January 9, 2011 Dr. Victor D. Pentz Senior Pastor Scripture Lesson: I Timothy 4:9-22

Transcription

1 Come Before Winter January 9, 2011 Dr. Victor D. Pentz Senior Pastor Scripture Lesson: I Timothy 4:9-22 Once in a while in the evening Becky and I will sink into the sofa, put up our feet, and go through old scrapbooks. A while ago we were flipping through our early years of marriage, back just after the earth s crust cooled in the 1970s, and we just howled. There was Becky decked out in her peasant dress and puka shells and I was in my powder blue leisure suit, sporting mutton-chop sideburns, and we were on our way to disco lessons. Remember disco? (Travolta stance) The Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever? They call it disco because Dis-go here, dis-go there! I said, Oh, honey, you are so much prettier now than you were back then, no contest. Becky said, And Vic, look at that roll around your middle. You re in so much better shape now than in the seventies. And for the next two hours we went on like that, lying to each other. But God s Word does not lie to us. Time takes its toll. In fact, Psalm 90 says we re like grass that withers, here today and gone tomorrow. The Apostle James writes, For you are a mist that appears for little time and then vanishes." In other words, in the context of eternity you and I are like a soap bubble that floats a few seconds, and then pops. Time is so precious. You can lose and replace a lot of things in life, but time isn t one of them. When it s gone, it s gone. In our scripture the Apostle Paul feels time slipping away. The sand in his hour glass was running out; he was imprisoned in Rome and would soon be executed. He grabbed his writing quill and penned what would be his last letter. It was to his protégé, Timothy, whom he left in charge of the far-away church of Ephesus. Paul says, "It s cold in this prison. Brr! Bring me my coat. And I am so bored; bring me my books. (Today he d say, Bring my laptop with the wireless card so I can keep sending letters. ) But, most of all, he writes, "I m lonely. Come to me, Timothy. I need you 1

2 here at my side. And then he adds these words: Come before winter. Come before winter." Let s look together at II Timothy 4:9-22. It s on page 1856 in your pew Bible. This is going to look like the Atlanta phone directory with all these names, but within here is such a story: 9 Do your best to come to me quickly, 10 for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. 11 Only Luke is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry. 12 I sent Tychicus to Ephesus. 13 When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments. 14 Alexander the metalworker did me a great deal of harm. The Lord will repay him for what he has done. 15 You too should be on your guard against him, because he strongly opposed our message. 16 At my first defense, no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me. May it not be held against them. 17 But the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. And I was delivered from the lion s mouth. 18 The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom. To him be glory for ever and ever. Amen. 19 Greet Priscilla [a] and Aquila and the household of Onesiphorus. 20 Erastus stayed in Corinth, and I left Trophimus sick in Miletus. 21 Do your best to get here before winter. Eubulus greets you, and so do Pudens, Linus, Claudia and all the brothers. 22 The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you. Come before winter. Why? A Sense of Urgency On the Mediterranean when winter came, sailing and navigation shut down. It was just too dangerous to be out there sailing in the winter storms. So if Timothy waited until winter he probably wouldn t arrive until April and Paul did not think he was going to last that long. He says in verse 6, "The time of my departure is at hand." You may have had in your family a time when an aged parent or grandparent was gravely ill and you picked up the phone and called a child or grandchild out of state and said, "It's time to come. Come now." That's what Paul is saying here: "Timothy, come now. It s now or never. So this passage is filled with urgency. If you remember the movie Titanic, what doomed that ship was a total lack of urgency. Now, if you did not see the movie I hate to ruin it by giving away the ending, but in the end the ship sinks yeah because there was so little sense of urgency. The crew did not even bring a pair of binoculars on board for the crow s nest which a Senate investigation later discovered would have saved all 2,200 passengers. It was also found a nearby ship tried to warn them they were headed for an iceberg and the wireless operator on Titanic replied, Shut up, I m busy. God wants us to go into 2011 with a sense of urgency, to remember the fleeting and precious nature of every moment, especially in three areas of life. Seize God s Opportunities First, God is going to send along golden opportunities that come from him that we can seize in faith or they ll slip through our fingers and be gone. 2

3 Shakespeare has Brutus say in his play Julius Caesar, There is a tide in the affairs of men/ Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; /Omitted, all the voyage of their life/ Is bound in shallows and miseries. / On such a full sea we are now afloat/ And we must take the current when it serves. I spent a lot of my early years catching waves. On a board the challenge is timing, knowing the precise second to thrust your body forward, dig your arms down through the water and catch the wave. Shove off too early, and the wave comes crashing down on top of you. On the other hand, shove off too late and you go over the falls; the nose goes down and you experience something surfers call pearling. When I was young they didn t have Velcro leashes to tie the board to your ankle. The board would shoot straight up into the air like a Poseidon missile and you had to dive to the bottom to keep from getting conked on the head. But shove off at the right split instant... I'll never forget the day I finally did that. I felt the swell of the wave beneath me, brought my arms down through the water, brought my feet up under me and, aping that crouch I'd seen others use hundreds of times, I rode my first wave. It s like yesterday the feel of my toes on the fiberglass, my buddy Mike yelling, Go, Pentz, go, and that roar behind me which someone once described as the sound of ten thousand yards of tearing silk. Shakespeare was right about surfing. We must take the current when it serves. And so it is in life. There s that split second in the World Series when the batter has to either swing or get called out on strikes, the moment when the stockbroker staring at the computer screen has to either buy or sell, the time when the young woman has to finally make up her mind and tell the young man yes I will or no I won t marry you. We have all these good intentions in 2011, to get that degree, to make a move in our career, to get serious about exercise or about attending worship on a regular basis, to go on a mission trip, to sing in the choir, to tutor in our incredible La Amistad ministry any night of the week after school. But too often the time just doesn't seem right and so we put it off. We pave our lives with "I-meant-to-do-thats." We miss the wave. What is God calling you to do in your heart of hearts in 2011? How we begin the year is so important. Did you know the hundred meter dash is usually decided in the first couple of steps? There s a lonely road in Alaska with a sign that says, Choose your rut carefully; you ll be in it for the next 400 miles. Let s begin this year well. Okay, I ve got to say something about that homeless man with the golden voice. You know who I m talking about. It s been all over the media this week. This homeless man, Ted Williams, was panhandling on the side of the road in Columbus, Ohio, when a local news reporter used his iphone to make a video, put it on YouTube and had 3 million hits the first day. On Thursday Ted Williams was on the Today Show. Matt Lauer asked him how, with all he d been through, he could have such love and grace. Mr. Williams replied, It all began in 2010 when I gave my life over to the Lord. He said, God, you never saw fit to take my voice in spite of all the flames and everything that went down my throat. I am emotionally ready to do the right things with this second chance. This time around, Matt, I have God." He said, "The differences between my successes of years gone by, I didn't acknowledge the Lord or thank Him for anything before, you know. I had some great opportunities of emceeing various venues and having a great time with all the perks of radio but I never once said 'O Lord thank you for this.'" 3

4 Here s a man who has caught his wave. Boy is he going places, if only he can stay upright on that wave, and we re all praying he will. In 2011, seize the opportunities. Hold on to Relationships The next thing we need to do in 2011 is hold on to relationships. They too easily slip through our fingers and are gone. Behind Paul's cry for help is a broken relationship. He writes: Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me. Paul had sent away all his other friends because he had good old Demas and Luke to count on. Then Demas went AWOL and Paul was devastated. Demas gets mentioned only three times in the Bible, but we see here the biography of a life. The first time Paul refers warmly to "Demas, [and] Luke, my fellow workers." Demas gets mentioned even before Luke. He is a fellow worker in spreading the gospel. The second time Demas's name appears, Paul refers to "Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas." Demas seems to have slipped a bit. Luke has earned for himself the moniker "beloved physician" and is now mentioned first. Demas happened to be there. The third time his name appears is here where Paul writes, "Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me." Demas may have gone off with Paul in the first blush of emotion as a new convert. Here he was, riding shotgun with the greatest Apostle of them all. He was where the action was. Demas loved it. And then things got tough Paul got thrown in prison, then this execution seemed to be approaching suddenly being an apostle wasn't fun anymore. And Demas was out of there. In life it s easy to devalue relationships and pour urgency into trivial things. When Erma Bombeck discovered she was dying she wrote, If I had my life to live over, I would have burned that pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage. I would have eaten the popcorn in the 'good' living room and worried much less about the dirt when someone wanted to light a fire in the fireplace. I would have taken the time to listen to my grandfather ramble about his youth. I would have cried and laughed less while watching television and more while watching life. Instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I'd have cherished every moment and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was my only chance in life to assist God in a miracle. There would have been more I love you's. More I'm sorry's. " In other words, her life would have been about relationships. Tim Sanders, former executive at Yahoo, says you should take all the things in life you think are important and divide them into three categories: some are rubber, some are metal and some are glass. There are things in our life that are rubber when you drop them they bounce back. You can drop some things and there are no huge consequences. For example I love following the Braves and Falcons especially the Falcons right now. Let me name-drop for a minute: the great new General Manager of the Falcons, Thomas Dimitroff, and his wife Angeline and son Mason are members of Peachtree. His mom was down recently and she took me aside and said, Vic, as his pastor your job is to keep Thomas humble and walking with the Lord. With this kind of season it s getting harder and harder to keep Thomas humble. (Actually that s untrue. Even with all the plaudits, Thomas is a very humble man.) But if a crisis came along, I could drop following the Falcons for a while and pick it up again. There s my passion for reading detective nov- 4

5 els by Michael Connelly, and even working out. These are all rubber; I can drop them and they bounce back. Things that are made of metal, when they get dropped, make this terrible noise. But you can recover from that drop. You miss a big meeting at work, and that s bad. But you can get someone who was there at the meeting to you the Cliff Notes. Or if you forget to balance your checkbook and lose track of how much you have in the account, and the bank notifies you that you have been spending more than you have that's going to create some noise, but, hey, you can recover from it. But then there are things made of glass. When you drop them they shatter to pieces and nothing is ever the same again. Yes, you can try to put it all back together again but it s still going to leak and you ll never find all the pieces. It won t be the same as before, because the consequences of its being broken will forever affect how it's used. And only you know the things in your life that you cannot, cannot, afford to drop. Most of them have to do with your relationships: your marriage, your kids, your family, and your friends. Treasure the people in your life. Demas dropped Paul, and a friendship was shattered. Hold relationships close to your heart in Live for God In 2011, there ll be opportunities. There ll be people. And, third, there will be God. We live every moment knowing that eternity is but a breath away. T.S Elliot said, I d much rather live as if God exists and discover at the end that he did not than to live as if God did not exist and discover in the end that he does. Bruce Thielemann tells how once Satan called to himself the emissaries of hell and said he wanted to send one of them to earth to aid women and men in the ruination of their souls. He asked which one would want to go. One creature came forward and said, "I will go." And Satan said, "If I send you, what will you tell the children of men?" The creature said, "I will tell the children of men there is no heaven." And Satan said, "They will not believe you, for there is a bit of heaven in every human heart. In the end everyone knows that good must have victory. You may not go." Then another came forward, darker and more foul than the first. And Satan said, "If I send you, what will you tell the children of men?" And he said, I will tell them there is no hell." Satan looked at him and said, "Oh no, they will not believe you, for in every human heart there is a thing called conscience an inner voice which testifies to the truth that not only will good be triumphant, but that evil will be defeated. You may not go. Then one hideous creature came forward, this one from the darkest place of all. And Satan said to him, "And if I send you, what will you say to women and men to aid them in the destruction of their souls?" And he said, "I will tell them that there is no hurry." And Satan said, "GO!" That spirit is still in our world today, But God always says, "Hurry." Never tomorrow, always today. Now is the accepted time. Today is the day of salvation. There is a tide. Catch the wave. We like to think Timothy got that letter, dropped everything, picked up Paul s books and Paul s coat, made a beeline for the dock, and rushed to his side. But what if he 5

6 didn't? What if Timothy had too many irons in the fire and couldn't get away right then, and put it off, finished up his work in Ephesus, then hurried to Troas in January? And there was a sign on the dock saying, "No ships until April," and so he had to wait and didn't get there until the end of April? Clarence Edward Macartney, who preached a great sermon on this text, imagines that scene: "He goes to the house of Claudia or Pudens or Ampliatus and asks where he can find Paul. And they say, 'And are you Timothy? Don't you know Paul was beheaded last December? Every time the jailer put the key inside the lock, Paul thought it was you coming.'" a Greek Prisca, a variant of Priscilla. There's no evidence Timothy ever did make it to Rome. It reminds us we need to act now. Is God calling you to make a change in your life? Have you received Jesus as your Lord and savior? Could you think of any better way to go into the new year than to have the Lord of Life out ahead around the bend arranging circumstances for your blessing and growth in 2011? Do it now. Don t miss the boat. Catch the wave. Prayer: Lord, thank you for this precious gift of time, a gift through which you give us the opportunity to go beyond time and live in eternity with you. We pray for those wrestling with issues of faith who may be this morning intrigued by the possibility of this Christian adventure, a life in which they give as much as they know of themselves to as much as they know of you. Lord, enter deeply into those inner dialogues this morning. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen. 6

7 7

8 PEACHTREE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 3434 ROSWELL ROAD, NW ATLANTA, GEORGIA