2 Timothy 1:3-5: A Remarkable Mother and Grandmother

INTRODUCTION

Karl Barth was perhaps the greatest theologian of the 20th Century. He was a man of immense learning. He was a master of Greek and Hebrew and whatever the great Christian thinkers had written since the time of Christ until the present.

Dr. Barth wrote shelves of books that students who want to be pastors diligently study to learn the deep things of the faith.

Once a skeptic asked Dr. Barth how he could be sure that the Gospel was true. The great Dr. Barth said, “Because my mother told me.”

This doesn’t mean that in the course of time Dr. Barth didn’t find out that some things his mother had told him were mistaken.

It doesn’t mean either that he was content all his life with the knowledge of God that he learned from his mother.

Surely when Karl Barth said that he had become convinced of the truth of the gospel by his mother, he meant that his that his mother planted the seed of faith and that there was nothing as important as his mother’s influence in his coming to faith.

Today is Mother’s Day, and since we have in our little congregation here a good numbers of mothers, I decided to talk about the importance of what you have done in passing the faith on to the next generation.

But even if you’re not a mother, you also have probably also had a role in passing your faith along to younger people.

Some of you are favorite aunts who had a big influence on the spiritual development of nieces and nephews. Some of you have taught Sunday school. Some of you have taught in the public schools. Others of you have had other opportunities to pass along your faith.

I once knew an elderly woman who never had children, but she taught Sunday school for years, and kept in touch with her former students in their later lives. She was, in a sense, the spiritual mother for many young people.

Several years ago there was a woman named Evie here at Village Ridge. She had given birth to two still-born children, and a sadness in her life was that she never had a child in her home. But she told me about a little boy in her church who came to love her and always sat with her in church. Who knows how much Evie contributed to that boy’s spiritual well-being?

St. Paul’s the last letter was written from prison to his younger friend Timothy. In it he includes these words:

 “I thank God whom I serve with a clear conscience, as did my fathers, when I remember you constantly in my prayers. As I remember your tears, I long night and day to see you, that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and now, I am sure dwells in you” (2 Timothy 1:3-5).

I. This is what we know about Timothy’s background.

A. Timothy was the child of a mixed marriage. His mother was Jewish and his father was a Greek.

In Acts 16 we learn that Timothy met St. Paul during his second missionary journey through Asia Minor—the country we now call Turkey.

Paul and Silas were journeying through Asia Minor—modern Turkey—on Paul’s second missionary journey when they came to Lystra

At Lystra there was a young man named Timothy. Timothy was the child of a Jewish woman who was a believer, and he had a Greek father.

We learn nothing more about Timothy’s Greek father. He may have been dead. He may have deserted the family. He may have been around but was not interested in Christianity. Maybe he was a believer but not as strong in his faith as his wife and mother-in-law.

This was Paul’s second visit to Timothy’s hometown of Lystra.

There had been a lot of excitement when Paul had visited Lystra three or four years before.

At that time Paul and his companion Barnabas had healed a crippled man who had never walked.

The townspeople were so impressed that they thought Paul and Barnabas were gods come to visit them. Paul they called Hermes, and Barnabas they called Zeus.

But when the apostles refused to be worshiped, the crowds turned against Paul and Barnabas. They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city—apparently dead.

But Paul wasn’t dead. We read that when the other believers surrounded Paul, he got up and went back into the city. We don’t read of anything else he did in Lystra at that time.

Maybe Timothy had learned about Jesus during that earlier visit.

But anyway, when Paul returned to Lystra, we read that he found a young disciple named Timothy.

B. Timothy knew the scriptures. He had the background he needed to become an apostle and companion of St. Paul as a missionary.

Timothy’s teachers seem to have been his mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois.

In the same letter Paul writes to Timothy: “From childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings (that means our Old Testament) that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15).

Timothy’s mother and grandmother had not only explained the truth about God but they had lived the truth.

So when Paul and Silas came to town preaching the gospel, Timothy quickly understood how Jesus fulfilled the promises of the Old Testament scriptures he had learned from his mother and grandmother.

In Paul’s letters included in our Bibles, Paul mentions Timothy as co-author of six of them. Two of the letters from Paul in our New Testament are written to Timothy. Timothy was one of St. Paul’s most important co-workers.

II. But my purpose this afternoon isn’t to talk about Timothy. I want to talk about Timothy’s mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois because of the important part mothers and grandmothers play in passing on the faith.

A. Every child’s first teacher is his or her mother. Some of the rabbis insisted that girls should be given a basic education—not because they thought that as women they needed the knowledge found in books. No, they wanted mothers to have learning so that they could give their sons a head start in learning even before they started school.

My father was anxious that his children would learn from books, and he was the authority on everything in our family.

But Mother was the best teacher because she had patience and took time to listen to us. She showed us with her life what it meant to love Jesus.

My purpose today is to impress on you who were mothers—or teachers or favorite aunts—how important you have been in the spiritual formation and success of the young people who came after you.

Very few people come to faith by listening to sermons, or by learning theology or by reading books or by hearing arguments.

Even evangelists such as Billy Graham will admit that most of the people who find Jesus through their evangelistic campaigns were invited or brought to their meetings by friends or neighbors or family members.

We come to faith mostly through our relationships with others.

We see the gospel lived in lives of those we love—and we come to share their faith.

And we mature and continue in our faith in the community of believers. (That’s why it’s so important to go to church.)

And for many of us—as for Timothy—the one who first drew us to Jesus was our mother.

Four pastors were talking about their favorite translations of the Bible. One pastor liked the King James translation best, another liked the RSV, and another said he liked the NIV.

The last pastor spoke up and said, “I like my mother’s translation best.”

“Oh,” they said, “Your mother made a translation of the Bible?”

“Yes,” the last pastor said, “she translated the Bible into her daily life and through it I came to faith.”

A few months ago the Christian Century magazine invited some noted Christian leaders to share the stories of important events in their faith journeys

Michael Jinkins, president of Louisville Theological Seminary, wrote of how his theological education began on the way home from church one day when he asked his mother about the odd wording of a Bible verse the preacher had preached on.

The verse was Matthew 6:34: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

The odd wording of the verse—as it is in the King James Version—puzzled the child, but he knew it must be important because it was printed in red in his Bible.

His mother said, “Hmmm, I guess it means that Jesus doesn’t want us to worry about the future. There’s enough for us to worry about today.”

Jinkins writes, “That was a lesson my mother, a child of the Great Depression, knew by heart. She then invited me to read the passage with her in the context of the whole text, and gradually its meaning became clear.”

What stayed with Jinkins from that conversation was the natural way his mother opened up to him the meaning of scripture, beginning with the words, “Hmmmm, I guess it means…”

Jinkins says he still uses that line often in explaining things to his seminary students.

B. But our opportunities don’t stop with our children. Sometimes children wander from the faith, and grandmothers or grandfathers bring their grandchildren to faith.

In every church we see grandmothers and grandfathers bringing their grandchildren to church.

In our church we sit on the second row from the front. On the other side of the aisle a grandmother and grandfather sit with their grandchildren.

The parents of the children have begun to come to church, but for years it was the grandparents who brought the grandchildren to church while the children’s parents stayed home.

A pastor named Fred Craddock tells about a young woman who came to his church and told him this story. It was during her freshman year in college, she had been a failure in her classes, she wasn’t having dates, and she didn’t have as much money as the other students. She was lonely and depressed and homesick.

She told Pastor Craddock that one Sunday afternoon she went to the river near the campus and climbed up on the rail of the bridge and was looking into the dark water below. She was so discouraged she wanted to die.

“But,” she said, “for some reason I thought of a line I had heard somewhere. It was, ‘Cast all your care upon him for he cares for you.’”

She said, “So I stepped back—and here I am.”

Pastor Craddock asked her, “Where did you learn that line?”

The girl didn’t know.

Craddock asked her, “Do you go to church?”

She said, “No…well, when I visited my grandmother in the summers, we went to Sunday school and church...”

Pastor Craddock just said, “Ah…”

Even though she had gone to church and Sunday school only during the summers when she had visited her grandmother, that verse from First Peter—“Cast all your care upon him, for he cares for you”—had stuck in her mind and saved her life.

Our pastor once asked a high-school age young man in his congregation: “Who was your role model for a faithful Christian?”

The young man named a person he really looked up to.

The odd thing, the pastor said, was that neither the young man nor the older Christian really knew each other.

We can influence younger believers even though we don’t really know them and don’t imagine that they are looking up to us as examples.

This has been true in my life. People have been an inspiration to me who never knew it. Maybe you have been an influence on some young person’s life and never knew it.

CONCLUSION

Your children are grown now and so are your grandchildren. But your job is not done.

You can still pray for your children and grandchildren, as I’m sure Eunice and Lois prayed for Timothy when he was away on his missionary journeys with the great Apostle Paul.

Through your love and faith, you can still be an example that draws them to God.

And even when you are in glory with Jesus, your influence will still linger on and bless them.

Sometimes our children don’t seem to respond to our efforts to draw them to Christ. But don’t give up. You don’t know the seeds you have planted in their hearts. Maybe they believe more than you think—or more than they will admit.

When we moved from our house to Village Place, we had a lot of fun passing our possessions on to our children and grandchildren. Our granddaughter Megan got the piano and our grandson-in-law Zach got the woodworking tools. Our grandson Caleb got my grandpa’s gold pocket watch and the Indian axe head Charlotte’s grandfather had found on the farm. Peter got the chiming wall clock that I made and was so proud of. Our daughter Susan got the garden cart and the gardening tools, and our granddaughter Nicole got the cedar chest Charlotte inherited from her mother. It was fun to find homes for our treasures.

But the most precious possession we can pass on is our faith.

And we pass on our faith—not only by teaching about God but by living the life of faith.

Words are necessary, but words don’t count for much without the deeds that illustrate their truth.

That’s how Timothy’s mother and grandmother passed their faith on to Timothy—and that’s how we pass our faith on to our children and grandchildren.

Now that’s something to think about today on Mother’s Day.