Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, July 12, 2026
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Modeling the good news of Jesus Christ starts with having confidence in the Gospel. And having confidence in the Gospel starts with rereading your own story through lenses of humility, honesty and grace.
It’s difficult for us to imagine Christianity as a new faith or as a marginal one. In the United States, Christianity is running on 2,000 years of doctrinal, ecclesiastical, and societal momentum. It’s had time to become an institution powerful enough to shape the people who adhere to it and the people who don’t.
We need to take great care to sympathize with Timothy as we read this story, because his Christianity is nothing like ours. It is small. It is scattered. It is decentralized and at constant ideological odds with itself. It has no brand recognition. It has no market share. It doesn’t even really have a name—Paul, Timothy, and their contemporaries certainly wouldn’t have referred to themselves as Christians.
It would be safe to assume that Paul is writing to Timothy because Timothy needs reassurance in uncharted territory. Guidance in his ministerial charge. The central questions we encounter through Timothy today are: How do I model something that doesn’t quite exist yet? How do I lead something that I’m not entirely sure I understand?
We might not be living in Timothy’s world, but when we really think about it, our world forces us to ask those exact same questions. We might not be operating in Timothy’s church, but when we really think about it, our church is animated by the same Holy Spirit as his.
And that means that our Gospel isn’t actually as cut-and-dried as we fall victim to thinking it is. Our relationship to the Living Word is just as fresh—just as ever-changing—as Timothy’s.
We can’t claim that we always know what it means to have confidence in the Gospel. So maybe Timothy’s Christianity is actually a little bit like ours. Maybe we can listen for the same wisdom that Timothy listens for in his first letter, today.
Paul tells us here that sharing the good news of Jesus hinges on having confidence in that good news. Not an intellectual mastery of it; not a systematic understanding of it; not the ability to draw complex flowcharts and matrices on a whiteboard to accurately map it out; but confidence in it. And confidence implies a personal experience with the Gospel—an embodied, ongoing engagement of our faith.
Verses 12-16 are written as a testimonial. Paul lays out his own encounters with God’s saving grace in order to speak to how Timothy might frame things for himself. Paul imposes interpretive lenses of humility, love, and salvation on his self-reflections—lenses that he can revisit time and time again in order to grow his confidence (and, by extension, the confidence of others).
How might the lenses of humility, love and salvation change your own self-reflection this week? If your faith were an emerging faith—virtually unknown to the rest of the world—how would you talk about it? Live into it? Share it? The combination of those answers will lead you to understanding more deeply what your own confidence in the Gospel looks like.
