The Faith That Dwelt First in Thy Grandmother

Paul opens his last letter by naming two women.

He is writing to a young man he loves, from a prison, near the end of his life, and one of the first things he says is this: when I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice.

He names them. Not the church that raised him, not a teacher, not himself, though he had every right to claim some of it. A grandmother and a mother, by name, in a letter that ended up in the Bible.

And the word he uses about that faith is unfeigned. Not put on. Not performed. The real thing, and he traces it back two generations before it ever reached the young man he is writing to.

I have to sit with that, because it is the exact thing I have the hardest time holding.

The faith I have came through a house I disagree with. Every bit of it. I would not know how to pray if my father had not prayed over me every night of my childhood. I would not know the sound of somebody actually loving God if my grandmother had not been in a kitchen loving Him out loud where I could hear it.

And they are wrong about something that has cost people I love a great deal.

Both of those are true and I have never once been able to make either one cancel the other.

He called it unfeigned

Read what he said, because the adjective is doing a lot of work.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also. (2 Timothy 1:5, King James Version)

Unfeigned faith. Which dwelt first in thy grandmother.

That is not a polite compliment about heritage. Paul is saying the faith in that young man is genuine and that it did not start with him, and he is putting two ordinary women at the head of the line.

And it is worth remembering what else was in that family. Acts tells us Timothy's father was a Greek, and there is no record of him sharing this. So this was not a tidy household with everything aligned. It was a mixed home, and the faith came down a particular line through it, and Paul does not treat that as a defect.

You have something genuine in you, and the mess it came through has never once made it counterfeit. That is not me flattering anybody's upbringing. 2 Timothy 1:5 calls it unfeigned and then names the two people it came through, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person recognize what is real in what they were handed.

Keeping and putting down at the same time

Here is the hard work, and I do not think there is a shortcut through it.

Almost nobody gets handed a pure inheritance. What comes down a family line is always a mixture: something genuinely from God, wrapped in a set of assumptions that came from a time, a place, a wound, or a fear.

And there are two easy ways out of that, and both of them are lies.

The first is to keep all of it, which means never examining anything, and calling that loyalty. The second is to throw all of it out, which means treating the people who raised you as if they had nothing, and calling that freedom.

The honest road is to do the sorting, item by item, over years, and it is slow and it does not feel triumphant at any point.

You are able to keep what is real and put down what is not, and Scripture has never once asked anybody to take an inheritance whole or not at all. 1 Thessalonians 5:21 says prove all things and hold fast that which is good, and the Spirit of God is the one who does that sorting inside a person without contempt.

What a grandmother actually gives

I want to name what actually comes down a line like that, because it is easy to reduce it to doctrine and it is not mostly doctrine.

What a person gets from a praying grandmother is not a theological position. It is the knowledge that God is a real person you can talk to out loud. It is the sound of somebody being honest with Him in a kitchen when they thought nobody could hear. It is the fact that Scripture is a thing that gets opened rather than a thing that sits on a shelf.

None of that is a doctrinal statement and all of it is load bearing. A person can correct a bad teaching in an afternoon. Nobody can manufacture the other thing in themselves at forty.

That is why the tone of this matters so much. Somebody who throws the whole thing out because a piece of it was wrong has thrown away the only part they could not have gotten anywhere else.

You were given something you could not have built yourself, and no error in the packaging has ever once devalued it. 2 Timothy 1:5 traces the real thing back through two women, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person feel gratitude and disagreement in the same chest.

Stir up the gift

There is one more thing Paul says two verses later, and it belongs here.

Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee.

Stir up. That is a word about a fire that has settled into coals. It is still there. It has not gone out. But it needs somebody to get in there and move it around, and Paul is telling a man who was raised right that being raised right is not the same as being currently on fire.

So the inheritance is real and it is not sufficient. It got him started and it will not carry him, and at some point every person who was handed something has to pick it up themselves.

You have a fire in you that came through them, and it has never once been able to stay lit without you. 2 Timothy 1:6 says stir up the gift of God which is in thee, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes something inherited and makes it a person's own.