1 Timothy 6:20-21
The next generation of American citizens understood the sacrifice that allows us to be free. This was a group of Christian people, the sacrifice that allows us to have the free exercise of religious conscience and freedom of expression. And so we went to the monuments, but we also went to Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier stands as one of our nation’s most solemn symbols.
It’s a soldier that is always present, 24/7, 365 days a year, and if anybody has ever been to Washington, D.C., you know that it can get to be about 120 degrees with humidity in the summertime, and on the occasion, it can get down below zero in the wintertime. But that soldier, that sentinel, is always present in the blazing heat, the freezing snow, and the pouring rain. Their constant vigil represents our commitment as a nation.
The sacrifice of the unknown soldier will never be forgotten. That guard there is a visible reminder of respect, of vigilance, and of duty. And I was watching that soldier in his vigilance on the day we were there, and I thought about And I thought about Paul’s letter to Timothy, and how that picture provided such a striking metaphor for Paul’s charge to Timothy, guard that which has been entrusted to you.
Guard the deposit entrusted to you, and we can go to the next slide now, and I’ll put up the Bible passage that we’re going to talk about today. You know, oh Timothy, oh Timothy, guard that which has been entrusted to you. Guard the deposit entrusted to you.
Avoid the irreverent babble, how much babble do we hear in society today? How much irreverence do we hear in society? Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, for by professing it, some have swerved from the faith. Grace be with you. So here Paul is contrasting a real treasure, the true treasure, that is the very words of God, the good news that Jesus brings us, the gospel, he’s contrasting that true treasure, a godly life, eternal reward, with false treasure.
The kind of thing that when you’re just pursuing wealth, or you are just running down some philosophical road of untruth, Timothy’s charged with, and he’s been entrusted with, guarding the gospel against distortions. So Timothy is charged here to guard the entrusted gospel against distortions, and what I want to do is I want to go through this verse, almost word by word, and he starts out and he says, oh Timothy, and you know, when we’re studying our Bible and we’re reading our Bible, we can kind of just skip that little word, oh, but Paul’s being, it’s a big deal here, Paul’s saying, oh Timothy, oh Timothy. It’s conveying, I think, a combination, in the Greek you can look at these definitions in the Greek and the understanding of what the context was in the Greek, and it’s conveying an idea of urgency and affection, so this combination that, I’ve got something real important to put you in charge of, but I’m going to do it with affection, because I’m going to call you to a really hard thing.
So, I’m going to say, oh Timothy. So you are, with affection, being called to an urgent matter. I think of the book of Jude, contend for the faith, Jude says, and he says, I’d rather be out there teaching the good news, I’d rather be out there sharing the gospel, but in Jude, Jude says, I find it necessary, though, to tell you that there’s some bigger deal happening right now, you’ve got to get out there and contend for the faith, it’s something similar that Paul is telling Timothy here, he’s saying, I’m calling you, Timothy, to do something really big, because it’s urgent that you guard that which has been entrusted to you.
What does it mean to guard the deposit here? You know, the word guard in scripture, guard the deposit entrusted to you, let’s start with the deposit, that’s referring to the gospel message itself, the very words of God, sound doctrine, not, I get to make it up as I go, or, you know, I’m reading this and I just feel it, you know, I’m going to take it completely out of context to make my point. Let me give you an example of that. I was recently speaking to Christian colleges and universities, they have a national convention on law and public policy, and they bring all their presidents and their lawyers and they come and they talk about, you would think, guarding that which has been entrusted to them, these are the Christian universities of the nation.
And you find very quickly that you’ve got a number of these universities whose leadership is trying to preserve and guard that which has been entrusted to them, and preserve the Christian identity of their institutions, but on the other hand, you’ve got some way over here, oh yeah, I’m looking at you, maybe I should go over here, we’ve got some way over here, some of you got that joke, that have basically kind of thrown the truth of God’s word under the bus and said, you know, it’s all about me and my personal autonomy and how we feel, and so, after I got up and talked about contending for the faith, there was a panel that got up, and I’m not making this up, lawyers representing law and public policy, some of the biggest Christian universities in this country said, I want your help, they were saying to this room, of Christian lawyers and Christian presidents, I want your help, we want to be able to have men that feel like they’re women be able to say they are and be able to go into the women’s locker room, and we want them to be able to compete against women because we need to, and I’m saying, wait a minute, what conference am I at?
And then they said to the room, we want you to help identify some Bible passages for us so that can support these positions we’re taking so that we can argue in court that the first amendment protects our right to let a man compete against a woman in sports and go into the locker, and I’m thinking, wow, Lord, how far have we fallen?
The word here, we’re supposed to be guarding the word of God, and we’re supposed to be protecting it and keeping watch, and it’s a sacred trust, the sound doctrine and apostolic teaching, not making it up because it fits a political narrative that I would like the difference.
Do you see what Paul is asking Timothy to guard here? Not your right to just get up and say whatever you want to be the gospel, but to guard the truth, to guard the truth, and that verb guard means to protect, to keep watch, and to defend.
We’re supposed to preserve the purity of the gospel from corruption, from dilution, and too often, I think, from neglect, and when I say neglect, it doesn’t happen in this church, I know, but there’s too many churches out there that the pastor up here will skip the Bible passages that are uncomfortable to talk about, and we’ll just neglect that part of the Bible, and so be glad that you are at a Bible-teaching, God-fearing church where you’ve got a pastor that’s up here every week guarding that which has been entrusted to him, and it implies the faithful transmission, in other words, teaching it rightly, teaching it correctly, not like that very, very, very, very smart lawyer sitting on that panel says, I want to teach something untrue, help me take something out of context, basically, it’s not what he said, but he’s basically asking us to take something out of context in the Bible so that I can make my case in court.
I’m almost embarrassed to be a lawyer sometime, and I really get what the Bible says about lawyers now, but not to mention what Shakespeare said, but, so the Greek word for guard that Paul is using has this rich, rude, and biblical thought, you know, you saw those who have stood in the gap for our nation come up here. It has a military watchman imagery. Think of each one of these heroes that were up here, standing up here, a soldier standing watch.
I think of Acts, where you’ve got the reference to soldiers standing watch, and it relates to protecting life and treasure, you know, protecting us from harm, from corruption. I think of the shepherds guarding their flocks by night. It suggests obedience to command, that’s why there’s this military aspect to this word that Paul is using here.
It’s suggesting this obedience to command. Guarding involves faithful responsibility and diligence in that responsibility to someone that’s higher than you, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And Paul is using that language intentionally.
He didn’t use, he could have used some kind of softer word, but no, he says, I want you to think of the folks that were up here when you hear me say the word guard. This is a big deal. And you know what I love is that in a good Bible-believing church, we know that the Bible is all one story, and it’s all about, you know, Jesus.
And so, I dug into, as I was preparing this message, into, well, what about in the Old Testament? You know, I know that Paul was using the Greek, but what’s this word guard? And is there any, is it going to be consistent? Or am I going to have to try and explain something? Of course, that’s not going to be inconsistent. You know, it was incredible. I think of Adam’s call in Genesis.
Adam was placed in Eden, and guess what? The word guard there, Shamar, in the Hebrew, he’s entrusted with guarding and protecting the creation that God had given him to be in charge of. And what happened when he didn’t, though? There was corruption, wasn’t there? And I think of Israel’s priests and the Levites in the book of Numbers. They were, again, commanded to guard, that same word, Shamar, to guard the tabernacle.
They were to protect it from defilement, and they were to make sure that godly worshiping was still there. And then my favorite one, the watchman on the wall in Ezekiel. Think about that.
Isn’t that a great picture of what we need to be doing in this nation right now so that your children and that your grandchildren can share the good news of Jesus to the next generation? The watchman on the wall, God’s appointing Ezekiel as a watchman to warn the people. I feel like that’s what I’m doing most of the time these days. Watchman who is there to tell the next generation, you have to guard that which has been entrusted to us.
And then in Psalms, God himself, who’s the ultimate guardian? And we see this in another letter that Paul writes to Timothy later, but God himself is the ultimate guardian. He says, behold, he who keeps, Shamir again, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber or sleep. So, you can know that God may be sending you and calling you to guard that which has been entrusted to you, to guard the very words of God, to guard the truth of the scripture, but he’s not going to be leaving you alone while you’re going to be doing that.
He’s going to be guarding you. He’s going to be with you because God himself is the ultimate guardian. And so again, there’s no inconsistency here when we’re being told to guard that which has been entrusted to us, because whether it’s the Old Testament or the New Testament or wherever you go in the Bible, it’s vigilance.
It’s covenantal faithfulness. It’s protecting what is holy from corruption and ensuring its right transmission. And you know what? Sometimes I just praise God for this little ministry of something like Global that we have, because before those guys got up on that panel and started asking the room to provide them Bible passage to support stuff that wasn’t in the Bible, I had had the opportunity to have a couple conversations with some godly lawyers who were looking to figure out how do we help move these institutions that are in the wrong way of thinking back toward what scripture says.
And one of those lawyers, and I love your last hymn, with the love of Jesus, we will know they’re Christians by their love. He got up and I could have, you know, somebody must have sang that song to him just before he got up. He got up and had the courage in that room to take that panel on, but he did it with the love of Christ.
And he did it through asking questions, not attacking them, not attacking who they were, but just simply by asking questions. And after about four questions, they had those lawyers on that stage questioning in their own positions. That’s what we’re called to do.
We’re not called when we’re faced with some kind of untruth or some kind of thing that is just abhorrent to the scripture to just put our tails between our legs and climb under the bed. We’re called to stand up, but we’re also called to do it compassion and respect. And I’m going to always remember this hymn.
I want to carry that hymn along with me from now on. And they will know we are Christians by our love. So, the Greek word for deposit means something precious, something entrusted for safekeeping.
Well, there’s nothing more precious and necessary for safekeeping than the very words of God and the truth of the scripture handed down from time to time, from generation to generation. And we have to, in the hardest of times, be willing to stand up. I think of the guy in Florida I represented.
There was a businessman who was a strong Christian man, probably attends a church just like this, knowing him these days. And the government came in and said, you can no longer, even though your company is a very important company, it was a big electric company and it was necessary for the electrical infrastructure of our nation. So, there were some national security aspects to, you know, that’s how important his company was.
It was a big, I mean, it was a fairly large company and he had a lot of employees. And because he was a Christian man, he paid these employees very, very well. And he gave them a Cadillac healthcare plan, the best you could get.
Nonetheless, the government came in and said, we are going to begin fining you up to $7 million if you don’t start participating in abortions at your company with regard to the insurance that you provide. And I got the call from him and he said, I’ll shut this company down. He was trying to; he was getting older.
He had built a very successful company. He was ready to sell the company. Now he can’t sell the company because he’s got this $7 million contingent liability attached to any sale and the government’s coming in.
And then we get a case in the Supreme Court that says, you can’t do that. So, they go back and they tweak their little regs a little bit and they come back again, $7 million or we’re shutting you down. He stood up and he said, the word of God says that every human being is made in the very image of God.
And that means that God has created every human being in the womb. And I am not going to participate. Even if it means I lose everything that I’ve built over the last 30 years, I will stand for the truth of God’s word.
That’s the deposit that he’s been, that’s talked about in this verse. That’s the truth of scripture that this president of this company on this day said, I will guard the deposit that has been entrusted to me. I’ll guard this part of God’s word that is true.
And I’ll guard that truth at all costs. When I was a federal judge, one of the probably favorite things I did was the last part of the immigration, lawful immigration process where a person became a citizen. And I would hold the ceremony and the proceeding where they would renounce their prior citizenship and announce their allegiance to the United States of America.
And after that oath, swear that was taken and they did that, I would reserve the rest of the day and I would bring them back to my chambers and they each tell their story. I’ll never forget one of the stories that a young woman was telling me. She said, my brother was in front of me and they said, are you a Christian? They asked a bunch of questions, but one of the questions were, are you a Christian? And the answer was yes.
And she said, the man that asked the question then pulled out a gun and shot him. She was next in line. And when asked that same question, she said, no.
And now she’s in America as an American citizen, but she says, it was my brother who did the right thing. Stood and guarded that which had been entrusted to him and he paid the ultimate price. As we know, many who have defended this nation and those who now serve as first responders sometimes do.
And so, for Timothy, this deposit is the apostolic gospel and the truth. And it’s so important. It’s got such significance that it’s worth dying for.
It’s worth losing your company for, but it’s certainly worth having the courage to stand up and engage the culture with the love of Christ so that somebody that God puts in your lane may know him. And more importantly, that somebody in the next generation may have the opportunity to know him as well. Because we are stewards, not inventors of the truth.
The world out there says you can make up truth and your truth is good for you and my truth is good for me. And there’s no such thing as a moral absolute. Somebody asks you that, asking if they’re absolutely sure about that, because they’ve just stated an absolute.
But our duty isn’t to modify and say that anybody’s truth can be true. We’re stewards of the real truth. And trust me, God’s truth will always correspond to reality.
If at some point the science of the day is inconsistent with God’s word, I’ll guarantee you at some point we’re going to find out that science is wrong. That’s happened every single time throughout world history. Our duty is not to modify what God has put down, but to preserve it faithfully.
And you know, it’s really fun to be a pastor and a Christian person who’s out there and we in proclaiming the word of God, I love to be able to share the good news, don’t you? But we’re not called just to be proclaimers of the truth, we’re called to be protectors of it as well. And that’s what Paul is charging Timothy with here. We’re supposed to guard against counterfeit.
You know, the scripture says, avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions. That’s what that panel was that I was telling you about earlier. I mean, that was irreverent babble and contradiction.
And how powerful is the devil’s prompting if you can get a professing Christian at a professing Christian university to make that statement in a room like that? So, we are battling against not flesh and blood. We are battling against principalities. And, you know, but man, each time that happens, that’s an opportunity for us to, you know, just let God be glorified.
Let us stand up, whatever the cost. Irreverent battle may take the form of, you know, philosophies that sound eloquent or sophisticated. They may even, how often do you hear it and it kind of tugs at your heartstring.
But if it’s denying God, it doesn’t take you very long before you can peel it back and you can see the evil and the ugliness behind it. Guarding means discernment. Always test everything you hear against scripture.
Always test everything you hear against scripture. I did a little word search of this irreverent battle. And in the Greek, that literally means profane, empty sounds.
I’m thinking, wow, just turn on the television, turn on Netflix, turn on Hulu, turn on whatever you’re turning on. Maybe we should just shut it off because there’s a whole lot of irreverent battle coming through, isn’t there? The contradictions are ideas that stand opposed to the truth of God’s word. How often is there a television program that is promoting something opposite of what God says in the beginning created man and woman, the very image of God he created.
There’s a big difference between knowledge and wisdom, isn’t there? And there’s a big difference between false knowledge, or what is falsely called knowledge, and the truth. Truth claims by people that are making stuff up, that’s false knowledge. It’s counterfeit.
And one of the things that I think God’s asking us to do, and he was certainly, through Paul, asking Timothy to do here, is figure out what’s the counterfeit stuff out there. And how do you figure out what’s counterfeit? Well, when I was a United States prosecutor, that’s what we did. We had the real deal, $100 bill, and we had the counterfeit dollar bill.
The way they trained the agents that were investigating that kind of stuff, is they showed them the real thing. And if they could look at the real $100 bill, they could eventually learn to see what was counterfeit. If you are in the Word of God every day, and you’re studying the Word of God, and oh my goodness, I just love this church, because after church, you do this wonderful Sunday school, and I challenge you to come to that too.
We’ll do a completely different thing than we’re doing here. But study God’s Word. So then when you see the counterfeit, you’re able to show that it’s wrong.
Again, while letting them see the love of Jesus in your heart as you do that. Let me tell you how important that is. God put a lot of lawyer DNA in this guy here.
And you learn to fight and to argue, and that part that you’re supposed to be compassionate and respectful, I got to work on that daily. Daily, because there’s a whole lot of lawyer fight and argue and win the argument DNA in me. And that’s part of what God’s asking us to do here.
He wants us to win the argument, but you know what he’s also telling us to do? He says, I don’t want you just to win the argument. He says, I want you to win their soul. I want you to win their soul.
And so, they will know we are Christians by our love. And they know. What happens if we don’t do that? One of the things that I loved about this church about a year ago, when we celebrated all the ways that you are able to help with missions out there.
And by the way, God bless you. Thank you for supporting us. I promise that we used every penny of that and with good stewardship.
But one of the things that I just really enjoyed, mostly because my wife and I home educated our children all the way through, was this is a church that has a lot of folks that home educate their children. And you know how important this message is from Paul to Timothy today? I can tell you many, many examples, too many examples, where godly parents did everything right. They raised their children, they trained them up in the Lord, either through home education or through really good Christian, you know, private education.
And one semester at some fancy public university, they undid it. Not because they showed those young people the truth, but because they showed irreverent babble in front of them in such a way that sounded so good. It was what our itching ears wanted to hear.
And so, we cannot underestimate the importance of what is being asked of us here when we’re called to guard that which is entrusted to us. Because if we do not do that, the cost is that the devil then tries to take them away. Now, I’ve got a lot of hope for each one of those young men and women that may have strayed, because Jesus never gives up on them.
They’re the sheep out there that the shepherd is going to come someday, I pray is going to come and bring each one of those examples back. But I’m telling you, there is a world out there that it’s a full court press. They send their deans of students to national conventions with the sole purpose of teaching them how to undo the indoctrination that their parents and Western world and society has instilled in them.
And this is what you need to do with your freshmen students that are at your university. It is ugly the battle that we are up against, but we need to know that we’re up against it. Because if we know what we’re up against, and we know that that’s a very dark darkness out there, we also know that Jesus is the light of the world.
And that Jesus will shine light on that if we do what we’re called to do. Guard that which has been entrusted to you. But understand that if we don’t do that, there will be some that will swerve from the faith, that will go the wrong way.
And I just want to reinforce the stakes. That’s the only reason I bring it up. Error leads not just to intellectual missteps, but it’s to a spiritual shipwreck.
And therefore, we want to stand up and correct error. Correct error. That gospel is a sacred trust.
It’s not invented. We don’t get to make up truth. It doesn’t get to get reinvented.
I’m going to tell you; there are some seminaries out there that will reinvent truth as we go along in society. There are judges out there that decide to reinvent the law and make it up as they go. And I don’t want to get into this because it’s a little bit aside from what we’re talking about today.
But part of what we do at Salt and Light Global is try and hold those courts accountable. We’re guarding that which has been entrusted to us. Because if a court can say the First Amendment no longer means the free exercise of religious conscience, if government writes a law that applies to everybody, therefore you no longer have the First Amendment if they write a law in a way that is generally applicable to everybody.
That’s what the Supreme Court did, by the way. And we’re fighting to get the court to come back and say, no, the First Amendment says you can’t interfere with the free exercise of a person’s religion. The same thing’s happening in the universities with regard to, and in the culture, with regard to God’s word here.
Let’s just reinvent what some of these things mean, and then we can do all the bad things, or all the things that we detain, they are bad, but we’re going to say they’re good now. And now we’ll have scripture, because we invented what scripture means, to support it. Wow.
You see what God’s doing here? He’s saying, no, I want you to guard that which has been entrusted to you. And I need someone to help me here because I’ve got a three-hour sermon, and so I need to know when I’m supposed to stop. What time is this? Quarter after, gotcha.
Now, guarding the deposit isn’t something that we do, you know, let’s just say that you did what I said, and you go start studying God’s word, and you get really, really good at it, and now you’ve got, okay, I’ve got every argument down, and I’m ready to go, you know, whoop on anybody that’s going to disagree with what God says. At that point, you got to do what the guy with lawyer DNA has, you got to stop back, you got to step back, say, I’ve been called to a gracious stewardship, not a brutal stewardship. I’ve been called to a gracious stewardship.
Christian people, we need to model integrity, we need to model humility, we need to model Jesus’ love while we maintain the true fidelity to Scripture. Because guess what? Even if we’re right, and we do it with a heart of arrogance, or a heart of something short of love and integrity, guess what that truth is going to do? It’s going to hit a brick wall. It’s not going to ever permeate the person that we are trying to share the good news with.
And so, let’s stay encouraged, though. Like Timothy, believers—wow, you say, how can we be encouraged? You see what the culture is like today? Like Timothy, though, I think believers, we may feel that weight of the culture, we may feel that weight of intellectual opposition, sometimes shaming, you know, people have tried to cancel me, people have tried to shame—one of the things they did at a university that I was at, I’m now working and helping Spring Arbor University, which is a good Christian school, but one of the things when I was at a public university, you know what they did to shame the Christians? All of a sudden, the three of us that were there showed up at work one day, and every single door on the office of the law faculty had a little rainbow. You know, we’re the professors that you can trust.
A trusted professor—I can’t remember what it said or something, but it was—and all of us, it was very, very clear that, you know, these are the three doors you better worry about, because they don’t have the seal of—and we need to, you know, when someone attempts to cancel you or to shame you, just respond with truth and love. And grace, because when you do that, that hymn—I can’t get that hymn out of my mind— they will know we are Christians by our love. So, guard the deposit, hold fast to the gospel, avoid the irreverent battle, discern between the crap that’s out there, I’m sorry, but that’s what it is, and true wisdom.
Measure all claims, all truth claims by the culture and the world out there against what God says, and lean on grace. Depend on the Holy Spirit to remain faithful, because he’s promised, you know, that he will. And I want to just kind of finish here by telling you how powerful grace-filled engagement can be.
I recently was speaking at Duke Law School, which, you know, they wanted to make sure that I knew that we’re tied for Harvard this year. We’re one of the best schools in the country. And I walked in, and every other office, there was a closed office with glass doors, and the person in there was wearing a mask and virtue signaling.
I’m thinking, wait a minute, did I just go back in time two or three years? And I said, at that moment, I said, okay, stop being arrogant, start praying. I was feeling, and I decided at that moment that I’m going to bring the Word of God to this group, because there may be a president in the future sitting here. There may be a future Supreme Court justice here.
There may be a member of Congress or a CEO of a Fortune 100 company. And so, with all the grace that I could muster, and I prayed hard. I talked to Marilyn the night before.
I called another man for accountability, and I said, right now, I just want to, I mean, I just want to do something else. And by the time we got done with those conversations, and I think that’s another good thing. I don’t know if Timothy talks about this, but put good men and women around you.
If you’re a woman, put good women around you. Put good men around you. Get an abundance of counselors, you know, so that when God puts you in a moment where you have the opportunity to guard that which is entrusted to you, somebody can be there and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, I’m going to pull you back here, because, you know, you’re supposed to stand up, but you’re supposed to do it with the love of Jesus.
And so, by that next morning, I was able to do that. And God honored it. It was a Charlie Kirk, it was right after Charlie Kirk died, so we had that situation.
And they do a Charlie Kirk type of format here, where it’s either debate or a, you know, or a, where I give my talk and then somebody on the far left, atheist, usually gets up and gives his, and he did, but he was respectful. And then the students get to ask questions. And I kind of did a Charlie Kirk thing.
I said, those of you that disagreed with me today, you have, please come up, be first on, you get to be first. And, but here’s how God used that. Not during the talk, I don’t think as much, but after the talk, an hour later, there were still students asking questions.
And they were on one-on-one type of things. And some of them were Christians. And three of them, in their own way, they were very different.
They all did its different ways. But three of them said, we’ve never heard that perspective here. We’ve never heard that perspective here.
And in their own way, they thanked and appreciated it. I guess my point is grace-filled engagement means that guarding that which has been trusted, doesn’t mean we have to withdraw from intellectual engagement. In fact, we should run toward it.
We should run toward it. And if we run toward it, God will give you the words at the time with whoever he’s put in front of you. I don’t know where each of you are at and where God has got you in this world, you know, but for whatever reason, I’m a lawyer, so he puts me, he puts lawyers in front of me.
God’s going to put other people in front of you, and he’s going to give you the words. He’s going to give you the grace so that maybe they will say to you, well, you know what? I hadn’t heard that perspective. It really makes sense.
And who knows where God takes that? Because if we engage ideas with humility and love and boldness, showing that biblical truth, you know, is intellectually credible, but more importantly, spiritually life-giving and life-saving, wow, just think how God can use that. So, get rid of any arrogant defensiveness. Remember about gracious stewardship.
Marked with humility and love, even when we stand firm in that conviction. And so, I want to give you a closing charge here. Like the soldier in the tomb of the unknown soldier, we are called to stand watch.
We are called to be faithful. We’re called to be tireless. We’re called to be courageous.
And I kind of act like, oh yeah, I like to share the gospel. Well, courageous, I’m going to confess, I can be very courageous with a big old podium between me, and I can share the gospel with however big a number of people are in front of this podium. What, you put me in an airplane seat next to somebody who needs to hear the word of God? We all can be more courageous, can’t we? We all can be more courageous.
And so, let’s be like that sentinel at the tomb of the unknown soldier, no matter what, every day, tirelessly, courageously, faithfully, guard the living truth of the gospel because it’s been entrusted to us by God himself. We’re not called just to be proclaimers of the truth; we’re called to be protectors of the truth. And let’s in our own lives try to avoid some empty chatter.
Let’s recognize and reject all those hollow philosophies out there. I’m thinking of critical theory and all this stuff that was bouncing around the schools and still is in too many places. And let’s rely on grace, trust the spirit because God promises that he’s going to give us what we need, and he’s going to be there guarding us while we’re guarding His word.
And I’m just going to finish with that because it says, remember, God guards us. You know, he says this in 2nd Timothy, and I didn’t get to, this is a whole other sermon, but in 2nd Timothy, in that letter he says, he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day. Wow, what a promise.
He’s going to have your back as you’re guarding that which he has entrusted you to guard. Grace and peace be with you all. God bless you.