Daily Faith Walk

This verse gets quoted a lot, usually alone, usually in large italic font over a sunset. But Paul didn't write it alone. It sits inside a short, personal paragraph to a young pastor who was, by every indication, scared, and it comes from a man writing his last letter from a Roman cell. Read the five verses before it and the one after, and the sentence stops sounding like a poster and starts sounding like something a dying man needed a frightened friend to hear. Quick answer 2 Timothy 1:7 is Paul reminding Timothy, a young, apparently anxious pastor facing real hostility in Ephesus, of what he already has, not promising him a feeling he doesn't yet have. The 'spirit of fear' Paul names (Greek: deilia) means cowardice or timidity, the reflex to shrink back, not ordinary human fear or anxiety. Against that, Paul sets three things God's Spirit actually produces: dynamis (power to act despite the cost), agape (love that keeps power from turning selfish), and sophronismo...

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:2, NIV) Paul wrote these words to a church he had never visited, in a city that expected everyone - immigrant, senator, slave - to know exactly how to fit in. Two verses, sitting right at the hinge of his longest letter, still get quoted more than almost anything else he wrote. Read them slowly, though, and you'll notice they're not really about being edgy or different for its own sake. They're about what has to happen inside a person before anything on the outside changes. Quick answer Romans 12:2 tells believers to stop letting the present age press them into its shape, and instead let God renew how they think - a renewal Paul ties directly to the mercy he's spent eleven chapters describing, not to willpower. The verse doesn't promise that non-conformity will...