A number of years ago I had a conversation with a long-standing friend, the wife of one of my close friends at home. She startled me with something she said in the course of the conversation. And indeed, it left a very deep and a lasting impression on me. I was asking her about her work and she said to me, “What I do isn’t really important.” And then she said, “But what you do – that is really important.” She was not the kind of Christian who would demean the biblical teaching on calling. She was not, actually, a woman who was just doing a little work in order to occupy her mind, or for that matter, for a little more in the family budget. She was, in fact, the only international-level scientist that I knew in Scotland. Her work had prolonged the life of those who were destined to die within weeks. She is a woman of high intellectual power. But what she was saying to me, I think, was this: “What I do prolongs people’s lives in this world. What you do transforms people’s lives for all eternity.” And it made a profound impression on me, I think, simply because it was such a reminder to me of how important in the life of a Christian, how important in the life of the church, how important in the life of the world is the preaching of the Word of God.

And indeed, that is the Pauline sense of things. Which is why when he speaks to his young friend Timothy towards the end of Paul’s own life he says (2 Timothy 4:1), “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and I charge you by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word of God.” He understood, as my friend understood, that the preaching of the Word of God is God’s great instrument for the salvation of sinners and the transformation of saints. We might (perhaps momentarily at least) be forgiven in responding to this and saying, “Well of course, Paul lived in an age when people really responded to preaching, and we don’t live in that kind of age any longer.” But did you notice in our reading that the context in which Paul says to Timothy he is to preach the word is precisely the context in which people no longer want to listen to orthodox Christian preaching. And he says to Timothy, “In such a situation as that, you must not (as many others have done and will do) lose your head to the strains of the music of the contemporary culture. Your task, Timothy, before God, for which you will answer for all eternity, is preach the word of God to those whom God has given to you in your congregation in Ephesus.”

And of course, the Word of God about which he is speaking is the very word of God that he had described in 2 Timothy 3:16,17 – the Scripture that is “breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.” And did you notice in our reading through these verses how Paul picks up the language he has used in 2 Timothy 3:16,17 and says in essence, ‘Since this is what the Word of God is for – for teaching and for reproving – Timothy, preach it that way”? “Be ready in season and out of season to reprove, to rebuke, to exhort, with complete patience and teaching.” Incidentally, that is a great guide for you and for me in our private Bible study. As we open the Scriptures, how are we to use the Scriptures? Well, we are to use the Scriptures in the way in which they were given us to use: for teaching, for reproving, for correcting, for equipping. And so Paul in essence is saying to Timothy, “Since God has placed His Word into your hands and into your heart, use that Word in your preaching, that it may fulfil its glorious fourfold function in the lives of God’s people.” And it’s that fourfold function of preaching that I want us to think about for a few minutes together this morning.

Teaching⤒🔗

The apostle Paul says that the preaching of the Word is in order, first of all, that we may be taught. It is that we may be taught. Taught the truth about God. Taught, as we sometimes say, to learn to think God’s thoughts after Him. To view our lives in this world not from a merely human perspective, but with the wisdom, with the truth, with the insight of God’s Word. And this is so important throughout the whole of the Scriptures, for the simple reason (you remember how the prophets put it): “My people perish for lack of knowledge.” The prophets and the priests are condemned by God because, having been given God’s Word, they have withheld God’s Word from God’s people. There are things in God’s Word that are hard for us to take. There are aspects of God’s Word that penetrate us like a sharp sword. There are aspects of God’s Word that offend us. And Paul is saying to Timothy, “If you’re going to preach God’s Word, then be prepared that people will be offended. But do not dare hide God’s Word from them, because it is God’s means of communicating His truth and His teaching to them.” And that, of course, is why the teaching and the preaching of God’s Word is what we call expository. The preacher is not there to communicate his own personal insights, his own world view. He is there for one single purpose: to teach God’s people what God has said in His Word. And he dare not deviate from that responsibility, or he starves the people of God and destroys them for lack of knowledge.

Why is this so important for the apostle Paul? Why is he so passionate about this? Why does he say uniquely to Timothy, “Timothy, I charge you in the presence of Almighty God to preach the Word”? Because he understands that the transformation of our lives depends absolutely on the renewing of our minds. We live in a widespread “feel good” culture, but the Bible says what we need to do is enter into a culture in which we learn to think biblically in order that we may live transformed lives. That is, of course, what Paul says in Romans 12:1, 2: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” And so the Word of God first of all addresses our minds that are so confused by nature, so darkened by nature. And it comes like shafts of illuminating light into our lives to help us to understand who God is, who Christ is, who we are, and how we may find and know God. As our Lord Jesus says in His prayer in John 17, “This is eternal life, to know You the only true God, and to know Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” And so the first task of the church’s preaching is to teach the Word of God.

Reproving←⤒🔗

But then you notice Paul adds to that. The Word of God is given to us not only for teaching; the Word of God is given to us, he says, for reproving. Or perhaps we might translate it ‘convicting’. The teaching of God’s Word that addresses my mind is not intended to stop at my mind. The teaching of God’s Word that addresses the mind is meant to pass through the mind into the conscience to reprove me. And that, of course, is where the Word of God becomes very up-close and personal to us. And this explains why, under the ministry of God’s Word as it is patiently unfolded (it does not matter what kind of personality the preacher has), one of the things that will happen is that God will find me out.

And in the personal dialogue in which I engage with Him, He will with such gracious modesty and kindness not expose, as it were, the truth of my heart to the whole congregation. Imagine for a moment if what the preaching of God’s Word did was to flash up on screens at the front of the church (the kind of thing you sometimes see when you’re speeding – 57mph. 60 mph). I know what it is to listen to the preaching of God’s Word and to try and press what God is saying out of my life. Now imagine for a moment, even as I am preaching the Word of God to you and I feel its weight upon my own life, feel it exposing my own conscience, that it were to be flashed up on the screen behind you – the resistance of my heart to what God was saying to me. Then I would be in the position of the psalmist in Psalm 130: “Lord, if You displayed my iniquities, who could stand in Your presence?” I would be out of the front door of the church, never to reappear – never mind in the pulpit, certainly not in the church.

And the wonderful thing about the preaching of the Word of God – and it happens in preaching in a way it does not (you will have experienced this) ordinarily happen when we are gathered around the Word of God in Bible study – it happens in preaching where we consciously place our lives together, you and I, under the Word of God to listen to the voice of God and to feel that it is sharper than any two-edged sword. And it breaks through all of my defences and penetrates to my sin and to the dark shadows of my life, and exposes the secrets and the subtle intensions of my heart. It exposes my deceitfulness; it exposes my hypocrisy. It lays me bare in the sight of God. And Paul is saying to Timothy, “Timothy, however painful that may be for you, and however painful it may be for your people, that is what we most of all need.” Because it is only when our needs are exposed that we look to Him for grace to heal us.

Do you remember that remarkable passage that we find in the Old Testament prophesy in Jeremiah 8? Where Jeremiah complains that the prophets are saying, “Peace, peace” where there is no peace. And they are healing the wounds of the people lightly. They are saying, as a last sum, “Don’t worry about that. You are not as bad as you think.” And Jeremiah cries out in those wonderful words, that even if you have never read you have heard them sung, “Oh, that there would be a balm in Gilead to heal souls that are conscious of their sin.” C.S. Lewis has a wonderful essay (at least the title of the essay is wonderful), and it applies to the preaching ministry of the Word of God. It is called Undeceptions. And that is what I need from the Word of God. I need to be undeceived about myself – in my self-sufficiency and in my pride and in my arrogance and in all that goes on in the secret places of my heart – because so long as somebody says to me, “Sinclair, peace, peace” where there is really no God-given peace, I will be crying out, “Oh, is there not some balm in Gilead, that someone might minister to me to deal with my sin-sick soul.”

It is like speaking of C.S. Lewis – that moment in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Eustace has betrayed, and he is turned into a dragon. And Aslan comes and he scrapes the dragon scales off him with his paws, making that horrible kind of sound. And later on Eustace is asked about it, and he says how horrible it was except for the joy of sensing that he was being made clean again. And that is what we experience in the preaching of the Word of God as it exposes our need and unmasks our hypocrisy. As we place ourselves before God, we discover the joy, the thrill of being made clean by His word.

Correcting←⤒🔗

And that, of course, is the third thing that Paul talks about. Not only the teaching the Word of God and the reproving of the Word of God, but he speaks about the correcting of the Word of God as it is preached. Where I was brought up reprove and correct meant exactly the same thing – both words meant you were wrong. If the teacher corrected you, it meant she was telling you that you were wrong. But that is not the atmosphere of Paul’s language here. The language he uses here was used in the medical world of the 1^st century for healing and correcting a broken limb or something that was misshaped in the body, or of rebuilding a ruin that had been destroyed. And Paul is saying, “Timothy, the glorious thing about the ministry of God’s Word is that it not only rebukes us and undeceives us and exposes our sinfulness, but then when it has done that it comes to us in all its gracious saving, healing, life-transforming power. You see, in a sense the pulpit is a deconstruction place. But it is also a hospital for those who have gone to the great physician and said to Him, “Oh, great Physician Jesus Christ, heal me by Your Word of grace.”

Those of you who are physicians know (I know this is sometimes a male thing rather than a female thing) how a man who has a sickness, something wrong with him, will do everything to resist having to go to the doctor to be told there is something wrong with him. And church can be exactly the same. I don’t want to know that there is something wrong with me. And Paul is saying that if you don’t want to know that something is wrong with you, you can never in this world nor in all eternity be healed by Jesus Christ. And don’t we find this as we place our lives – I have found this all my Christian life as I have placed my life under the ministry of God’s Word, even when I have been the one who has been preaching it myself – He has poured into my life the transforming grace of His truth. He has been chiselling away at my sin because He wants to reproduce in my life the characteristics of my Lord Jesus Christ, and make me more and more like my Saviour.

Equipping←⤒🔗

And so the Word of God is given to Timothy and to us for teaching, for reproving, for correcting, and then fourthly for equipping. And you see, this is why my friend said, “What you do is really important, because it equips me for what I do.” Oh, I pray you may know this: that what happens in these few minutes we have together on the Lord’s Day equips you for every day of the week. And as the Word of God penetrates your mind, cleanses your heart, transforms your life, it equips you for the rest of the week to serve Him for your glory. And there are things that are preached from God’s Word that the Holy Spirit impresses upon you, and you find yourself in the middle of the week so living for His glory because He has taught you something from His most precious Word.

And so as we engage together and we sit together, you and I, under the preaching of God’s Word Lord’s Day morning, Lord’s Day evening, (some of us are able to come on Wednesdays and others at other times), what is happening to us? Well, we are in a classroom where we are learning to be disciples. We are in a hospital room where the great Physician is engaged in uncovering our secret spiritual sicknesses. We are engaged in surgery where what defiles our lives is cut out by the scalpel that the Holy Spirit uses. And then we begin to be healed, and this place becomes not only a hospital room, it becomes a therapeutic place and an equipping place, a training ground. And we who came in crippled and broken and wounded by our sins and by the world are able to walk (yes, even if we do it with a limp) out of the front door into the world and live for the praise of the glory of God.

You know, my minister who had preached through the Bible so much said to me when I was a very young student, “Sinclair, I never preach now but I believe something will be done that will last for all eternity.” For all eternity! My dear friends, we should never place our lives under any kind of preaching that will not do us good for all eternity. But oh to think that through the preaching of the Word something might be done among us, in us, that would last for all eternity. No wonder Paul says to Timothy, “I charge you in the presence of God, who will judge the living and the dead: preach the word.” May He give us a longing for that, and for the in-breaking power of the Holy Spirit among us that accompanies it that it may be so.