2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 • Staying Faithful through the Gift of People

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Do you like to give gifts? What do you like best about giving gifts to someone? How do you go about picking out what you want to give? Are you a cheerful giver, or do you resent having to bring a gift to someone? What’s the best gift you have given? In the last article, we looked at how to grasp God’s truth to protect ourselves from being taken captive by spiritual error. This is post #8 in the 2 Timothy blog series. In this post, we will look at how the gift of people in our lives helps us to stay faithful.

Listen to this post as a similar podcast from our To Be Found Faithful Bible Study covering the book of 2 Timothy in the New Testament.

Jesus Is the Best Giver

Jesus Christ is the best giver! He gives so many things to us that we don’t deserve and can never earn. He gives us these gifts out of His love for us. Paul teaches this in every one of his letters we have in the New Testament, including 2 Timothy.

Because He gave His life on the cross, Christ offers to anyone who believes in Him an incredible number of gifts. All we must do to receive these fabulous gifts is one thing: believe in Him.

Belief is not just intellectual agreement that something might be true. Belief is a commitment of the will. It is the difference between walking alongside a pool of water (seeing it is there) and jumping into the water (experiencing the water personally). God acted. We are to respond to His action by saying yes to faith in Jesus Christ and jumping into the new life God has for us. When we say yes, we receive incredible gifts.

As a direct result of Christ’s finished work on the cross, our relationship with God is changed forever because of our faith in His Son. We receive much more than just having our sins forgiven and going to heaven when we die. Christ gives us mind-blowing, heart-thrilling gifts.

The Gifts of the Cross

Because Jesus gave Himself on the cross, here are a few of the best gifts He has given to you and I as believers.

• You can know that God is no longer angry at your sin because His holy wrath against sin was fully satisfied by Jesus’ death on the cross.
• You are given complete reconciliation in your relationship with God because Jesus becomes the bridge for you.
• You are given redemption meaning you have been freed from the slavery to sin and released to serve God in freedom.
• You are given complete forgiveness of your sins. This gift is ongoing and includes every sin—past, present, and future. God has erased your mistakes so that you are no longer guilty.
• You receive the gift of being declared righteous in God’s eyes so that now you are perfectly acceptable to a holy God based on your faith in His Son.
• You receive the gift of being sanctified—declared holy to God and set apart by Him for His special use.
• We also receive the gift of being a new creation with a new identity in Christ. No longer are we just what the world sees.

And God adds many more gifts to us in that new identity. Everyone who trusts in Christ is lavished with treasure in Christ. You can finger many of those treasure jewels by reading Ephesians 1:3-14. And you get it all at once as a package deal the moment you place your faith in Jesus Christ.

It was totally God’s work to make sinners acceptable again in His sight. Our proper response as new creations is one of love and gratitude as we live dependently on Him and let Him work in our lives.

But wait there’s more. God gives us people in our lives to cherish and strengthen us. God’s gift of people who model following Christ for us help us to stay faithful to Him. One such gift is the gift of mothers.

The Gift of Mothers

Timothy’s grandmother and mother

Paul noticed that God had given Timothy two special gifts in his life—his mother and grandmother. He said this in chapter 1,

“I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.” (2 Timothy 1:5)

Those two women were honored in Scripture as women of faith. They not only cherished young Timothy as a boy but also taught him to love God and place His faith in Jesus Christ. They were intentional about training Timothy as a youngster. We get that from chapter 3:

“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” (2 Timothy 3:14-15)

From infancy, Lois and Eunice started training him in the Scriptures. Timothy not only grasped the truth but held onto it and lived it out as a man. Those faithful women gave him what some would call “sticky faith.”

My mother

My mom was such a gift to me and to my children. I miss her since she passed from earth to heaven several years ago. But, I haven’t missed the fact that she left an incredible legacy for me, my three brothers and all of our family members—a legacy of how to serve Jesus faithfully as a woman.

Momma loved Jesus and His people. She served in her local church as nursery coordinator, Sunday School director, and youth counselor. She was teaching children’s Sunday School until her late 70s whenever a teacher was needed.

My mom cared for people outside of the church, too. She helped to establish and operate a ministry to help the needy in her community. For 40 years, she made sure the donations were spent wisely to help the needy. She did not give it up until the month before she died at age 87. I have complete confidence that I will see her again in heaven. Yes, having a godly mother is a gift from God. I had sticky faith because of her faith instilled in me.

Read more about my mother’s influence on me in this blog on Bible.org, “The Legacy of a Godly Mom.”

The Gift of Sticky Faith

I got that phrase “sticky faith” from the title of a book that focuses on what we as parents can intentionally do to help our children have real faith that sticks beyond the time when they live in our homes.

It has been an appalling discovery in recent years that 50% of children in churched homes walk away from their faith when they leave home to go to college or beyond. Most Christian parents want sticky faith for their children. But how do you get there?

A high school pastor wrote an article titled, Three Common Traits of Youth Who Don’t Leave the Church. In it, the author concluded that teens whose faith stuck throughout college and into their 20s had three things in common by the time they finished high school:

• They were born again and knew it.
• They were equipped, not entertained, as youth.
• Their parents lived the gospel before them.

Let us explore these a bit more.

Common condition #1: They were born again, and they knew it.

That means they understood that at a specific time they had made a conscious decision to put their faith in Jesus Christ and to follow Him as His disciple. For our children, I noticed that this decision happened at different times for each of them ranging from early teens to late teens. Our son spent a summer in a cabin in northwest Arkansas without television or internet. He spent those three months studying theology and reading biographies of Christians he admired. He was testing what we had taught him to see if it was true. By the end of the summer, he was convinced his faith was real and true. Already a believer, he committed himself to being Jesus’ disciple and has stayed faithful to Him. Common condition #1: They were born again, and they knew it.

Common condition #2: They were equipped, not entertained, as youth.

The teens with sticky faith knew how to share the gospel. They also knew how to disciple someone and lead a Bible study. While our children were in high school, they all got a chance to lead small groups for younger children. One of our daughters had the best experience because she was the small group leader for a group of middle school youth for 3 years. By the time she got to college, she could do the same for her peers on campus. She was praying for them and discipling them and answering their questions about how to follow Jesus. That helped her to stay faithful to Jesus. Common condition #2: They were equipped, not entertained, as youth.

Common condition #3: Their parents lived the gospel before them.

More importantly, they lived out the gospel of grace rather than living by law. When you understand God’s grace and live it out for all to see, others can see that you are motivated to obey God because of love and gratitude for what He has done for you. This is catching so those watching will be motivated to love God and be grateful to Him, also. Having godly parents is important, but so is having godly mentors.

Read the blog, “The Path to Sticky Faith” on Bible.org.

Having Godly Mentors

Godly mentors are a great support to parents.

Paul to Timothy

Paul was such a mentor to Timothy. Can you imagine how grateful Lois and Eunice were as they saw their precious young man was loved and discipled by the apostle Paul? Yes, Timothy was often in danger. Did that worry them? Probably. Were they on their knees for his safety and Paul’s safety? Most likely. Did they regret that Timothy was in such strategic ministry for the kingdom of God? I hope not. We will see them in heaven and can ask them about this experience.

What we do know is that throughout both 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy, Paul encouraged the young man to keep doing what was right and keep teaching truth even if some people who hated Christians would try to stop his teaching what the Bible says. His love for Timothy oozes from both of those letters.

Our children

Several adults who loved the Lord made a huge difference in the faith walks of our children. Our son had a sixth-grade Sunday School teacher who was passionately in love with God. Over that year, I watched our son develop a love for God he didn’t have the year before and one he has continued to have ever since. He still remembers her influence on him.

If you have had godly parents or mentors in your life, praise God for them and write thank you notes to them. My parents are with Jesus now. I should write all those who significantly impacted our kids. There are so many, though. Where to begin?

Seeing Sticky Faith in Your Children

Several years ago, we asked our adult children, who do have “sticky faith,” what they thought we did right to encourage a walk of faith in them while growing up and to prepare them to be Christian adults. They already tell us what we did wrong! It’s nice to hear what we did right.

This is how our children responded, showing what really mattered to them:

You encouraged our walk of faith and prepared us to be Christian adults by making sure we were actively involved in church, prioritizing church involvement over other out-of-school activities. You modeled your walks of faith in front of us (for the most part), which made a big impact. You emphasized prayer in our lives—before meals, before bedtime—ingraining these patterns in our lives. You discussed theological issues and developed deeper thinking skills in us, usually around the table or in the car. You rewarded us verbally for making “new” discoveries in our personal walks of faith. You surrounded us with God-fearing people. You got us involved in helping out/serving church members in need or the church in general. You modeled for us a response of gratitude for food God provided and church members who helped us out on occasion.

I am so grateful to God for leading us as parents to do enough things right so that our children had “sticky faith” beyond their teen years, even if I don’t remember the details.

But we knew, as every parent knows, as you know if you are a parent, regardless of how much we influenced them in the right direction, each child must still respond to Jesus’ call on his or her life individually. So, we prayed and trusted in our God to capture the heart of our child as He had already captured our hearts. Then, we depended on Jesus to help us do our part and left the rest up to Him. Once a child trusts in Christ as Savior, the best influence for “sticky faith” ever—God’s Holy Spirit—moves inside to impact that child from the inside out for the rest of his/her life! Thank you, Jesus!

Read more about giving your children sticky faith in this blog, “The Pathway to Sticky Faith in a Pull-Apart World.”

Jesus Christ is the best giver! He gives so many gifts to us. And some of the best gifts are the people He places in our lives that show us how to stay faithful to Him every day.

In the next post, we will look at what it means to stay faithful in view of His appearing.

Let Jesus satisfy your heart with His faithfulness. Then, make the choice to stay faithful to Him for the rest of your life.

All of the above information is covered in the To Be Found Faithful Bible Study covering the book of 2 Timothy in the New Testament.

Related Resources:

• 2 Timothy blog series
• The Legacy of a Godly Mom on Bible.org
•  The Path to Sticky Faith” on Bible.org
•  The Pathway to Sticky Faith in a Pull-Apart World

AI was not used to generate this post.