12. Dear friends, you and I have been entrusted with the testimony of Jesus in fullness, entrusted with a great revelation of Christ. It has been committed to us. Christianity has become, and is, I am afraid, becoming more and more generally a matter of whether you like it or not, something that you like, that pleases you. No, here is a challenge which says: Look here, if it costs you everything, even your very life, you have got to see that there is nothing lost. It is not a case of whether it pleases you, of your having a good, happy time, but whether, through every adversity, you are determined to land this treasure intact at last at the feet of the Master and say: Here you are, Lord. Here is that which is Thine. Nothing is lost. You gave. I return. To use the Lords parable of the talents, the return is with interest, with increase.
Go back to these letters and you see that all this call and challenge to Timothy, as a representative member of the Church, is that there shall be no loss whatever of a sense of vocation, of a high and holy calling, of real responsibility - I am a RESPONSIBLE member of Christ, of His House, of His Church. I am not a passenger, not just someone to be carried and fed, but someone taking responsibility, with a sense of trust. There has been given to each one of us a deposit by Jesus Christ, and at the end He will look to see what we have done with it.
Now, you see, this is the significance of these letters, and I think you will agree that all this is familiar to us today, this tendency to lower, to deteriorate, to decline, to lose something. It is a real battle, is it not, to maintain the high standard, to keep things on a high level, to maintain spiritual fulness. There are the pressures, the discouragements, the heartbreaks, the treacherous Christians; there is Alexander the coppersmith. So, to end where we began, we note that the conflict is from the beginning to the end. Pauls life, from conversion to execution, was marked by conflict, and there was no let-up at the end. If the testimony of Jesus is truly and deeply bound up with a life or a people, it is only logical that the forces of evil will not abandon their antagonism to what is predestined to be their doom, and anyone or any company called into that destiny will be marked for that antagonism. The warfare, therefore, will continue as long as we Stand, withstand, and, having done all, stand.
The Lord help us so to do!
_________________ Lars Widerberg
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