Paul's final charge to young Timothy carries the urgency of a dying man's last words. "Be instant" means to be urgent, pressing, ready at every moment. The gospel cannot wait for perfect circumstances, ideal audiences, or personal convenience. It must be proclaimed "in season and out of season"—when it is welcomed and when it is rejected, when it is fashionable and when it brings persecution, when we feel equipped and when we feel inadequate.

This urgency comes from understanding what is at stake. Souls hang in the balance between heaven and hell. Lives are being destroyed by sin while the remedy sits unused in our hearts. Yet Paul's instruction includes a crucial balance: we are to speak with "longsuffering"—patience, gentleness, enduring love. The gospel is urgent, but it is not harsh. It confronts sin, but it offers hope to the sinner. During a fierce thunderstorm, a woman felt compelled to take a gospel tract to her reclusive neighbor. Everything in her reasoned against it—the weather was terrible, the timing seemed wrong, her neighbor had never shown any interest in spiritual things. But something deeper than logic urged her on. Years later, that neighbor testified that the tract came on the very night he had planned to end his life. In his despair, he had cried out to God for a sign, for hope, for anything to keep going. The knock at his door was God's answer, delivered through a woman who chose to be "instant" when the Spirit prompted, regardless of the season.