The 260 Journey

Day 198

Today’s Reading: 2 Timothy 2

Bill Bright has been one of the most influential Christian leaders of our generation. He and his wife, Vonette, founded Campus Crusade for Christ , which is now active in 190 countries, and consists of 26,000 staff members and an additional 553,000 trained volunteers, who work on campuses and in various settings around the world. Campus Crusade also produced the Jesus film that has been seen by more than 5.5 billion people to date, and the “I Found It” campaign, which swept the globe in 1975 and brought millions more to Christ. Bill also wrote more than one hundred books. He wrote his last one, The Journey Home, when he was slowly and painfully losing his battle with a debilitating illness called pulmonary fibrosis.

This is how his physician told him he didn’t have much longer to live:

'He sat me down one day—Vonette and me—in his office and said, “You don’t seem to realize what’s happening to you. You’re dying. It’s worse than cancer. It’s worse than heart trouble. We can deal with these in some measure, but nobody can help you with pulmonary fibrosis. You are going to die a miserable death. You need to get your head out of the sand and be prepared for it.”

So I said, “Well, praise the Lord. I’ll see the Lord sooner than I’d planned.”'

American poet W. H. Auden wrote, “Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.” Think about that. While everyone is eating and enjoying the day, we all know there is an end. One Puritan writer said, “If you attempt to talk with a dying man about sports or business, he is no longer interested. He now sees other things as more important. People who are dying recognize what we often forget, that we are standing on the brink of another world.”

Second Timothy is the apostle Paul’s “long journey home” book. This is number fourteen of Paul’s letters. It’s his last one. And it's an investment into leaders and, more specifically, young leaders. Former United States Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, said, “The task of the leader is to get their people from where they are to where they have not been.” This was the charge Paul gave Timothy:

"No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier. Also if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not win the prize unless he competes according to the rules. The hard-working farmer ought to be the first to receive his share of the crops." (2 Timothy 2:4-6)

In this challenge to Timothy, Paul uses three images: a soldier, an athlete, and a farmer. With each of these images and examples, Paul specified something importantly inherent in each of them: to be effective.

Be a soldier. If you are in active service, you don’t entangle yourself in the affairs of everyday life. Or as one version says: “For every soldier called to active duty must divorce himself from the distractions of this world” (TPT). The soldier sees the big picture. He is not distracted by minutiae, but is in it to please the One who enlisted Him. The soldier lives for his General.

Be an athlete. Compete according to the rules. There are no shortcuts to winning. Paul is saying the prize is for those who keep the rules. With so many performance-enhancing drugs hitting professional athletes today, it’s a perfect example of trying to cut corners to win. Winning in the Christian life has no shortcuts. It may be a longer path and journey but God is doing something in your training.

Be a farmer. He is referred to as the hard-working farmer. Hard work gets results. The fruit of the farmer’s labor is inevitable; a crop comes because of his commitment to that field. In God’s Kingdom, it seems God gives promises, but they are not automatic. God gives the children of Israel the promised land, but Joshua has to fight for it for seven years. Work hard and stay diligent.

Leadership calls for those who see the bigger picture, those who don’t take shortcuts, and those who work hard. One of my favorite writers is W. H. Griffith Thomas. He gave this priceless insight to young preachers: “Think yourself empty, read yourself full, write yourself clear, pray yourself keen—then enter the pulpit and let yourself go!”

That’s what Paul did for young Timothy.

Day 197

Today’s Reading: 2 Timothy 1

The apostle Paul gets three verses into Timothy’s second letter as a young pastor and reminds him that serving God must be done with a clear conscience: “Timothy, I thank God for you—the God I serve with a clear conscience, just as my ancestors did. Night and day I constantly remember you in my prayers” (2 Timothy 1:3, NLT).

Serving God with a clear conscience. This is paramount in our relationship with God. For the most part a clear conscience helps us to know the voice of God. One of my dear friends and mentors Winkie Pratney said: “A clear conscience is absolutely essential for distinguishing between the voice of God and the voice of the enemy. Unconfessed sin is a prime reason why many do not know God’s will.”

Your conscience is where you hear the whisper of God and feel the conviction of the Holy Spirit. The old saying goes, “Conscience does not keep you from doing anything. It just keeps you from enjoying it.” I love a small boy’s definition of what the conscience is: “something that makes you tell your mother before your sister does.” A clear conscience makes you stop before it’s too late. It helps you to slam on the brakes before you say and do something that you will regret later.

So many people skip a clear conscience and keep going till consequences show up. And so many Christians assume it’s okay to blow by the warning of their conscience and to continue on when really God has given us a mechanism to pause before moving forward.

Our goal is to have a clear conscience. There are different types of violated consciences in the New Testament, which are important for us to take note of. It comes after a conscience that was not kept clear:

• Paul warns Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:2 of a seared conscience.

• Paul tells Titus in Titus 1:15 to be aware of a defiled conscience.

• The writer of Hebrews in Hebrews 10:22 warns of an evil conscience.

I believe that every time we fail to keep our consciences clear, you border on a defiled or evil or even seared conscience. Do not dismiss conviction. It’s the brake for moving forward into regret. Many of us have regrets because we did not respond to conviction. And so it’s important for us to respond to conviction instead of waiting for consequences.

What makes us stop and pause? Conviction or being caught?

Conviction is when we feel something deep inside that is like an alarm telling us there is an intruder. Embarrassment will make us stop late, but conviction will go deeper to make us seriously pause early.

Have you ever been in the middle of a conversation and were about to say something that was not edifying about a person, something that was gossip, and you felt this feeling, Don’t say it. That’s God’s warning mechanism for a clear conscience.

Don’t finish that statement. Don’t start that joke—it compromises who you are. Don’t . . .

Stay in tune with the whisper of God. That will promote a clear conscience every single day, not just on Sundays at church. When you serve God seven days a week, you fight every day to keep a clear conscience.

There was a ship that had a regular route from California to Colombia. One day shortly before leaving for California, some drug dealers sent the ship’s captain a message that offered him $500,000 to allow a small shipment of drugs to get through to the United States. The captain replied with a no. On his next three trips, they raised the offer each time until they reached $2 million. He hesitated, and then said, “Maybe.” Then he contacted the FBI, which set up a sting operation, and the drug dealers were arrested. One of the FBI agents asked the captain, “Why did you wait until they got to $2 million before contacting us?” The captain replied, “They were getting close to my price.”

Do you have a price? Is it 20 percent off a coat or a dress using your friend’s employee discount, which belongs to them and not you? But since they said they would buy it and you can pay them back, it must be okay? It isn’t. Don’t violate your conscience. Keep it clear. As A. W. Tozer said: “An honest man is strange when in the midst of dishonest men, but it is a good kind of strangeness.”

The story goes that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes novels, played a prank on five of the most prominent men in England. He sent an anonymous note to each one that said simply, “All is found out. Flee at once.” Within twenty-four hours, all five men had left the country. Their conscience wasn’t clear.

What if you received that note? Would you have left or stayed?

Day 196

Today’s Reading: 1 Timothy 6

There’s a word in the game of football that keeps enduring—Hut! An article in The New York Times pondered why this word keeps hanging around:

It is easily the most audible word in any football game, a throaty grunt that may be the sport’s most distinguishing sound.

Hut!

It starts almost every play, and often one is not enough. And in an increasingly complex game whose signal-calling has evolved into a cacophony of furtive code words—“Black Dirt!,” “Big Belly!,” “X Wiggle!”—hut, hut, hut endures as the signal to move.

But why? . . .

“I have no idea why we say hut,” said Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce. . . . “I guess because it’s better than yelling, ‘Now,’ or ‘Go.’”

Joe Theismann, the former Washington Redskins quarterback . . . reckons he shouted “hut” more than 10,000 times during games and practices. . . . “I’ve been hutting my way through football for 55 years—but I have no clue why.”

The article conjectures that “hut” may come from the military backgrounds of many early pro football players. But that’s just a guess.

This is similar to what Christians believe and why. Many people have been told what to believe without the why or the rationale behind that belief or doctrine. And it’s been around so long, they don’t have a clue about the explanation.

The word doctrine means a set of beliefs or teachings from the Bible. Why do we believe what we believe? Or are we just saying hut, hut every Sunday and not knowing why? Will we get thousands of years into Christianity since the resurrection of Jesus and be asked why we say and do certain things and not have an answer?

Fortunately, we learn some answers in today’s chapter, where Paul tells us the why. Paul takes a thirty-thousand-foot view of doctrine. He talks about doctrinal diversions but gives us one big statement. Here are Paul’s important words:

"If anyone advocates a different doctrine and does not agree with sound words, those of our Lord Jesus Christ, and with the doctrine conforming to godliness, he is conceited and understands nothing; but he has a morbid interest in controversial questions and disputes about words, out of which arise envy, strife, abusive language, evil suspicions, and constant friction between men of depraved mind and deprived of the truth, who suppose that godliness is a means of gain." (1 Timothy 6:3-5) 

There it is: the bombshell phrase, the thirty-thousand-foot view of why we believe: doctrine conforming us to godliness. To know if a belief system is true, the end result of our belief should make us godly, which means it should make us look more like Jesus.

Religion tries to get us to look like the club, the people on Sundays and in the pew. The goal is not to look like Sunday people but to lift our eyes a lot higher to heaven. Our goal is not to look like the person in the pulpit but the One who sits on the throne of heaven. That’s what doctrine is supposed to do. It conforms us to godliness. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “If your knowledge of doctrine does not make you a great man of prayer, you had better examine yourself again.”

Paul wants to help us better understand how it plays out practically, so he offers the question “Can you be rich and a Christian?” as the test case. The answer is “yes, absolutely.” But Paul reminds us of some things in our lab work:

"Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and harmful desires which plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs." (Verses 9-10)

Paul challenges not being rich, but the reason behind why we want to get rich. It’s not the money but the motive that is destructive. If we want money we will fall into temptation and a snare to many foolish desires. That desire is so powerful that people have wandered from the faith.

But Paul says that you can be rich with the right motive. He doesn’t stop there, though. Remember he says doctrine should conform us to godliness. We cannot say to Christians that we need to be rich or we need to be poor. That is religious. We can say to Christians that whether we are rich or poor, we must make sure we look more and more like Jesus.

If it’s the prosperity doctrine telling people that gain is godliness, they are wrong. If it’s another camp telling people that poverty like Mother Teresa is what God wants, that doctrine is just as bad.

Our goal in life is not to look like a rich televangelist or like a woman in India. Our goal is to look like the Man who died for our sins.

Paul continues by saying this to the rich people in regards to godliness:

"Instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited or to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy. Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is life indeed." (Verses 17-19)

Those words are really for all of us: Do good. Be rich in good works. Be generous. Be ready to share.

Nineteenth-century preacher J. C. Ryle captured it well when he said: Doctrine is useless if it is not accompanied by a holy life. It is worse than useless: it does positive harm. . . . Something of “the image of Christ,” which can be seen and observed by others in our private life, and habits, and character, and doings.”

Day 195

Today’s Reading: 1 Timothy 5

A truck driver had been hired to deliver fifty penguins to the state zoo. As he was driving his truck through the desert, his truck broke down. Three hours passed, and he began to wonder if his cargo would survive in the desert heat. Finally he was able to wave down another truck. He offered the driver five hundred dollars to take the penguins to the zoo for him, and the other driver agreed.

The next day, the first truck driver finally made it to town. As he drove, he was appalled to see the second truck driver walking down the street with the fifty penguins walking in a single-file line behind him! He slammed on his brakes, jumped out of his truck, and stormed over to the other trucker. “What’s going on?” he shouted. “I gave you five hundred dollars to take these penguins to the zoo!” The other trucker responded, “I did take them to the zoo. And I had some money left over, so now we’re going to see a movie.”

Miscommunication leads to complication and confusion. Just a little miscommunication can mean a lot of problems. In today’s chapter, Paul gives us a lesson on effective communication. As author William H. Whyte so aptly said: “The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it.” Paul wants to remove the illusions for us. And his advice is priceless. He starts off 1 Timothy 5 with explaining how to communicate to people:

Never speak sharply to an older man, but plead with him respectfully just as though he were your own father. Talk to the younger men as you would to much-loved brothers. Treat the older women as mothers, and the girls as your sisters, thinking only pure thoughts about them. (Verses 1-2, TLB)

This passage can so easily be passed over and we miss Paul’s powerful lesson on how to communicate to different groups of people. All people don’t hear the same way; ages and gender contribute to that. Paul tells us the importance of knowing who we are speaking to and how to speak to them. It’s about knowing our audience.

I have had the privilege of doing chapels in different venues. I have spoken to MLB and NFL teams, and in those environments, I make sure I do certain things. The window is short, and I realize for the entire season, this is these professional players’ church. I must not only respect their time but also must make sure I am making use of their time. Here are my two rules in these settings: lift up God’s Word and lift up God’s Son.

First, I always bring a physical Bible and read from it. Why? Isaiah 55:11 says, “My word shall never return void.” That means better than a leadership principle or a pep talk, the best thing I can do for those players is give them a Bible principle, because it will always be productive. Second, I lift up God’s Son. Jesus said in John 12:32, “If I’m lifted up I will draw men to Myself.” When we don’t lift up Jesus, then people are attracted to the wrong thing: us. And we don’t have what they need.

The apostle Paul gave us his important chapel rules as well when we are talking to certain groups of people. He said when we have to have a hard conversation with a person older than we are, harsh and hard talk must be dispensed with and we must take the posture of a son and see that person as a parent. This strategy goes from if we’re a supervisor with senior citizens on our staff, to having to tell our elderly neighbor to keep their dogs off our lawn.

Plead with them as if they were your own father. He says the same treatment goes for elderly women. His plea about how we speak to our peers is much needed also in our generation. Young men talk to other young men as beloved brothers, as though they are our own flesh and blood. And when we see a young lady, we treat them as flesh and blood also and keep our thoughts pure about them. This is profound communication advice from Paul for all of us.

Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men in the world, was recently with some young entrepreneurs who asked him to share one piece of advice for twentysomethings who’d just graduated from college. He told them: “The one easy way to become worth 50 percent more than you are now—at least—is to hone your communication skills. . . . If you can’t communicate, it’s like winking at a girl in the dark—nothing happens. You can have all the brainpower in the world, but you have to be able to transmit it.”

First Timothy 5 keeps us from winking in the dark. Knowing how to talk to people is an art and hard work, and there is much to consider. According to the Harvard Business Review, “The number one criteria for advancement and promotion for professionals is an ability to communicate effectively.”

Thanks to Paul, you can communicate effectively because of the tool he provided in 1 Timothy 5.

Day 194

Today’s Reading: 1 Timothy 4

How long does it take to become an expert in something? In the Development of Talent Project, Dr. Benjamin Bloom of Northwestern University studied the careers of world-class sculptors, pianists, chess masters, tennis players, swimmers, mathematicians, and neurologists. Across the board, he discovered that it takes between ten to eighteen years before someone can reach world-class competency. The point of the study was that it takes time to be the best at whatever chosen career or path you aspire to.

In Outliers, author and researcher Malcolm Gladwell calls “becoming an expert” the ten-thousand-hour rule. How do you become the greatest band of all time? An expert in rock and roll? You work at it for ten thousand hours. Gladwell speaks about the Beatles seemingly instant success that many think happened on the Ed Sullivan show in one night. Gladwell says that’s not the case. Before landing in America, they’d already been playing together for seven years. It was the band’s ten-thousand hours of playing that made them who they were, not a night on American television.

They’d started out doing one-hour sessions, in which they performed their best numbers, the same ones, at every one. But then they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany. While there, they played eight hours, seven days a week. Gladwell explains much of their ten-thousand hours:

The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, five or more hours a night. On their second trip, they played 92 times. On their third trip, they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg gigs, in November and December of 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. . . . Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is what set the Beatles apart.

Gladwell considers that the key to success in any field is simply a matter of practicing a specific task that can be accomplished with twenty hours of work a week for ten years.

Paul gave this challenge to Timothy in one word:

Have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. (1 Timothy 4:7-8)

Discipline!

The grandmaster level chess player, a concert pianist, a high-level athlete all have the word discipline in common. The saying goes, “The distance from your dreams to reality is called discipline.” This is why most people miss their dreams. The other side of an undisciplined life is disappointment.

Paul was telling Timothy that the goal in discipline is godliness. Or putting it another way: “godliness” is not automatic. We have to work toward it. Getting born again? Christ did the work for us. Getting godly? We have to discipline ourselves. Listen to the passage from The Message: “Exercise daily in God—no spiritual flabbiness, please! Workouts in the gymnasium are useful, but a disciplined life in God is far more so, making you fit both today and forever.”

I had a friend tell me one time that he was speaking to the boxing welterweight champion, who told him that he would set his alarm for 1 a.m. every night so he could get up and do one hundred sit-ups and one hundred push-ups. When my friend asked him why he would do that, he said, “I knew I was working while my opponent was sleeping, and I wanted the edge on him.”

That’s where ten-thousand hours comes from. Discipline and effectiveness, discipline and success travel together.

Theologian Henri Nouwen spoke about discipline for our spiritual lives: “Discipline means to prevent everything in our life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere we’re not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that we hadn’t planned or counted on.”

Jim Elliot was a modern-day missionary and martyr, who practiced ten-thousand-hour devotional living. He wrote these powerful words: “I may no longer depend on pleasant impulses to bring me before the Lord. I must rather respond to principles I know to be right, whether I feel them to be enjoyable or not.”

Discipline is focus. Discipline is work. Discipline puts blinders to things that are crying for our time and attention. Because Timothy joined Paul before AD 50 and Paul was writing in the early sixties, Timothy was at least in his mid-twenties and could well be in his early or mid-thirties. This term for “youth” (in verse 12) could apply up to the age of forty in that culture, although it usually applied especially to someone under twenty-nine. And the challenge to young Timothy was that he would have a lot of distractions in life, so it was important to get focused on the right thing.

Paul challenged Timothy to make his discipline not simply about going to Planet Fitness; reminding him that disciplining ourselves physically isn’t wrong or bad—it’s just that there’s a better discipline, and that is about pursuing eternal things. Listen to Paul’s admonishment again: “Workouts in the gymnasium are useful, but a disciplined life in God is far more so, making you fit both today and forever” (verse 8, MSG).

No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, and disciplined. Gary Player, one of the greatest golfers in the world, was known for his discipline. When he was 80 years old, he still got up every morning at 5 a.m. and did 1,300 sit-ups. One day while hitting off the practice tees, he heard someone say, “I wish I could hit a ball like that.” He turned around and said to the onlooker, “No, you don’t. You know what it takes to hit a golf ball like [I do]? It takes getting up at 5:00 a.m. every morning to hit 1,000 balls until my hand bleeds, then I go to the clubhouse to bandage my hand, then go back and hit another 1,000 balls.”

We want the results but not the discipline. Godliness is the goal for us, says Paul, and discipline is the key.