2 Timothy 1:3-5; 3:13-17, Learn Christ!

Here is a word that lends itself wonderfully to the devotional study of the Word of God.  I hope you will do as I am doing: stop and consider what we need to learn. Manthanō is a verb meaning “to learn, be apprised.”  We will take our time working through this list, in order of the NT.

·       Mt 9:13: To the leaders Jesus reproved them to go and learn what this means: I will have mercy, not sacrifice, for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.  The Jewish leaders were the OT scholars, and yet they had not learned this.  Jesus is quoting the OT (Hosea 6:6).

·       Mt 11:29: Take my yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.  Learn of Christ!  I’m going to move some other NT passages up that agree with this same thought.

·       Jn 6:45: All who listen to the Father and learn from Him come to Christ. We can only come to the Father through Christ.  Thus, if we listen to the Father He will speak to us of Christ.  Pray this for your unsaved friends, that they will listen to the Father as the Holy Spirit does His work of conviction. Pray that the light of the gospel will shine in them to the glory of God (2 Cor. 4:4).

·       Eph 4:20(-22): You did not come to learn Christ in that way.  What is this about?  In the preceding verses Paul is talking about the life of the unsaved person, full of self-centeredness.  But you did not so learn Christ, if so be that ye have heard Him, and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus.  We learned how to live the Christian life when we learned Christ through the gospel.  Paul says, “in the past” you learned Christ, and what you learned is not consistent with continuing to live in the sin of which you repented.  We never leave the gospel!

·       Col 1:7: In 1:6 Paul says of the Colossian Church, they knew the grace of God in truth.   This came through the gospel.  Their understanding of grace was not corrupted as, say, those false teachers in Jude 1:4: For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord ^[b]God and our Lord Jesus Christ.  How had they learned this?  1:7 says, they learned the truth from Epaphras, a faithful brother who ministered in Colosse.

·       Ro 16:17: In that same vein, Paul warns the Romans to watch out for those divisive people who are contrary to the teaching you have learned.  What we learned of Christ will never need to be changed or added to or taken from!

·       2 Ti 3:14ab: In what are some of Paul’s last earthly words to Timothy, he encourages him to continue in what you learned, knowing from whom you learned.  I’m sure Timothy learned from Paul, but v15 indicates he is talking about what Timothy learned from childhood from his mother Eunice and grandmother Lois (2 Tim. 1:4).