Nearly every time I drive over the I-35W bridge near downtown Minneapolis, I think about the day it collapsed. If I happen to forget, there are thirty-foot memorials at each end to remind me of what happened.

At 6:05 in the evening on Wednesday, August 1, 2007, in the heat of rush hour, the heavily trafficked four-lane steel bridge gave way and fell eighty feet into the Mississippi River. In all, 111 vehicles were damaged or worse, 98 people were treated at local hospitals, and 13 died. After months of investigation, it was determined that the gusset plates (small sheets of steel applied to joints or beams for reinforcement) had been a half-inch too thin.

The support beams under bridges are life-sustaining, death-defying realities that we almost never think about unless they fail. Just imagine how many people drove over the I-35 bridge that Tuesday, the day before it fell — on average, some 140,000 cars — and casually looked left or right to enjoy the view. Knowing, afterward, just how easily it might have been their car among the rubble, I’m sure they all felt (and continue to feel) the preciousness of good bridges and the pillars that support them.

In that way, my drives over the new I-35W bridge (likely one of the strongest, most-inspected bridges in the world) also help me feel the preciousness of the church. As the apostle Paul tells Timothy,

I am writing these things to you so that, if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth. (1 Timothy 3:14–15)

Unlikely Pillar

Again, we probably don’t think enough about pillars (much less buttresses, for that matter) to see and feel the beauty of what God has said about the church when he calls her “a pillar and buttress of the truth.” Just one chapter earlier, Paul highlights the significance of the truth:

[God] desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all. (1 Timothy 2:4–6)

God wants men and women everywhere to hear, believe, and enjoy the truth — the truth about God, about grace, about the cross. And under that truth, he has placed a chosen pillar, a buttress he himself designed and constructed for this global and eternal purpose: the church.

“God intended, from the beginning, to make the weak and wandering church the stage for his divine homily.”

Could any pillar have been more precarious? Could God have made the gusset plates any thinner? When Paul wrote his letter to Timothy, the church was only decades old, and it was embattled on nearly every front. Fragile. Sinful. Divided. Persecuted. Afflicted. Far from the picture of a weight-bearing beam. And yet God saw a reliable, even unshakable pillar in her — because he had promised to establish and reinforce her. He intended, from the beginning, to make the weak and wandering church the stage for his divine homily.

To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 3:8–10)

“Through the church.” God could have revealed his unsearchable wisdom, the riches of Christ, the mystery of the ages in any number of ways, but he chose to unveil the truth through the church. Throughout all generations, God has made the church — the wobbly, stumbling, spreading, and prevailing church — the keeper and messenger of the truth.

Straying Pillar

How strange and tragic is it, then, when the truth we’re meant to hold up and draw attention to begins to take a backseat in the church — when we start coming to church for reasons other than the truth? Even then, Paul knew this would happen, and so he warned Timothy in his next letter:

The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. (2 Timothy 4:3–4)

The ears were already itching in his day, and they certainly haven’t stopped in ours. Our society has only given us more ways than ever to have our itches scratched — books, podcasts, social media, YouTube, and more, all constantly vying for our attention and devotion. Has it ever been easier to accumulate teachers to suit our unique passions, lusts, and fears? Has it ever been easier to wander after whatever’s trending (and away from the truth)?

This puts significant pressure on church leaders to scratch the same itches — to build churches and plan services and develop programs that compete with what people love and follow online. For our part, we may start choosing (or leaving) churches based on the Sunday morning “experience,” rather than whether they preach, live, and love what God says. The demand for entertainment subtly slides from the screen to the pew, and truth moves from the center of our life together to the margins.

Remember, these pressures and temptations are not new. The apostle was already warning the church in the first century, nineteen centuries before the first iPhone. Satan has always warred to make the truth seem boring, inconvenient, secondary. He knows how much earthly and eternal good a truth-loving church can do — and how much damage one can do that neglects or compromises the truth.

Unshakable Pillar

So if the church wavers on or fades from the truth, will the truth fall? Certainly not. Social media and online entertainment habits may have distracted many of us from the church and the truth, but they are no serious threat to either.

Remember, God chose and constructed this pillar (not the poor engineers responsible for the I-35W bridge). And Jesus promises that nothing and no one will fell her, not even the unfaithfulness within her: “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). So how do we join him in guarding and uplifting her? How do we, in our individual local churches, act like the pillar that we are? We feast on what bores itching ears.

God gave Timothy the remedy: “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:1–2). What makes the church a pillar and buttress of the truth? She holds up and lives out what God has said — whatever God has said, however he has said it, whatever it means for us. J.I. Packer writes,

Doctrinal preaching certainly bores the hypocrites; but it is only doctrinal preaching that will save Christ’s sheep. The preacher’s job is to proclaim the faith, not to provide entertainment for unbelievers — in other words, to feed the sheep rather than amuse the goats. (A Quest for Godliness, 285)

Faithful churches seek the words of God like silver (Proverbs 2:4). We meditate on them day and night — not because we have to, but because his words are a river of nourishment, contentment, security, and joy (Psalm 1:2–3). Whatever happens around us, we stare through the truth — his truth — like a window, until we see our realities as he sees them.

Pillars in the Pews

God has made the church the pillar of truth. So does it serve that purpose in your life and in the life of your church?

“The pillar doesn’t rise or fall just with preachers, but with ordinary people in ordinary pews.”

If you’re not sure, you might begin by asking what drew you to your current church, and what keeps you there. Has your time in this church deepened your understanding and enjoyment of the word of God? Is it a church that loves to hear from God in the Bible, even when what he says is confusing, uncomfortable, or convicting? Do the gatherings gladly lead with the truth — or with music, humor, and an atmosphere that softens the harder edges of the truth? Does your church consistently shy away from beliefs and verses that the world hates — on sin and hell, on sexuality, marriage, and abortion, on race and justice, on the sovereignty of God and election, on the cross? Or does your church have a manifest and growing love for the truth?

And then, even more personally, how are you contributing to your church’s pillar-ness — or not? Are you a thin and unreliable gusset plate waiting to break, or do you intentionally devote yourself week in and week out to the truth? How are you currently seeking to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ (2 Peter 3:18)?

God strengthens the pillar of the Church by building and fortifying individual churches, and he strengthens individual churches by building and fortifying individual souls — souls like yours. He steeps each of us in truth — through his word and in fellowship with other truth-lovers — so that the church stands firm in every age and circumstance. The pillar doesn’t rise or fall just with preachers, but with ordinary people in ordinary pews filled and overflowing with the truth.

The world makes its quiet but furious war against death, groping to live forever. Plastic surgery, obsessive fitness, compulsive dieting, pouring billions into scientific research searching for the holy grail of immortality. The author of Hebrews describes the condition as a lifelong slavery to the fear of death (Hebrews 2:15).

Try as we may, Adam’s and Eve’s children cannot shake the ancient nightmare.

[God] drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:24)

Humanity, east of Eden, still reaches out in vain for that Tree of Life.

Curing Death

How would the world change overnight if all people everywhere heard that a man had cured death? How many ages would pass celebrating the discovery? But as it stands, these same people bypass the knowledge of a true eternity because it is not the eternity they invented.

“How would the world change overnight if all people everywhere heard that man had cured death?”

God has placed in us a sense that life continues after death: “[God] has put eternity into man’s heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Yet most suppress this knowledge of their own immortality. But why?

Because they “did not see fit to acknowledge God” (Romans 1:28) — the God “who inhabits eternity” (Isaiah 57:15). They disavow the truth their hearts would thrill to believe because they do not approve of any eternity with God. Better to steal happy moments from a broken and fleeting mortality, their dead hearts reason, than submerge in an endless existence with the God they disapprove.

Immortal Beings

All men, we know, shall live forever. We trust and love the eternal God, we believe in the resurrection from the dead, we believe Jesus’s promise of eternal life with him. And we know the everlasting fate of the wicked: “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46).

Eternity exists, we believe, and all men are immortal. The souls we come in contact with at the ballgame, in the restaurant, walking the dog — shall be a million years from now. The mailman, the bus driver, the nosy neighbor — immortal beings. The most decrepit among us shall outlive the galaxy.

“The most decrepit among us shall outlive the galaxy.”

Even considering those who have gone before us — the deceased grandfather, the fallen child, the departed spouse — though hidden momentarily from our eyes, we know they are and shall be again. Death, we profess, is the Great Interruption, not the Great End.

Falling Leaf

While we say we believe in undying souls (a truth that the world would go delirious to acknowledge), do we give that momentous reality much thought? Does that eternal weight of glory hold much weight with us? Has it changed your week at all?

How many of us have believed upon eternity, as John Foster lamented, in vain?

The very consciousness that your minds have been capable of admitting and dismissing this subject [eternity] without a prolonged and serious emotion, ought to produce at last that seriousness, by means of wonder and alarm, which may well be awakened by the consideration how many years you have believed this truth in vain. (An Essay on the Improvement of Time, 150–151)

How many years have I believed in eternity without much effect? And not just any eternity, but eternity with the Blessed God? Eternity with Jesus Christ? How many of my waking moments of these short and numbered days have orbited around the ceaseless “day of eternity” (2 Peter 3:18)? If in Christ I have hope in this life only, do I really feel myself of all people most to be pitied (1 Corinthians 15:19)?

How this world deceives me. The sturdy tree and its branches I call “this life”; the falling leaf I call, “eternity.”

Forgotten Forever

With one glance of the mind, I realize my madness. Who at sea would give all his affection and thought to a day’s trip onboard, completely disregarding the inescapable land ahead? I forget that “Surely a man goes about as a shadow!” (Psalm 39:6) as a dream (Psalm 78:18–20), as a flower that fades, as grass that withers (Isaiah 40:6–8), as a mere mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes (James 4:14). This world, O my soul remember, “is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:17).

I hope you have kept eternity closer at hand than I have.

Have you, Christian — possessor of the mightiest revelations, steward of sacred knowledge, keepers of the way of eternity — appropriated these truths for yourself and distributed them freely to a desperate and decaying world? Has forever bent down with you as you changed diapers? Has it drove with you to work? Has it laughed along while you had a game night with neighbors?

Has “everlasting” brought you low to plead in prayer for your children, your church, your city? Has that terrifying splendor, “immortality,” lifted your gaze from this painted and perishing kingdom to the one that cannot be shaken?

Has eternity provided you an anchor in suffering? Sent you along on a grand mission? Warned you against friendship with Here and Now? Bestowed solemnity to life? Brightened up gloomy days? Infused courage to venture on in Christ? Showed you the coming tsunami that will wash away all these splendid sandcastles? Endowed acquaintances with new significance? Lifted our eyes with abiding gratitude to God? Equipped us to drive a spear through sin?

Have you believed in eternity in vain?

Tree of Life

We must awake to the coming world without end. We are those who look “not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).

People all around us live and die for the seen, the felt, the tasted, the pleasurable, the transient. But God has left you and me here to speak, to reason, to plead with immortal souls that they be reconciled to God.

Through faith in Christ, we have reached our hands out to a Tree of Life on Golgotha’s hill, and we will taste of that fruit denied to our first parents:

To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. (Revelation 2:7)

Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates. (Revelation 22:14)

This tree is within reach because Jesus Christ — the Resurrection and the Life — has drawn near to us. He promises, “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die,” and asks the pertinent question, “Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26).

God give us grace to believe, and to make sure our friends know, our families know, our children know, that eternity is only a short time away.

In the church’s mission against the gates of hell, one of our main weapons is the familiar, often unremarkable, easily underestimated act of teaching.

Jesus taught (Matthew 4:23; 9:35), and he called his apostles to teach (Matthew 28:19–20). The apostles taught (Acts 5:28; 28:31), and they equipped local pastors to teach (1 Timothy 3:2; 4:13). Now, pastors teach (2 Timothy 4:2), and they raise up faithful men (2 Timothy 2:2), as well as all the saints (Colossians 3:16), to continue the teaching task. Through teaching, God lights up the darkness and lifts up his Christ, he frees Satan’s captives and makes them his sons, he hammers hell’s gates and wins back the world.

But not just through any teaching. Thoroughly Christian teaching is a bigger, broader task than many assume, especially in an age of abundant online content. Throughout the New Testament, the teaching of Jesus and the apostles, and then the church, assumes a certain context, flows from a certain character, comes with a certain content, and aims toward a certain completion.

And perhaps nowhere do we see these features more clearly than in Paul’s farewell address to the Ephesian elders (Acts 20:18–35). How did Paul teach the Ephesians so as to “open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God” (Acts 26:18)? And how might pastors, missionaries, and other teachers model him today?

Context: All of Life

The word teaching, for us, likely evokes images of academia: classrooms and desks, lectures and note-taking. Paul certainly had a category for formal public teaching, as when he taught in the Ephesian synagogue or reasoned in the hall of Tyrannus (Acts 19:8–10). But for the apostle, teaching was also woven into all of life.

Paul “lived among” the Ephesians for three years; his “students” were those “among whom I have gone about” (Acts 20:18, 25). Paul knew the Ephesians deeply, and the Ephesians likewise knew Paul. He had taught not only in public but “from house to house” (Acts 20:20); they had seen not only his talk but his tears (Acts 20:31). In his teaching, Paul clothed abstract principles with his own lived example. He had not only told them the words of the Lord Jesus, that “it is more blessed to give than to receive,” but he had “shown” them (Acts 20:35).

Andrew Clarke, in a review of Claire Smith’s study Pauline Communities as ‘Scholastic Communities’, describes Paul’s teaching method this way: “Close, authoritative relationships invited the imitation of modeled lives, and not merely attendance at formal discourse.” Discipleship, Paul knew, is less like learning physics and more like learning carpentry, and disciples are less like students and more like apprentices. And so, Paul spoke to all of the church’s life with all of his life, joining doctrine and devotion, precept and pattern.

“Paul spoke to all of the church’s life with all of his life, joining doctrine and devotion, precept and pattern.”

Understandably, then, Paul was not content with distant, disembodied teaching — at least, not as his primary mode of teaching. Even when Paul wrote letters, he longed to turn pen and ink into flesh and blood (Galatians 4:20; 1 Thessalonians 2:17–18; 2 Timothy 1:4), and he often sent his written teaching with those who could model “my ways in Christ” (1 Corinthians 4:17).

Today, we rightly leverage our digital technologies for teaching (as I am now). But as we turn away from the Internet and toward our real-life churches (ideally our primary teaching context), can we say with Paul, “You yourselves know how I lived among you” (Acts 20:25) — because, indeed, we have enfleshed our teaching in everyday life?

Character: All of Christ

Given this all-of-life context, Paul’s teaching required a certain character. If teaching included imitation and not just information, the teacher needed more than true ideas; he needed a holy life. So, as Paul reminds the Ephesian elders of his ministry among them, he says as much about his manner as he does about his message.

Paul had served with humility, taught with tears, suffered with patience (Acts 20:19). He preached Christ as altogether worthy and then showed his willingness to die for his name (Acts 20:24). He taught the whole counsel of God with courage (Acts 20:27). And he displayed a manifest freedom from greed and laziness as he commended the Servant Savior (Acts 20:33–35). As he taught in all of life, he modeled — as much as an imperfect saint can — all of Christ.

Words and works could not be separated in the apostle’s mind. Faithful teaching called for faithful living — not only because a faithful life would illustrate and embody the teaching, but also because it would guard the truth in a teacher’s heart. “Pay careful attention to yourselves,” Paul told the church’s elders. And why? Because “from your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them” (Acts 20:28, 30). Before a teacher speaks “twisted things,” the desire to draw others after himself captures his heart. Twisted teaching comes from a twisted soul, a twisted life.

The church father Gregory Nazianzen once said of his friend Basil that “his speech was like thunder because his life was like lightning” (Pia Desideria, 104). Likewise with Paul. So, when the apostle instructs Timothy to raise up more teachers, he tells him to look not merely for “able” men — men who can and want to teach — but for “faithful men” (2 Timothy 2:2), men whose words thunder because their lives blaze.

Content: All of Scripture

If the context of Paul’s teaching was all of life, and the character was all of Christ, then the content was all of Scripture, with a special focus on Jesus’s person and work. He taught the whole Christ from the whole counsel of God.

Twice, Paul mentions his refusal to pick and choose from God’s word:

“I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable” (Acts 20:20).
“I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27).

How tempting to “shrink” before some uncomfortable word from God rather than, like Paul, “declaring” it. How tempting to minimize, sidestep, muffle, ignore, or twist the toughest texts. Yet Paul knew that all God’s words were “profitable,” no matter how painful they landed at first, and that he as God’s steward would be judged by how faithfully he taught his Master’s message (Acts 20:26–27). And so, he didn’t shrink from proclaiming every promise, telling every story, witnessing to every warning, and declaring every command.

At the same time, he spoke especially “of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21), or what he calls “the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24) — or most succinctly, “the word of his grace” (Acts 20:32). Of all that was profitable, the gospel was most profitable; among the whole counsel of God, Christ was the climax. Every promise pointed to his person and work, and every command flowed from his cross.

Completion: All He Commanded

Finally, as Paul taught, he aimed toward the grand ambition of the Great Commission: “. . . teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20). The end of Christian teaching is not understanding but obedience — what Paul elsewhere calls “the obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5).

“Oh, how good it would be if our own teaching were washed in the tears of holy love.”

Paul yearned to see the word of God’s grace “build . . . up” believers into Christ-loving, word-obeying, devil-shaming disciples (Acts 20:32). So, he not only explained and applied God’s word, but even “admonish[ed] everyone with tears” (Acts 20:31). Oh, how good it would be if our own teaching were washed in the tears of holy love. With Paul, such leaders live and weep and teach to kill anger and birth gentleness, to clothe the proud with humility and the sorrowful with praise, to take people curved toward themselves and open them up to a broad new world, to heal fractured relationships and create communities so satisfied in Christ they confound the devil’s kingdom.

Such a mission, of course, is impossible apart from God. Who can open the eyes of the blind, or break the iron chains wrapped around the will, or deliver those enslaved to the ancient lie? Only the Spirit of the living God. Paul knew it, and so we read, “When he had said these things, he knelt down and prayed with them all” (Acts 20:36).

Teaching may be the church’s sword, but it cuts only when wielded by the Spirit. Without him, our best words are a dull and broken blade. So, before we teach, and after we teach, and perhaps even as we teach, we pray, “Father, take these feeble words, this little teaching, and win back more of your world.”