Five To Focus 23. Strength and Equipping For Every Good Work
Five To Focus • Sermon • Submitted
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There’s always a purpose to training.
You might have completed a training program at your job in order to learn a new software for data entry.
You might have trained yourself for a career by going through college.
I remember the training I did the first time I ran a 5K. I started a couple months early running shorter distances and gradually getting longer until that day came and I did it.
The thing about training is that you are creating a pattern of living. Whether it be mentally, physically, or even spiritually. That’s what I want to talk about today. We have talked the last 4 weeks about the role of Scripture in your life: it teaches, rebukes, corrects, and trains you in righteousness. But for what?
What is the purpose to the training you undergo in Scripture? It was not intended to just fill your head with knowledge. It was intended to impact your very character, your thinking, your behavior, your speech, your affections. Get it out of your head and put it into play!
That’s what we’re told in . Let me read it with v.16:
16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
V.17 gives us the reason for the roles of Scripture to be carried out in your life. That reason is 2-fold: that you might be complete, and then equipped for every good work.
The meanings are very similar, but there is a slight difference. Strong’s dictionary says that the wording here would read more like this:
The Complete Word Study Dictionary: New Testament 1822. ἐξαρτίζω exartízō
“that the man of God may be competent because he has been equipped [outfitted, furnished]”
So the Bible equips you—but for what? For every good work. Isn’t is reassuring and exciting that God wants to use you in His mission? He has a work for you! And he equips you for that work and makes you complete, or competent, to do it!
There’s something else interesting about the language of this verse. The word “equipped” is in the Greek perfect tense, which basically describes a completed verbal action that occurred in the past but which produced a state of being or a result that exists in the present.
describe a completed verbal action that occurred in the past but which produced a state of being or a result that exists in the present
View this as an abiding condition. 2 Timothy is a letter from Paul to Timothy. So Timothy was being told that as you abide in the Word of God, you will have the strength, all the equipping, to do what God has called you to do. For Timothy, we know what that calling was. In the next verses, 4:1-2, he was to preach the word. He was to lead the church. Surely, he needs strength and equipping to do that.
Michael S. Heiser and Vincent M. Setterholm, Glossary of Morpho-Syntactic Database Terminology (Lexham Press, 2013; 2013).
But that might not be your calling. That might not be the “every good work” that God has for you. But no matter what it is, the Word of God will be the strength and equipping for it.
The whole point is this: keep the Bible close. Don’t let it become distant when times get tough. This is where your strength comes from. We are to abide in Christ, abide in His Word, and let it change us. So don’t let your study of the Bible just stay in your head. Let’s be faithful to every good work that God has for us by finding strength and competence through His Word.
The whole point is this: don’t let your study of the Bible just stay in your head. It’s not just an academic pursuit