2 Timothy 1:6-18
“If you were not strangers here, the hounds of the world would not bark at you.”
–Samuel Rutherford
2 Timothy 2:11-26
“I never thought I’d be in this ministry. I never expected to be a missionary. I knew all along through school I was not called to a mission field. I heard a great missionary, a missionary doctor of the Sudan Interior Mission, tell a story that came from his field and every fellow in the seminary was weeping, including myself. The boys, one on the one side of me and the other on the other, both of them went to the mission field and they’ve done a great work. I never felt called to go to the mission field. The first time I made a trip to the mission field and saw what the missionary there was undergoing in his family and the tremendous sacrifice he was making, I said to a friend of mine who went along with me, ‘I know now why God didn't call me as a missionary. The reason is that I don't have the intestinal fortitude to make the sacrifice this man is doing here, burying himself in the jungle and giving out the Word of God to just a couple of hundred people.’ Believe me, I guess that God didn't intend for me to do it that way. And now, I found myself broadcasting in all these different languages. I'm not the one doing it. I just make the tapes and they translate them and we are rejoicing in what's happening today. I don't know how it happened other than I just know God did it and I'd like to invite you to come and go along with us and let's take the Word out today!"
–Dr. J. Vernon McGee, Introduction to 2 Timothy 2:11-26
“Here is a quotation that reveals the ignorance of a man who failed to recognize that the Word of God is one great unity that needs to be rightly divided to be understood. I’m quoting from an article: ‘In short, one way to describe the Bible, written by many different hands over a period of three thousand years, and more, would be to say that it is a disorderly collection of sixty-odd books which are often tedious, barbaric, obscure, and teeming with inconsistencies. It is a swarming compost of a book, an Irish stew of poetry and propaganda, law and legalism, myth and murk, history and hysteria.’ That man really spoke a mouthful. His verbiage is quite verbose and reveals a woeful ignorance of the Bible. And he reveals the result of not rightly dividing the Word of God.”
–Dr. J. Vernon McGee, Edited Messages on 2 Timothy
2 Timothy 3:1-12
“In this world it is becoming more and more unpopular to be a Christian. Soon it may become dangerous.”
–Melvin Laird
2 Timothy 3:8-17
“I believe that today we're moving in a time when it costs something to be a Christian.”
–Dr. J. Vernon McGee, Introduction to 2 Timothy 3:8-17
“In this world it is becoming more and more unpopular to be a Christian. Soon it may become dangerous.”
–Melvin Laird
2 Timothy 3:16—4:8
“They shall invite teachers en masse. In periods of unsettled faith, skepticism, and mere curious speculation in matters of religion, teachers of all kinds swarm like the flies in Egypt. The demand creates the supply. The hearers invite and shape their own preachers. If the people desire a calf to worship, a ministerial calf-maker is readily found. Clement of Alexandria describes certain teachers as ‘scratching and tickling, in no human way, the ears of those who eagerly desire to be scratched….’ Seneca says: ‘Some come to hear, not to learn, just as we go to the theatre, for pleasure, to delight our ears with the speaking or the voice or the plays.’”
–Dr. Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament
“They want religious entertainment from Christian performers who will tickle their ears. We have a love for novelty in the churches today; emotional movies, pageants, foot-tapping music, colored lights, etc. The man who simply opens the Bible is rejected, while a too shallow religious entertainer becomes a celebrity. And verse 4 indicates that itching ears soon will become deaf ears as people turn away from the truth and believe man-made fables.”
–Dr. Warren Wiersbe
“Dr. McGee, you’re going to find out in your own ministry that there are a great many people more interested in Anti-Christ than they are in Christ.”
–Dr. Arno C. Gaebelein
2 Timothy 4:6-22
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.
–“Crossing the Bar” by Alfred Lord Tennyson
|
