2 Timothy 1: Fan the Flame and Do Not Be Ashamed of the Gospel

Introduction

This message opens a new series at Église Baptiste Toulouse Métropole, "Passing the Torch," on Paul's second letter to Timothy. The text for the day: 2 Timothy 1:1-12.

This is the last letter of the apostle Paul, the thirteenth he wrote. It is especially moving: Paul writes it after his four missionary journeys, during his second imprisonment in Rome, perhaps in the year 66. He is awaiting trial and he knows he will be executed. This time there is no way out. He writes to Timothy, who stayed in Ephesus, to encourage him in the faith and to see him once more before he departs for eternal glory. At bottom, it is a kind of testament.

The preacher sums up what is at stake this way: "when fear threatens to extinguish our faithfulness, we need to look to the grace of God, the power of his Spirit and the victory of Jesus Christ over death in order to remain faithful to Christ, even when that faithfulness becomes costly."

Outline of the message

1. Timothy, a faithful servant in a costly setting

Timothy is not an unbeliever, nor a man who has denied Christ. He is a faithful servant placed in a setting where staying faithful costs more and more.
His spiritual father is in prison, close to death. Many have abandoned Paul: "all who are in Asia turned away from me, of whom are Phygelus and Hermogenes" (verse 15). Right after that, Paul gives thanks for Onesiphorus, who stayed faithful and attached to him, and who visited him in his chains.
False teachers threaten the church in Ephesus, and Timothy has to resist them. He knows the temptation of fear himself.
Paul's point is not "stop crying and be more enthusiastic." He says instead: when fear and the cost of the Gospel threaten to put out your flame, remember who gave you his Spirit, look at the example of your spiritual father, and gaze on the Gospel for which he is ready to die.
We do not live through the same situations, but we know the temptation to stay silent when the Gospel is uncomfortable, to lose heart when the fruit is slow in coming, or to water down the truth to avoid conflict in the family or among friends.

2. Fan into flame the gift of God

"For this cause, I remind you that you should stir up the gift of God which is in you" (verse 6). This "for this cause" points back to Timothy's sincere faith (verse 5). The flame was lit long ago: they had served the Lord together for some fifteen years.
The permanent danger, today as then, is the fear of disgrace, of the cross, of renunciation. It pushes us toward compromise and guilty concessions, with a fatal consequence: lukewarmness, the cooling of the heart.
This flame is not just a skill. It is "a courageous readiness to make Christ and his Gospel known, and even to suffer for that Gospel": the fervor, courage and perseverance that grace produces in the heart.
Timothy received this gift through the laying on of hands, most likely at his commissioning (1 Timothy 4:14), in connection with the prophecies made about him (1 Timothy 1:18). The preacher cites John Piper, who suggests that at that moment Timothy burst into tears, the tears Paul recalls in verse 4.
The message is clear: the flame was lit by God himself. "We do not have to light the fire in our hearts." We have to tend it and feed it so that it keeps burning.
There is a battle to get up in the morning and pray, to switch off the screens and read the Word, to get off the couch and go see our brothers and sisters. The preacher testifies that everyone he has seen neglect the Word and attend church gatherings less often has ended up going out. It was in those moments that they made disastrous choices and suffered the most dramatic falls.

3. The fire in the wood stove: ashes, embers, wood and oxygen

"God has not given us a spirit of timidity; instead, his Spirit fills us with power, love and wisdom" (verse 7, in the translation read that day). The flame is fanned by God's power, by the Holy Spirit.
On winter mornings, the preacher comes down to the living room, opens the stove, removes the ashes, gathers the embers, adds wood and opens the air vent. A few moments later the flame comes back and warmth returns to the whole room.
The spiritual life works the same way: shake off the ashes that smother the flame (the seduction of the world), gather the embers (fellowship with other believers), add wood (return to the Word of God), add oxygen (let the Holy Spirit work in the heart).
Paul opens his letters with "may grace be given to you" (verse 2) and closes them with "grace be with you" (2 Timothy 4:22). This grace comes through his Word: his apostolic writings are not the fruit of his imagination, but the Word of God that nourishes his people.
"The Spirit is given to us, and yet we have to fan the flame." It is about preparing our hearts: "Lord, set me on fire, fan my flame, feed my soul with your Word."

4. Refuse shame

What could have made Timothy ashamed? Perhaps the apparent weakness of the Gospel: you preach and see little fruit. "Every French pastor understands what I am saying."
Perhaps also being associated with Paul, treated like a criminal, and the prospect of suffering in turn. Or the loss of reputation, rejection, opposition, and his own inner frailty.
"In Toulouse, for the moment, we are not really at risk of being jailed for talking about Jesus." But we can feel a social, intellectual or relational shame.
Nobody wants to come across as a fundamentalist. Saying that Jesus is the only Savior, that the Bible is the Word of God, that we must repent, that it is God who defines good and evil: this will not please everyone, and we can be tempted to make the Gospel more acceptable.
The world would like to make Christians look like people who have stopped thinking. "After all, this is Toulouse. This is a university city." So we prefer not to talk about a Creator who made everything by his word.
There is also the gaze of others: "It is easier to tell your colleagues, 'This weekend I ran a trail race,' than to say, 'On Sunday, like every Sunday, I was at church with my brothers and sisters.'" And there is the pressure on the biblical truths the world rejects: the choice to wait for marriage, the conviction that the Creator determines our gender and that marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman, the existence of the devil and of hell.
"Fear does not necessarily lead us to deny Jesus Christ. It can simply lead us to live as if we had something to hide, as if we were ashamed of our God."

5. Why be ashamed?

Paul serves the God of his ancestors (verse 3). Raised in the Jewish faith, he does not think he has turned his back on the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. For him, Jesus is the fulfillment of God's promises.
He serves him with a clear conscience. Outwardly, he is imprisoned, vulnerable, humiliated, deprived of freedom. Inwardly, his conscience approves of him: he has nothing to be ashamed of, either before God or before people.
Evangelical Protestants are a minority in France. But we are not the first to live as a minority: we are part of a long history of believers who passed on the faith from generation to generation, sometimes at the cost of great suffering. Like Timothy, we have received a Gospel that does not come from us, not to forget it but to pass it on.
Timothy's faith is sincere, and it was also the faith of his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice (verse 5). Paul does not say, "you are a Christian because you were born into a Christian family." But their example helped shape an authentic faith in him. Now it is his turn to pass on the Gospel.

6. Suffer with me for the Gospel

Paul does not merely ask Timothy not to be ashamed. He calls him to take his share of suffering: "suffer hardship with me for the Good News according to the power of God" (verse 8). He will say it again: "Yes, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution" (2 Timothy 3:12).
We proclaim Jesus Christ, who came to his own and was not received, who was despised, rejected and crucified. Jesus said it: "If the world hates you, you know that it has hated me before it hated you"; "A servant is not greater than his lord" (John 15:18-20).
Jesus bore our sins and our shame so that we might be reconciled to God. "Why would we be ashamed of the one who was not ashamed to call us his brothers, at the price of his own life?"
The point is neither to provoke rejection nor to seek everyone's approval: "Let us love our contemporaries, serve them humbly, and not be ashamed of the Gospel by which God saves sinners." Paul does not boast about his sufferings, but he refuses to believe that suffering for Christ means having failed. The preacher points to the news from Open Doors to be convinced of it.
In the West, opposition takes another face. The danger is not only opposition that wants to silence Christians, but the comfort that lulls them to sleep, the distractions that scatter them, and a culture that leads them to live as if the Gospel were not essential.
This opposition does not say "give up Jesus." It whispers: "you are tired, you will pray tomorrow," "you will talk about the Gospel when the opportunity is better," "you will go back to serving when your situation is more stable," "if you do not do it, others will." None of these thoughts is scandalous taken in isolation; the danger comes when they become a way of life.
"The persecuted Church in the East is prevented from proclaiming the Gospel by the opposition it faces. The Church in the West neglects proclaiming the Gospel by pursuing its comfort." The enemy's goal is the same: to silence the witness. The preacher repeats the words of Benjamin Short, who spoke the previous weekend: there is a fight to get up in the morning, to seek God in his Word and to pray by the Holy Spirit.

7. Look to the splendor of the Gospel

The preacher reads an excerpt from a poem by Paul Tripp, author of, among other books, Change Really, but How?: everyone builds their life on a story. Some are incomplete, some are false, some are true. But only one rises above all the others, "the one complete story, spanning from before the beginning to the destiny," the only one with the power to rescue and redeem, to save and sanctify, to crush death and give life.
Paul tells this story in verses 9 and 10: God saved us and called us with a holy calling, not because of our works, but according to his own purpose and the grace given in Christ Jesus before the ages began. Christ has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light. This is "the doctrine of salvation in brief."
Why remind Timothy of this, when he has worked with Paul for fifteen years and has been teaching these things for years? "Because we tend to forget it." To recover the flame and the courage, we have to run this story over our hearts again.
We were lost, but he saved us. The Son of God became fully human, experienced all the sufferings of humanity, lived a perfect life and offered it as a sacrifice in our place. His righteousness is credited to us and our sins to him.
"We do not proclaim the Gospel because it is popular, but because it is true. Not because man can save himself, but because God saves by his grace. Not because death can be avoided, but because Christ has conquered it."
Paul embodies what he teaches: "I am not ashamed, for I know him whom I have believed" (verse 12). He is neither insensitive to suffering nor sure of getting out of prison. He knows the one in whom he has believed and he knows that he is faithful. Our assurance does not depend on us, but on the only faithful one, Jesus Christ.
Paul, as his death approaches, does not tell Timothy "watch out, protect yourself, avoid trouble." He tells him: "do not be ashamed of the Gospel," because this Gospel is far too precious to keep to ourselves.
The final appeal: if you do not yet know Christ, come to him, stop relying on yourself and tell him "forgive me, save me, thank you for your grace." If you are a Christian, do not let fear, comfort or discouragement put out your flame: return to the grace of God and ask him for the courage to bear witness. And as a Church, let us pray and encourage one another to keep the flame of the gift of God burning.

Key takeaways

The flame of God's gift was lit by God himself; our part is to tend it through the Word, fellowship with other believers and the work of the Holy Spirit.
Fear does not necessarily push us to deny Christ, but to live as if we had something to hide.
In the West, comfort and distractions silence our witness as surely as persecution does.
Jesus was not ashamed to call us his brothers; we have no reason to be ashamed of him.
Our assurance does not rest on us but on the faithfulness of the one in whom we have believed.

Personal application

Where does your flame stand today? What ashes are smothering it, and what "wood" do you need to put back into your life this week?
In what situation are you tempted to keep your faith quiet: at work, in your family, in front of your friends?
Among the little phrases of comfort ("you will pray tomorrow," "others will do it"), which one has become a habitual way of life for you?
Who passed the faith on to you, and to whom are you called to pass it on in turn?
Who in your church can you pray for this week, that they may keep the flame of God's gift burning?

Verses cited

Frequently asked questions

What does "fan into flame the gift of God" mean in 2 Timothy 1:6?

For the preacher, this gift is not just a skill: it is a courageous readiness to make Christ known and to suffer for the Gospel, the fervor and perseverance that grace produces in the heart. The flame was lit by God; it is up to us to tend it through the Word, fellowship with other believers and the work of the Holy Spirit.

Why can a Christian be ashamed of the Gospel today?

In Toulouse, you do not risk prison for talking about Jesus, but you can feel a social, intellectual or relational shame: coming across as a fundamentalist, as someone who has stopped thinking, or simply fearing the gaze of colleagues. This fear does not necessarily push us to deny Christ, but to live as if we had something to hide.

Why is Paul not ashamed despite prison?

Paul is neither insensitive to suffering nor certain of getting out of prison. He is not ashamed because he knows in whom he has believed and is persuaded that God has the power to guard what he has entrusted to him until that day (2 Timothy 1:12). His assurance does not depend on him, but on the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.