The world is as complicated today as it was when the Apostle Paul helped establish the early church,

and yet his instruction to his protege, Timothy, was very simple.

Preach the Word.

Alistair Begg examines Paul's simple, solemn and strategic charge

in another popular message from Truth for Life's Encore 2025 series.

2.7.1.

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ, Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, preach the word. Be ready in season

and out of season, reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.

For the time will come when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears,

they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from

listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your

ministry. For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure

has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.

Henceforth, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous

judge, will award to me on that day,

and not only to me, but also to all who have loved his appearing. Amen. Well, this final charge

that is given by Paul here at the end of his second letter is actually unlike

the charges that he gives in his first letter, inasmuch as most of those charges have a very

specific objective in mind. But when he comes now to the end, and it is essentially the end, he is saying to Timothy,

this is what I need you to understand, to believe, and to hold to for the rest of your life

and for the rest of your ministry. And in every realistic sense, it is the word of a spiritual

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