Equipped for Every Good Work
“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
— 2 Timothy 3:14-17 (NIV)
Paul wrote this from custody in Rome, in chains, near the end of his life. In the same letter he asks for his cloak before winter, and for his books. Timothy was young, the son of a Jewish mother and a Greek father. His mother and grandmother raised him on the sacred writings at home, a job usually left to fathers. Each scroll was copied out by hand over weeks, and few homes owned even one. Most people never held one, and heard them only when believers met and read aloud. The word behind God-breathed, theopneustos, is barely found in Greek before this letter. The word translated "equipped" was also used for fitting out a ship before a voyage. You fit out a ship to sail it, not to leave it tied up in port. Jerome died on this day in 420, after years of turning those writings into Latin. Words like these were given to be used, not just kept.
You know more of the Bible than you are doing. Maybe you can quote the line about forgiveness and still have not made that call. Maybe you know who needs help and keep saying: one day. Some mornings you read a verse and by evening nothing of it is left. You are not short of knowledge, you are short of one move. And sometimes it is not the time that is missing, it is the dread of that one conversation. One thing out of today's reading can be behind you before you sleep.
One Chapter, One Action
- 1Open the Bible today, on paper or on your phone, at Luke chapter 10, and read it to the end. It takes a few minutes. Then pick one sentence in it that tells you to do something, and do it today, in the smallest way you can.
- 2If reading is hard for you, or there is no Bible in the house, play that chapter in a free Bible app and listen while you wash up. And if the thing cannot be finished today, make its first move today: send one message, or put it in tomorrow's calendar with a time.
God, I know more good than I am doing, and You know that too. Today help me read one chapter to the end instead of reaching for my phone. Show me one sentence in it that I can actually do. If it puts a finger on something I would rather leave alone, help me not to argue. Help me do that one thing today, however small it turns out to be.
Today I will read one chapter to the end and do one sentence from it before I sleep.
Where was Paul when he wrote this?
In custody in Rome, in chains, near the end of his life. In the same letter he asks Timothy to bring his cloak before winter and his books, and says almost everyone had left him.
What does God-breathed mean here?
It translates theopneustos, a rare Greek word barely found before this letter. It says these words came out of God the way breath comes out of a person.
Why this passage on 30 September?
Jerome died on this day in 420, near Bethlehem. He spent more than twenty years turning the sacred writings into Latin, working back to the Hebrew, and his version was read in the West for centuries.