardware in your store. Or they must eat in your restaurant. Everybody in this community is touched by somebody in our congregation almost every week. Think what would happen if every one of us took seriously the command of God, “Do thou the work of an evangelist.” And we began to look for opportunities to speak to people wherever we are about Jesus Christ, who he is and what he can do.
I’m not talking about in a brass sort of way that buttonholes people and embarrasses them and is a disgrace to the Gospel. I’m not talking about that kind of stuff. I’m talking about the kind and gentle and loving spirit that we can have as we just share what means so much to us. Can you imagine what would happen in this community if everyone in our congregation should suddenly begin to do the work of an evangelist? It not only would turn the town upside down but the county and the state of Texas upside down. It would be a duplication of the book of Acts: “These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also” (Acts 17:6). Personal invitation.
Henry Ford played golf every week with a buddy who sold insurance. One day Ford bought a huge insurance policy from his friend’s competitor. When the friend heard about it, he said to Ford, “Why didn’t you buy that policy from me?” Ford said, “You never asked me.”
You know there are people out there waiting to be asked. They are not lining up, mind you, but they are there. I once knew a young lady in our church who attended so often she was asked to take a leadership role in the youth department. When asked how long she had been a member of the church, we found out she was not a member at all, even though she was very active and all the kids loved her. “Why haven’t you become a member?” we wanted to know. “Nobody ever asked me.” We asked her, and she joined the next Sunday. I suspect that there are some more people out there who they like what you’ve got, if what you have is real and vital to you, has changed your life and made it better. They like that and they would buy it if you would ask.
That’s why you ought never tell me that you are a prospect for this church because I’m going to tell you outright, face to face, that we want you here. More than that, God wants you. And there is no substitute for that personal invitation that comes first from the heart of God through us.
Do thou the work of an evangelist. For you to do that you may have to make some changes in your life. Sometimes we have to eliminate in order to consecrate. Our lives get too cluttered up with a lot of other things and we don’t have time for the main thing. And so to eliminate in order to consecrate may first be necessary. But this is where the water hits the wheel. This is the most important thing we have to do.
F. B. Myer, a great English preacher, was one day visiting in the home of A. B. Simpson, the founder of the Christian Missionary Alliance, an organization that became a great missionary movement in our world. We Baptists are not the only ones who have a great missions movement, and I thank God for the CMA. May he multiply them, whatever their name may be.
Myer got up early one morning and stole down the steps to find a quiet place for his devotional. He thought he was up earlier than anybody else but as he walked by the study he glanced in and the saw Simpson on his knees before a globe of the world. And he had his finger on that globe and he was praying for a specific place. A minute later he spun that globe and put his finger down to stop the globe and he bowed his head and prayed for that place. He didn’t realize that F. B. Myer was looking through the crack in the door. In a minute he stood and put his arms around that whole globe and bowed his head and began to pray for the whole world.
That’s the way we are to be. Praying and working at one spot, but at the same time with a heart of compassion that reaches out to the whole world to try to claim it for God and to one day place it at the feet of Jesus who is the only Lord and Savior. We shall stand before him one day and in light of that I charge you before God and the Lord Jesus Christ to keep reaching out to lost souls.