The greeting

The greeting is very similar to that of the first letter and follows the same standard form, leading into thanksgiving. But what follows has a particularly personal warmth and intimacy which is sustained throughout the letter. Timothy is addressed as my beloved child.

Thanksgiving and encouragement

What binds them particularly together is Timothy's sincere faith which he has inherited from his grandmother through his mother. It may seem surprising that in this instance the faith has already been transmitted over three generations, as if the grandmother had been converted to Christianity first, followed by the mother and then finally the son. But we notice that Paul says that he worshipped God as his ancestors did, and since Eunice (and presumably Lois) were Jewish (Acts 16.1), then Timothy's ‘faith’ may (like Paul's) mean the devotion to God which he showed as a Jew before his or their conversion to Christianity. All three generations may have been models of that traditional Jewish piety which Christianity inherited and only partly modified.

Timothy's faith and piety, then, had long been habitual to him. In addition he had received, by the laying on of Paul's hands, both a commission and a gift of God enabling him to perform it. But this too, for all its supernatural origin, was something which (as modern experience will endorse) could in due course be taken for granted and lose its potency unless one were periodically to rekindle it by an effort of will; and to assist this process of ‘rekindling’, the writer devotes a few words to the Spirit which is imparted with the ‘gift’.