Friendship Matters

If you knew you were dying, who are the people you'd reach out to?

The names on that list says something about the value of those relationships, doesn't it? Today, Alistair Begg shows us who the Apostle Paul wanted with him in his final days and why he chose those particular men. This is Truth for Life Weekend, and we continue our study in 2 Timothy 4, we're in verses 11-13. Let's just be straightforward and acknowledge that Paul would not have been happy with the designation superhero. I was with a company of children not so long ago, and one of them turned around and said, I'm a superhero! She didn't look remotely like a superhero to me, but apparently she was. I had to go and see what a superhero is.

That's how old I am. And having discovered what a superhero is, I can say with confidence that Paul was not a superhero, and mercifully so. He had reached the end of his journey, he's told us that. He had completed his mission. His assignment had been successfully exercised.

He had done his best all the way through the running of the race, and now he has issued the instruction to Timothy to do his best and to come and visit him. But in the midst of all of that, we see that he is actually vulnerable. He's vulnerable. And it is important to acknowledge this as an encouragement to each of us who know ourselves to be vulnerable.

In fact, to the extent that we ever give the impression that we are not, then we're not telling the truth to ourselves or to anybody else. And it comes across in different ways, doesn't it, in Paul. The departure of Demas is something that has wounded him. He was not immune to the disappointment that comes from separation—to lose a friend, to lose a colleague.

And he's addressed this throughout the letter. He began the letter by saying, You're aware, Timothy, that all who are in Asia turned away from me. It hurt him.

It stung him. In verse 16 here that we read, You will remember that no one came to stand by me. And that's the wonderful thing about vulnerability, in that what it does in Paul's life is it forces him back again to all the sufficiency that is his in the Lord Jesus.

You remember in writing to the Corinthians, he says, I was so aware of this thorn that bugged me, and three times I asked for it to be removed. But the LORD said to me, No, no, my grace is sufficient for you, because my strength is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, says Paul, I will all the more glory in my weakness, so that Christ's power may rest upon me. For when I am weak, then I am strong. And the idea of the sort of—the great leader, whether it's a church leader or a business leader or a physician or whoever it is, who somehow or another is able just to move through life without any concerns at all, is a mythology.

And it certainly is not here. Paul is vulnerable—vulnerable to the loss of a colleague, vulnerable to the cold, vulnerable to loneliness. That's why he wants companionship. And vulnerable to boredom, presumably so that he can have his books and his scrolls.

Paul was vulnerable. Secondly, verse 11, Luke alone is with me. Luke alone is with me. So, we have the loyalty of Luke. Not all the departures that are described here should be viewed as desertions.

I think that's probably true of Crescents, who has gone off to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia, and Tychicus also, as we will see. But nevertheless, it was the nature of the friendship. It was the loyalty. It was the fact that even now, in the absence of so many people, with life moving on and with his death before him, when he says, Only Luke is with me, the loyalty of this man really mattered. And it is this loyalty that we should just mention for a moment. Loyalty—the loyalty of a husband and a wife through thick and thin, the loyalty of parents and children, the loyalty of colleagues in ministry—the loyalty factor is huge.

And it ought not to be overlooked. So there's no indication that he was a great evangelist or that he was a strategic thinker or he was some innovative and compelling leader. But his contribution to the kingdom was huge on the strength of his loyalty. Faithful to Christ. Faithful to the cause of Christ. Faithful to his brothers and sisters in Christ. And faithful, particularly, to the servant of Christ. His loyalty was the thing that stood out.

Tolkien, in The Fellowship of the Rings, has a statement where he says, Faithless is he that says, Farewell when the road darkens. Luther says the same thing. He says that the loyalty of the soldier is proved where the battle rages.

In Luke's case, it was very straightforward. So, what we would expect to discover, we also discover. Namely, that when the fruit of the Spirit is produced in the life of the child of God, right in the heart of it is faithfulness or loyalty. Because the work of the Spirit of God is to make us more and more like Jesus, who, when he reviled, did not revile in return, but remained committed to the cause to which he'd been assigned, to the will of his Father. And when confronted by the reality of his own death, he recoiled from it.

It was his loyalty that saw him through. If there's any other way that this could be done, Father, then let it be done. But if not—not my will, but yours—be done.

I hope some of you will derive great encouragement from this. Because often, we've got it really upside down, don't we, despite the instruction of the Bible? The Bible teaches us from the physical frame of our lives, from our bodies, that the parts that we're not seeing right now are far more significant than the parts that we are seeing. And yet, we tend to spend a great deal more time on the bits that are seen than on the parts that are unseemly.

It makes sense. But then when we apply it to the church and to the body and the things that happen in the body and the preoccupations with personality and with leadership and so on, we fail to take to heart. And we may chastise ourselves because our position in the framework of things doesn't seem to have the profile that others have or doesn't seem to have the lasting benefit that others may have.

But that is to think wrongly. Because long after human eloquence has been forgotten, long after verbal brilliance has died a death on the lips of the speaker, loyalty will be wrong remembered. And Luke was loyal. You may want to thank somebody this week.

Send them a note. Thank you for your loyalty. It'll be an encouragement to them. Thirdly, Mark was useful. Mark was useful. The word that he uses here for useful is the same word that you find in verse 21, if your Bible is open, of chapter 2, a vessel for honorable use set apart as holy and useful to the master of the house.

It's the same word that you find in Philemon, where, as he makes a plea for Onesimus, he says, I appeal to you from my child Onesimus, whose father I became an imprisonment. Verse 11, formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me. Useful!

Just to be useful. I mean, yes, so Mark is useful. You say, Well, okay, that's fine, we should move on.

No, no, no, no, not so quickly. A little history will help us to realize what a significant statement this is on the part of Paul as his life begins to leave him. Because Paul had lost his temper about Mark. Paul had got in a big argument with his buddy Barnabas about Mark. Paul and Barnabas had separated from one another on the basis of Mark, because Paul said Mark is useless.

Now he wants him to come because he's useful. Who changed? Paul or Mark or both? Turn for a moment to Acts chapter 12, and I'll just give you a little background on that, and you can follow it up on your own. In Mark chapter 12, you have the record of the release of Peter from the jail. He goes to the house in Jerusalem, the house of Mary, who's the mother of John, whose other name is Mark. So sometimes he's referred to as John and sometimes as Mark.

John Mark will do. It's quite a house. He'd been born or grown up in a place that was at the very heart of the Jerusalem church. His mom had obviously put their house at the disposal of the church, and the Christian community used it as a central gathering spot. That explains why Peter would have made his way there after he had been released miraculously from the jail. It is also probable—well, no, we wouldn't want to say categorically, but it is probable that it was in this house that the upper room was where the disciples gathered with Jesus on the night of his crucifixion. It was therefore probably also the location of the gathering for prayer in the upper room when the Spirit of God was poured out in Pentecost. In other words, it was quite a place to come from. This is this young man's heritage.

What a happy thing to grow up in a home where Jesus Christ is central and prayer is fundamental. That's Mark's home. Therefore, it's not a surprise, is it, that Mark then is given the opportunity to be part of the missionary endeavors of Paul and Barnabas. And he heads out with them. In Acts chapter 12, we read of how his home life is there, and then he is heading out with him in ministry. That's chapter 13 and verse 5. When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews, and they had John to assist them. So there he is. John Mark is there, and he's become an assistant missionary. His mother must have been well pleased. People were said to her at the market, and, How's John Mark doing these days?

Wow! I'll tell you, he's doing very well. You've probably heard of Paul. Oh yes, we've heard of Paul. His friend Barnabas, well, he's with them.

He's an assistant there, and apparently doing very well indeed. Well, not so fast, Mom, because within eight verses—we're now in the thirteenth verse of chapter 13—within eight verses, he is actually heading in the opposite direction. When Paul and his companions set sail from Paphos and came to Perga in Pamphylia, John left them and returned to Jerusalem. Now, the inference is well captured by Peterson in his paraphrase in The Message, where he paraphrases verse 13, Pamphylia is where John called it quits and went back to Jerusalem.

So the young assistant that is off to a great start has decided that he's not going to be going any further with them. Paul's reaction to that is such that when they set out for their second ministry journey, that's where the departure took place. Turn to Acts chapter 15, and if you look down to verse 36, in the ESV it has a heading, Paul and Barnabas separate, and here's the occasion of it.

After some days Paul said to Barnabas, Let's return and visit the brothers in every city where we proclaim the word of the LORD and see how they are. Now Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark, but Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia and had not gone with them to the work, and there arose a sharp disagreement. So, tempers flared. Two very central figures in the missionary endeavor of the church, under God, are now at loggerheads with one another over a matter of personnel.

All of you who are involved in the human resource department in office work and so on understand how crucial personnel is, and the assignment of people and the placement of people. And here it is. And there's a sharp disagreement, and they separated from one another. And Barnabas, he took Mark with him, and he sailed away to Cyprus, and Paul chose Silas and departed, and he went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.

Parenthetically, let's just stop and notice something wonderful in the providence of God. That is, that their disagreement led to a separation, which in turn led to the doubling of their efforts in the cause of the gospel. So it wasn't that God, quote, caused their disagreement, made them have an argument.

No, they had an argument because they disagreed. That happens. That happens in church life. It happens in mission life. It just happens.

And in the providence of God, the separation that took place meant the doubling of effectiveness in the gospel and, two, the opportunity for John Mark to be restored to usefulness under the tutelage of Barnabas, and for Paul to age well enough to recognize the fact that even though he might have been right at the time, he wasn't right forever, and therefore the big, mighty, apostle, vulnerable Paul—not superhero—would have to be prepared to say eventually, Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is useful to me. Exactly. See? Trekking right along.

Beautiful. Now, we don't know what happened in the interim, because we don't have the description of it. But it seems fairly obvious that Barnabas, who was uniquely gifted in this area, became the coach for John Mark, who incidentally was his cousin. And so he takes Mark, if you like, under his wing, and by the time that they have advanced a little further down the line on the occasion of Paul's first imprisonment, Barnabas's confidence in Mark has presumably bolstered him, encouraged him, strengthened him, and by the time of Paul's first imprisonment, you begin to read that Mark has actually shown up all over again. Now, we don't have anything here to say about Barnabas, but let's just pause and give credit where credit is due. What an amazing character was this son of encouragement, Barney. That's what his name means, son of encouragement. Well, he was the embodiment of his name, wasn't he? Again, I think Paul's reaction was probably justifiable. Justifiable, but it wasn't necessarily best. Providentially, it worked out as it did.

But how thankful Mark must have been that Barnabas wasn't like Paul, that Barnabas was prepared to stand up to Paul, that Barnabas doesn't kowtow to Paul because of the uniqueness of his gifting and the power that he was able to exercise. There's a lesson in that as well, isn't there? That's why we need each other.

That's why it's important. That's why we're always better together than any of us are on our own. That's true in marriage. It's true in family. It's true in church family.

It's true on our pastoral team. Those of you who know our church know how vital it is that all these elements are present—protecting one, protecting the other, protecting us from ourselves and from our own proclivities—and how God in his mercy gives to his characters like this. Paul, of course, would have known this, because when he first tried to join the disciples, Luke tells us in Acts chapter 9, all of the disciples in Jerusalem were afraid of him. He needed somebody to speak on his behalf, to take him. He didn't want to go in by himself. Or he did want to go in by himself, but nobody wanted to have him in there.

And what do we read? But Barnabas took him. But Barnabas took him. And what he'd done for Paul, he now did for this young cousin of his.

And Mark is able to overcome the earlier challenges. Have you found yourself at a crossroads, and you made the left turn instead of the right, and you've been beating yourself up ever since? I missed the great opportunity. No possibility for me now.

I'm over on the heap now. No, not for a moment. With God, failure is never final. He's the one who restores the years even the locals have eaten. If the ministry of the gospel is only to a certain elite group of people who are cheerleaders and quarterbacks, then what in the world hope do many of us have?

But it's not. It is the call of Christ into those who at the crossroads go the wrong way, who are finding themselves plunged in the pit. And in the mercy and providence of God, he comes to restore so much so that Mark proves useful. He wants to take Mark along, because he is very useful to the ministry. He's not asking for Mark to come so they can play Scrabble together.

He's not asking Mark to come so they can have a group hug. He wants Mark to come because Mark is useful to the ministry. I don't think he means ministering to his needs. He's concerned about cloaks and books and loneliness and so on. But I think he's talking about the ministry—that the ministry that is going to be impacted by Mark himself is the ministry of the gospel. Paul's focus is not selfish. It's gospel-focused, even in relation to Alexander, to whom we will not come this morning. But Alexander has done me great harm. You should be careful about him, because he strongly opposed—he doesn't say, because he strongly opposed me, Paul.

He strongly opposed the message. His concern is for the message. Get Mark and bring him here, because he is so incredibly useful for the ministry. Now, the details are, I think, fairly straightforward, and we should stop. In fact, we will stop.

We are about to stop. But if you just look at Paul's strategic thinking here, Tichicus, I have sent to Ephesus. The chances are that Tichicus carried this letter to Ephesus. He's the one who carried Colossians. He's the one who carried, I think, Ephesians as well. So he's a mailman. And so he says, I've sent Tichicus to Ephesus.

Why would that matter? Because I want you, Timothy, to come from Ephesus. So when you come from Ephesus and you leave a gap, don't worry about it too much, because Tichicus is actually the one who's shown up there bearing the letter, and you can have confidence in him. Because—and this is my only line for Tichicus— Tichicus, if Paul is vulnerable and Luke is loyal and Mark is useful, Tichicus is lovable.

Lovable! In Colossians 4, Paul introduces him, Tichicus, a beloved brother, a faithful minister, a fellow servant of the Lord. A beloved brother, a faithful minister, a fellow servant of the Lord. In other words, a suitable replacement. High praise that Mark should come.

Mark, whom he had regarded as unreliable, as unfit for continuing in ministry, is the one for whom he sends. And along with that, of course, the books, the biblia, or scrolls and parchments. And I told you, we're not going to say anything about those scrolls and parchments. We're not going to get involved in conjecture. But for those of you who like conjecture, chew on this while you're driving around. Imagine. Imagine this—and this is complete conjecture, for those of you who like hypotheses.

Here's the possibility. If things played out the way they are described as unfolding here, what that means is that Paul ends his life in a Roman jail with three guys—Timothy, Mark, and Luke. The scrolls, the parchments, are clearly significant. What if some of those were fragments of descriptive passages of the life of the Lord Jesus? And what if Paul said to Mark and to Luke, Hey, why don't you use some of this stuff and write a gospel? And they said, What's a gospel? And he said, Well, you write it, and then people will know. It's pure conjecture.

It's beyond the bounds of anything. But that would be quite a change, wouldn't it? I'm not taking Mark with me—useless character that he is. Hey, Mark, why don't you write a gospel and tell everybody who Jesus is and why he came and what he means? That is Alistair Begg with a message titled Friendship Matters. You're listening to Truth for Life Weekend. If you listen to Truth for Life Weekend regularly, you know we carefully select and recommend books to help you and your family grow in faith.

And we didn't have to search very far to find today's book recommendation. This is a book written by Alistair. It's titled Pathway to Freedom—How God's Laws Guide Our Lives. This is a softcover book that is a comprehensive study of the Ten Commandments. In it, Alistair draws from Scripture, from hymns, as well as from the Puritans and other sources to demonstrate that God's ancient code of conduct remains pertinent in our 21st century lives. Find out more about the book Pathway to Freedom—How God's Laws Guide Our Lives when you visit our website at truthforlife.org.

I'm Bob Lapeen. Thanks for listening. When the Apostle Paul faced his final days chained and abandoned in a Roman dungeon, it would have been easy for him to wallow in bitterness. But amazingly, he extended grace. Join us again next weekend to find out how he did so and how we can follow his example when we face our own tough times. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.