1 Timothy 1:18-20 (September 15, 2024)

We can turn in your Bibles to 1st Timothy, 1st Timothy chapter 1. We're going to finish up chapter 1 as we're going, we're just making our way through this book a few verses at a time.

We come to verses 18 through 20 this morning. Verses 18 through 20, 1st

Timothy chapter 1. As we look at this, the question that I want to put before you is this.

How do we make it safely home? How do we make it safely home?

Or to use the sailing metaphor that Paul uses in this passage, how do we make it safely to harbor?

Or to put it more explicitly, how do we make it safely to heaven? We all want to come to the end of our lives faithfully.

We all want to end well and before then, between now and then, we don't want to just royally mess it up.

How do we make it safely home? Today we're going to see

Paul, in these verses, he's going to reissue his charge to Timothy to oppose false teachers within the church.

Telling him to wage the good warfare, to fight the good fight, having faith and a good conscience.

That is, Timothy is to watch his own life and he is to watch his own doctrine closely.

He's to watch the life and doctrine of those there in the church in Ephesus as well. Because if one does not hold to sound doctrine and live an obedient life and a moral life, that person will make a shipwreck of their life and their faith.

And ships that wreck do not make it safely to harbor. Those that are shipwrecked, they need to be rescued.

So Paul tells of how the church is to go about that too. Naming two specific people who are in that very situation that the church there in Ephesus would know about.

And so, you want to make it safely home, safely to harbor, safely to heaven.

You want to end your life, well, let's look at 1 Timothy 1 verses 18 -20 and be encouraged to fight the good fight of faith, keeping watch on our life and doctrine.

Let me read these verses for us. God's word says, This charge I commit to you, son

Timothy, according to the prophecies previously made concerning you, that by them you may wage the good warfare, having faith and a good conscience, which some, having rejected concerning the faith, have suffered shipwreck, of whom are

Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I delivered to Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme.

This is God's word to us this morning. I want us to begin in verse 18 where Paul begins that sentence with this charge.

And by this, he is referring back to verse 3. So we saw this a couple of weeks ago in verse 3 where he charged

Timothy to then charge the church to teach no other doctrine. And then in the verses that we considered last week,

Paul goes on a little bit of a tangent, a little bit of an aside, establishing his authority to make this command to Timothy, establishing his authority in the ministry, answering possible objections to his ministry on the basis of his past sins.

He acknowledged there that we saw last week, he acknowledged that he is the chief of sinners, but he points to Christ from whom he had received mercy.

He points to Christ, saying that the very reason Christ Jesus came into this world was to save sinners like he was.

Paul doesn't dispute his past wickedness, but glories in Christ from whom he had received this mercy and forgiveness.

And then having defended his ministry against his possible objections, he now returns to his original thought from verse 3.

He returns to it in verse 18, charging Timothy that he was to charge the church to teach no other doctrine, to not give heed to fables, endless genealogies, and idle talk.

That was where Paul was back in verse 3. And now he says in verse 18, this charge

I commit to you, son Timothy, according to the prophecies made concerning you.

So he's reissuing that charge and he's appealing to these prophecies that were made concerning Timothy. Now we don't know exactly what these prophecies were.

We do know, because it says it right here, that there were prophecies made concerning him. These were likely uttered when he was ordained to the ministry by the laying on of hands.

And Timothy was to look back on these prophecies and he was to draw strength and draw courage and confidence from them.

For he had been called by God to this work. That's what these prophecies show.

He was appointed by Paul, who we saw in verse 1, was an apostle of Jesus Christ by commandment of God our

Savior, and the Lord Jesus Christ our hope. So the first way we know that Timothy was called to this work is that God's apostle

Paul had appointed him. In Paul's absence, Timothy stood in Paul's place.

And so you can trace Timothy's authority in the church, appointed by Paul, who was appointed by God. And then we also see that these prophecies were made concerning him and his appointing, demonstrating

Timothy was called by God for this purpose. He was put there in the church in Ephesus to do

God's work there, to protect the church, lead the church, tend the sheep there, and protect them and charge them from teaching no other doctrine.

Now these prophecies, they don't work like magic. Timothy still had things to do. He still had to fan and to flame the gift of God which was in him through the laying on of hands, 2

Timothy 1 .6. He still had to do the things that God called him to do. He still had to preach and to teach and to charge and to protect.

He had to do all those things. Not giving in to sloth or timidity or inactivity, but as one commentator put it, to cheerfully comply with providence.

God had put him there, and then he was there to do those things. And this is what

Paul's doing. He's motivating Timothy to do that which God had called him to do, to wage the good warfare, to fight, fight, fight the good faith, and to do so more courageously.

For what can give us more courage and confidence than to know that God has appointed us to do the very thing that we are doing?

Timothy needed to hear this, to be spurred on to the love and good deeds that God had appointed for him to do there in Ephesus.

He needed to hear that fighting, that striving, laboring for true doctrine in the church was good, worthy, noble, glorious.

That opposing these real, specific, in the flesh people to their face, that that was a good thing.

To do that before the church that he was to serve, that was a good thing.

I believe we also need to hear this from Paul in our day, because our cultural norms of politeness and our cultural sensibilities and values go hard against those who dare to stand for truth and sound doctrine.

You see, we as a kind of a broader society, we don't make big deals about doctrine. And we don't make big deals about learning enough of the

Bible to be able to recognize and discern true doctrine from false.

Or we call it unloving to name someone who is teaching falsely, false doctrine.

And it's impolite to tell someone that they're wrong. We're just supposed to go along and get along.

But that is not what Paul says here. He charges Timothy to wage the good warfare.

Now we understand this when we're talking about actual physical war. Many of you, your fathers and grandfathers were deployed to Europe or the

Pacific back in World War II. And it was a noble affair and a worthy one, but it was not a polite affair.

I mean, they're shooting real bullets at real people, and real people are shooting real bullets back at them. Because real things were at stake.

And sometimes within church life, whether in a local particular church or in a denomination or association of churches, we find ourselves with real things, real people at stake.

And so we must wage the good warfare. Of course, how we do that matters.

Verse 19, having faith and a good conscience. We must wage the good warfare having faith and a good conscience.

By faith, Paul here means doctrine. It's what he calls in this letter and others, the faith.

So having the doctrine. And then also by good conscience, Paul means to point to the character of our lives.

We are to live in accordance with that faith, with that doctrine. And we're to do so sincerely, without hypocrisy.

In other words, and we're going to see this repeatedly throughout as we go through 1 Timothy, because it's a big theme.

In other words, we are to watch our life and doctrine closely. What we believe and how we live.

And those things go together. What you believe should inform and shape how you live, but often how you live will inform and shape what you believe.

And so we are to guard the good deposit that was given to us, sound doctrine. But the only way to keep that sound doctrine secure is to guard it with a holy life.

And that is to keep a good conscience, verse 19. Paul then says that some have rejected this.

So you keep going in verse 19. It says, having faith and a good conscience, which some having rejected concerning the faith have suffered shipwreck.

Some, he's speaking generally at this point, have rejected life and doctrine, faith and a good conscience.

And the result has been disastrous. The result for them is they made a shipwreck of their faith. They made a shipwreck of their life.

They did not make it safely to harbor. See, when you lose either one of these, when you lose the faithful life or you lose the sound doctrine, the wheels come off.

Fear of God is extinguished. Envy, pride, and lust take over.

And sin always leads to destruction. Sin always promises life on one hand, but it never can deliver on that promise.

It only brings death. We see this in James chapter 1. Then when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin.

And sin, when it's full grown, brings forth death.

Then Paul moves on from talking about this very generally, some, to very specifically,

Hymenaeus and Alexander. He names two people that Timothy and likely the Ephesian church there will know of personally.

He says, of whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander. And Paul here, he's not afraid to name names.

Now who are these men? There's some dispute about which Alexander this is.

There's other Alexanders mentioned in some of Paul's letters as well. But he named Hymenaeus again in 2

Timothy 2, verses 17 and 18. In that passage, he's again telling

Timothy to charge the church to not strive about words, to no profit, or to the ruin of the hearers.

2 .14 And then he names Hymenaeus and his false teaching. Hymenaeus' teaching that the resurrection had already passed.

And Paul is saying that by this, that he had strayed from the truth. 2

Timothy 2 .17 And his concern there in 2 Timothy 2 is made explicit.

And I think it's the same concern that he has in 1 Timothy 1. The concern is that such idle words and false teaching lead to, quote, an increase to more ungodliness, 2 .16,

and to overthrowing the faith of some, 2 .18. So what you see here is there are idle words and false teaching, and they are having a negative effect on the other members of the church, and causing them, leading them into ungodliness or just overthrowing the faith all together.

And this is the reason that Paul names specific false teaching and specific false teachers.

He is concerned for the godliness and the faith of the rest of the people in the church. He does not want them to be harmed.

He does not want them to be led astray. He wants them to make it safely home.

If Timothy had been gentle and coddling to Hymenaeus and Alexander, that would mean he was being harsh with the rest of the people of the church.

For to be gentle with wolves is to be harsh with sheep. There is no place in Christ's church for a minister to be afraid to deal with threats to Christ's people.

That is what Paul is telling Timothy to do. It is the height of unfaithfulness for a

Christian minister to abdicate his responsibility to protect the sheep entrusted to his care. And I say that with trembling, because I know my own propensity towards people -pleasing.

I'm well acquainted with how easy it is to talk about all the evils out there and how excruciating it is to talk about the sins in here.

You have to look somebody in the eyes and tell them, no, that's wrong, that's dangerous, that's not good for you, it's not good for the people that you love.

I'm not immune to the cultural pressures and sensibilities and customs and norms. But here's the thing, the

Bible says what it says. Wage the good warfare.

Tend my sheep. Guard the good deposit. We don't get to disobey just because it is difficult.

Now the church has been dealing with false teaching for a long time. The church has dealt with heresies and heterodoxies and all sorts of things throughout her history.

There have been controversies about the deity of Christ. There have been controversies about the humanity of Christ. There's been controversies about the

Trinity. There's been controversies about the nature and extent of salvation. Talking about universalism here. There's been controversies about Gnosticism and the role of the physical world.

There's been controversies about whether the God of the Old Testament is the same as the God of the New Testament.

How one is justified with God. The trustworthiness of the Bible. It's inerrancy, it's infallibility.

Whether the miracles of the Bible are true. Disputes about creation and evolution. You go back to Acts and Galatians and you see

Paul dealing with false teaching there about circumcision. And whether one had to become Jewish in order to become

Christian. There was always some threat to sound doctrine. Today I believe the greatest threats and heresies revolve around anthropology.

That is the doctrine of humanity. Here we're talking about sexuality, manhood, womanhood.

There's all sorts of dangerous teaching out there about these things. Things that undermine God's good design and creation.

Things, threats that undermine the sufficiency of God's word.

Whether by importing evolutionary doctrine, Marxist ideology or pop psychology into Christian teaching.

There are always threats to sound teaching. And so we must always be on guard against false teaching.

So on the authority of Christ I would charge you that no one teach such false doctrines in this church.

Now I don't think we have that problem here currently. And I praise God for that. And I intend to do my level best to keep it that way.

Because the Bible says what it says. Now Hymenaeus, Alexander and others they had strayed from the truth.

They made a shipwreck of their faith and led others to overthrow their faith and increase into more ungodliness.

So how did Paul handle that? How did Paul handle them? Let's go back to verse 20.

Of whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander? Whom I delivered to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.

Now what does that mean? What does that mean to hand someone over to Satan? I believe this was referring to excommunication.

There is safety in God's church. There is safety in the church where God's spirit is and where God's people are.

And so to hand someone over to Satan then is to put them outside of the church. To be removed from the safety of the church.

Delivering them to the wiles of the devil. To treat them as the unbelievers that they are living like.

Now the purpose of this is two fold. First it is to protect the church.

It is to protect the other sheep of the church. So you remember Hymenaeus' false teaching was leading to an increase to more ungodliness.

To overthrowing the faith of some. So it was dangerous to keep them inside the church because they were leading others astray.

One commentator said it like this. The greatest injury done by wicked men is when they mingle with others under the pretense of faith.

The power of doing injury is taken from them when they are branded with public infamy and shamed and shunned.

Because people then know they are not to be trusted. And so church discipline of an individual is done to protect the rest of the group.

The rest of the church. Second purpose, it's two fold. Second, such action is done in hopes of the redemption and salvation of the one being excommunicated.

See the last part of verse 20. That they may learn not to blaspheme.

This is tough love. It is tough love that is meant to lead them to repentance.

Paul hands them over to be tormented by Satan so that they can be confronted with the seriousness of their sin.

And through pain turn from it. This is just a larger scale version of why parents spank their kids.

The hope there when you are disciplining your kids with spanking is that through measured, acute, temporary pain.

The child will learn not to lie or back talk or his sister. This is the same principle. Is that through pain they might learn not to blaspheme.

I want to read to you from 1 Corinthians 5. This is a related passage. Has some similar language in it. 1 Corinthians 5 verses 1 through 5.

Says it is actually reported, this is Paul writing to the Corinthian church. It's actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you.

And such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles. That a man has his father's wife.

That's the situation. So far the church has refused to deal with it. So Paul chastens them in the next few verses.

And you are puffed up and have not rather mourned that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you.

For I indeed as absent in body but present in spirit have already judged as though I were present him who has so done this deed.

So he chastens them. Because the church had kept going as if this grievous sin wasn't happening among them.

When it was. So then let's now see what Paul tells them to do. He says in the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ. When you are gathered together along with my spirit. With the power of our

Lord Jesus Christ. Deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.

That his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. He says when you come together.

This is a church action that's going to happen. This isn't an individualized church action. Together. In the name and power of Christ.

It's not a church action alone. It is the action of Christ through his body the church. It is his authority. And his action at work through his body the church.

And he says do this. Deliver such a one over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh.

Now. This sounds a little bit harsh yeah. But is it?

You may ask is God harsh? Of course not. So two things are true.

If God is not harsh. And God says to hand over a high handed unrepentant sinner to Satan for the destruction of his flesh.

Then that instruction cannot be harsh. At least not in the sinful sense of the word harsh that we understand.

So God's not harsh. But testimony to scripture is that God is severe. You go read

Romans. Paul talks about he speaks of both the kindness and severity of God. God is not sinfully harsh.

But he does deal severely at times with people. Think of Achan who brought sin into the

Israelite camp. Think of Ananias and Sapphira who lied to the Holy Spirit. Moses he didn't allow him into the promised land.

Canaanites when their idolatrous iniquity was full they were purged from the land. Think of Hebrews 12.

God disciplines every son he loves. It says for whom the Lord loves he chastens and scourges every son whom he receives.

You see God is too loving and too holy to leave his people in their sins. Therefore the church should be too loving and too holy to leave their people in their sins.

Now to be sure we must be careful not to take any action ever from malice, anger, spite, vengeance.

But we also must be careful not to abdicate our duty out of a misplaced sensitivity or untethered empathy or fear of being severe.

Because to do so would put the rest of the church in harm's way. And leave the sinner languishing in his or her sins.

Neither of which are actually loving if we define love according to the Bible.

Now I'm aware of how this sounds. I'm aware of the many ways this could be hijacked, misapplied, misunderstood, misused, weaponized.

Some of you have been around churches long enough. You've seen such misuse before.

But remember the principle misuse does not negate right use. Misuse does not negate right use.

And the Bible says what it says. And we're not at liberty to disregard the parts of the

Bible that we don't find pleasant. Rather we must put our hand to the plow in that unpleasantness so that we might see redemption.

So verse 20 says Paul handed them over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme. 1

Corinthians 5 he tells the church to deliver such a one over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh that his spirit may be saved in the day of the

Lord Jesus. And so we see the purpose of church discipline is redemption and restoration.

That's the goal towards which we are laboring. But too many Christians want redemption without the price.

We want resurrection without the cross. We want glory without suffering. But God does not work that way.

Jesus secured our redemption but he did it through suffering. He did it on the cross. And so we too must be willing to do the hard, arduous, painful work of church discipline if and when circumstances arise that warrant it.

Now when the issue is false teaching like with Hymenaeus, the lines are pretty clear.

At least they ought to be pretty clear. This is one reason that I believe churches ought to have written agreed upon statements of faith.

And I hope in the coming years to lead us into adopting a statement of faith into our governing documents.

We don't actually currently have one. Because this makes guarding doctrine, not having one, makes guarding doctrine difficult because you don't have an agreed upon standard.

I think we have that informally. I'd argue that our default statement of faith is the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.

But I'd also argue that every church really needs to have it in writing. But thankfully

I believe we have much consensus about doctrine here. And so I praise God for that.

And that consensus makes it where the lines around false teaching are pretty clear. That's the faith part of verse 19, the doctrine part.

But things get a little more tricky when it comes to the good conscience part of verse 19. Things get a little more tricky when it comes to the life of the life and doctrine.

How one is living. Because now you're getting into sins. Now we're getting into making judgments about how one is living outside of God's way.

This gets hard. And it raises the question of what sins should a church discipline for?

I want to venture an answer here in just a moment. But first we must make a distinction between two different types of discipline, informal and formal.

And we must highlight the fact that church discipline does not equal excommunication. Or as we southerners like to say, churching someone.

Church discipline is the broad category. And there's a lot there.

Excommunication is just one part of that. It is the last resort aspect of that. It is not the first action.

And it is certainly not the most desirable. And so we remember those two things are not synonymous.

One is part of a larger whole. But first I want to make a distinction between informal discipline and formal discipline.

Informal church discipline involves just the regular ministries and the life of the church. So being formed and shaped by Lord's Day worship each

Sunday. Preaching and teaching of the word. Counseling. Words of correction.

Whether that's from a pastor or a deacon or a fellow church member. Somebody sees something in somebody's life and just kind of, not that way but this way.

This is just regular Christian life. We ought to be iron sharpening iron.

Spurring one another on to love and good deeds. Including the good deeds of confession and repentance from sin.

This is just plain old vanilla Christianity. And it is informally training our people towards godliness.

Discipline. Discipline just means training, right? However, there are times when the sins within a congregation arise that warrant formal discipline.

Sometimes there are sins that are just degrees of grievousness more serious. Some sins are uniquely destructive to oneself or family or to the church or to the church's witness in the community.

Some sins are uniquely public and must be dealt with. Some sins are uniquely perpetual or persistent.

They're habitual and need to be dealt with more formally because the informal ways are not working.

Sins aren't being put away and they're harming others. If you want a more specific idea of what types of sins would be included.

I'd suggest that 1 Corinthians 5 gives us a really good place to start. I don't think that's exhaustive but I think it's a good place to start.

There Paul speaks of the sexually immoral, covetous, idolater, reviler, drunkard, extortioner.

Churches have also long disciplined for chronic absence from worship. For forsaking the assembly that Hebrews 10 .25

commands. This is a good starting place for seeing what types of sins would warrant that.

And God has graciously given us instructions in Matthew chapter 18 for how to do this.

There Jesus instructs us to do the following. He says go to the person who sinned and tell him his fault. And the hope here is that he just repents.

This is kind of informal at this point. The hope here is that he repents and that's the end of it. You've won your brother Jesus says.

But if he will not hear it then you take two or more. So that by two or three witnesses the charge may be established. I think two things are meant there.

One if there are two or three witnesses for the original offense you take them. Because they can establish the fact of it.

But also at play is you take one or two people along. You make a gracious group appeal for repentance.

If he refuses then you have two or three witnesses that bear witness to the church. Of his refusal to repent of that gracious call towards it.

Because the next step is to take it to the congregation. Take it to the assembled church Jesus says. The church needs those two or three witnesses to justly entertain the charge.

That's the standard of justice in the Old Testament. Two or three witnesses. If he still won't repent. Then Jesus' words here.

He is to be treated as a heathen and tax collector. That is an unbeliever. Or in Paul's words to be handed over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh.

That he may learn not to blaspheme but be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. That's the process that Jesus gives to us for handling these things.

Now I am really happy that I am not preaching this message on church discipline today.

Because we're in need of it. I promise you there's no situation that I'm bringing up at the next members meeting. I'm only preaching this because it's right here.

We turn the page. We preach the text. It's there. This is one of the beauties of preaching through books of the

Bible. I didn't choose the topic. The Holy Spirit did. And by doing it this way we come to topics that we wouldn't have chosen otherwise.

Here's the thing. I believe it's in God's providence. That he had us here looking at 1

Timothy 1 18 -20 this morning. I trust that God is using the truth from his word to sharpen us and shape us.

I don't exactly know how or why. Perhaps it is preparatory for some situation we're going to face a few years down the road.

And we'll be well taught on it and prepared for it. Or maybe there's some of you here that need to hear this as a warning.

Because you're teetering. Nobody knows it but you're teetering on the edge of falling into serious sin.

Maybe this is one of those snap to reality moments. To get you back on track. To lead you to confess and repent.

That's you this morning. I want you to receive the discipline of the Lord through his word this morning.

Receive the admonition of the Lord through his word and his ministry this morning.

And turn from your sin and confession and repentance. And turn to Jesus Christ and to his way.

You too can obtain mercy and be spared from the destruction of your flesh at the hands of Satan.

Be a quick study in learning not to blaspheme. In learning not to revile God's word.

Stop now before it gets any more serious. And to all of us this morning.

The encouragement throughout this letter is to all of us. Watch your life and doctrine closely.

For this is the only way to make it safely home.

Let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, help us to take your word utterly serious.

Let us never be flippant about what you have said to us. Never flippant about your commands.

About how you expect us to live. Your word tells us to be holy as you are holy.

Father I pray that we will live holy lives. That you would enable us and we would lay aside every sin which so easily besets us.

And so easily weighs us down. Freed from its burden by your mercy and your grace.

And we thank you for your mercy and grace. But let us not ever think that your grace means we don't have to obey.

No your grace makes it possible that we can obey. We don't sin so that grace can abound.

As Paul so adamantly refuted in Romans chapter 6. Grace abounds so that we can walk in holiness.

And so help us because we know we are weak. Lord you know our frame. You know that we are dust.

Lord help us. Lord help us to help one another walk holy.

And walk worthy of the high calling that we have in Jesus Christ. Lord I hope we never have to deal with high handed unrepentant grievous sin here.

But Lord if we ever do. Give us courage and give us strength to do it right.

And may it end in redemption. To the glory of your name.

Once again we return thanks to you. For the mercy we have in Christ Jesus.

We all can confess with Paul that we are the chief of sinners. But we all can confess that we have been washed.

Cleansed. Sanctified. Justified. By the grace of the