FBC Morning Light – August 3, 2022

Well, a good Wednesday morning to you, and today we find ourselves beginning in our Bible reading in another new book of the

Bible. You know, you get into these New Testament books and it's like every few days you're in a new one.

And so today we're in 1 Timothy. And this letter, 1 Timothy, is written by the

Apostle Paul to a man by the name of Timothy, a younger man, and Timothy has been charged with the work of the pastoral ministry in the city of Ephesus.

And so much of what Paul writes to Timothy is insight into the work of pastoral work, pastoral ministry.

And this is, you know, true right off the bat as he opens up this letter. And you see some insight into one of the aspects of the work of a pastor in these opening verses.

He says in verse 3, which is in faith.

And so we discover right off the bat here that one of the responsibilities of proper pastoral ministry is the prevention of certain kinds of things, like false teaching, you know, doctrine that is contrary to the gospel.

If someone comes into the work, comes into the church, and wants to promote some doctrinal aberration that is a distortion of orthodox doctrine, then no, they need to be shut down, they need to be stopped.

But then he also talks about those who give heed to fables and endless genealogies.

Now there could be some cultural specific things related to that, you know, the genealogies, a lot of emphasis was placed on genealogies and so on and so forth.

But I think the bigger point is that these fables and endless genealogies are extra -biblical stuff.

That is, this isn't truth from the Scripture.

This isn't God's written revelation that he's given to us. These are rather speculative ideas that might be tangentially tied to the

Bible. The Bible has stimulated an awful lot of ideas and ways of thinking and stories and ideas that, you know, they're not rooted in God's revelation.

They are rooted in man's imagination over some idea that he got from the

Bible. You can go to an average Christian bookstore, if there was one anymore,

I don't know, just do a search on Christian literature,

Christian books on Amazon, or go to christianbook .com and you can find an awful lot of books that are written with a

Christianized theme to them that pick on some idea that may have a kernel of a truth taken out of the

Bible but then expanded upon and blown out of proportion. In the end, it's really not very helpful.

It's not helpful because you're not growing in the knowledge of the truth, you're not growing in the grace and the knowledge of Christ, you're listening to ideas and so forth that are the ideas of men.

These are not the things that are going to feed your faith. So this is what he says, they instead cause disputes.

People end up arguing over these things that are not clearly delineated in the Scripture, and it doesn't edify in the faith.

One of the preachers I like to listen to often, he has a saying that I've picked up on and I found to be quite helpful.

He says, the main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things.

I think that's a good idea to just keep in mind. It's a good filter to help us filter through a lot of the stuff that's purported under the umbrella of Christianity today.

The main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things, not fables and endless genealogies.

The pastor is exhorted to keep his people, to guard his flock from these things, and the thing that motivates him is love.

He says, the purpose of this commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from a sincere faith.

Some have swerved from this, he says. They've turned aside to idle talk, they desire to be teachers of the law, they don't understand what they're saying.

The pastor's heart must be one of love for his people, that they be delivered from any kind of teaching or ideas that will take them off path, take them astray.

Pray for your pastor, pray that he fulfills the responsibilities that God has put upon his shoulders, even in this area of guarding the truth.

Our Father and our God, we thank you for this very good counsel that Paul gave to Timothy, because it applies to us even today.

I pray that you would deliver us from false teachers and from insignificant stuff that can distract us from the truly important.

We pray it in Jesus' name, amen. All right, well have a good rest of your Wednesday. I trust