God’s Word for You
2 Timothy 1:8-9a Not by our works
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Tuesday, June 2, 2026
8 Do not be ashamed of testifying to our Lord or about me his prisoner, but join me in suffering for the gospel while relying on the power of God. 9 He saved us and called us with a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace
Paul encourages Timothy about being unashamed and even proud to proclaim Christ and telling people about what the Apostle was going through. This would have the effect of encouraging many Christians to use Paul’s experience as a source of strength for people going through something similar, or something not so severe—and more especially because of Paul’s constant and unwavering focus on Christ as the center and goal of everything in his life. Paul says, “testify to our Lord,” meaning that God himself, Jesus Christ, is the one we testify to when we are persecuted and troubled. We look to Christ for help, and we acknowledge our faith him. Paul does not say “Do not be ashamed…” as if Timothy was doing something that he had to stop doing. Grammatically, the Greek words tell us that this was something Paul says Timothy should not let happen.
It might be easy for someone to be ashamed of Paul, since the Apostle was a prisoner, and a condemned prisoner at that. But Paul was in prison for the sake of the Gospel, and Christ said that his people would suffer for the sake of the Gospel. “Anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:38-39).
From here Paul introduces the subject of salvation by the grace of God. We can take time to look at two aspects of God’s grace. Here at the beginning of verse 9, we have the “why” of salvation. In verse 10, we will see the “how.”
God did not show his grace to us because he owed us anything. Remember that the actual task of saving us caused the Son of God pain and terrible torture, even to his death. This was difficult work, accomplished by agony of his spirit and his emotions as well as his physical body. Yet he did not owe us anything. Well, he did owe us wrath and punishment on account of our sins. He had promised: “The soul who sins is the one who will die” (Ezekiel 18:4). And this promise went back to the Garden of Eden, when God said: “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Man, fallen into sin, couldn’t do anything to wriggle out from under this death sentence. It meant more than physical death. It meant suffering in terrible agony in hell for all eternity. There would be no end to that suffering. This is God’s judgment upon the sinner: “The way you live and the things you did have brought this on you. This is your punishment. It is bitter! It strikes your heart!” (Jeremiah 4:18). And this is the sinner’s response: “My agony! My agony! I am writhing in pain. Oh my heart! The walls of my heart are quivering! I cannot keep silent!” (Jeremiah 4:19).
But God showed us his pity, his compassion, which is his grace. We already explored this grace as an attribute of God and his love in verse 2. Here we want to remember that God’s grace is the love he has for mankind, not on account of anything anyone has done, or because anybody is loveable. No, he is gracious because he is a loving and gracious God. It is all about him, not at all about us. The burden of showing that you or I might be worthy of his love is lifted away from us, because it is not about us.
Why is this important? It is important for the same reason that we saw how “trust” is important as an aspect of faith, beyond mere knowledge and beyond agreeing that such knowledge is true. When the suffering, burdened, and despairing Christian wonders whether God could ever love them, we must never point them inward. We must never point them at their own life. If we were to do that, they might too easily object, “But you don’t know me or my life! You don’t understand how bad and wicked a sinner I really am!” They can too easily be left in the terrible reeking bilgewater of doubt that says, “I am worthless. I don’t deserve God’s grace. He can’t save me.” We never want anyone left in such a terrible place in their thoughts. But God assures us that when he reaches out to us, when he offers his forgiveness, it isn’t on account of anything good in us, but on account of his own divine attribute of being a loving God.
We see this especially in our verse here with the words “but because of his own purpose and grace.” This is a priceless statement, because it truly removes the reason for God’s grace away from us and back where it truly is: in God himself and his good purpose. “It mightily substantiates the article that we are justified and saved without our works and merit, purely by grace and solely for Christ’s sake. Before the creation of time, ‘before the foundation of the world was laid,’ (Ephesians 1:4), before we even existed, before we were able to have done any good, God elected us to salvation ‘according to his purpose’ by grace in Christ” (Formula of Concord).
We also need to examine the “how” of our salvation and the application of God’s grace, but that will be expressed in the next words of the letter. For now, we praise God for giving us his grace even though we have not earned it or deserved it in any way. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23-24). “With the word of his Gospel may he lift up and sustain our hearts in all temptation and in the very hour of our death.”
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.