1 Timothy 5:1-16 Getting Love Wrong

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsek preaches from his series, Blueprints for a Healthy Church, following the plan for the book of 1 Timothy.

Let's listen in.

Church as Family and the Call to Grow in Faith

Welcome to Recast Church. So I don't want you to forget where you are or anything. I'm Don Filsek. I'm the lead pastor here. And I'm really glad that you're here. I hope that you arrived this morning with a plan to hear God speak through his word.

That's really our goal. And our goal in our gatherings on Sunday morning is to grow in our faith. And what we mean here at Recast Church, we talk about maturity being growing in faith, growing in community, growing in service.

And when we talk about growing in faith, we believe that faith is not strengthened. You can't grow in it without contact with his word. And so growing in faith looks like taking in his word, believing it is truth enough that you go out and you base your life upon it.

And so that's what we mean by growing in faith. And I hope that that's your goal here this morning in this gathering. We come in contact with his word. We believe it's true that we go out and we live it in our daily lives.

Our text this morning is going to require a lot of historical explanation. And it's even going to require more work to apply this text in our current place and time in history. It's a little bit of a strange text when you read it at first.

And it might be one that you are not very familiar with in the New Testament. But as we dig in, you'll see what I'm talking about. Paul is going to spend 14 verses correcting an Ephesian church care program for widows.

And he is going to correct it so hard that it will barely exist by the end of his instructions. And that seems a little bit strange to our ears. And particularly where we live, we don't have a particular problem in the church in America with widows.

It's not a significant need. And there's some reasons for that culturally. But this text is going to require us to attempt to piece together what their program looked like in that ancient culture. And we will also need to understand why it needed correction.

And then we will need to figure out how that correction fixes things in our own heart. We need this. We're an increasingly... Here's what I want to kind of get at here at the start of the text as I'm introducing it.

Before we come to sing some songs together. We are an increasingly bleeding heart kind of people. Do you agree with me on that? There's a lot of compassion. There's a lot of feels. There's a lot driven by the emotions.

We're kind of, I would suggest, an increasingly knee-jerk kind of people who often do kind things for others. And I would suggest to you that by and large as a culture, we do it so that we'll feel good about ourselves.

We can give to all of the online giving programs. And what's one of them called? I just can't think of the big one. Everybody is on GoFundMe, right? So you can jump on GoFundMe and you can fund all different kinds of things from somebody's house burned down in California to somebody's going through major medical treatments out in Utah.

And you can get on there and you can just support and support and support without much thought about what our kindness is or isn't doing. Is it producing any fruit? Is there anything really coming of this?

Aside from just feeling like we're good. Other than just feeling like we're good people. And this makes the text suddenly more interesting because it forces us to ask the question here at the start. Could we do something that we think is loving that actually is harming others?

Could we possibly be doing things that we think is helpful and really is harmful? Do all church programs really result in good fruit? Is there a break point where the scales of helping tip over into hurting?

This text shows us an example of one such tipping point. And Paul was quick to take the axe to anything the church was doing that was leading toward division and sin. And so let's think about this. Let's think about this before we read it together.

The church at Ephesus, this is going to be a shocking statement. The church in Ephesus was being too generous.

What?

Did you say that wrong, Don? No, the church in Ephesus was being too generous. And it was causing problems. So ask yourself, can a church be too generous?

What?

Well, let's open our Bibles to 1 Timothy 5, 1 through 16 and see how the church in Ephesus was causing problems with their program of generosity to widows. So this is God's holy word. Again, 1 Timothy 5.

We're going to look at the first 16 verses and grab your device and navigate over to there so you can follow along as I read this. Recast God's holy and precious word, a strange word to us in our culture, in our context, but a word that we need.

And I'm convinced that God has revealed this to us because it's beneficial to us. 1 Timothy, starting in chapter 5. Do not rebuke an older man, but encourage him as you would a father. Younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters in all purity.

Honor widows who are truly widows. But if a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show godliness.

To their own households.

And to make some return to their parents. For this is pleasing in the sight of God. She who is truly a widow left all alone has set her hope on God and continues in supplications and prayers night and day.

But she who is self-indulgent is dead even while she lives. Command these things as well so that they may be without reproach. But if anyone does not provide for his relatives and especially for members of his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Let a widow be enrolled if she is not less than 60 years of age, having been the wife of one husband and having a reputation for good works. If she has brought up children, has shown hospitality, has washed the feet of the saints, has cared for the afflicted, and has devoted herself to every good work.

But refuse to enroll younger widows for when their passions draw them away from Christ, they desire to marry and so incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith. Besides that, they learn to be idlers, going about from house to house.

And not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry their children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander, for some have already strayed after Satan.

If any believing woman has relatives who are widows, let her care for them. Let the church not be burdened so that it may care for those who are truly widows.

Let's pray.

Father, I thank you for your word that strikes us at different places and at different times. And this is a strange word, a word about church programming, a word that does get down to the heart of our generosity and toward our kindness and the way that we roll as a church moving forward.

Father, I pray that you would guide and direct us into your truth. We don't get things right. I'm confident that we have programming. We do things that are not very fruitful, that are not very helpful.

We are not an extremely efficient organization, but we are indeed your people. And so Father, we lean on you to do the best that we can, trusting in you for the results of any kind of programming, any kind of desire that we have to reach out or reach in to people's hearts.

Father, we are thoroughly and completely dependent upon your Holy Spirit. But I pray that you would also make us a nimble organization. I pray that you would make us a nimble people who are quick to correct what is wrong in our midst, in our own hearts, and quick to keep short accounts with you.

Where you say, fix it, we would fix it in a heartbeat because we love you and we want to honor you. And so Father, I pray that you would draw this truth from this word down into our hearts today. Father, we have an opportunity to praise you in worship right now.

I pray that our voices would mingle together in the gathering of your people with joy and with delight. We are your saved and redeemed people. And from that place of a foundation where our sins have been washed away, where we are cleansed and we are purified in the blood of Jesus Christ.

From that place, I pray that our praise would rise to you with glad hearts, lightened this morning by the reminder that we belong to you. And I ask this in Jesus' name, amen.

Go ahead and be seated.

And get comfortable. Keep your Bibles open to 1 Timothy 5, 1 through 16. If you lost your place or you lost, reopen that device and make sure that the word of God is in front of you.

As we walk through this.

And as I say every week, if you need more coffee juice or donut holes while supplies last, it looks like there's one lonely bag of donut holes back there. So don't all race for it at the same time, but somebody's going to have to eat those.

So take advantage of that.

There goes Dave.

Somebody's going to have to arm wrestle him for it. The first two verses of our text serve as kind of an introduction to the familial relationships of what it means to be church. Now, there's all kinds of ways of thinking of the church, but only a couple are accurate.

Really, throughout the New Testament is the idea of family or the body of Christ. And so we serve one another. We serve Christ and in serving Christ, we serve one another. And in serving one another, we serve Christ.

And there's meant to be a deeper type of relationship that you have with the people sitting around you than you do just with anybody else in the world. Paul tells Timothy to watch carefully over the way that he interacts with others within the church.

And he does so with various categories. He says, for older men, he is not... Instructions from Paul to Timothy. For older men, he is not to give a stern or harsh rebuke, but when needed, and there may be times where an older man in the church needs some correction, he should encourage them respectfully as one would address their father.

Now, that presupposes some kind, respectful tone towards your father as well, of course, which isn't necessarily given in our culture anymore either. But it's obvious there is the intentional respect given to those who are older than us.

He is also equally told he's to treat younger men as brothers. Now, for some of us, that might not register anything at all. Raise your hand in the room if you have a brother. You ever punch him? You ever wrestle with him?

You ever get kind of snarky with them? Yeah, so brothers can be harsh to one another, right? I've got three younger stepbrothers. I beat them up regularly. But by encouraging us to think of younger men in the church like brothers, we at the bare minimum should have in our minds an ongoing intentional relationship with others.

If we're not careful, we can begin to, and I think that over years of church shopping and church hopping, we can begin to see relationships within the church as easily thrown away. And it ought not to be so, church.

We can burn bridges here and then just leave. As a matter of fact, you could walk out of here, shoo somebody out, walk out the front doors, and walk to a handful of local churches, right?

They're everywhere.

So what does it mean to be a member and a part in an active family-type relationship within the local church? That's what this text is driving for. Familial relationships are not easily thrown away. Now, certainly, unfortunately, they can be thrown away, but they're not easily thrown away.

We would deeply feel the betrayal of a brother or a sister or a mother or a father in a way that we probably wouldn't feel the same betrayal from a co-worker or next-door neighbor. We're told in the text we're to treat older women as mothers with all the respect and honor that is due to them, and younger women should be treated as sisters.

And particularly, he adds, with all purity toward women who are younger than Timothy. He says, treat them with dignity and with purity. So Paul starts this way, leaning into the relationships and the familial-type relationships, because what he's doing is he's giving us generalized instructions for relationships within the church because he's about to bring the hammer down on a very relational ministry program.

A very relational ministry program. And this is going to require a lot of explanation. I'm going to try to summarize what was going on there in Ephesus to try to bring it to our culture so that we understand it.

But verse 3 starts out with what could be perceived as a pretty cryptic phrase. Honor widows who are truly widows. So are there fake widows? Are there women out there pretending? Are they faking their husband's death so that they can, you know, what's a fake widow?

Well, what's a true widow? The text begs that question. But first, let me just explain a word about honor there so that we understand what we're talking about from the very get-go. Honor those who are truly widows.

But the word honor has very financial overtones to it in the Greek language. Much like we would, in English, refer to an honorarium. I want you to think finances when you think honorarium. It has the word honor nestled in the middle of it, but it has a financial overtone to it.

Same with this Greek word. The scope and usage of it has frequent financial help baked into it. So this becomes more clear in context that Paul is telling Timothy to aid or assist, even financially, widows who are true widows.

And then now he's going to go on to define what he means by a true widow. What's a true widow? And let me remind us all, before we get too deep into this text, why are we talking about widows? Why does that matter?

Is it really even significant? Is it something that we could just skip over, Don, and move on to the next text? Because we don't have a lot of widows in our church. And so maybe we could just kind of take this off as like a little study on the side or something.

But widows, let me remind you, church, are very close to the heart of our God. All throughout the Old Testament law, our instructions to care for the fatherless and the widow. God has and reveals himself to have a significant soft spot in his heart for those who have no protector, for those who have no earthly protector.

And he has a real soft spot for them. God has a soft spot for those who have experienced deep loss. He is with us in those dark moments, in those dark times. Now, many of you would just raise your hand and say, to become a widow is a dark place in life.

That's a dark place in life. We've all seen it, we've all observed it. Hopefully we haven't gone through it ourselves. But we've, probably everybody in this room knows somebody who has lost a spouse. And all of that idea of God loving widows actually culminates in a passage in the New Testament.

Old Testament talks about it a lot. In the law, the prophets talk about how they take care of the widows. I mean, it's all over the Old Testament, but the New Testament culminates in a passage in James.

James writes in chapter one, verse 27, religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this. You wanna know what good religion looks like? It is to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and then to keep oneself unstained from the world.

This is pure and undefiled religion before God the Father, visit orphans and visit widows. How many of you think that's pretty close to God's heart? He's saying, that's significant, that's important. Pure religion is the care of the disadvantaged, care for those who have no one to care for themselves.

And so this care was turned, understandably, when you think about coming out of a Jewish context where all of that Old Testament was leaning towards taking care of those in need, and then there being a significant need in that early church, which we'll talk about here in a second, it was turned programmatic in the early church.

Programs were developed and fostered in order to take care of widows. Now to clarify, why in the world would they have an issue and a problem with widows? Well, there's a disparity of life expectancy right now between men and women.

Did you already know that? Generally speaking, women live longer than men, that's the truth. But in ancient times, that gap was even wider according to some research they did this week, significantly wider, that women would live significantly longer than men back in the day.

And so it's still the case now, much more likely then that a woman would live out past her spouse, and this created a social burden in a society, of course, without some of the benefits and advantages that we have in our current society.

There was no social security, there were no insurance policies, there was no retirement savings, they didn't have residential care facilities to care for the elderly. So all of that going against that ancient culture, and so can you kind of start to build up a problem in the ancient church there?

A lot of widows in these ancient churches. And so the church had developed a program to take care of the widows, and it appears to have been a pretty robust program. A woman who had lost her husband could go to the church leadership and ask to be, you see a formal word for enrolled later in the text, but she could go and ask to be enrolled in the program.

How formal that was is a little bit unclear, and some of the things that I read debated about how formal of a program this was, but it seems clear to me from this text that it had a couple of prominent features that need to be explained for us to make heads or tails of what was going on in Ephesus that needed correction.

The first thing that we need to understand about this enrollment process or the program that was going on in Ephesus is to be enrolled involves some type of vow of chastity. There was some kind of a celibacy moving forward that was signing on the dotted line, so to speak, enrolled.

You were basically committing to God to remain single. The second is that to be enrolled was to have all of your financial needs met by the church. That's a pretty significant thing, like you're gonna get, I mean, food, housing, everything's gonna be taken care of by the church.

They're gonna cover you. The third thing is that the church in Ephesus was enrolling all of their widows in this very generous program. So they were having, no matter how old you were, no matter where you came from, no matter what, you come to the elders, they're just like, sign you up, sign you up.

You take that vow and away you go. And Paul is spending a good chunk of time on this because we need to see what happens when our good intentions end up harming the church. That's why we're talking about this.

There comes a point when helping hurts. And Paul says not everyone in the church, not everyone on the church dole is truly a widow in that some on the church dole here in Ephesus had other means and ought to be provided for already.

So he tells Timothy, remove from the role anyone who has children or grandchildren. He says that early in the text. Obviously children or grandchildren around, but close. And here he gives us a word that I think we can apply, it really applies to many of us directly, probably all of us to some degree directly.

We are to care for those in our own families who are in need first. Let that settle in, let that sink in, let that become a responsibility that you bear under God's direction from the word today. Scripture here is saying that God is pleased when children and grandchildren take care of their parents and their grandparents in need.

Now I think we know this, but are we planning for it? And that's what I want to encourage you to think about regardless of what stage of life you're in right now. Some of you are doing it right now. I, by the way, have seen some extremely, I would say some extremely godly examples of this here in the church where dad came to live in the house together with the family.

Or there's all kinds of situations that I've seen here where I just commend you. And I think that there have been some examples here that I would love to hold up and say, I am impressed with the care and concern that has been given to elderly parents and grandparents here in this church.

Many of us are at an age where parents or grandparents are in need of our help and support. And we know that it's not always financial, right? Did you already know that? It's not always financial. A lot of times it's just a visit.

A lot of times they just need somebody to talk to. A lot of times they just need to see your face and they need to know you care, right?

How many of you knew that? You knew that.

Sometimes that's all it is. And it needs to be a willingness and a love to lean in and listen and to participate in their lives. Now, the fact of the matter is it also equally, even in our context and in our culture, there could be financial needs.

There could be the need to prepare and plan to bring mom and dad home to your house. It's a real possible need. I want you to think that through and imagine what it might be and then plan accordingly.

So the one who is enrolled in this program is supposed to be the one who is left alone. They've got no family there to care for them, no family at least in the area who is able to or maybe unbelieving family that is not able to care for them.

And that's the true widow. And second in verse five, she is also to be one who has shown herself to be godly. The true widow is one who has proven themselves to be a part of the church. The true widow, as Paul defines her, is a woman who has placed her hope on God and persists in prayer.

It even goes so far as to say night and day. Now you can imagine that the hardship and the difficulty that's brought on a woman from losing her husband, that there's a lot of pain and anguish. But it's proven in this case that the godly woman is the one who leans on God.

And if that means those sleepless nights is in prayer, is leaning into God, not away from God in the moment of tragedy, is leaning towards God. They are the one who the church is to enroll. And in verse 10, he goes into detail to explain that the woman who would qualify for this program should have had a good relationship in the church.

She should have had a good relationship in bringing up her children, who are obviously not around to support her at this point. She served the church, she cared for the needy, has been a one-man kind of woman.

The opposite of the instructions given to the elder earlier in this book is actually just switch the gender. And now it is a one-man kind of woman in verse nine. And she has been devoted to doing good.

A woman who the church is going to provide for for the rest of her life should have a legitimate need based on nobody around to care for her. And she should also be a woman who has served the Lord with a good reputation.

So why is Paul talking about this? I can see some of the question marks on your mind. Like, why is Don talking about this? Well, where there is a stern correction in scripture, you can smell a serious problem.

Where there's a stern correction in scripture, you can be sure that there is a serious problem. And look at verse six to see the first signs that something doesn't smell right here. A widow, however, so enroll a woman, a true widow is one who serves the church with gladness and joy and has been involved.

But a widow who is self-indulgent, says Paul, is dead even though she's still alive. And that turned dark pretty quickly, right? She's spiritually dead. Paul is not speaking to Timothy about some theoretical person who may occasionally act self-indulgent or something like that.

He is telling Timothy to fix a serious problem in the church of Ephesus. There are true widows in need in the congregation of Ephesus, but there are also self-indulgent, livid up, opulent, luxurious widows in Ephesus who are dead spiritually.

And they are glad that the church is paying their way.

Now, how many of you,.

Just think about this with me for just a second. How many of you want to be Timothy in this text? Do you realize what Paul is saying to him? Kill the program. He's left with the task of killing the Help the Widow Fund at his church.

How many of you are ready to bolt? Like, if that's your task, it's like, I'm out. I'm out of ministry, it's over. I'm going to work for UPS or something. I am not gonna keep doing this if I have to kill the widow program.

And knowing the way that churches work, the program had to have some kind of creative title. You know, it was probably Widows of the Word, Welfare for Widows, or Lunch with the Widows. I don't know what it was called, and it's not said in the scripture, but in verse seven, Paul says, downsize it, cut the budget.

The program is causing reproach and embarrassment to your church, Timothy.

Cut it.

What?

In part, the embarrassment, of course, comes from families who are not being willing to care for mom or grandma. Like, that's embarrassing. Like, that's a poor testimony to the world around us. If a person will not care for their own relatives, they are denying the faith that calls us to love one another well.

They are showing themselves to be worse than unbelievers, who have the common, unbelievers who have the common decency to care for their own parents. This is not, by the way, a categorical, factual declaration that anyone who refuses to take care of mom is objectively and measurably worse than all murderers and rapists.

It's not an objective statement here. Rather, it's a comparison that comes out of social convention. What he's getting at here in this verse is that even unbelievers know you should take care of your elderly parents.

Even they do that. Should you not at least do what the unbelievers do in love? Should you not at least have that kind of heart? You look like an unbeliever when you do this. You prove yourself. If you don't care for mom and dad in their old age, you're looking pretty poor.

Without a cultural understanding, verse nine sounds reasonable. Let a woman be enrolled if she is not less than 60. And how many of you think that sounds like a fair age?

Sound like a fair age?

Sound like a fair cutoff? Go ahead and raise your hand. I want to see your hands if you think that that sounds about fair. You know, if she's over 60, then go ahead and enroll her for the rest of her life.

If she's under 60, don't let her enroll. But I am suggesting to you that Paul is, in essence, cutting this program. He is making it almost untenable, and here's the reason why. By the way, I'm not suggesting that Paul doesn't care about widows.

I think he does. I think he's just, at this point, the programmatic enrollment of women who had lost their husbands and who had committed some pledge of celibacy was being strongly curtailed by divine instruction here.

But a woman needed to be old and unlikely to remarry. She needed to be alone, and she needed to be a godly example to qualify for this. And we see a real problem here. We see the real problem and the real shame of the program.

They were enrolling young women who lost their husbands, and these women were not proving themselves to be godly. According to verse 11, they were being drawn away into passions. Likely, some of them were falling for men who were not Christians and giving up their faith in order to marry non-Christians.

Some were living La Vida Loca on the church's dime, and then they would still desire remarriage despite the pledge to the contrary that they wouldn't. They would abandon their former pledge, and having been drawn away from Christ, they showed themselves to be under condemnation.

A little bit on the age for just a second. One thing that you need to understand is just that first hint of an age restriction, and I need to get back to that because I skipped it in my notes here, but just to explain that to you for a second, why in the world 60 doesn't match up with our understanding.

The life expectancy of the Roman Empire was not over 30. It was actually about 28. I'm taking the highest number I found for expectancy of life in the Roman Empire. Now, you go, wait, 28, but there was such a high infant mortality that you need to understand, if you run the statistics, you understand that most people, if you made it to five, if you made it to the age five, then you were pretty likely to live a while.

Does that make sense?

Most people in that era and that time died before the age of five, and so it's not unheard of for a person to live into their 60s in the Roman Empire, but it also was not very common.

It wasn't common.

So when he's talking about don't enroll anybody unless they're 60, that's kind of like maybe saying don't enroll somebody unless they're 90 in our day and age. Okay, it's getting up there, right? And so we see the real problem and the real shame of the program revealed in verse 11.

That's where we kind of get back to the deepest part of the shame. Now, you have these younger women who are being drawn away into their passions, being drawn away from Christ, but the real problem and the real shame is that they were enrolling young women who lost their husbands and they were not proving to be godly.

They were falling for men who are not Christians. And so let me summarize all of this in case you're lost. Lots of widows in the church in Ephesus. The church comes up with a plan to take care of them.

Younger women were signing up as well. They were being drawn away through sexual temptation or even just relationships with ungodly guys. They were abandoning their pledges. It says abandoning their faith.

I think that the word there can equally be translated pledges and everything that I saw and read leans toward that translation so that it was this pledge of celibacy that they were foregoing in order to marry outside of the faith.

And the thing is in that ancient culture it was extremely common. It was the routine that a woman was gonna adopt the religion of her husband when she got married. And so that was what was going on here.

And further these particularly ungodly widows had learned to be idlers, gossips, and busybodies. They go from house to house apparently stirring things up in the church and speaking about things that were inappropriate.

The word inappropriate there in the text has a sexual overtone to it. They are talking about all kinds of things that nobody ought to name. And the church has given them everything they need so that they're now free to go about sinning and dismantling church unity.

Talk about a failed program. Anybody think that that sounds like a failed program? The church in Ephesus was bleeding out from a self-inflicted wound here. And so Paul's statement in verse 14 can strike us.

If you just take that verse and put it on a mug it looks super sexist, super sexist. And our culture has really got a keen ear for this kind of thing, right? We tune into it but out of context it sounds terrible.

But in context you've got to remember that the very future of the church is at stake as well as the reputation of the church to outsiders at stake and the very souls of these women caught in sin is at stake.

And so I believe that these words from Paul come out of his desire to see God glorified in the lives of real people. And so rather than just come in and close down the program Paul says, and here's what you can do.

Here's the direction I want you to go with these younger widows. Encourage them to remarry. Encourage them to have children. Encourage them to manage their own households and to give the adversary no reason and no room to slander the church.

He said earlier to Timothy, encourage women in the church to live a quiet and peaceful life. Stop giving these young widows opportunity to stir up dissent. This text does not mean that the church was to kick the younger widows to the curb.

It doesn't prohibit the church from helping them but it does mean that the church is encouraging these widows in this ancient culture to remarry. That is what Timothy needs to be saying to them. So to remind us how bad things have gotten through the failed welfare program here in Ephesus, verse 15 tells us that some have even gone so far as straying after Satan there in that context.

The freedom given to them through welfare has been abused in this context and they have used their free time to go after a life of self-indulgence and passions which have drawn their hearts away from Christ into running after the evil one.

Paul's final nail in the coffin of this program is found in our last verse and it is to suggest that believing women in the church, if you're looking for something to do, and obviously this even indicates how widespread widowhood was in that church, but if you're looking for something to do, look into your own family, find the widows and care for them.