Today I'm Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Have you ever wondered what the Bible means when it says we're living in the last days and what to expect? Today will answer that question. Stay with me. When things fall apart, when violence rises, trust erodes, and people close to you seem to be drifting, how do you stay grounded?
Paul had a very specific answer for Timothy. And today on Living on the Edge, Chip Ingram helps us realize that answer for ourselves as he turns to 2 Timothy. I'm Dave Druy, and we're in a series called You Can Make Disciples: Personal Coaching from the Apostle Paul. If you have your Bible handy, go ahead and turn to 2 Timothy 3, starting in verse 1.
Now here's Chip with today's message titled, Be Prepared, Don't Be Surprised. When we are surprised, we react. When we are prepared, we respond. When we are surprised by things, we react. When we are prepared.
We respond. And I thought about how When you're surprised. And when you're surprised by evil, It's disorienting. I think the last few years have been very disorienting, haven't they been? I mean, it's just, it's like violence and evil, and it's grown and grown and grown, but then it kind of got like it went nuts.
It was similar to uh Is a fellow that I knew. I did know him real well. He actually had gone to seminary. He visited our church quite a bit. He was in the area.
And I got a phone call from his wife. He said, This is absolutely crazy. Will you please help my husband? And he's in jail right now. I said, He's what?
Yes, he's in jail. They've accused him of sexual molestation.
So I got to find out what's going on, and he's in jail, and I call him in jail, and what's going on, and huge misunderstanding, and I have no idea what's going on here. And, you know, maybe someone's made accusations. And so I jump into it, and I happen to know the DA pretty well and got on the inside to find out what, you know, I think there's a tremendous injustice. I mean, this guy went to this seminary, and he's this person in the community. And, you know, I'm trying to help his wife and just thinking, oh my gosh.
DA says, Chip, can we talk? Yeah. He said, well, this There's been this allegation, yeah. He said, but um The reason he is where he is is that um We have a number of others who aren't willing at this point yet to testify publicly, but we have a string of these. What?
Y you know what? It's true. It's true. When evil surprises you, when things start happening that are almost Hard to digest. It's very disorienting.
And my first thought was, well, do I not have any discernment anymore? I mean, how How could I never see anything or Is what's happening to the world? And then thoughts like, well, who can I really trust? And can we believe in people, right? And then you see and then now it's happened.
all across the culture. And so Paul warns of an increase in wickedness in the last days and we'll talk about the last days. Yeah, let me just read verses One through About five. But realize this: that in the last days, difficult times will come. That word difficult can also mean dangerous.
challenging. For people will be lovers of self and lovers of money. Boastful, arrogant, slanders, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving. irreconcilable, malicious gossips. without self-control.
Brutal haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Holding, notice the context of this, holding to a form of godliness, although they've denied its power. Command. Avoid Such people as these So let's ask and answer two questions. And then let's dig in and talk about what are the implications.
Question number one should be: are we in the last days? Right? Hebrews chapter 1. God, after he spoke long ago to the fathers and the prophets, And in many portions and many ways, in these last days. Has spoken to us.
Through his son. whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also made the world. When Jesus came, And revealed himself as the Son of God and the Messiah and the Savior of the world, biblically speaking, that's when the last days begin. We are in the last days. Because this is the last installment.
There isn't something else coming later. This is the era of the church, of God's appeal, of salvation, and depending on your theology, you're turning the end times. The church will be raptured. The Lord will return. He'll set up his kingdom.
And on we go. We are in the last days. Now, what we need to understand is that we're a couple thousand years from when the last days began, and so. I think it's fair to say Like how long are these last days?
Well After a few decades of the church, Some early Christians were saying, hey, you know, what's the deal with the last days? And so in 1 Peter, Chapter 3. Peter explains, Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own desires, and saying, Where's the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue just as they were from the beginning of creation. For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the Word of God the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of the water by the water, through which the world.
at that time was destroyed by being flooded with water. But by his word, the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly people. Do not let this one fact escape you. Notice, beloved, that with the Lord, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some count slowness.
but is patient toward you, not willing for any to perish, But for all to come, to repentance. And so I think when you open this chapter and he says, Mark this, Timothy, in the last days, evil things are going to come. And then he starts to lay them out. He's saying, in the last days, beginning now, these are the kind of things you're going to see. And the inference here is, as we get closer and closer, these kinds of things will intensify and become more and more the norm instead of the exception.
Does that make sense? What Timothy needed to know was the things that he was seeing that was so overwhelming and so wicked. We're what Jesus said would happen. What characterizes the increase of wickedness is primarily self-love. Love of money.
Love of pleasure. And then the dominoes. How about this? Lean back. Amplified Bible.
But understand this: that in the last days, dangerous times of great stress and trouble will come. difficult days that will be hard to bear. For people who will be lovers of self, narcissistic, self-focused, lovers of money. Impelled by greed, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, and profane. and they will be unloving.
They'll be devoid of natural human affection. They'll be calloused and inhumane, irreconcilable. They'll gossip maliciously. They'll be devoid of any self-control, intemperate and immoral. They'll be brutal.
Haters of good. Traitors in relationships, reckless and conceited, lovers of sensual pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of outward godliness, religion. Although they have denied its power, for their conduct nullifies their claim of faith. Avoid such people and keep far away from them. And then he's going to give a couple of examples so that Timothy realizes Hey.
This has happened in the past. And so The question I put here is how are we tempted to interpret these developments? When you've seen all this wickedness and all this violence and stuff happening, down deep, what are your feelings? What have you done? Where are your fears?
And you know what? We would hear. Just feels like the world's out of control. Feels hopeless. I'm scared to death for those of you that are grandparents or for those that are parents.
What kind of world are my kids going to come into? Um Is it even going to be safe to walk in the streets in the future? Right? These are the kind of things that create incredible angst. Anxiety.
Depression. Division. When things are really getting crazy, what do we do? We're all human, right? Remember when we were little kids and things got really hard?
You blame your brother, you blame your sister.
Well, when they get really hard in the society, you find some other people to blame. And it's them. And the problems out there. And we get more and more and more divided. And we create this petri dish culturally of anger and blame and hurt and suspicion and lack of trust and fear.
And that's the temptation that we have. And in the midst of that, there's this Supernatural community. This group of people that is what's called the body of Jesus. His hands, his feet, his eyes, people that live above all that fray, people who understand the fallenness of mankind, people who recognize the things that they have done and been forgiven of, people who grasp that this is our opportunity in the midst of all this pain and blame and violence, this is the opportunity to love. and to heal and to respond.
and to set an example. And what Paul is saying to Timothy is, This is going to be the normal thing, but you've got to understand this is how people react. For some people, you isolate. For some people, they begin to doubt. You know, I don't believe anymore that God's sovereign.
If He was, we wouldn't be having this. This isn't the life. I've gone to church. I tithe. I read my Bible regularly.
And look at what happened. Look what happened in my world. Look what happened in our company. Look what happened in our nation, right? Do you understand where this goes?
That's why he's writing to Timothy, and that's why we're reading it today. We're tempted to feel hopeless. and helpless and blame and question God's purposes. We'll be right back with more from Chip Ingram here on Living on the Edge. If you want to see Chip teach, not just hear him, the Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram YouTube channel has the full video experience, complete series, on-screen message notes, and content you won't get to see anywhere else.
It's a great way to share a message with someone who prefers video.
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Now back to the message. How are we to respond to these developments? Look at verse 6. He says, avoid turn away from such people and their behavior. The two temptations are to one, compromise or to isolate.
It's like, you know what? It's so crazy out there. I'm just going to kind of watch it on TV and hope it doesn't get too close to me and you know, my little world. The problem is your little world keeps shrinking, right? The flip side is We've all heard that illustration where you put the frog in water and you do the temperature very, very, very slowly.
I think as. As it erodes more and more in the culture, you're going to see more and more things that. Even five years ago, Christians would never do this, that will become commonplace. Because people will compromise. I was counseling with a A person uh you know, a year or so ago and Uh Godly person, great family, and a couple of his godly friends, and one was going through a tough time, and he kind of.
tried to help his buddy and eventually they got a divorce. Then it happened to another close friend and so his couple closest friends are going through these things and and um And then, you know, they entered a new world.
Now they're wounded, now they're hurt, and now they're sort of Back in it, well now they're sleeping around. And I I said You know, what do you? What do you think about all that?
Well, I'm really trying to help him. I'm really trying to help them. And I said, are they willfully just kind of living that out? Yeah, but you know, we're talking and And I, you know how pastors are, I pulled out the Bible and So I said, you know, I know you want to help them, but This passage says when a so-called brother or sister is living in willful sin and you talk to them and they don't respond at all. Don't even eat with them.
Don't keep providing the spiritual and relational support that facilitates the benefits of being in the body of Christ instead of allowing the consequences of their actions to be. Remember what Paul said? I turned this one over to Satan to buffet him? The goal wasn't to hurt him, it was to restore that person that was involved in immorality in the Corinthian church. And I'll never forget he said, well, you know, I could never do that.
Which was followed sometime later by a moral failure in his life. 1 Corinthians 15, 33. Bad company. Krebs good morals every time. And none of us are immune.
It's happening so subtly. And it's not just in the sexual area. Ask yourself: how are people viewing money? How are people viewing priorities? How are people viewing sort of what's acceptable or not acceptable?
And I don't mean culturally, I mean from what the scripture says. And so notice how he picks it up. He talks about the specific ways these people live it out. For among them are those who slip into households and captivate. Weak women weighed down with sins led on by various impulses.
Always learning, never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.
So he says, Timothy. This is a current example of how these things, not just in the last days, someday, some way, but these things are playing out right now. You just need to be aware. And then he gives him a historic example. And then he goes on to say: just as Janus and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth.
Men of depraved minds, worthless. in regard to the faith. By tradition, those were two of the magicians who when Moses did, remember all the supernatural things, they could copy it, copy it, copy it until he did some things that required the creation of life. He goes, you know, it's happening today. It happened back in Moses' days.
And then notice, but he says, look at the outcome. Look at the outcome. But they will not make further progress, for their foolishness will be obvious to all, just as it was also of Janus and Jambres.
Now say you're Timothy, you know your Old Testament, and you're thinking of the challenge and the bondage and what they went through and Moses who was bold. And before being bold, what he got? He got knocked by Pharaoh and he got knocked by his own people. Do you see the picture he's trying to see? And so Moses gave up and said, I guess it's not worth it.
Oh, no, that's not how the story goes.
So Moses hung in there. And Moses said, challenges and doubts and struggles. And the Lord was with him. And he's saying, Timothy, this is how life goes. And now he wants to sort of Help him get on the positive side of things.
You'll notice In the next section, I just entitled this, Don't Be Afraid, Keep Pressing Ahead, verses 10 through 17. Don't be afraid. We can't live our life out of the lens of fear. You have to live your life out of a lens of faith. But this kind of evil causes us to question that.
That kind of evil causes us to wonder. Can we trust God? Can we trust His promises? And what Paul's trying to help him see is, okay, Timothy.
So notice this. Let's remember some of your past progress. Verse 10.
Now you. He's contrasting him with these People that are going down very bad pass.
Now you followed my teaching. conduct, purpose. Faith. Patience. Love.
Perseverance. Persecutions and suffering, such as happened to me in Antioch. At Iconium and at Lystra, what persecutions I endured, and out of them all. What's the punchline? The Lord rescued me.
I would encourage you. to remember Past progress. to literally kind of look in the rearview mirror, not maybe a year or two, but Yeah. But to try, and even if you need to sit quietly and ask God, or especially with family members, where has Has God shown up in the most challenging and difficult times in our life? And you would start to tell stories about taking one of your kids to the ICU.
You talk about a time in some of our cases when one of you had cancer and it was very questionable whether you're going to make it. And you start looking back, looking back, looking back, looking back. And you would have a story. that God has rescued you out of things in the past. He's not idle.
And by the way, I know I'm a broken record. If you keep watching a lot of news, you will live in fear. because the news is made and geared to be sensational. It's to get your attention and to keep you watching. And when you keep watching, since you're a product of your thought life, you will assume that the things that are happening on the news are going to happen to you.
And the lens in which you will look at the world is: it's negative, it's violent, it's terrible, it's bad, and it's not going to get better. And so, your only two choices are: one is to isolate or to compromise or. medicate yourself in some way. And you can do it with drugs, you can do it with alcohol, you can do it with work, you can do it with escape. And so You know, you need to kind of be aware of what's going on.
But if you get on and watch your news feeds and you scroll, and every time that thing goes off, oh, can you hear it? There's another shooting, and what about this, and what about that? When's the last time someone said, I'd just like to declare that in the last 10 minutes, there were about 27.5 million acts of kindness of people who cared for one another. I got an email from a friend who works in the Global South, and he gave the statistics of the number of people. In the last two or three years that have come to Christ in the global south, it's more of all the people that have come to Christ in all of church history.
God's working in power. You don't get any good news. God's working in amazing ways here and all around the world. There's young people that are on fire for God. They're not all just a bunch of slackards.
But you know what? It's not going to make the news. And we have by and large a church that is living out of fear. This is Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram and a message titled Be Prepared, Don't Be Surprised. It comes from our series called You Can Make Disciples: Personal Coaching from the Apostle Paul.
Every lesson is available for you to revisit and share at livingonthege.org. And the Living on the Edge podcast is another great way to listen wherever you go. Subscribe today and take it with you. Full-length sermons from Chip are also available on the Chip Ingram Sermon Podcast wherever you listen. Yeah.
The world is loud. The pull away from God is constant. And Paul's word to Timothy and to us is be prepared, not surprised. If you want tools for that kind of readiness, Chip's book, Yes, You Really Can Change, gives you the inside-out framework for that kind of staying power, how God's grace actually produces lasting change, not just better behavior. And since this series is about investing in others, every purchase includes a second copy to pass along to someone you're walking alongside.
So get your copy and one to share at livingontheedge.org slash offers. You know, for 30 years, Living on the Edge has pursued a clear goal to help Christians live like Christians. And these Bible teachings and faith-building resources continue reaching new listeners today because of the faithful donors who stand behind us. If you'd like to partner with us today, it's simple. Go online to livingonthege.org and make a gift of any amount.
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Well now here's Chip with some final thoughts. As we close today's program, The teaching from the Scripture brought to mind One of the most challenging things in my life. There's times where God says, Chip, this is what I want you to do. But the moment I think of obeying it, I realize I'm going to disappoint someone or someone's going to think that If I do that, I don't care about them anymore. Pleasing people or pleasing God.
I feel between the rock and the hard place. And here's my question for you to day. What is it that God has prompted? and brought to your mind, maybe over and over, about a relationship or about a habit or about a practice. But you know if you obey God, some people will be very disappointed.
or you think you're going to let them down or they'll think less of you. Would you be willing today to ask Jesus to give you the strength and the help to obey him. Here's your verse for the day. Proverbs 29, 25. The fear of man is a snare.
But blessed is he who trusts in the Lord. Trust God, you'll never regret it. I'm Dave Druy. Chip has a question he's been asking church leaders for years, and the answers shocked him. Don't miss the next part of our message.
Be prepared. Don't be surprised.
Next time on Living on the Edge. Uh Today's program is produced and sponsored by Living on the Edge. Uh
