May 14, 2017 PM Service Timothy's Charge by Pastor Josh Sheldon

1 Timothy as a More Accessible Afternoon Series

Well, turn in your Bibles please to the book of 1 Timothy. I know I made some noises and maybe some minor announcements about wanting to go to some of the minor prophets for the afternoon series, and I still do have that in view, and Lord willing we shall get to those.

But just to be quite frank and honest with you, to take these short books of the Hebrew prophets and bring them into messages here for the afternoon and the amount of work to do in the Hebrew and such, especially because the books are so concentrated, a short book you don't have a lot of time to develop the themes, all that to say, there's just a bit more work to prepare for the afternoon messages from those than I thought it to be.

I go to 1 Timothy of course not as a compromise, all Scripture being given by inspiration of God, but you will understand that it is somewhat more accessible in terms of just the amount of work that I need to do to be able to be prepared to give you a gospel and edifying message.

So we'll be in 1 Timothy, and actually the more I read through that book, having read it just sitting and reading all six chapters at a sitting several times in a row, I'm actually rather pleased with this as a choice for where to go for the afternoon series for a while.

If you look there at 1 Timothy, we'll have our attention on the first two and a half verses really. Let me read them to you, and if you follow along we'll see, you'll notice where I stop in the middle of verse 3.

This is the word of the Lord to the church. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, to Timothy, my true child in the faith, grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord, as I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus.

The Purpose of 1 Timothy for Church Order

So the first of these two letters written to Paul's young protege, his young disciple Timothy, will be our text for the next several weeks to come. Now, this is the first really of three letters that are properly called the pastoral epistles.

First and second Timothy, and then of course Titus, where we find our instruction looking at those three as a whole really. We find our instruction for church order. In 1 Timothy, we have a very clear statement of purpose in the third chapter if you want to look down at that.

Third chapter of 1 Timothy in verses 14 and 15, where Paul really gives the overall purpose for this letter, the theme, which needs to be consistent and coordinated with anything else that we understand from this book, because this is what the apostle says he's writing the book for, or the letter.

I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things so that if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of truth.

So this book, this letter of 1 Timothy is written to Timothy to instruct him on what? It's on how to guide the church. Just as much also, it's a letter to the church, that the church should know how they are to be guided.

The application for our times, I mean right away we can see an application, it's fairly obvious that this is the instruction to pastors by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit through the pen of the apostle to Timothy, and by God's grace and his preservation of his word to us.

So it's an instruction to me as your pastor, as the man who stands here week in and week out and delivers the word of God to you, delivers the gospel to you as a church, and instructs you by it, this is a word to me.

It tells me how I am to instruct you to conduct yourselves in the church. And just as much, and we need to hear well, at this church one of the blessings we have is that as a culture, if you will, we do hear well, we do take God's word seriously, we do listen to what's being declared from this pulpit, it is just as much a letter to you to know how I am to instruct you.

So as much as I can come and say this is what we must do, you then are responsible to come to me and say, pastor, this is what you must tell us to do. We are a congregational church here at Providence Bible Church in Sunnyvale, by congregational we understand that there's really three offices in the church.

There are pastors, there are deacons, and the men who hold those positions we call officers. We have three deacons now and one pastor. There's another office, and that's membership. Now members, you're not officers in that sense.

But I think that this is good support for the responsibility and the high position that we place, the high view we have, I should say, of what it means to be a member of a church, to be a responsible hearer of the word of God.

As I said, just as much as I can point to 1 Timothy and say, therefore, you're going to conduct yourself this way, you must look at 1 Timothy and say, therefore, pastor, you must instruct us this way.

It's almost a symbiotic relationship. It's to both of us, not just to pastors. My purpose this morning is really just to introduce the letter to you. And we'll go no further than the first two and a half verses where I stopped off there.

Paul the Apostle and Timothy His True Child

The author is Paul, the apostle Paul. We've become generally familiar with him, wrote some, what is it, 40 of the New Testament letters. We've been going through his great letter to the Romans in the morning services.

He is the author also of 1 Timothy. Paul, the former zealous Pharisee who became the equally zealous apostle from Christ-hater to loving servant, from church-destroyer to church-planter. Paul's spiritual journey, though he went from a deeper commitment against Christ than I think most of us had in terms of how zealous we were, to a more intensively zealous and energetic man in Christ's service than most of us would ever be.

But despite the extremes of his hatred against Christ and then his love for him and his attempts to destroy the church and then his energy to build it back up, despite the extremes of those positions, because he was such a zealous, energetic man, his spiritual passage, his spiritual journey, came by the same means as any of ours.

By the grace of God, by the regeneration of the Holy Spirit, by God's predestining election of who he would have to be in Christ his Son. Paul, by the same Holy Spirit as the rest of us, made able to believe and repent.

He names himself an apostle, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus. It's a position that was one of recognized authority and commission. The word apostle is a compound of stela, which means to prepare or to equip, and prefixed to stela then is apo, the prefix which means away from.

So one sent away from, an apostle sent away with equipping credentials to represent another, of course in this case, Jesus Christ. Now I want to stay on the idea of apostles just for a moment, you know there's really a couple of, I shouldn't say a couple because it sounds like there might be more, there's two kinds of apostles that we meet in the New Testament.

One type is what we meet in, for example, 1 Corinthians 15, 7, where Paul speaks of the other apostles, James, Barnabas. There is an apostle, those who are sent, who are sent by churches to preach Jesus Christ, to preach the same as the other apostles, we'll get to in a moment, but commissioned and sent by their churches.

So they're apostles for Jesus Christ in sort of a limited sense the way we all are. But when he says that what he is, he is by command of God, he's setting himself apart from that more general group. The apostles of Paul's group were the men, there are 13 of them, there were the 12 disciples, Matthias replacing Judas, and then Paul as one born out of due time.

These are men whose revelation was directly from the Lord Jesus Christ, from the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. These were men who at that time in history could testify to others of the death, the burial, and most importantly, the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So we have really two sets, legitimate sets of apostles, those who were sent to declare Jesus Christ and sent by the church as what we would call missionaries, and those, that elite, that group that was then, and only then, and not to be repeated, who personally met the Lord Jesus Christ, the resurrected Lord, and could testify of him.

Paul says in Galatians 1 .12, he makes it very clear, he says, For I did not receive the gospel from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. Only Paul and the other 12 could lay this claim to being that apostle of Christ, personally selected and sent by the resurrected Lord Jesus.

In those opening verses, there are really two descriptions of God that I want to speak about a little bit. First he's God our Savior. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by command of God our Savior, that term for God, God our Savior, is only found outside of the pastoral epistles, these three that I mentioned.

The only other place we find that, God our Savior, is in Mary's Magnificat and in Jude's doxology. It's a fairly unusual term, a special term, if you will, for God. There were ideas springing up in Paul's time, about the time that he wrote this letter in the late 60s, there were ideas springing up then as it is now today, that Christianity was nothing more than a series of ethical ideas.

It only differed from other systems of ways to live in its details. Today's pluralism is really much the same, this pluralism around us everywhere. Boys and girls are taught from an early age that there's no one truth that is universal, and to lay claim to absolute truth for them is a terrible heresy, and so those who say there is no absolute truth say with absolute confidence that there is no absolute truth, as if it's an absolute truth that there is no absolute truth, and it just becomes one of these ridiculous sorts of things.

But Paul was contesting something much like that back then. Find what works best for you, never lay claim to having something that must work for others, no universal, all-encompassing, divinely revealed truth.

But you see, it's all wrong. It's all wrong, and we can look at this opening greeting, not even getting into the meat of the text of this book yet, and it says, God our Savior. We don't worship God, our ethical instructor.

He didn't reveal himself as just a superior moral ethos, just a better way to live. The church comes together because of God our Savior, our Savior. The church is reminded that with salvation comes instruction, but it is salvation that has pride of place.

Men are in want of both, to be saved and to be instructed, and before they hear what they're instructed to do, the church is reminded that it is the God who is saved who now speaks the instruction. Very important, God our Savior.

And the other appellation here is Christ Jesus, our hope. Christ Jesus, our hope. Having Christ before Jesus is obviously emphasizing something, it's emphasizing his title, Christ, which is the Messiah, Christ, which you could say King Jesus, Christ Jesus, our hope.

Christ denotes both his person as Messiah, and his divinity as the Savior of men. I mean, is it too much to say that Paul, after naming God by which is meant the Father, naming him as Savior, and then immediately highlighting the title Christ as his chosen means of salvation?

Is it too much to say that he teaches us here the equality of Christ Jesus and God our Father by putting them in the same line this way? If God is God our Savior, and Jesus, we get the title Christ first, and Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah, salvation.

I don't think it's too much to say that even here, Paul just assumes the equality of God the Father and God the Son. He said Christ Jesus, Christ emphasizing his salvation. The name Jesus does the same, it emphasizes his historicity, the fact that Jesus Christ walked among men.

The angel of the Lord, the pre-incarnate Christ, really, as we discussed a bit in Sunday School this morning, remember the angel of the Lord in the book of Judges says to Manoah, Samuel's father, when he says, what is your name?

The answer is, why do you ask my name, seeing that it is wonderful? In other words, I'm not going to give you a name. My name is still shrouded, my name is still mysterious. You don't get it yet. It's the angel of the Lord, that's the pre-incarnate Christ talking to him, why do you ask my name, seeing that it is wonderful?

But now, now we can say that wonderful name, it's Jesus. Why do you ask my name, seeing that it's wonderful, that name is Jesus, God in the flesh, born of the woman. He's Christ Jesus, our hope, Christ Jesus, our hope.

The father is the fountain of salvation, the son then is the embodiment of this, our hope. Psalm 65 verse 5, it says of Christ, oh God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth. Psalm 119 .81 says, my soul longs for your salvation, I hope in your word.

And later in the last of the pastoral epistles, which we're not going to get to, that we'll refer to fairly often, I think, Titus 2 .13 applies all this directly to Jesus. It says, we are waiting for our blessed hope, excuse me, our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and savior, Jesus Christ.

Now I'll make a brief mention for you here, that this particular phrase from Titus, and there's many others that we could look to, we won't, that would be a lecture, but the way this is phrased, the great God and savior, excuse me, the great God, and then the savior are one and the same.

The terminology, the grammar, the way it's put together in the original language is saying great God applies to Jesus as Jesus applies to great God. It applies to one and the same person. We're waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and savior, who is none other than Jesus Christ.

Savior is as much his title as it is God's. If salvation is God's design for us, it is Jesus by whom we must be saved. His deity was so foundational that Paul could use a phrase like this without even pausing to explain it.

He writes to Timothy and calls him my true child in the faith. Now sometimes this is thought of as expressing Paul's fatherly affection and love for the young disciple, and I think that he was very affectionate towards Timothy and he had a great love for him as a father would a son, because he was his spiritual father.

I think this may be true. There's something we can see in the relationship they had. Paul met him in Lystra. We read about this in Acts chapter 16, and we know that Paul got to know this family very well.

He knew his father, who's unnamed. He knew him to be a Greek, no hint that he was a believer. In 2 Timothy we find that Paul knew Timothy's mother Eunice very well. He stayed with them long enough to get to know Timothy well enough to want Timothy to go with him on his missionary journeys.

Timothy trusted him enough to be circumcised by him, making him able to enter the synagogues and by that perform the ministry that Paul had in mind. Paul knew them very well. He spent some time with them.

He knew this family. But with all that, I believe that there was a very deep and loving relationship between these two. It seems to me that when he says, my true child, it has more to do with the authority being delegated to him, to Timothy by Paul, than the relationship.

Timothy is reminded of this later when he said, Monash, let no one despise you because of your youth. What matters is that he's a man of God with a delegated authority from an apostle of Christ to set the church in order.

So true child lets the church know that Timothy is legitimate, he's genuine, he is really acting with Paul's apostolic authority. I think it's more of a credential that Paul has in mind here so that when the church heard This is Timothy, my true son in the faith, the true, genuine article, that the church would then hear Timothy as though it were Paul.

We today, of course, have no distant authority sending delegates to individual churches or naming officers for us. That model which is followed in some Presbyterian and then the Roman model. They find some support here, but they have to misuse the text a bit to do so.

It's an incorrect reading. One of Timothy's jobs was to watch over the appointment of pastors and deacons there at Ephesus. I don't believe he was one of the pastors. He was the one setting things in order.

He didn't hold either office of pastor or deacon. It's interesting too, I don't believe that Timothy appointed them. He made sure their selection was in accord with Paul's orders. That's why we have 1 Timothy 3 and the qualifications for deacons and pastors.

Paul's just setting church in order. He's just giving them the process that they have to go through, the qualifications that have to be met. The autonomy, the self-governing authority of the local church where pastor serves at the congregation's indulgence and suffrage, I think is confirmed here.

And the hearers of this message today do well to take with great soberness of spirit the importance of the authority vested in them here to confirm these officers and submit to their authority. You know, I said up front just a few moments ago, this letter is as much to you as it is to me, as your pastor.

When you read the qualifications for pastors, for deacons, it's as much your responsibility to be sure that they meet that and that you submit to that authority as it is to the pastor or the deacon to perform the functions that are said there and to exercise that authority correctly.

It's got to work both ways. So my true son might be said today, he's the real deal, he's the genuine article, words to that effect. I almost want to say, this is my beloved son Timothy, hear him, but you would take my meaning by that.

He's giving the credential. The Ephesians were to hear Timothy as though it was Paul himself speaking. Like Jesus said, whoever receives you, receives me. Whoever receives me, receives he who sent me.

Old Testament example of that we see in 2 Samuel 10, you remember King David sent emissaries to the young Ammonite prince to give him condolences on the death of his father. And that prince was convinced by his advisers that the delegates from David were there as spies and so they treated them disgracefully and sent them back with their beards cut off and the back of their pants cut open to humiliate them.

And David took that as having treated himself that way. And his revenge against them was terrible. It's this kind of an idea, especially when we're speaking of apostles, but it's that idea with the apostle Paul to Timothy, with Jesus to the 70 he sent out, with David to his emissaries, that the way you treat them is the way you treat the one who sent them.

Remaining in Ephesus and the Church in a Dark City

So the first part of verse 3, which is where we ended, and that's the last thing I want to consider this afternoon, it tells Timothy to remain in Ephesus. I think it's worth our time just to take a few moments to talk about what Ephesus was in that day, what it was like.

Ephesus was the greatest city in Asia, on the western edge of modern day Turkey. It was a thriving commercial center. It had a deep water port, or at least for the ships of that day, which weren't very deep draft compared to today, but for that day it was a very deep water port and it was big enough and its harbor could accommodate a lot of ships at the same time.

So it was a very thriving commercial center. It was also the center for worship of the goddess Diana, or in the Latin she was called Artemis. The temple they built in her name was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

Paul's stay there, if we read about it in Acts, was the longest of anywhere that he visited. It was in Ephesus that the riot was started by the silversmiths, the ones who were making the trinkets for the tourists coming to worship Diana, and they made the little trinkets to sell them.

Well, when they heard about the way, and what the way, what Christ had to say about their worship and about Diana, well they went nuts because they were going to lose their living. That was in Ephesus.

There was much spiritual battle in Ephesus. Some of the most intense in all of Paul's journeys. It was in Ephesus that Paul found John the Baptist's disciples. Remember them? He said, did you receive the Holy Spirit?

They said, we haven't even heard there was a Holy Spirit. It was in Ephesus where the sons of a huckster named Sceva, remember they were exercising a demon out of someone? And they said, in the name of the God who Paul worships, because they'd seen Paul do these things, so they wanted to imitate Paul's way, and so they were just following the words Paul said or something like that.

In the name of the God who Paul worships, we command you to leave her, and the demon says something like, and I'm not going to quote it exactly, who are you? No, we know Paul. We know his power. We keep away from Paul, if we can.

No, we've seen what Paul can do. Now, who are you? Of course, the seven sons of Sceva, it was in Ephesus that the demons turned on them, beat the tar out of them, and they ran away naked and humiliated.

It was in Ephesus that God worked extraordinary miracles through Paul. As deep as was the demonic worship there, and that influence, as much as that was, so God increased the miraculous works that he worked through Paul.

You recall, it was in Ephesus where if a cloth or a napkin, so much is brushed against Paul, and then was brought to a demon-possessed relative or someone who was sick, there was actually healing done.

God working in this extraordinary way in this extraordinarily dark city where Timothy was told to remain. It was also the Ephesian elders that you read of in Acts when they heard Paul's farewell. They were the ones who wept so openly, who loved him so dearly.

This connection between them was so strong, and the love bond amongst them so deep that he gave them that wonderful farewell address you can read of in Acts chapter 20. And they fell on his neck, and they wept, and they wished him Godspeed.

That was all in Ephesus, and that's where Timothy was told to stay. Not in some Beulah land, not in some Shangri-La, it was in Ephesus, the city of demons, a city whose reputation was because of their adamant dedication to a goddess.

It was a city whose worship was of the most egregious sort, a sort which attracted droves of Diana devotees, anxious to immerse themselves in practices that ought not even be named among God's people.

And we can stop and ask ourselves, do we think of the San Francisco Bay Area as bad? I mean, our namesake city to the north infects its surrounding communities the way pollution pollutes and ruins rivers, sexual perversion is rampant, things that ought not be even named among us.

New age is everywhere, is it not? Cults are all around us, and they're abounding. Demons are openly worshipped around us. Wicca, what is Wicca? The witchcraft cult, whatever they are, is growing. Timothy was in a place like this, in Ephesus.

You see, some are called not just to live, but to thrive in places like this. Some are set in place by God in an area where the differences between good and evil are more clear, more contrasted than in other places.

There are those of God's people who by His will, by His design, will grow in the image of Christ, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts the way Daniel and his three friends did, and surrounded, as we are, by what we're surrounded by, as were the Ephesians, and most especially as was Timothy.

There are those who by God's design are to be light in a world like this. Read 1 Corinthians 12, one of the most stunning things you'll read in 1 Corinthians 12 about the different functions that we have, where we have eyes, and mouth, and hand, and foot, and all these different parts of the body.

Remember what it says, which God set in place just as He pleased. Some like young Timothy, some like Daniel, Daniel with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, are called to thrive, not just live, not just judge, but to thrive, to grow into the image of Christ in a contrasting way from all that's around.

It's not just here. It's not just here in the left coast and the center of left-coastedness, which we live in. You know, I read recently, this is terribly confusing, and even as I read this, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make good sense of it to you, but I'll just read the way I put it together.

I saw this on a headline thing I was watching on the news. A Tennessee court granted the rights of a husband to a lesbian whose partner gave birth by artificial insemination. Now this husband-woman had no biological genetic part in the baby.

The insemination was completely outside of that. And in this culture, Tennessee, not San Francisco, Tennessee, you know, the way I said that, I really gave a great offense to many, didn't I? It was a great error I did by calling a woman who perceives herself to be a husband something other than her chosen and preferred perception of the moment.

So a woman who is the husband of the other woman and called the father of the child, this is Tennessee, not San Francisco, not the left-west coast, this is Tennessee. And I look with wonder sometimes at the number of people who go to some other part of God's country because it's a better place to do this or to do that, to raise a family or I can own a home, and they go to Missoula, Montana, they go to northern Idaho where people are more conservative, people are more godly.

If I understand the prevalence of sin in the world outside of God's preventing grace, they really can't be that. But there's this desire to get away from all that's around us. I'm not sure that that's always something that we should strive for.

Timothy was told to remain there and take care of the church and give them instruction to make sure things are being handled in a godly way, meaning a godly way completely different and opposed to and antithetical to what was going on around them.

God places us where he pleases, not always where we want to be, not always where things are smooth and where we're surrounded by friends and godly companions. Sometimes he leaves us where home prices soar and evil abounds.

He left Timothy at a church surrounded by just that. It is the prevailing influence of the powers of darkness that makes the church his witness. Remember Jesus promising to build his church, and he also promised with that that the gates of hell had no chance against the building of his church.

It makes it all the more important, the difference that we strike from those around us. What is Paul handing here? Paul is handing to Timothy a great trust to ensure that the gospel will be protected in the doctrine and in the life of the church.

There's many, many doctrines that we're going to come across as we go through this book. As we live out the doctrines of the gospel, we become walking advertisements in that sense of the gospel itself as we live out the way God would have us to do it.

Paul gives Timothy this great trust to ensure that the church will be the bastion of truth, the pillar and buttress of truth as he said in chapter 3 verse 14. It's a great stewardship. You know we all say that we believe in Jesus, but then what?

We believe in Jesus, now what? Well, then the church, the body of Christ, this organic unity that grows together into his stature, that growth nurtured by our doctrines. Doctrines we pull from the Bible, cull from the Bible, some of them right out there, low hanging fruit and easy picking.

As we live them out, we grow into that image, the image of Christ and become the body that God would have us to be. Our faith is in the gospel. Gospel is a divine revelation entrusted to Paul by the command of God and of Christ Jesus, then from Paul to Timothy and then through his letters, preserved by God so that we have them in front of us, to us.

We preach and live a message that has been faithfully handed down to us by those to whom the Lord personally gave it. So let not our confidence be weakened by all the vitriol that surround us, by the wickedness that takes place outside these walls.

Paul's courage came from his calling as did Timothy's. The church's courage and the faith comes from that same gospel infused into us by one and the same spirit. So as we begin this series, which we will be in for quite some time, may God bless us, may God strengthen us as we go through this letter to the church and there in this letter, in this portion of scripture, find our instruction and may our obedience to it rebound to Christ's glory.

Amen.