2 Timothy 2:14

‘Of these things put them in remembrance, charging them in the sight of the Lord, that they do not strive about words, which is profitable for nothing, to the subverting of those who hear.’

God’s people are continually to be put in remembrance of ‘these things’, of Jesus Christ the Risen One (2 Timothy 2:8), of Jesus Christ, God’s ruling King (2 Timothy 2:8), of the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory (2 Timothy 2:10), of the fact that our Saviour Christ Jesus has nullified death, and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel (2 Timothy 1:10), and of all God’s requirements that we endure as good soldiers of Jesus Christ (2 Timothy 2:3), all as summed up in the hymn that he has just cited.

And it is these things that must possess their minds, rather than words and arguments about things which are not only not beneficial (‘profitable for nothing’), but are actually harmful (they subvert those who hear them). The seriousness with which Paul viewed this injunction comes out in his words, ‘charging them in the sight of the Lord’. The Christian is under a duty to Jesus Christ to concentrate on the essentials of the Gospel, and not to be taken up with peripheral arguments and extraneous doctrines which can divert their minds and the minds of others from Jesus Christ Himself.