2 Timothy 3:2

Summary retelling of 2 Timothy 3:2

Paul them tells Timothy that people love themselves, they love money, and they are proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, and unholy.

Thoughts for Today

First Thought:

Lovers of themselves.  Self-monger.  Conceited.  Looking out for number one.  That’s many ways to say the same thing.  But they are all true.  Human beings are naturally more interested in what is going on in our own life than what they can do for others.  Just look at most advertising, most Facebook posts, and most Twitter tweets.  Human beings are inherently self-interested.  We come out of the womb expecting other people to feed us, change us, and all around care for our needs.  Most of childhood and teenager life is spent wanting the people in our life to appease our needs.  We can be different, but we have to be trained.  It’s a ton of work.  It’s just not natural.  We have to want to be anything except the self-monger because we naturally are the self-monger.

How bad do you have the self-monger bug?  Do you think of yourself as a lover of self?  What can you do about it?

Second Thought:

Lover of money.  Greedy.  Avaricious.  Storing up treasure in this world.  We do love our money, don’t we?  We do love our bank accounts.  We love to spend money in some of the most frivolous ways.  So often we don’t even think about how we spend our money or horde it.  We don’t think about all the people in the world that have nothing.  We don’t think about all the people who don’t have access to drinkable (safe) water.  We don’t think about the kids who can’t even afford a book.  I’m not saying we can solve all the problems of the world.  But we are greedy people in our hearts.

Do you believe money is the answer to everything?  Why do you think we enjoy saving our money and storing up our treasures?  Why do you think we enjoy spending money on some of the most pointless of things when there is so much need in the world?

Third Thought:

Proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, and unholy.  More dark attributes from the dark side of humanity.  What’s really sad is just how many of these attributes can be rooted to our self-monger.  We are proud because we focus on our own gifts and successes.  We are abusive because we only care about getting our way and not about how we hurt others.  We are disobedient because we want our own way.  We are ungrateful because the more we focus on ourselves the more we adopt an entitlement perspective.  We are unholy because we’d rather focus on ourselves than focus on God.  At the heart of this list is … well … ourselves.

Which attributes on this list do you struggle with the most?  What do you think the answer to the problems of this list is?

Passage for Tomorrow: 2 Timothy 3:3