Full Life - Commissioning God's People

Some modern theologians have understood that the 2 Timothy 4: 2-5 passage can be viewed as the Apostle Paul's Commission for Christians today and for centuries to come. I believe it too. Open your bible and check it out. It is a solemn commission from Paul not only for the leaders of the churches of the living God, but for all who, subject to the authority of Christ as Savior and Lord, understand that everything that the church and its members have a missional perspective. Preach the word. Insists on time and out of time ...

The Great Commission of Jesus (Matthew 28) is the highest commission, the supreme mandate that helps us understand God's will for his church and assures us that by fulfilling it He will be with us. Paul's charge to his disciple Timothy is a concise orientation with a clear progression and meaning: He admonishes, rebukes, exhorts with great patience and instruction ...

The apostle not only charges us to preach the word, but to do it in season and out of season. Beautiful teaching. No more waiting for leaders to schedule an evangelistic campaign to go out preaching! The Lord's time is now. People are spending more and more time on religious activities and spending more money on religious products and services than on fulfilling God's mission. The word persevere does not pass the test of being carried from mind to heart. Paul says insist (persevere, persist, obsess, do not lose heart in preaching the word). And he adds: he corrects, reprimands and encourages with great patience, without stopping teaching. Do we correct members of the body of Christ when they go wrong? Do we rebuke when it is necessary to do so for the health of the church to remain? Do we encourage the brother who made decisions based on his emotions and not on the Spirit and despised the grace of the Lord?

The reasons for Paul's commission to young Timothy (and to us today) are astonishingly current: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but having itching ears, according to their own desires, they will accumulate teachers for themselves, and will put aside their ears of the truth, and they will turn to myths (to fables) ”(2 Timothy 4: 3-4). Several names come to mind of men who began to work anointed with a beautiful call from the Lord of glory, and today they are only rags and spangles, varnish of a promising legal faith of a paradise here on earth, miracle workers of mythology. people who use the innocence of the faithful to accumulate wealth and prestige before men in the name of God.

But the Lord left us his message of blessing, a difficult assignment, a commission for the Christian man and woman who long to glorify God in their lives. “You, on the contrary, be prudent in all circumstances, bear suffering, dedicate yourself to evangelization; fulfill the duties of your ministry ”(2 Timothy 4.5). We all have gifts given by the Spirit, therefore we can all exercise at least one ministry. There will be sufferings, but we will have to endure them (we already know that the Christian life is a narrow path) and the most urgent: dedicating ourselves to evangelization, which is not limited to only proclaiming in words the gospel of Jesus Christ as the sole mediator of the grace of God. salvation, but also in action.

My prayer is that this Commission of Paul (which is in the first place of the Lord) will be a reality in your church and in every servant who decides to fulfill it.

God bless you!