He Is Risen Sermon

Preach What You Have Received: The Word That Holds the Resurrection

The apostle Paul is writing from a prison cell. He knows the end is near. He has already told Timothy, in the verses just before our reading, that the time of his departure has come. He is not writing from a comfortable study with books arranged on shelves and a warm fire. He is writing from chains, with the awareness that the executioner's blade is not far away. And yet what he writes to his young colleague Timothy is not a farewell lament. It is a charge. It is a commission. It is, in the deepest sense, a passing of the torch.

We hear these words from Second Timothy in the context of the Church's life together, and they arrive with particular weight when the Church gathers to proclaim the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because what Paul is doing in this passage is not simply offering Timothy good advice about ministry. He is telling him where the power of proclamation actually lives. He is telling him what makes a sermon more than a speech, what makes a homily more than an opinion, what makes the preacher's voice carry something beyond the preacher's own intelligence and earnestness. The answer, Paul says, is the Scripture itself. And the Scripture, when faithfully opened, reveals the One who is risen.

Let us hear the text. Paul writes in Second Timothy chapter three, beginning at verse fourteen: "But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed. You know those who taught you, and you know that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work."

And then, without pausing, Paul moves into chapter four: "I solemnly charge you before God and Christ Jesus, who is going to judge the living and the dead, and because of his appearing and his kingdom: Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, will multiply teachers for themselves because they have an itch to hear what they want to hear. They will turn away from hearing the truth and will turn aside to myths. But as for you, be sober-minded in everything, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry."

This is the word of the Lord.

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not tell Timothy to be entertaining. He does not tell him to be relevant in the sense of chasing whatever the culture finds interesting at the moment. He does not tell him to soften the message until it offends no one. He tells him to preach the word. And he grounds that command in something astonishing: the appearing and the kingdom of Christ Jesus, who is going to judge the living and the dead.

Paul is not appealing to institutional loyalty or professional obligation. He is appealing to the resurrection. The risen Christ is the judge of the living and the dead. The risen Christ will appear again. The risen Christ has a kingdom that is coming. It is because Jesus is risen that the word Timothy preaches carries eternal weight. It is because the tomb is empty that the Scriptures are not merely ancient literature but living address.

This is the heart of what we mean when we say, in the great Easter proclamation, that he is risen. We do not mean only that something remarkable happened in a garden outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, though it did. We mean that the One who was crucified, dead, and buried is now alive, reigning, and returning. We mean that history has been interrupted and redirected. We mean that death itself has been answered. And when Paul tells Timothy to preach the word, he is telling him to preach from within that reality, not merely about it.

There is a difference, and it matters. A preacher can speak about the resurrection as a doctrine to be defended, a proposition to be argued, a tradition to be preserved. All of that has its place. But Paul is describing something more immediate. He is describing a proclamation that arises from encounter with the living Christ through the inspired Scriptures. He says Timothy has known the sacred writings from infancy. They have shaped him. They have given him wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. They have not merely informed his mind; they have formed his life.

This is what Paul means when he says all Scripture is inspired by God, breathed out by God. The Greek word behind our translation is theopneustos, God-breathed. The Scriptures carry the breath of the living God. When they are faithfully opened and honestly proclaimed, something happens that no rhetorical skill alone can produce. The Spirit who inspired the text accompanies the text. The risen Christ, who is the subject of the whole Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, makes himself known through it.

The Anglican tradition has always held this conviction close to its center. The collect for the proper Sunday of Scripture, the language of the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles of Religion, all of them return again and again to the Scripture as the place where God speaks and the Church is fed. We come to the Table in a moment, and we will receive the body and blood of Christ in bread and wine. But we have already been receiving him in the word read and proclaimed. The two belong together. The liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the table are not separate events. They are one movement of the risen Christ toward his people.

Paul knows that this kind of preaching is not always welcome. He tells Timothy plainly: the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine. They will accumulate teachers who tell them what they want to hear. They will turn from truth toward myths. This is not a prophecy about some distant future age. It is a description of every age, including this one. The pressure on the preacher to be agreeable, to avoid the hard texts, to smooth out the jagged edges of the gospel, to offer comfort without challenge and affirmation without truth, that pressure is not new. Paul felt it. Timothy felt it. Every faithful preacher in every generation has felt it.

And yet Paul does not say: adjust the message to the appetite of the audience. He says: be sober-minded in everything. Endure hardship. Do the work of an evangelist. Fulfill your ministry. There is a kind of pastoral courage required here that is not harshness and is not indifference to the congregation's pain. It is the courage to trust that the word of God, faithfully proclaimed, is what the congregation actually needs, even when it is not what they think they want. It is the courage to believe that the risen Christ, present in the proclamation of Scripture, is more than capable of doing what no clever sermon series can do.

This means the preacher must be formed by the text before standing to open it. Paul tells Timothy that he has known the Scriptures from infancy. They are not a tool Timothy picks up when he needs to make a point. They are the air he has been breathing. They have given him wisdom for salvation. They have taught him, rebuked him, corrected him, trained him in righteousness. He is not standing above the word as its master. He is standing under it as its servant, and then standing before the congregation as its messenger.

This is the shape of faithful proclamation in every season. The preacher comes to the text not to confirm what the congregation already believes, not to perform intellectual sophistication, not to demonstrate pastoral warmth as an end in itself, but to open the Scripture so that the risen Christ may be seen. The homily is not the destination. The homily is the door. What lies beyond the door is the living Lord, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and who meets his people in the breaking of the word just as he meets them in the breaking of the bread.

When Paul charges Timothy before God and Christ Jesus, he is reminding him of the company in which he preaches. The congregation gathered in the room is not the only audience. The risen and reigning Christ is present. The one who will judge the living and the dead is listening. This is not meant to terrify the preacher into paralysis. It is meant to liberate the preacher from the smaller fear of human disapproval. If the risen Christ is present, then what the congregation thinks of the sermon is a secondary question. The primary question is whether the Scripture has been faithfully opened and whether the living Lord has been honestly proclaimed.

So we come to this day, in this season, in this place, and we receive again the ancient and inexhaustible commission. Preach the word. Not your word, not the word the culture is waiting to hear, not the word that will make everyone comfortable and no one uncomfortable, but the word that is able to give wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. The word that is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness. The word that equips the people of God for every good work.

He is risen. That is not a seasonal greeting to be set aside after the Easter season ends. It is the permanent condition of the universe. It is the ground on which every sermon stands, the reason every Scripture reading matters, the source of every genuine transformation in the life of a believer. The word we preach is not the word of a dead teacher preserved in a text. It is the word of the living Lord, who breathed out the Scriptures, who fulfills them in himself, and who is present wherever they are faithfully proclaimed.

Go and preach that word. In season and out of season. With patience and careful instruction. With courage and with love. And trust that the One who is risen will do, through the word you carry, far more than you can ask or imagine.

Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Holman Bible Publishers, 2017. Second Timothy 3:14 through 4:5.

The Book of Common Prayer. Church Publishing, 1979. The Collect for Proper 28 and the Articles of Religion.

Thomas C. Oden. First and Second Timothy and Titus. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. John Knox Press, 1989.

N. T. Wright. Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Letters. Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

Philip H. Towner. The Letters to Timothy and Titus. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans, 2006.

Richard Hooker. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Book V. 1597. On Scripture, preaching, and the ministry of the word.