2 Timothy 1:13

The double ground of Appeal is also the double line of Responsive Action

13. Hold fast the form of sound words Rather, Hold to the model; the word for -form has occurred in 1 Timothy 1:16. As Bp Lightfoot points out, Clem, ad Cor. c. v. fin., the compound signifies the first roughly modelled block in the sculptor's art; just as in the sister art the similarly formed compound hypogrammosis the pencil drawing to be traced over in ink, or the outline to be filled in and coloured. Cf. 1 Peter 2:21, leaving you an example that ye should follow his steps." Hold to or keep to rather than -hold fast," because it is the simple not the compound verb.

sound words Here opposed to the gangrene of Hymenæus and Philetus, ch. 2 Timothy 2:17, see notes on 1 Timothy 1:10; Titus 1:9. Add the following from Dean Vaughan on - The Wholesome Words of Jesus Christ," Cambridge -University Sermons" of 1866. -Never before through the whole volume of his letters has St Paul applied that term to the Gospel. Now it is almost his only epithet for it.… New experiences make new expressions.… St Paul himself saw the first symptoms of this morbid action of the Gospel; alternations of hectic flush and deadly pallor; of a pulse now throbbing, now torpid; of lost appetite and broken sleep; of deformed excrescence and palsied limb.… Each falsehood in religion is some overstrained onesided or isolated truth. Either free grace or free will either faith or duty either truth or charity either dependence or responsibility either the Humanity or the Divinity not both, not all this has been in all time the oscillation, the ebb and flow, of human doctrine; and the Gospel has been not healthy, not well, but sickly, at times almost dying, in consequence. The wholesome wordsare known by this sign that in them every part of the truth is equally present, every function of the life equally vigorous. Health is the balance of the powers: a healthy Gospel is one which holds in exact equilibrium opposite forces excluding nothing that is good, yet suffering no one good thing to engross and swallow up the whole."

which thou hast heard of me -Of" in the sense of from, the Latin anot de; so very frequently in A.V. representing the other meaning of a, -by"; cf. 1 Corinthians 11:32 -chastened of the Lord."

in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus The faith and the love are both -in Christ Jesus," and are, as Fairbairn puts it, -the spiritual element or frame of mind in which the pattern of things exhibited to him should be remembered and applied." The clause belongs to -keep," not (as Alford) to -heard." So A.V. and R.V., by the insertion of the comma. St Paul had as hissecret of activity and endurance the present sense of a present Saviour, and he longs for Timothy too to possess it as constantly. See note on 2 Timothy 2:1.