Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash

One of the hardest parts of life is the ability to focus. I don’t know about you, but my mind often wanders, tempted to pick up my phone and mindlessly scroll through Instagram. Staying on task is hard work. 

But have you noticed that people who accomplish great things in life and live without regrets (2 Timothy 4:7) can stay focused on the task? 

Even when that task is difficult or painful. 

But what does that look like when you run from one thing to the next? What does that look like in our relationships with other people and our relationship with God? 

In 2 Timothy chapter 2, Paul gives us 3 incredibly helpful images as we think about how hard life should be, what to do when life is hard, and how not to be surprised when encountering difficulties. 

Paul tells Timothy that following Jesus and being faithful to finish our race well will be like being a soldier, an athlete, and a farmer. Each of these gives us a glimpse of what life and faith will be like, but we often forget them. 

Soldier

Paul says following Jesus is a lot like being a soldier. Soldiers put everything on the line; you are always on in war.

You don’t get distracted in a battle. 

A soldier is willing to suffer, knowing it will not be easy, and willing to lay it on the line.

A soldier has said yes before an order has been given.

Soldiers in active service do not expect a safe or easy time. They take hardship, risk, and suffering as a matter of course.

A soldier is always a soldier, just like a Christian is always a Christian.

Which means he doesn’t worry about the things everyone else worries about. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t worry about food or shelter, but “civilian pursuits” refer to priorities. As followers of Jesus, our priorities must differ from others in the same way that the priorities of a soldier differ from the rest of the population. 

The reality is few Christians in America will die for their faith. But, the more faithful you are, the more God works and moves in your life, and the more roadblocks and hardships Satan will send your way.

To be good soldiers of Jesus Christ, we must be dedicated to the battle, committing ourselves to a life of discipline and suffering, and avoiding whatever may ‘entangle’ us and distract us from it. 

Athlete

The Greek word in verse 5 for compete here also means “to contest, contend, wrestle and struggle.”

For many of us who follow Jesus, this is often what it feels like, and for good reason. Paul tells us that we shouldn’t be surprised. 

An athlete who succeeds has a lot of talent, gifts, determination, and willpower. These are needed to work your body, the sacrifice of working out, eating right, the discipline, the struggle to keep going when you don’t feel like moving.

An athlete’s life revolves around their sport, even in the offseason. They take breaks and rest so they can perform at a high level. 

Each athlete for the Olympics during Paul’s time had to state on oath that he had fulfilled the necessary ten months’ training before he was permitted to enter the contest.

And here’s the thing about athletic competitions. I always hear something at the gym: the bar doesn’t lie. This means that whatever is on the bar when you lift, that’s what you can lift. Not, “Oh man, one time I lifted this.” You can’t hide if you didn’t train. You will not have the endurance or the strength. If you haven’t lifted weights, you can’t show up at the powerlifting meet and squat 500 pounds. No amount of steroids or HGH will cover up a lack of training. 

In the same way, it will be your dedication to Jesus. 

Farmer

A farmer works long, hard hours in the cold, heat, rain, and drought.

He does not work when it is convenient but when he has to. The seasons don’t wait for him. The rain comes, and the sun shines; he doesn’t know when. But he must be prepared to act when they do and make adjustments when the weather doesn’t cooperate. 

He has to plant at the right time and harvest at the right time; he must always be ready to go at a moment’s notice, as a storm can come at any time.

While there are moments of excitement, being a farmer is mostly ordinary and mundane. In the same way, while there is excitement and risk in following Jesus, most of our time following Jesus will not be in big mountain-top moments but in the ordinary, often mundane moments of life. 

Walter Liefeld said, “The military image here has to do not with warfare but with disciplined obedience; the athletic image deals less with success and more with conformity to the rules; the agricultural image stresses hard work.”

Paul tells Timothy that finishing your race will require endurance, discipline, and perseverance. 

No matter what you are facing, whether it is your faith, a prayer you’ve been praying, your career, parenting or marriage, faithfulness will require endurance, discipline, and perseverance.

Over the years, many things have been said in sermons and classes at church about giving and generosity. I’ve heard pastors berate people from the stage, guilt people into giving, or have a narrow view of generosity, which is seen as only about money instead of the broader context that Scripture gives. 

When scripture talks about generosity, it includes money, but it also includes our time and our talents. 

Throughout the New Testament, Jesus and others continually tell us that wherever we spend our time, our talents and treasure matter to us. We can say with our lips that we want to honor God and that God is a priority in our lives, but if we don’t back that up with how we spend our lives, we are fooling ourselves. 

In 1 Timothy 6, Paul wants us to ask ourselves if we are trusting in God or if we are trusting in the uncertainty of wealth. 

So, what does it look like to honor and trust God with our finances? To be generous in a way that honors God. The writers of the New Testament give us 4 words to guide our generosity:

Worshipful. Generosity is an act of worship.

Every time we are generous, we are worshiping. Every time we aren’t generous, we are worshiping. 

Being generous with our time, talents, and treasure shows that we believe everything belongs to God and worship him. As Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 6, we place our hope in God. 

But when we are stingy and hold our time, talents, and treasures tightly, we worship something else. That might be security, more prestige, our kid’s sports calendars, etc. 

But Paul tells us every action and decision is an act of worship, either towards God or towards the uncertainty of wealth. 

When we are generous, we are reminding ourselves who owns everything. We are stewarding what God owns and has entrusted to us.

When we share our finances, time, and talents with those around us, we worship and give glory to God, who gave us these things to use. 

Proportional. The word tithe means “tenth,” where giving 10% back to God comes from. If you aren’t giving back to God and want to move forward in generosity, that is a great place to start but not where to end.

What is proportional for one person isn’t for another.

Each year, Katie and I pray through upping our percentage of what we give back to God.

Not only because generosity is the first step to contentment.

But have you ever met someone generous and miserable? I haven’t. They’re always happy.

The same happens with time and talent. Each person has different amounts of time they can give in each stage of life. Your proportion of time is different in your teens, your 30’s, compared to your 60’s. 

Sacrificial. Giving away $100 might be a lot for one person but not for another.

Giving should stretch us. It should change us and our priorities. 

In many ways, it should make us go ouch. That is what sacrifice means. It hurts a little bit. It pushes us and challenges us.

That is what generosity should do.

Andy Stanley said, “Giving 10% makes many people uncomfortable, extremely uncomfortable. But then, so is a colonoscopy, and those save countless lives.”

Being uncomfortable isn’t bad.

Discomfort is sometimes the thing we need to grow in our faith. 

Intentional. This means you planned it. It didn’t just happen.

In 2 Corinthians 9, when Paul talks about generosity, he says that each person should decide in his heart.

This means you decide ahead of time.

I encourage everyone in our church to give using automated giving on the giving envelope. It means you decide ahead of time.

Here’s the question for us: Is your giving worshipful, proportional, sacrificial, and intentional?

Photo by Massimiliano Morosinotto on Unsplash

For most of us, prayer bounces between a plea for help, a running conversation or to-do list with God, a reassurance of God’s power and presence in our lives, a wishlist or a shouting match with God, and wondering if God has forgotten us.

One of the most common ways we pray is a prayer for help.

Eugene Peterson said, “Trouble is what gets prayer started.”

And that’s true.

We pray out of desperation. We pray because we aren’t sure what else to do. We rend the heavens in hopes that God will hear and move. We pray through tears, mumbling, and bumbling from a place of helplessness.

We pray for health, healing, relationships to be mended, kids and parents and spouses to be saved, to be changed. We pray for jobs and finances. We pray for those close to us who are destroying their lives. We pray for wisdom in decisions.

And in all this, we are often very helpless to bring about an answer.

So, how do you ask God for help? How does He hear?

Psalm 121 gives us the answer:

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.

The LORD is your keeper;
the LORD is your shade on your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.

The LORD will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The LORD will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.

Here are four things we learn from this Psalm about asking God for help:

Admit your need for help. This seems obvious, but asking God for help means admitting our need for help. We don’t do this naturally. We are naturally self-sufficient, self-assured people. We are raised to handle it, get it done, be fine, and not depend on anyone.

The writer of this Psalm is helpless, and they know it. They need help.

Believe God can and will help. Know where your help comes from.

For many of us, once we exhaust our ability to fix something, we still don’t go to prayer. Maybe there is a book, a sermon, a financial move, a Google search I can do, a person I can get advice from. Prayer for too many of us is a last resort.

When we get there, we say, “God, I don’t know if you can help. I don’t know if you care to help. So I’ll look around.”

Be patient. The writer of Psalm 121 reminds us to go to sleep. This communicates that sometimes our prayers will take longer than we think, but God will fight for us and work on things while we sleep.

Sleep is one of the greatest pictures of faith in our lives.

Why?

We worry, are anxious, and replay conversations over and over in our minds at night. We lie there, staring at the clock, thinking about our bank account, job, marriage, kids, and parents. The problems we experience in relationships, worrying about college, bills, health, and so on. Yet, at that moment, there is almost nothing we can do.

The people we worry about are asleep; the people we call for help and advice are asleep. The writer of Psalm 121 says, “Go to sleep.”

God is over all things. Why can we be patient and go to sleep? Not only because God is our help and never sleeps, but because verses 7 and 8 tell us that God is over everything.

He watches all things. He is not surprised by anything. Nothing catches him off guard.

It ends with a crucial word, forevermore.

Forever is a long time, yet that is our God’s scope.

Psalm 121 is a prayer to give us the confidence to ask God for help and confidence as we wait for that help to come.