Week 5: Love That Strengthens

Now the question shifts from where love gets what it needs to what love does when the body is strained, and it begins with a strain every congregation recognizes: a young preacher in Ephesus, close to quitting, while the men who should have stood with Paul have scattered. The lesson widens to 2 Timothy 1:15-18, where one man, Onesiphorus, refused the exit everyone else took, searched Rome for a chained apostle, and was not ashamed to be found with him. Then Paul turns to Timothy: be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, a passive command; keep on being strengthened, so that the strength is received rather than produced, and the same verb returns at 4:17 when Paul confesses that the Lord stood with him after everyone else deserted.

What Timothy received is a deposit, and a deposit is meant to move from Paul to Timothy to faithful men to others, which is where love enters, because knowledge puffs up and love builds up. The soldier, the athlete, and the farmer each pay a cost for someone else's sake, and none of them is strong for himself alone. The turn to Christ is Luke 22:31-32, where Jesus tells Peter, on the night Peter will fail him, that He has prayed for him and that when he turns back he is to strengthen his brothers, the same two steps in the same order: be strengthened, then strengthen.