“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
“. . . . which is why I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me. Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you” (2 Tim. 1:12-14).
Paul suffers with intelligence, and he does not allow that suffering to function as an incentive to get him to feel ashamed. This attitude of his is what he is exhorting Timothy to aspire to. If everybody in the world left everyone else completely alone, there would never be any reason to be ashamed. But the world offers incentives to shame, and included in those incentives are sufferings (many of which are shameful, like prison). Who normally goes to prison?
But the reason Paul was not ashamed was that he knew the one in whom he had trusted. Trusting in Jesus Christ meant that he did not trust the assessment of the world. Paul had had the gospel entrusted to him, and he knew that Christ was guarding what Paul himself was guarding. After Paul died, Christ continued to guard it. But this does not mean that we can become careless about it — Paul did not have a fatalistic view of God’s sovereignty. The fact that Christ was guarding what had been entrusted to Paul was not grounds for Paul to become negligent — quite the reverse. And Paul urges Timothy to take the same view. Because Christ is protecting the “pattern of sound words,” this means that Timothy should take care to follow those same words. But he is not to follow the pattern of sound words like a doctrine-monger — he is to do this in the faith and love that are found in Christ. Further, this pattern, this “good deposit” has been entrusted to Timothy and he is to guard it by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us as Christians. The gospel had been entrusted to Paul, who entrusted it to Timothy, and both were to labor in protecting that gospel as they knew God was protecting it as well.