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(upbeat music) - Drive Time Devotions is a Saddleback Church podcast. We want to
invite you to one of our weekend services. Visit us online at saddleback.

com for locations and service times in your area. Please visit us this weekend.
- I want to welcome you to this last day of our look together through Second
Timothy chapter two.

Way too quick going through this chapter. I know I've gone a little over some of
the days this week, but this chapter we could talk about for hours upon hours
upon hours. And the verses we're going to look at today, they're incredible verses.

We've been talking about the fact that I need to entrust what I've learned to
others. I need to endure hardship. I need to enrich my soul by listening to
God's word and not false teaching.

If I'm going to last, those are the things that I have to do. And if I'm going to last
in life, if I'm going to last in faith, one of the things I have to do is in these
last verses we're looking at, verses 20 to 26. I have to engage my faith.

Paul says, if I'm going to engage my faith, there's some best things that I have to
choose in my life. Just a daily choice of life. How do I look at life?

How do I choose through my day? Well, listen to verses 20 to 22. In a large
house, there are articles not only of gold and silver, but also of wood and
clay.

Some are for noble purposes, and some are for ignoble. If a man cleanses himself
from the ladder, he will be an instrument for noble purposes, made holy, useful
to the master, and prepared to do any good work. Flee the evil desires of youth,
and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on
the Lord out of a pure heart.

You want to live a life of faith? Pick up on what we talked about yesterday. It's
a life lived as one who is approved before God.

I'm giving my life back to him. And the false teachers want to make you feel
unapproved. Even the false teaching that Satan sends into your heart and mind as
a temptation wants to make you feel unapproved before God.

But these verses say that's not who you are. In Jesus Christ, you are an
instrument for noble purposes. So how are you going to live your life?

He talks here about some articles in a house, some dishes that are just common
dishes, and some that are noble. We have this in our house. You have the common
everyday dishes, and then you have the dishes that are in that china hunch that
only come out at certain times.

They are the noble ones. They are the ones to be used well. As a believer in
Jesus Christ, you are the noble one.

You are the one chosen for God's purposes. You are the china plate, but you
still have a choice. Now, you can act like you're ignoble.

Paul talks about here. You can act like you're not what you really are. You can
hop off the counter, and you can get under the sink and put garbage on your
plate.

You're tired of being under there? Before you get back up on that table and
recognize that you are to be used by God for noble purposes, you need to go
through a spiritual dishwasher. You see, the plate isn't the problem.

God has given you a new life in Jesus Christ. The plate's not the problem. Your
core, who you are at your core is not the problem.

What I let into my life, what I get put on my plate is the problem. Ignoble is
the word that's used here. Sort of an ugly word, isn't it?

There's some ugly things that maybe you've let into your life lately. Some ugly
thoughts, some ugly jealousy, some ugly lust, some ugly envy. You've let some
ugly things on that plate lately.

So what do you do? Do you think, well, that's it? The plate's gone.

I'm not what I used to be. No, you go through the spiritual dishwasher. And how
do I do that?

I do what verse 22 says. I flee the evil desires of youth, and I pursue
righteousness, faith, love, and peace along with those who call on the Lord out
of a pure heart. This is God's spiritual dishwasher for your life so that I can
live my life for the noble purposes that God made me for.

I don't care how you feel about your life. I don't care for one instant if you
feel useless. If you're a believer in Jesus Christ, you are made useful by the
master.

You're prepared to do any good work, but you need to go through this spiritual
dishwasher because you've been putting some wrong things on the plate. How do I
do it? Three things.

You run away, you run towards, and you run with. Flee the evil desires of youth.
You run away.

Pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace. You run towards something else.
You can't just run away from the wrong thing.

You just run into the wrong thing again. You gotta run towards the right thing.
And how do I do that?

I run with. I do that along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.
You run away, but you also run towards.

Maybe you have been trying to run away from sin in your life, from putting those
dirty things on the plate, but you haven't been running towards anything.
Righteousness, faith, love, and peace. If all you're trying to do is run away,
you're not going to get anywhere.

A while back I was trying to lose some weight, and I was writing a message about
discipline and trying to trust God in the myth of losing weight. And while I was
writing that, I realized that out in our kitchen there was this box of donuts.
And I began to think about the box of donuts.

And I'm working on the message. It's an empty house. I mean, other people in the
house knew I was trying to lose some weight.

So I took the box of donuts and I put them up on the top of the refrigerator.
Like, that would help. And I went back to write the message some more.

And I kept thinking about the donut. That's all I could think about. Now, what
do you think happened that day?

Do you think I ate a donut that day? Nobody else in the house? That's all that I
was thinking about?

What I wasn't going to do? Of course I ate a donut. It was a chocolate one.

It was a cream-filled one. Because all I was thinking about was what I was not
going to do. If you're going to do the right thing, you have to chase after the
right thing.

You can't just run away from the wrong thing. Don't depend just on your
willpower. You get out of the wrong situation as fast as you can.

If I really didn't want to eat the donut that day, the only way would be for me to
go somewhere else to study that day or put the box of donuts in the garbage can,
actually take them out and crumble them into the garbage can. 'Cause you can
still get, well, that's another story. When you think about living the life of
faith, living the noble life that God has given for you, you run away, but you
also run towards.

And when you run away, you don't leave a forwarding address. You run towards
what God has for you. But that's not the end of the story.

You also run with. You find other believers who are heading the same direction.
You're not made to do this alone.

God wants you to run with other believers, live the life together with others.
So let's get practical about this, this kind of life, this noble life that God
has for us. Life's healing choices.

How do I do this? Let's say you're tempted to adultery. Say you're tempted to
put something on your plate that you know would hurt God, would hurt others,
would hurt your family.

But you cannot seem to lose that temptation. It's growing stronger and stronger
in your life. How do you handle that temptation?

Well, step one is you quit seeing how close you can get to doing the wrong thing
without getting burned. That's what Satan loves to tempt us to do. Let's see how
close I can get.

Let's just flirt with it. No, you run away. Even if that means you have to quit
your job or move from where you live, you run away.

What's your job worth? What's your neighborhood worth? It's certainly not worth
your marriage, worth your family.

If you have to run that far away, you run that far away. If statistics are
right, and I believe they are, many of you are facing the temptation of
pornography on the internet. For men, it's a visual temptation, looking at
pictures.

For women, it's chat rooms, talking with people in words that are way, way too
intimate. Stop depending on your willpower to say no. You get a filter for the
internet, and you get a fresh purpose for your life.

You begin to live out in good relationships. You make a fresh commitment to your
marriage. You get a friend, and you share with them what you're going through,
so you're running along with someone else.

Now, maybe that's not the problem you're facing. Maybe it's drugs or alcohol, or
maybe it's just the temptation to be lazy and just focus your life on yourself
or some small, tired entertainment. There's a hundred things I could mention
right here.

And we've all tried, you've tried the willpower route and found out it just does
not work. You might make it a couple of weeks, but it's not your own willpower.
It is running away, but it's also running towards what God has in your life.

What could you pursue in your life that's His? And it's running along with those
who are His. That is choosing God's noble purpose for your life.

That's the day-to-day way that I have to live it out, that you have to live it
out. And you're going to struggle sometimes. And when you struggle, what do you do?

When you struggle in faith, what do you do? You get back in the spiritual
dishwasher. You flee again, you pursue again, and you get those relationships,
those good relationships in place again in your life.

Whatever the truth Satan is telling you about your life right now is, I gotta
tell you this. If you're a believer in Jesus Christ, you've given your life to
Him, He has chosen you for noble purposes. And Satan wants to lie to you and
say, and you've wasted your life, you've wasted your opportunity, you're just
common dish now.

You are not the dish that he can use for noble purposes. It's just not true.
God's spirit's in your life.

God has saved you for a purpose. Don't listen to that lie. Put yourself in the
spiritual dishwasher and watch what God has to do.

Choose the best. Now as you're choosing the best, just last few verses in this
chapter, take us back to what we've talked about again, and again, and again
about choosing the best. Let me read for you verses 23 to 26.

Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments because you know
they produce quarrels. And the Lord's servant must not quarrel. Instead, he must
be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful.

Those who oppose him, he must gently instruct in the hope that God will grant
them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to
their sentences and escape from the trap of the devil who has taken them captive
to do His will. Here's Paul once again talking about this. Don't get involved in
foolish arguments.

Why does he keep talking about this? Because we keep struggling with it. We
quarrel about words, and because we quarrel about the wrong words, we miss the
truth.

Now to what we've talked about again and again in these verses, Paul adds one
important thing here. He says you gotta be patient with other people as you
share God's truth with them. God's patient with you.

You be patient with other people. God has helped you to escape the trap of the
devil, so you be patient and help other people to escape the trap. It is
tempting.

It is so tempting to be negative with people when they're struggling. Well, God
is patient with me. God, give me the strength to be patient with others.

Someone on our research team wrote this. I don't know how many times in my days
before I knew Christ, I was turned off by Christians who I thought wanted to
force feed Christ into me. The best way to get a non-believer thinking about
Christ is to speak softly, speak the truth, and set a godly example to
demonstrate how God can work in your life.

That's what my family did with me. This sent a lot of prayers, and after 50 plus
years, it worked. What's he saying?

He's saying you love other people to Jesus Christ. If you want to live that life
of noble purpose, it's not just about cleaning the plate off. It's then
realizing what does God want to serve on the new clean plate?

And one of the things that he wants to serve is hope to other people's lives.
One of the things he wants to serve is he's helped you to escape some traps. He
wants to help somebody else to escape now through your life.

He didn't clean you up just so you could look at your shiny plate and say, "Wow,
isn't that great? " He cleaned the plate so now he could serve on that plate
some things that other people need in their lives, some truth of God that other
people need in their life. I don't know about you.

I don't feel worthy of that, but I know that Christ has made us worthy of that.
So let's pray in hope right now. Jesus Christ, in hope, we pray.

We pray that you would enable us to entrust what we've learned to others, to
endure the hard times, to enrich our minds and hearts through your word, and to
engage our faith. And Lord, as we go back to the very start of this chapter, we
pray that we would live our lives strong in your grace. Satan wants to tempt us
and make us feel less than we are, make us feel like we could never live the
kind of life that you've given us to live.

But Jesus, you invite us to a different life. Yes, we stumble sometimes, but
that doesn't change the life that you've invited us to or the people you made us
to be. So Jesus Christ, I pray that once again today, we'd see who we are in
you.

We'd live that life approved before you. We'd grow through the spiritual
dishwasher today, and then we'd let you serve on the plate of our lives, those
things that the world around us needs. We ask this, Jesus, in your name, amen.

Join us next week. As we look at chapter three, we're going to take a look at how
to live each day in light of the last day, the day of Christ's return.