Legacy Builders

Today I want to reveal to you one of my long term weaknesses. This is something that I have had as long as i can remember. It may have been instilled in me by my adopted father or it may just have been something God put in my character. Either way it is both a blessing and a curse.

The thing is that I don’t like to leave things unfinished. Now that might not seem like much a weakness to you but it can be. I have watched movies I did not like just because i watched the first ten minutes or so and felt that I should go ahead and finish it. I one read a trilogy of books that I did not enjoy because I had started the first one and read three or four chapters hoping it would get better because it had good reviews. Once I had read that far in the book I could not bring myself to stop reading, I felt that I should finish the book. I kept picking it up and reading for a few chapters and then putting it down because I did not like it and then I would go back and pick it up again. I finally finished the book and was relieved, but then it began to bother me that it was part of a three book series and I had the other two books and had not read them. So, over time I read all three books and didn’t really enjoy them at all. Now this would not be a problem if they were textbooks and my goal in reading them was to gain some kind of knowledge, we have all had that kind of experience, but these were novels, 300 page novels, read strictly for pleasure and I read three of them without enjoying it because I had started them and felt that I should finish them. Weird huh.

Of course this trait also helped me read every page of every book when I went to college, along with all of the recommended reading, and that helped me get good grades. But as Jerry Clower would say I told you that story so I could tell you this one. I have decided not to return to the series on letters to the seven churches because I feel that God has impressed on me to start the series on prayer right away. And so it begins.

Now as you might assume if you know me at all this will not be the normal series on prayer. It will not start the way you expect and it may not end the way you expect. In fact I don’t even know how it will end as I just began preparing it yesterday after struggling and fighting with changing sermon topics midstream. I want to talk about specific prayer. I want to talk about prayers that you pray by yourself and prayers that you pray with the body of Christ. We are going to start with one of five ways I want you........and me......... to learn to pray in your quiet time. Now these are not just a list of names or a specific amount of time, it will not be that easy. This is interactive prayer, this is all in prayer, this will take time and effort and planning. This is a type of prayer you may not have prayed before, but I want it to be an effective prayer. I want it to be real and alive. So we will approach it slowly and carefully.

First we go to 1 Timothy 1:1-11

1 Timothy 1:1–11 NASB95

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus according to the commandment of God our Savior, and of Christ Jesus, who is our hope, To Timothy, my true child in the faith: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. As I urged you upon my departure for Macedonia, remain on at Ephesus so that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines, nor to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the administration of God which is by faith. But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. For some men, straying from these things, have turned aside to fruitless discussion, wanting to be teachers of the Law, even though they do not understand either what they are saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions. But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully, realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted.

You may have noticed that there is nothing here about prayer, hold on, that part is coming. Paul talks a lot about prayer in chapter 2, such as:

1 Timothy 2:1–2 NASB95

First of all, then, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity.

1 Timothy 2:8 NASB95

Therefore I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and dissension.

We will get there, but first I want you to start with me at the beginning, or at least as close to the beginning as we can get. But before that we will engage in corporate prayer for our rulers and our country.

(Pray for kings and rulers)

So to start at the beginning of 1 Timothy Paul calls Timothy his true son in the faith, Paul had trained Timothy. Can you imagine that, being trained by Paul. Can you imagine being trained by Paul, having Paul grade your homework and explain where you went wrong. Have you ever tried to follow Paul’s logic and got lost, imagine that every day. Yet Paul had poured himself into Timothy, he had planned for Timothy to take his place in teaching and in leading the church. This was the most important thing in Paul’s life, his ministry and he was entrusting it to Timothy. He had mentored him and taught him all he could, he guided him at every step. The most important thing in Paul’s life became the thing that he poured into Timothy at every opportunity, preparing the next generation to carry the torch, to take over, to keep the faith. Paul was preparing Timothy so that the work that Paul did, the life that lived and the church that Paul started would not die out. Paul was assuring his legacy.

Paul reminds Timothy in this letter of what he had taught and what he had urged him to do, the encouragement he gave and the instruction he imparted. Paul had poured his wisdom and his faith into Timothy and now Timothy was having to deal with false teachers and deceptive people. Paul reminded Timothy of the core values he had learned:

1 Timothy 1:5 NASB95

But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

1 Timothy 1:8 NASB95

But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully,

It was obvious that Paul had spent hours and hours teaching and preparing Timothy for what lay ahead. Paul must have spent hours in prayer for Timothy. Whenever he wrote letters he usually began with a list of the people he had been praying for but he did not do that here, he was writing to Timothy and I think Timothy knew that Paul was praying for him. Paul must have spent time thinking about Timothy, about his life and his ministry, praying to God to teach him and protect him. Paul selected Timothy to pour himself into and to dedicate his time to.

Paul was a busy man. He had a lot to do, a long way to go, and his time was very limited. He had enemies and battles to fight. He had a task set before him that no man could accomplish. He must have been overwhelmed and felt pressed for time. There were so many things that Paul wanted to do that never got done, so many places that he wanted to go and go back to, so many letters to write, sermons to preach, people to teach. Paul had more to do than any 20 men could do, but with all of that going on Paul took the time to teach Timothy, to prepare Timothy, to look as far down the road as he was able and prepare Timothy for the things that lay ahead in his life, things that Paul would never be directly a part of but that Paul’s influence would be a major force in through Timothy. Why did Paul do this, because Paul knew the secret.

What secret you ask, that man is mortal. None of us will be able to do everything we want to do or go everywhere we want to go as often as we would like. We will all leave this world with unfinished business, things we wanted to do, places we wanted to go, people we wanted to see one more time, things left unsaid between friends and family. Death comes to us all and we all leave work undone. Family members we want to protect or help now have to be protected or helped by someone else or do without, tasks we wanted to get done now are left unfinished unless someone else does them. Each generation, each life comes to an end, it has been that way for thousands of years and it will be that way until Jesus comes again. And so each of us has a task, a job to add to our already long list, to prepare the next generation.

We prepare our kids to live on their own and to support themselves. We help them all we can but we know that we will not alway be there and we want them to continue to be successful even after we are gone. We send them to college or teach them a trade, help or encourage them to start a business and give them all the knowledge, love, encouragement and assistance we can. A good parent knows that the best gifts we can give our children are the gifts that are not part of their financial statement but a part of their character. If they know the right things, believe the right things, act the right way and are strong in their convictions even if the world changes, even if they go into a field or place we never went and we can’t help them, the lessons we taught about how to live, how to love, and who you are will be with them and help to guide and shape them no matter where they go.

We teach Sunday School and send kids to camp and VBS and we pray for each other and help each other in church and we want our church and our faith to continue after we are gone. We pour a lot of ourselves into our church and we don’t want to see it wither because we are not there. In every area of our lives that is important to us there are things to be done, and we cannot always do them, so we pour into the next generation hoping that they will continue and even improve on what we have done. We find someone, maybe a lot of someone’s over the years that we can teach who we are and what we have learned and let that knowledge give them a head start, hoping that they will continue what has been so important to us, that the work that we have done will not die when we do.

So today I want to urge each one of you to begin a process. I want you to look around and find someone you want to pour into, someone you want to carry on when you are gone. Someone who will not let the things that you love die. It might be one of your children, it might be a dear friend, it might be that you need to look around and find someone that you don’t have much a relationship with now but you make the opportunity to build that relationship. It needs to be someone who you can love and someone you will allow to love you. It needs to be someone you care about or come to care about. It needs to be someone you are willing to spend time with and spend time by yourself thinking and praying about. I want you to find a Timothy in your own life.

Begin by praying, commit to asking God who this person should be and if they are the right one. Pray often, listen, look for clues, for confirmation that you are on the right track or indications that you should choose another. Don’t rush, there will not be many Timothy’s in your life. In my own life only one of my three sons could be my Timothy, only one was enough like me or had enough of the same interest that it would work. My other sons were influenced by me. One of them’s wife used to say that he was my clone, but she was wrong. At least so far. We have some very fundamental differences. I love him, I pray for him, I want the best for him, but he has never embraced the things that are most important to me.

Find someone who embraces what you love, someone who wants what you can give, someone who you can pour yourself into and they will receive it. Open your eyes, ask God to show you, seek out someone in your life that you can prepare to take over the things that you love. Find them, and over the next few weeks we will discover how to pour into them, how to pray for them, how to make a Timothy. It is perhaps the longest lasting think you will ever do in your life. Are you ready to build your legacy, are you ready to leave your mark on the world. Now is the time, today is the day. Build your legacy now.