Addressing his disciple Timothy with a letter, Paul reminds him of the gift of God that he received during prayer with the laying on of hands, and that he must now constantly renew within himself. As is clear, during that prayer Timothy experienced a certain kind of spiritual initiation, that renewal of life, inward and outward, which truly makes a person different, new, opening new life and new possibilities to him. But such effects are never one-time events. A person's transformation is a long and gradual process; one encounter with God, one outpouring of God's breath, even a strong and vivid one, almost never ends the matter. Such an outpouring can begin the process of spiritual change, but after that the person will have to work himself, and above all he will have to understand what has happened to him, the new thing that has entered his life, the new possibilities God has opened to him, and the new tasks God has placed before him. This is the work the apostle reminds his disciple about.

At the same time Paul describes the spirit Timothy received, and that he himself had received earlier, as a spirit of "power, love, and self-control," not of fear or timidity ("fearfulness"). At the center here, as is clear, stands love, accompanied by "power" and "self-control." The "power" mentioned by the apostle is that divine energy which has sustained the being of the universe from the very beginning of its existence and which can manifest itself in a special way where God wants to mark His presence in a special way. Thanks to it, God's miracles do not remain purely spiritual phenomena, receiving the possibility of affecting also the natural processes taking place in the world. By "self-control" (or more precisely, by the corresponding Greek word), Paul means not simply "innocence" in the sexual sense in which it is understood today, but the inner wholeness of a person at all his levels: wholeness of will, wholeness of inner life, and finally wholeness of outward life too, without which a person is not complete.

Such wholeness makes a person a bearer of God's power, which otherwise will not manifest itself in him. But at the center stands not power and not wholeness; at the center is the love with which the Kingdom is permeated and which there, in the Kingdom, is the medium for all relationships existing in it, including the chief ones - the relationship between the Father and the Son, through which the Kingdom exists. It is within and in the context of the Father's relationship with the Son, within the Kingdom, that both wholeness and any manifestations of God's power are possible. But God's breath, the breath of the Kingdom, can exist in a person only in the process of constant renewal: breath cannot be stopped; it exists only in motion. These are the foundational things for Christian life that the apostle reminds his disciple about.

Paul writes this letter at a time when his situation was not very enviable. His apostleship brought him not only joy and the ability to work miracles, but also much suffering. That is why these words about fear are so important here. "For God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of power and love and self-control." In order to preach, one must be truly fearless and not be ashamed to testify to what Jesus commanded, even when it runs counter to the principles on which the pagan world was founded. Paul encourages Timothy by telling him that God gives him this fearlessness, that it is a special gift received by the faithful.

Each of us is called to be an apostle, to bring the light of the Gospel into the world through our life. At times this requires real courage, which only the Savior Himself can give. Even if you are not threatened with mortal danger, living in our world according to the Beatitudes requires an almost knightly bravery.

The human mind is resourceful; this has been known long and well. So has the fact that it is the greatest flatterer in the world: if a person very much wants to convince himself of something, prove something to himself, or justify something for himself, his mind is glad to try and please him. It will find the needed arguments and offer such interpretations of perfectly obvious facts that, if the person wants, they will allow him to see those facts as completely different from what they really are. This activity of the human mind turns out to be especially "useful" when certain facts simply refuse to fit within the framework of a scheme, concept, or theory devised by the same human mind.

Something like this happened when certain "scribes" (apparently learned rabbis or teachers of Torah from the Jerusalem academy) began to claim that Jesus supposedly cast out dark spirits by using the power of their own head, the ruler of the world of shadows and the kingdom of death, one of whose names was Beelzebul. The absurdity of such a claim was obvious, and Jesus immediately pointed it out to the scribes: if everything were as they claimed, that would be a tremendous stroke of good fortune, because it would mean that a split had occurred in the kingdom of darkness, so that fighting it would now be quite easy. It was obvious to everyone that nothing of the sort was to be expected.

The scribes simply proposed a theory that could explain what was happening without destroying their own concepts, above all their messianic concepts, and some others as well. This Man, they said, violates the Law given by God (in reality, the prescriptions invented by people and proposed as an interpretation of that very Law given by God); therefore He cannot be a man of God; therefore He cannot heal; and since He nevertheless heals, then... at this point the new theory came in handy: therefore, He heals by the wrong power, not by God's power. The logic is preserved, but it has no relation to reality.

Yet a person who wants to deceive himself tries not to notice this, and truly does not notice it, while the mind helps him remain in ignorance. A person's life is determined not by mind and not by logic, but by will, which compels a person to choose and decide. This includes choosing what he wants to see and what he does not want to see. And seeing what one wants or failing to notice what one does not want is not so hard; when needed, both mind and feelings will help with this. They cannot resist the will, which determines who and what a person will be before God and people.