This is a very prophetic word that God has dropped in my heart. We’ll be looking at 2 Timothy 1:8-18. Paul wrote two letters to young Timothy, who was a son. We have illegitimate sons in the church, and the reasons are many. They aren’t legitimate sons. God is after sonship. He’s after us becoming full, mature sons of God. We can be in church all our life and never truly step into full sonship. We view a lot of our Christianity from our Western culture. Let me give you an example. We don’t have kings in America, so when the Bible talks about relationship to kings, we don’t really have a concept of that. We know presidents. Because of our lack of understanding of what a king is, we don’t really understand when it says King of kings. When we view scripture, we don’t really have the proper understanding. What was God trying to say? It’s true with the Hebrew and Greek languages. There’s a gulf of understanding missing, because we think it from an American viewpoint, and don’t get it from a biblical viewpoint.

Paul wrote both of these letters to Timothy, his son in Christ. Timothy went on to pastor the largest church in Ephesus at that time. Paul is writing this letter while he’s in prison, and he’s encouraging Timothy. Think about this. Prison should have given Timothy a perspective that Paul was writing from, because of where he was. But to the credit of the Holy Spirit, you read the book of Timothy, and you don’t read the letter as though it’s somebody in prison. So, we can be in a culture, and not necessarily read through the culture’s lens what God is trying to say. You can be from Africa, Asia, or in between. You can be reading the scripture through the lens of that culture, but God is outside of culture, and He can write a letter to us and cause us to interpret scriptures based on the revelation of the Holy Spirit, and not on the culture.

Read 2 Timothy 2:8-18 in the Amplified. It says that the grace of God was given to you before the world was ever created. So, all that you and I try to do in God is not obtainable, because it was already done. We just have to accept Him, and what He did is sufficient for what I can do.

Verse 10 says that Jesus annulled death and made it of no effect, and brought life and immortality. What Jesus did caused us to be able to miss death, permanent death, and go on to glory.

Paul describes who he is in 2 Timothy 1:8-18. He told Timothy not to be ashamed of the testimony of the Lord, nor of him, His prisoner. There is an unashamedness that we need to have. Paul told Timothy to hold fast in faith and love. He mentions that all Asia turned away from him, but that Onesiphorus had not been ashamed of his chains, and sought Paul out. He asked the Lord to grant mercy to him.

I want to pull some nuggets of truth from this. But, before I do, let me give you another story in Daniel 6. Daniel was distinguished above the politicians, because an excellent spirit was in him. The leaders and politicians were getting ready to set Daniel over all these realms. He was a warrior, a politician, and a strong steward of God, but he’s got problems. The leaders sought to bring an accusation against Daniel concerning the kingdom, but they couldn’t find any error or fault in him. The only way they could bring an accusation against him was to find it concerning the law of his God. There was conniving and strategizing to cause Daniel to stumble. The politicians came to King Darius and they made law that no one could make a petition to any god or man for thirty days, except of King Darius. And any who did would be cast into the den of lions.When Daniel found out there was a plot to trap him, he went in his house with open windows and knelt down and prayed three times a day, as he had done previously. They plotted Daniel’s downfall. It’s not unlike today’s politics.

We need to be careful of keeping company with those, who when danger arises, leave their friends in a lurch. Proverbs 18:24, “Friends come and friends go, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” Have you had friends in life who were fair weather friends? They were friends for the season, and then they were gone. I’ve seen many come and be committed to me as a Christian young man, and then they were no more…

The church is living in an age of disloyalty like no other time. People are not loyal, faithful and committed to hardly anything. Job, marriage, life, anything… Maybe food and entertainment. That’s it. In 2 Timothy 1:15, it says that all of Asia forsook Paul. He named two strong leaders who also left him. Scripture says that all of (known ) Asia was won to the Lord, but then it says that all of Asia forsook him. Wow! From great awakening to great defection. There is a spirit of disloyalty over the land, that makes people no longer commit to each other, like they used to.