There is no atmosphere which seems to suit the neighborhood of heaven better than that of family affection. We have witness of this in the Word.
Jacob was dying. Joseph brings his two sons to the bedside. The patriarch has an important business to fulfill under the Holy Ghost. He has to adopt these children of a strange woman into the family, and give them the highest privileges of the loins of Abraham. He has to utter the counsel of God concerning them—that the elder was to serve the younger. And he has to give Joseph one portion above his brethren—the earnest of the right and inheritance of the first-born.
But ere he sets himself to finish all this weighty matter which concerned the order of the people of God on the earth he indulges his heart in company with his son, going over some family recollections, and retouching in his soul some of the tenderest personal sensibilities. He speaks to Joseph about his mother's grave, when she had died, and where she was buried. This is not without its purpose. He was on the skirts of the heavenly land, where family affection is to bloom in its full loveliness, where the many-mansioned house of the Father is to witness the dwelling of the brethren and the marriage of the Lamb; and the heart thus in the glow of family happiness was in spirit nearest to it.
So in 2 Timothy. Paul was ready to be offered. The time of his departure was at hand. And he has a weighty business to do with Timothy—to advise, encourage, and instruct him, under the Holy Ghost, touching the churches here. But ere he enters on that, like the dying patriarch, he indulges his heart in company with his dear son over some family recollections. He tells Timothy of his own forefathers, and reminds him of the faith of his mother and grandmother. He calls up the remembrance of Timothy's personal affection for him, thus to gratify his own heart by such glances at past days, when the flow of fervent desire went from heart to heart between them.
And this was the atmosphere in which the spirit of Paul thus moved and had its being, now that he had come to the very borders of the heavenly country. It suited—none better—those purer regions. And happy to have such a witness of such a truth. The Spirit, conducting the elect, whether Jacob or Paul, whether in the earliest or latest days, to the neighborhood of the holy Jerusalem, gives them to breathe the element of simple family affection, and to indulge the heart in the joy of well-known personal attachment.