And the servant of the Lord must not strive. — Although these directions and commandments in all cases belong to God’s servants of every degree and calling, yet some of them, as we should expect from the nature of the Epistle, peculiarly apply to Timothy and those like Timothy specially devoted to the ministry of the Word. And so here everything which is likely to be the cause of strife, heart-burning, or hot words, is, St. Paul urges, singularly out of place in the life of a servant of that Lord who fulfilled to the letter that Isaiah prophecy of Messiah, “He shall not strive, nor cry; neither shall any man hear His voice in the streets.” (See Matthew 12:19-20.)
But be gentle unto all men. — Quiet and kind, not only to those belonging to the brotherhood of Christ, but, as is expressly mentioned, to all. It is noteworthy how, in these Pastoral Epistles — which contain, so to speak, the last general directions to believers in Jesus as to life as well as doctrine of perhaps the greatest of the inspired teachers — so many careful suggestions are given for the guidance of Christians in all their relations with the great heathen world. Conciliation may be termed the key-note of these directions. St. Paul would press upon Timothy and his successors the great truth that it was the Master’s will that the unnumbered peoples who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death should learn, by slow though sure degrees, how lovely and desirable a thing it was to be a Christian; should come at length to see clearly that Christ was, after all, the only lover and real friend of man.
Apt to teach, patient. — The Greek word is better rendered by the forbearing of the margin than by “patient.” Patient of wrong, however, best gives the full force of the original. This is what the servant of God should really aim at being: the teacher rather than the controversialist — rather the patient endurer of wrong than the fomenter of dissensions and wordy strifes.