2 Timothy 2:11-14 - He cannot deny Himself

2:11-13

The “here is a trustworthy saying” is used several times in the pastoral epistles (eg 1 Tim 1:15). “If we died with Him ...” We died with Christ on the cross (Rom 6:1-5), the corollary of this is that we will also live with Him, we share in the resurrection. “If we endure ..” The Christian life involves enduring, this is such an important thing to learn, to know and to live by. We need to endure. If we do so we will reign with Christ. There is both a now and a future aspect to this. The greatest aspect is the future reigning with Christ, but the now aspect is also important. A key element to achieving things in this life is endurance. The flip side of this is that if we disown Christ, He will disown us (Matt 10:33). There is a great reward for enduring, and a great price to pay for giving up. Men may be faithless, may give up or deny the faith (and we hear of examples of this every week), but Christ remains faithful. Some man or woman may have changed his or her mind, but God hasn’t!

2:14

Having encouraged Timothy to fight the good fight, learning from what Paul has done, we now come to a specific area: dealing with false teachers. This is an area we always have to deal with. The first thing Timothy is told to do is to keep reminding people of the truth. A big mistake we can make is to assume that people know the truth, that because we have told them once we do not need to tell them again. This is wrong, and is unscriptural. The Bible emphasises the need to constantly remind people of the truth. And they are to be warned against “quarreling about words”. Examples today might include numerology, or some obscure teaching. As Paul says, these things are of no value and only ruin lives.