SUMMARY KEYWORDS

deposit, paul, god, timothy, faith, patterns, people, life, live, road trips, jesus, legacy, years, feel, faithfulness, grow, part, meant, campuses, step.

SPEAKER

Phil EuBank

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Well, Good Morning, Menlo Church. So glad that you are with us today. Thanks for joining us this weekend. I don't know about you, but last weekend will be one of those days that I never forget. It was just an incredible way for us to have a chance to share together this 150 years of God's faithfulness to this community here at Menlo. I hope you had a chance to join us for it, it was great to see such a great turnout from all of our campuses, and a special welcome to you.

I think that for lots of us, right? Maybe you had some part of it last week that was your favorite. My favorite part of last weekend was seeing volunteers serving together because normally they are at different campuses. So even though they were from different campuses, they got to see the same heart, the same mission across multiple campuses as one church celebrating together. It was really, really special. Thanks for making space, changing your routine to be there with us.

Now, we are three weeks into a series where we are talking about legacy. And if you're like, "Oh, that was... did you guys plan that?" We did, it was on purpose to do it at the same time. And we are not just talking about God's faithfulness over the course of the last 150 years. But really anticipating what God wants to do next through this special community here at Menlo.

We've been in the first few verses of a letter that is widely believed to be the Apostle Paul's final letter that he wrote in his life, and he writes it to a young pastor that he's been mentoring named Timothy. And he's giving him encouragement, specific and personally, for what it looks like in his life to guard a legacy. He knows his time is short. He knows the stakes for Timothy's life. And he wants to leave him with some really, really important final instructions.

I also want to make sure that you know that people at all of our campuses are going to go public with their faith in Jesus today by being baptized for the very first time. You want to say thank you to them for maybe taking that step with you today. It's amazing. If you sense God calling you to do that, maybe you didn't sign up beforehand. It's not too late. We are ready for anyone to take that step at all of our campuses, even if you didn't come expecting to. We were expecting you. And so if that's a step that over the course of our time together you've decided to follow Jesus, and you're ready to make that decision public, we have everything that you'd need. And we'd love to make it possible for you today.

Now, before we get started, I'm going to pray for us. And if you've never been here before, never heard me speak, I pray kneeling. And the reason that I do that is because God says He gives grace to the humble. And so even if you're not kneeling in your own heart, even if you're not a follower of Jesus, just humble yourself before God, who knows what He might have in store for you. Would you pray with me?

God, thank you. Thank you that you are with us, that your grace and your goodness are with us every moment of every day, no matter what we are enduring. No matter what we're facing, no matter how massive the obstacles in our life or certainly in our world are, God, we are so thankful that we can bring them before you and trust you to work.

And God, certainly, on a weekend when we talk about guarding legacy, we do thank you, God, and we give honor to the men and women who have given up freedom many times to put themselves in harm's way, to take on orders, to go to places and fight to defend and protect our freedom. Help us to live in light of that legacy as well that allows us to freely pursue you, worship you, grow in you, and take steps with you. God, we love you, wish you'd be with us now. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.

Now, I'm guessing that some of you can relate to what I'm about to talk about, which is a tension I am living in the middle of. I have little kids who are really just now beginning to think about the implications of money, right? No one tell them that 25 cents is not a lot of money. Nobody tell them, okay? They're on that end of the spectrum. And then on the other end, for most of this year, I have served as the executor of my mom's estate. I'm seeing the very beginning and the very ending of people's financial reality at the same time.

Now, my parents were never rich. But after my dad's passing a few years ago, my mom became very interested in trying to preserve something to hand down to her kids. And the problem for her is the same problem for lots of us, which is, the longer you wait to do that, the harder it is to do it. Really the time to make that decision is pretty early on.

Both of my parents came from difficult family backgrounds and experienced their entire careers without the benefit of college degrees or the pedigree that you would normally associate with the type of jobs that they did. And even though in my life, I didn't get some of the same traditional childhood experiences, and some of it was really difficult, there are things that I received as well. I was given a deposit just like you were. I learned how to persevere through very difficult situations and circumstances. I learned

that the things I did had consequences, and the opportunities that were in front of me were not guaranteed or permanent. I needed to show up well, or they would likely disappear.

We all have deposits like that in our lives that are a part of our legacy, whether they're connected to church or not. God's responsible; He is providing opportunities for you and me to learn even the difficult lessons. Some of them, for you, like me, might have been deposits of what not to do. Anybody get any of those deposits? The cautionary tales in your life? I saw drugs destroy one of my brother's lives. And very early on, even as a child, I knew I wouldn't ever touch that stuff. It was this costly deposit and lesson that I got to learn from my brother. For some of you, you watched the way your parents treated one another, or the way you felt as their child, and you knew you didn't want to live or lead in a home that felt like that, as an adult.

That's the deposit. Others of you, you have a great example of a parent, coach, teacher, boss, or friend who made an impact in your life that you are so thankful for. And you're committed to making the same kind of impact in others. And the example that others have made by investing in you is a deposit. What you do with that deposit is the choice that you will make, and you won't make it once; you will make that choice every single day of your life.

The apostle Paul, he had been invested in his entire life, first in the Jewish faith, and then by Christians. Imagine the first time that someone from this new group of Jesus followers took an interest or cared for Paul, Paul, who had been a religious leader within Judaism and was actively persecuting Christians. And now somebody extends hospitality to him, kindness to him, help solve a problem in his life or ministry. Can you imagine how that must have felt?

Paul knew how deeply he needed God's grace as a result of that. And even with all of his boldness and all of his ministry impacts, he would admit this. He says, "For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and you believed."

See, Paul, he knew the deposits that had been made in his life. And he wanted to make the most of the time that he had left in light of the deposits that had been given to him, which is really what he's trying to leave with Timothy. He's basically asking Timothy to consider regularly, and I think God's asking you and me to consider, are you interested in your deposit? Are you taking it seriously, that God up to this point in your life has given you experiences and opportunities, good things that you're trying to follow, bad things you're trying to avoid, on purpose and for a purpose.

And here's what's hard, especially if you're younger, legacy feels like one of those problems you're gonna solve decades down the road, doesn't it? But what you'll see in

this passage is that patterns create pathways, and course correcting down the road of your life for your legacy gets more difficult. As a matter of fact, there will never be a day, no matter how old you are, there will never be a day where it will be less costly or less difficult to course correct your legacy than today. It is worth paying attention to.

We never really got on airplanes as a kid growing up; everywhere that we went was a long road trip. And before you think, "Okay, I have an idea of what road trips in 2023 are," let me just dispel some of that for you, let you know about the road trips I experienced. Okay, some of you, you can relate, you just shout amen every time I say something you can relate to. Okay?

The first thing was, it meant that we were in a large station wagon. Anybody even know what those are now, right? Just a big station wagon. In that, it meant that we had books on tape, which are like streaming but on small rectangular devices that you just kept putting in. And I never wanted to listen to the books; they were books my parents wanted to listen to. And then my mom, she had this really big map, which is like an app, but it's on paper. And there's only one of them. And she would like comb through the details of how to give directions to this map. And she was regularly navigating my dad about where to go to get to our preferred destination while he simultaneously applied just as much effort to completely ignore her.

That was what road trips were for me, and the problem was that they were doing all that while I'm sitting quietly in the backseat. I'm using a color, the book — let me make sure you heard that, not a coloring app, a coloring book. And I'm waiting for the tension to resolve one way or another. And what made it more difficult is that the longer the trip went on, the more my mom and my dad were equally convinced of their competing thoughts about where to go. And we went further and further off the route that would get us to our destination. That's what my road trip life was like. And eventually, it meant that we would inevitably stop at a gas station for directions, which, I'm just saying, as a 2023 person, feels wild to me that we ever - this is how desperate we were — we were like, "You know what, this random gas station attendant will help me know how to make my interstate travel effective." I can't imagine doing that today, right? But that's where we were without smartphones, without the solutions of GPS. What a different world we live in today.

But all those patterns, it took us somewhere; those patterns meant that our path was going to be less direct than we wanted it to be. Paul, he knew the power of patterns. God knows the power of patterns in your life, road trip or life trip. Some of his final words to Timothy were about patterns. He said it this way, "Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus." Paul had been investing in Timothy for years, and he didn't want him to forget. See, this pattern that we are — this phrase that we translate, "Follow the pattern of the sound words," it can also be translated, "hold on to the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me." Paul knew that there would be so much pressure for Timothy to drift over time, so much pressure. All he would have to do is just kind of let go of the patterns that he had heard from Paul, all he had to do was let go of the patterns that he

had seen in his mom and his grandmother, these God-honoring truths in favor of something that felt more culturally compatible. And we all feel the same, don't we?

Paul, he had spent time with Timothy. And I'm sure there was lots of time for sharing, lots of time for praying together, lots of time studying together. I'm confident that letters like this from Paul, and whatever else Timothy could get his hands on, he was poring over it every day. He was memorizing it, he was making notes about it, he was processing it over and over and over again. Imagine if you only had a few books from the entire New Testament as your entire library of the scriptures. See, without the full New Testament assembled, which wouldn't be done, by the way, for hundreds of years, these patterns were even more important because they were more difficult to make sure you had a comprehensive understanding of. It would have been so easy for these things to get distorted.

But Paul also wanted to make sure that Timothy was hanging on to Orthodox theology, right living, right believing, right understanding in the spirit of faith and love that flowed from Jesus. It's easy to slip into one of the two extremes. And Paul wanted to make sure that Timothy didn't, and God wants to make sure that you and I don't slip into one of these extremes, right? One of the extremes is that we hang on to the truth at the expense of people. We're so interested in being right that we're right with information and wrong with people. On the other side, we can slip up and out of a genuine concern and love for people, we abandon truth to find their approval. Neither of these is what Paul's advocating. He's charging Timothy to hang on to the truth with the love of Jesus driving him. That's what God's calling you and me to do, that the deposit he's made in you should grow that kind of faith.

Timothy had been headed down a pathway from Paul's pattern for a number of years. But it wouldn't have taken much change for that pathway to head off track. One of the things about legacy is that it has in its mind the long term. If you're a couple degrees off course and you're going from one side of your house to another side, you'll still get to the other side of the house. But if you're on a flight to the East Coast, and you're a couple degrees off at the beginning of your flight, you're gonna end up in the wrong state. See, that's the power of patterns creating pathways and the longer were off course, the further off course we become. But the same thing works the other way. If you stay connected to the patterns of Jesus over the course of your life, you stay faithful in pursuing Him and walking with other people trying to do the same. Your life will produce outcomes that would have been impossible without God.

Some of you grew up in homes like mine. And the idea that you could have a different legacy or live a different life that would have different outcomes. Sometimes you wonder if it's true for you. It is. It is absolutely true for you if you will turn from your ways and follow the patterns of Jesus for your life. See, all of our lives are like long road trips. And while information has never been more accessible than it is today, it may be that wisdom has never been more rare. The sooner that you course correct your patterns, the sooner you can get back on the right path. But you have to decide if the work is worth it. It will never be easier than it is today. If you think, "I'll do that, I'll do that in a few

months, I'll do that in the new year, I'll do that when this resolves itself at work or with this relationship," I'm telling you, it will never be easier than it is today. You have to ask yourself, are you interested in your deposit? Are you interested in growing it? Or are you willing to watch it continue to shrink? Will you live in such a way that recognizes God has placed people and situations in your life for a reason, that He actually wants to grow you through them?

The second idea that we find in the passage from Paul is that deposits require security. See, the most valuable things in our lives are things we take the best care of, right?

That may be for you. It's an alarm system for your house or a safe to keep documents or special family keepsakes. We take care of them differently on purpose. Paul knows the patterns that he has set up can really help him, but he also wants Timothy to understand the need for guarding the deposit of God in his life. The deposit was bigger than just what Paul had done. And it would take more than just Paul's words to guard it. He says it this way: "By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you."

See, the Holy Spirit is the security system for the good deposit that God has entrusted Timothy with. And it's the good deposit guard system for you too. The deposit was Paul, it was his teachers. And specifically, Paul calls out his mother and his grandmother, which I can absolutely relate to and be thankful for that they are just people over and over again who have invested in Timothy. Timothy was carrying on the faith of people who had gone before him, people who had sacrificed their way of thinking for the sake of following the patterns of Jesus. And now Timothy was leading a church to help others discover the hope of Jesus. You're a part of a community today, even if this is your very first day, of men and women who knew that they loved you without knowing your name. Their faithfulness is a deposit we continue to honor today.

But in your life, in your specific circumstances, what is your faith deposit? Is it the faith that was handed down to you from your parents? Maybe it was a bold friend that risked relational status quo with you in order to share what their faith in Jesus meant to them. Maybe it was a pastor or a ministry that has invested in you for years. These are all deposits that we hopefully live in light of.

One of the first places that Alyssa and I lived was in was Fort Worth, Texas where I did grad school. And while we were there we lived in a nice little place downtown. And there was an alarm system that was a part of this little kind of townhome thing that I was very faithful to set before we left our condo or townhome, and the reason was because if somebody broke into our place while we were gone, I hoped that the sound, the beeping that the system would make would scare them away. The reason that I hoped that the beeping would scare them away is because that is the only possibility that the system could achieve. It wasn't hooked up to a service. Did I mention that I was a seminary student?

All it could do was bark; it had no bite. And that's some of our security systems for the deposit of sound teaching and the investment of faith in our life. We've never

personalized it. We've never incorporated it into our daily decision-making. It's just the way we sort of think has been sometimes shaped by rooms just like this one. We might make some noise early on, but without something more serious, without integrating it into our life, we will often give up; we will let go of the sound teaching just like Paul is warning Timothy not to do.

What are the threats to your faith? Do you think? Do you live in light of these? Not out of fear but out of fortitude to understand that you actually have to take intentionality to walk in the faithfulness of who God is. How can the Holy Spirit help you? Well, He can help you see them. John Mark Comer, an author and pastor, he highlights three major threats to the deposit of God's work in our life that I think can be helpful. The first he says is (1) The Flesh, and by that, he means the sinful condition that we have as people that even trying to follow Jesus with a renewed spirit, we live in fallen flesh that is working against the choices that God wants for us. There's (2) The Devil, which is a real spiritual enemy with a real spiritual force working for our destruction, trying to take us out. And then (3) The World, which are the systems that are all around us all the time that the devil and his demons are constantly manipulating to hurt you and me. And if you're like, that got very serious, very fast. If you don't live in light of those, it's very easy for your and my faith to be sabotaged.

John Mark, he goes on to highlight just how dysfunctional the approaches of surrendering our good deposit are, and not asking the Holy Spirit to guard it. He says, “Amid the revolution, the questions nobody seems to be asking are, Is this” - sort of the moment we live in culturally – “making us better people? More loving people? Or even happier people? Are we thriving in a way we weren't prior to our liberation?” Isn't that an important question?

That even if you're not a Christian in here, would you say that you have found the purpose you are looking for? That you found the satisfaction you were hoping to gain in your job or your family relationships, or your accomplishments or in your acquisitions? The Bible says that the only place we can find that is in the creator of our souls.

For some of you, the best way to ask the Holy Spirit to guard your spiritual deposit is to start by asking Him in prayer, admitting that you've been trying to do it on your own and saying, "I need you to give me discernment. And then when you show me the things, and the people and the situations that are undermining my faith, give me the power to do something about it." For others, it may be that there's a step of faith that God is calling you to take. And guarding your deposit means investing it in a step of faithfulness, with integrity, to grow in some area of your life.

God doesn't want our faith to be stagnant. Sometimes church, I think we position our faith as a transaction for heaven, not a trajectory for eternity. It's not about where we'll go someday. It's about the fact that God wants to have control of our life today, and every day. Paul's telling Timothy, and God's telling you that your legacy involves a good deposit, a deposit that offers you patterns to follow, patterns to hold on to, and a resource worth God's security system. The Holy Spirit is referred to as the helper. He

wants to help us walk in faithfulness and truth together; we're supposed to do it in relationship.

And finally, in what feels like a pretty strange turn, Paul, he reminds us that people keep receipts. We might not air the dirty laundry of who has wronged or functioned outside of integrity with us; Paul wants to make it clear to Timothy that he remembers, and he is warning Timothy about the dangers of betrayal.

It'd be one thing for your social media following or for you to throw someone in your life under the bus on your social media platforms, or maybe a text thread that gets screenshotted and shared. But Paul, he went to another level; the people he's criticizing we are talked about 2000 years later. I believe that God inspired the Bible and that He used specific personalities of its writers to do it. And there is no doubt that He used Paul's specific personality in this passage.

Right here, Paul says, "You are aware that all who are in Asia turned away from me, among whom were Phygelus and Hermogenes. May the Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains, but when he arrived in Rome he searched for me earnestly and found me - may the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that day! - and you well know all the service he rendered at Ephesus."

Paul, he was keeping receipts; he knew who had helped him and who hadn't. He was confident that even when things didn't work out in the moment, they would work out in time. He was confident that even if someone had functioned in foolishness or was evil in a situation, that time would tell the truth. And I just encourage you; for you, you may find yourself feeling discouraged, you may find yourself feeling betrayed. And you feel like you know what, who's going to finally reveal that? Time will reveal that; time always tells the truth, as difficult and as painful as it might be, as much as you might want to inappropriately put somebody on blast. You can trust God with the truth.

Maybe for you, it's a warning that part of guarding a legacy in your life is staying true to who you are in Jesus and maintaining integrity with others. When we face pressure, it's often people who get squeezed out of our thought process for what they need, rather than how we can escape the situation. We're ready to take a shortcut; we're ready to cut a corner because ultimately, we feel like it's an easier way than dealing openly and honestly with what is happening in our lives.

On the other hand, maybe you have those friends that you've kept your whole life, friends you've had for decades, people that you're referring to, but when you talk to them, even after years of not talking to them, it's like no time has passed at all. Friends where you can have the conversation that includes everything from the deepest level of loyalty and belief in one another to the fun you can have with each other.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've connected with friends in other parts of the country, and part of my legacy of faith and the way God has grown me is in these friendships. In

the same conversation, we talked about casual topics, our family, work environments, and then the heaviest stuff that you can imagine that we're carrying in this moment of our lives. If you can't think of people like that in your life, it's probably connected to a pattern that you have of being scared of the conflict, the loyalty, and a fear of betrayal that comes with it. If you want to grow in this part of lifelong legacy, maybe grow some relationships you currently have into faith-filled relationships, I'd recommend a book to you called "Made for Friendship" as a possible resource for you to think about, "What would it look like for me to take a step, not just to have acquaintances that I see sometimes or people that I can give the highlights to, but people I can be really honest with?" For some of you, it's going to take a step, and we're gonna talk about that in just a minute.

We don't often think about our faith as a deposit that we're living with or stewarding. But what's funny is we do that with other stuff, don't we? For our first several years of marriage, we were renters in the city of Seattle, and we lived with an everyday awareness that the way we treated where we currently live was directly connected to a security deposit. If we didn't take care of the house, whatever it took to fix, it was going to come out of that deposit. As a matter of fact, to this day, when I go pick up a rental car, I just take a quick video with my phone of the condition of the car before I take it so I won't be held responsible for pre-existing damage. Don't you wish you could do that in relationships? Like when you meet somebody, don't do that. But don't you wish you could? See, we're really intentional with those kinds of deposits in other areas of our life. But I think what Paul is challenging us to do is bring that kind of intentionality to the deposits that we've been given in our faith.

One of the best ways to guard the legacy of faith that God has placed in us is to keep growing. Faith is like the technology that we use every day. And sometimes we can hang on to a device or use a piece of software long beyond its continued updates and support. And we feel like it might work, but it's actually getting worse and worse every day. It's getting more vulnerable, more susceptible to threats every single day. Your faith is designed for updates all the time, for you to keep growing all the time, every day. And one of those, that you're gonna see in just a minute, is people going public with their faith by getting baptized for the very first time. And maybe for you, you sense the desire to do that same thing, that God's waking you up to be able to go public with your faith; that may be the thing that God's going to do to help you guard that deposit in this next season. In a moment, you'll hear instructions on how to do that very thing.

For some of you, it's filling out a Connect Card or going to Info Central. For some of you, it's checking out First Step Sunday right up here right after service and joining the team, finding somebody shoulder to shoulder and beginning friendships with people. Menlo Church, don't settle for an end-of-life faith that might still look functional on the outside but is featured less and less in your decisions every day. God wants us to guard the deposit of faith He's given us so that it can grow, not just for us to coast through life.

Let's pray that He does that right now.

God, you want to do something in each and every one of our lives. No one in this room is designed to be a spectator. So God, would you give us a fresh perspective right now about the step you want us to take, about the areas of our life that we've let ourselves stay open and susceptible to dangers and threats without the protection of your Holy Spirit? And God, would you help some of us that are going to take steps even right now, even in this room, even over the next few minutes, to be examples for the rest of us?

That you're not done. And God, there's a path in front of us if we will follow you. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.

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