God Speaks: Learning the Gospel Playbook - 2 Timothy 3:16-17

Super Bowl XLIX

11 years ago. One of the most iconic plays in the history of the Super Bowl occurred. Tonight is a rematch between the two teams that were in Super Bowl 49… the Seahawks and the Patriots. In that 2015 game, the Seahawks were down by 4, but had a chance to win with 26 seconds left in the game. All they needed was one yard and they would be Super Bowl champs again. And a virtually unknown rookie named Malcolm Butler stepped in front of the pass at the goal line, and intercepted the ball. The Seahawks lost. The Patriots won. It’s still considered one of the greatest plays in NFL history.

But Butler wasn’t lucky. His play wasn’t random. He knew exactly where he was supposed to be. Butler had studied the Seahawks' playbook relentlessly. In the days leading up to the game, Patriots coaches drilled him on Seattle's stacked receiver formations. So in the heat of the moment, with the Super Bowl on the line, he recognized the setup immediately. Butler had been beaten on similar plays in practice, but he learned from it. He rehearsed. He anticipated. As he later said, "I knew what was coming. I just beat him to the spot."

In a game like the Super Bowl, the playbook matters more than at any other time because everything is magnified: the speed, the noise, the pressure, and the consequences. On that stage you don’t have time to “figure it out as you go.” You’re facing the best athletes in the world, coached by people who have spent two full weeks studying your tendencies, your formations… even what you like to do when the game is on the line.

That story does get at something true about all of us: The Super Bowl isn’t where you learn the playbook. When life comes at you fast—and it always does—you don’t rise to the occasion so much as you fall back on what has been put into you. You’re working off of muscle memory. So here’s the question: When the pressure hits—when the diagnosis comes, when the marriage frays, when the kid breaks your heart, when anxiety sits like an anvil on your chest at 2 a.m.—what’s does your muscle memory… where do your instincts take you?

And that takes us to Paul’s words to Timothy:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for teaching, rebuking, correcting, for training or educating in righteousness.

“All Scripture is God-breathed.” We’ve said this before… this means the Bible isn’t merely old religious information. It’s not a museum artifact. It’s the very life-giving breath of God… the breath that breathed life into our first parents in the garden is the very same breath that gives us salvation and life and that breath is what is profitable for “Educating in righteousness.”

We’re always being educated

Training assumes you’re being formed—shaped—disciplined—taught. Training implies doing it over and over again. Training also implies education. Education is important. Let me put it bluntly: if the Word of God is not educating you, something else is. Your heart will be trained. Your conscience will be catechized. Your instincts will be formed. By whom?

By fear. By outrage. By your social feed. By your past. By the idols you keep petting in the dark. By a culture that disciples you into self-salvation: “Fix yourself. Improve yourself. Curate yourself.” There are so many alternative educations vying for our attention. And the result is predictable: when suffering comes, you don’t have promises—you have panic. When temptation comes, you don’t have a Savior—you have excuses. When guilt comes, you don’t have Christ—you have shame.

The Problem isn’t more information

There are two ways we get educating in righteousness wrong.

First,

St Paul isn’t saying we need more information.

The devil is quite happy to let you become a Bible consumer so long as you never become a Christ receiver. “Educating in righteousness? Great. Here—another book. Another study. Another podcast. Another dataset. Another highlighter color.” And pretty soon “education” becomes a baptized version of the same old fantasy: if I know enough, I’ll be safe. If I understand enough, I’ll be in control.

But the first temptation wasn’t ignorance. It was the seduction of knowledge—“knowing good and evil”—knowledge as independence from God. Our problem has never been lack of data. Our problem is that we think knowledge will save us. The idea of “knowledge is power” is as old as the garden of Eden. And we live in Christian world that is absolutely drunk on knowledge. Systematic theology is king. And we want knowledge because we’ve convinced ourselves that we can never allow ourselves to be wrong.… we always have to be right and if we’re going to be right, well then… we better get our facts right. We BETTER know good and evil… doubling down on the problem in the garden. In fact, we’ve even rewritten that narrative… Eve’s problem wasn’t knowing Good and Evil… her problem was the way she tried to do it. But that’s not what the text says. The text says the temptation was the actual knowledge itself. And since then, we chase knowledge as if it’s our Savior because we always want to be in control, we always want to be right.. and we get granular about it… so that we can manage our own righteousness.

But Scripture’s “educating in righteousness” is not simply adding Bible facts to our heads. We’ll come back to this in a moment.

The problem isn’t we need better understanding of the commands

The second way we get this wrong is

We presume St Paul is saying we need to educate ourselves in the law, as if God’s commands are the ticket to righteousness.

You see this everywhere. The Bible is the book where we get better morals and better behavior. We had to memorize this Bible verse as kids and training in righteousness 10 times out of 10 was about morality and ethics. “OK kids… the purpose of the Bible is to make you better obeyers of mommy and daddy.” You get caught in a sin and the first question is… “now Chad, have you been faithful in your private time with God and reading the Bible every day?”

This kind of presumption turns Paul’s comfort into a new ladder. In 2 Timothy 3, Paul isn’t saying, “Educate yourselves in God’s commands so you can become righteous.” In fact, here’s where it all goes off the rails: He’s not talking about your righteousness. You don’t have any righteousness that you can call your own. But we’ve convinced ourselves of that.

Paul is saying that Scriptures is God’s life-giving breath and is profitable for educating and training ourselves in the righteousness that comes from Christ, so that your life is formed by what God has given, not driven by what you must achieve. It’s not our righteousness, it’s Christ’s… not just for our justification by for our sanctification as well.

Yes, the Law is holy and good. It tells the truth. It names what love looks like. It exposes what sin is. But the Law has a hard limit: it can diagnose; it cannot resurrect. It can demand righteousness, but it cannot manufacture it. And here’s the problem: if “training in righteousness” is talking about what we have to do in order to live in righteousness, what we have is the hamster wheel of “try harder”, “be better”, “be moral”. Can you honestly look in the mirror and claim that’s going to be enough during crunch time when the stress level is off the charts? If all we do is rehearse the commands as if doing them over and over will fix our sin problem, we’re either artificially propping ourselves up with pride by dumbing down the law or we will collapse in despair. Either way, we’re goners, because we’re left with ourselves.

The righteousness is Christ’s, not our own

I cannot stress how important this is, especially when life goes south. Paul’s “training” is not self-improvement; it’s Gospel formation. I don’t know how many times or different ways we can say it: Scripture keeps putting Christ in front of us—crucified for sinners, risen for our justification, given for our sanctification—so that our reflex in “crunch time” is not “I’d better perform,” but “Christ has done it.”

This is all about educating ourselves in the Gospel. The righteousness Scripture trains you in is not the righteousness you build; it’s the righteousness you receive—Christ’s, credited to you, spoken over you, delivered to you. And once you’re given that righteousness, then—only then—the Word trains you to live like what you already are in Him.

We are going to say this till we’re blue in the face here at The Table Church. There is no upside to “try harder” Christianity. We all know how broken our lives really are. I talked to a Christian parent some time ago who was not happy about the life choices of their child. And the longer they talked, the more I had to wonder quietly if the child had ever really heard the Gospel in that Christian home. Because all of the discussion was about behavior. “If the child would ‘just get right with God’”. There’s no grace in that. That’s simply looking for behavior boxes to check under the guise of getting right with God. Wow. I had to wonder if the child knows that God is right with them. Does the child know that Jesus is absolutely in love with them?

We’ve convinced ourselves that life is about the commands instead of the promise. And so we orient all of our talk, all of our lives around behavior instead of grace.. around morality instead of Jesus… around performance instead of forgiveness.

Learning the Gospel Playbook

There’s all sorts of ways we educate ourselves in the Gospel. We rehearse God’s promises over and over. We receive the promises in faith when we hear them. But there’s one real simple way we do this. You know where we educate ourselves in the Gospel? It’s kind of sitting right there in front of us. I know people who grew up saying the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday who claim they never heard the gospel when they were growing up. I get it. You do something so often it loses meaning… or at least that’s what we’re told. But it also occurs in a context in which there’s a lot of law and very little Gospel. The Creed educates us in the Gospel.

The Creed is not first of all a list of religious data points. It’s not a bunch of bullet points. It’s a story so we can live. It begins where every human story begins, not with a principle but with a Person: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” Before you ever lifted a finger, before you ever made a promise to God, before you ever had your life together for even five minutes—there is a Creator who made you. That’s not a concept; that’s the opening chapter of reality. Your life is not an accident. You come from somewhere. You belong to Someone.

And then the Creed does what the Gospel always does: it moves straight to Jesus, and it speaks Him with verbs—real actions in real history: conceived, born, suffered, crucified, died, buried, descended, rose, ascended, sits, will come. That’s the living story of Jesus and his love moving toward us sinners. And here’s the miracle: His story becomes our story. His conception for our new birth. His suffering for our peace. His cross for our forgiveness. His resurrection for our life. His ascension for our confidence. His coming again for our hope. When we confess the Creed, we’re not merely recalling events; we’re locating ourselves inside the mercy of God.

So when Paul says Scripture is useful for “training in righteousness,” we should hear: training you to live in this story. Not merely to memorize facts, but to be reheated and steadied by the Gospel when your own story is unraveling. Because when life goes sideways, you don’t need more bullet points—you need a narrative strong enough to hold you. A story with a Father who creates and provides, a Son who redeems and forgives, a Spirit who gathers and keeps. A story you can tell yourself again when you can’t see the next step: I am not abandoned. I am not condemned. I am not alone. I am forgiven. I am baptized. Christ is risen. And His mercy will have the final word.

Let’s all stand. You’ve been given a card when you came in. It’s the words of the Apostles’ Creed. Let’s take a moment train ourselves in righteousness using the words of the creed:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day He rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there He will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

The Creed is the Gospel playbook. This playbook tells us whose we are and what Jesus has done for us—and it gives us language to live in this grand story when our own stories are falling apart. Week after week, year after year, century after century, the Creed has been the Church’s steady retelling of the saving story: creation, redemption, sanctification—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

That is what “Training in Righteousness” looks like.. Christ’s righteousness, given to you… for when life goes sideways. Trying to navigate the constant pressure of life isn’t about “what must I do?” but “what has He done?” Not “who will I be today?” but “who am I in Christ?” and “Who is Jesus FOR ME today?” That’s why we rehearse the Gospel story over and over and over… Jesus is constantly giving himself to us… speaking a promise that creates what it declares: You’re forgiven. You’re mine.

Let’s Pray.

The Table

If you ever wanted training in righteousness.. here you can taste it, smell it, touch it… Christ’s righteousness FOR YOU. This is the Gospel rehearsed with bread and wine, the story of the cross placed on your tongue, so that in the very place where your sin would accuse you, Jesus answers with His own righteousness. The Sacrament trains you away from self-salvation—away from measuring your worth, away from trusting your resolve—and trains you back into simple faith: not my righteousness, but Yours, Lord; not my strength, but Your mercy. And as that gift is the same every time, it becomes steadying: when life goes sideways, you have somewhere to go, something to receive, a promise you can cling to—not because you performed well enough to deserve it, but because Christ delights to feed sinners with His righteousness again and again. Come running back to the Table where Jesus is everything He Promised to be FOR YOU.