One Step Up

             Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth. (II Timothy 2:15)

This verse is daunting. Present myself as one approved? Approved? The rest doesn’t get any better. I mean, the whole point in Genesis is that man tried to earn approval on his own merits. We tried to be “like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4) But then Jesus came, died, and rose again so we could live by faith. Paul taught that we were to live by faith. But in today’s passage, he seems to have gone back to the old ways, in which we had to struggle to live according to the impossible standard.

One of the rules for correctly handling the word of truth is to keep the idea in context. This letter was written to Pastor Timothy. His job was teaching others. If you’re a carpenter, your job involves correctly handling wood. You have to know how to manipulate it to make things. A non-carpenter needs to only learn enough to care for what’s made.

This is not to say that those of us who aren’t pastors don’t need to act on what we find in this verse. A non-carpenter who knows something about wood and carpentry is better able to take care of what the carpenter made. In fulfilling his responsibility to correctly handle the word of truth, the pastor teaches both who can teach, and those who can’t, how to correctly handle the word of truth. But while the correct handling of Scripture is vital for everyone, it is “even more so” for pastors and teachers. You can’t teach what you don’t know.

Returning to the parallel, a carpenter who has learned to correctly handle wood and his tools does not need to feel ashamed. That doesn’t mean mistakes can’t occur. But the 99 successful projects should outweigh the one that failed. The one should not destroy the confidence of his capacity to succeed. Instead, the 99 should give the carpenter the confidence to present his work for approval.

Think of it this way:

present yourself to God as one approved,

a worker who does not need to be ashamed

and who correctly handles the word of truth. 

We start at the bottom of the skill ladder by learning to correctly handle the word of truth. We stay on that first rung. We don’t need to anxiously peer through the mists of time in search of either shame or approval. As we continue on that rung, it will slowly merge with the middle and top rung. If we focus on the top of the ladder, chances are good that we’ll never be able to stand on the first. It’s not “I have to do all that!?” It’s “Just one step up.”