Aug. 6, 2017 PM Service Taking Gods View – Dignity by Pastor Josh Sheldon

Turn in your Bibles, please, to 1 Timothy chapter 5. I'll read for you verses 1 through 16, though we will only get through in the preaching the first two verses.

But we will be in these first 16 verses for at least the next

Sunday, and I want to set the context by reading beyond this afternoon's preaching text. 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 household 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 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 a 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 busy buddies, saying what they should not.

So I would have the younger widows marry, bear 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." Well there is in these verses some of the most difficult instruction that the

Apostle Paul has to offer the church. This is right up there with head coverings and chapter 2 with the roles of men and women in the church.

Too easily we ignore the plain meaning of the text as an anachronism applicable only to the

Greco -Roman world of 2 ,000 years ago, though all too often we hide behind that as cover for the fact that we're ashamed to stand clearly against the mores and the ever changing ethics of the world around us.

But the gospel on which we stake our eternal souls does not bend to the whims of society or given to its expectations.

The gospel is a revelation of God's righteousness, Romans 1 16, and that righteousness extends beyond the legal declaration that our sins are forgiven.

It includes all aspects of our life, nowhere more prominently than in our life together as a body.

And all that by way of introduction that when we get to the teaching on widows, and there seem to be these two classifications of widows, we need to take this word seriously and do the hard work of applying it to ourselves today, and not just brush it off as something that was for them then, because only they then had that problem where the culture had these views of these different categories of people.

We often say the easy way out leads back in, and the easy way out of God's word just leads us back into the problems that we face.

We need to do things God's way. In Matthew chapter 12 verse 46, we read,

Jesus was still speaking to the people, or excuse me, while Jesus was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brother stood outside asking to speak to him, but he replied to the man who told him, who is my mother, excuse me, and who are my brothers?

And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, here are my mother and my brothers, for whoever does the will of my

Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother. Now those words were spoken, of course, before the cross.

After the cross, we read, for example, Romans 8 15, as we had this morning, for you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry,

Abba, Father. You see, by the Father's adoption, who are we?

Well, we, by that grant of the Father, by that declaration of God the Father, we are

Jesus Christ's mothers and brothers and sisters. We are, in a word, a family.

The conduct of the church towards one another is its witness of the gospel itself.

Now much is answered by these verses. This afternoon, we're only going to focus in on a couple of them, but the rules on how a family lives together, how the church reacts with one another, how we interact with one another, goes all the way really to chapter 6 verse 2.

That's all about us together as a body, as a family, adopted children, adopted by God the

Father because of Christ the Son. So how should a family conduct itself?

I should say, not a family, how should this family, this family bound together in Jesus Christ, how should we here conduct ourselves?

How should a family behave towards one another? And the answer is in accordance with the rules set forth in 1

Timothy chapter 5 verse 1 through chapter 6 verse 2. Now widows, of course, get the most attention here.

And as we deal with them, we'll see that there were particular issues for the church in Ephesus that were unique to them then, yet there are principles that apply to us now, because our conduct as a church family towards those in need is our witness, again, of the gospel.

The way we respond to one another, the way we interact at any level with each other is, at every point, a witness to the gospel, the grace of the

Lord Jesus Christ in and amongst us. And the way we respond to those in special need is even more so.

As brothers and sisters in the Lord, we must treat each other with the dignity of the gospel itself.

We must have God's view of those who are in Christ Jesus. We must have

God's view, actually, of human beings in general, as we will see.

The instruction begins with Timothy himself in the first verse of chapter 5, and here

Timothy is required to set the example by his demeanor towards everyone else in the church.

Do not rebuke an older man, but encourage him as you would a father. Treat younger men like brothers, older women like mothers, younger women like sisters, in all purity.

So what is this? What are we being told here? What was Timothy being told then?

Something culturally, historically bound? No, not at all. This is the eternal word of God.

He's speaking about respect. He's speaking about honor. It's about dignity. It's about moral purity.

Paul starts with his protege's manner towards older men. We don't know

Timothy's age. The best estimates are he was about 30 years old. And what is meant by older isn't specified, so we're immediately left to apply wisdom and apply discernment here, because we cannot say, do not rebuke an older man, but encourage him as you would a father.

And that was only for Timothy in Ephesus. That has to be for Providence Bible Church, for you, for me, for all of us in Sunnyvale, Milpitas, Fremont in 2017.

What is meant by an older man? You know in the 1964 movie Zulu, there's a scene where Lieutenant Bromhead bristles at Lieutenant Chard giving him orders.

These two lieutenants, they understand the Zulus are coming and somebody has to take charge and do something. Well the one,

Bromhead, doesn't like being told by Chard what to do, so what do they do? They exchange commission dates.

Bromhead, May 1872. Chard, February 1872.

So Chard is the older man by three months. He's the senior and he's going to get the respect. He's going to get the honor.

He's going to get the dignity of having his orders carried out because of a few months.

That kind of nitpicking though cannot have been what Paul meant for Ephesus then or for us now.

He meant for Timothy to show deference to men old enough to be due that extra measure of respect called for in God's word.

Not to calculate the months, how much older are you than me? Is an older man 20, is a 20 -year -old compared to an 18 -year -old an older man?

Well yes. If we do the mathematic equation, of course he is, but then we're back to the scene in Zulu.

That wouldn't make any sense. That would be silly, which God's word never is. What is meant is a man like Leviticus chapter 19 verse 32, you shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man.

You shall fear your God. I am the Lord. You see the emphasis. You shall fear your

God. I am the Lord. This is serious. God has a severe teaching.

Chapter 19 of Leviticus is where we find what Jesus Christ himself said is the second great command.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself. He means a man old enough that to be rebuked would be embarrassing.

Use wisdom. Use discernment. Use the sense that God gave us.

He means someone who would be shamed and his dignity would be harmed for someone of your age to rebuke him.

Interesting that it starts out this way. I think it's no accident that Paul refers this to Timothy and it alludes back to Leviticus 19, which as I said has all these important teachings including the second great command.

It is like the other. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength.

And the other is like it. It's here in Leviticus 19 in the same general context of you shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man.

The face. In Leviticus 19 it says you shall do no injustice to the poor.

Do you know what that word is? You shall not take away his face. You shall honor the face of an old man.

You shall not make him so that he can't show himself in public. You shall not shame him so he wants to hide, so he feels dishonored, embarrassed, belittled.

This doesn't mean older men are to be devoid of correction. That's not what is meant at all. The word rebuke here is a compound word in the original language.

The suffix of this compound word means to strike with blows. It's a violent word.

You can think of a pugilist, a boxer striking someone with blows, a pugnacious man who's just looking for a fight striking with blows.

And the prefix of this word is upon. So upon this one striking with blows.

But is he talking about actually hitting the person? No. He's talking about the words, the power of our words.

James speaks all over his book about the power of our tongue to bless and to do good, to build someone up in the

Lord, to encourage someone to be more like Jesus Christ, and that same tongue to do harm, to bite and devour, as Paul says in Galatians.

Biting and devouring each other is powerful, incredibly powerful tool that we have right here between our teeth.

The tongue. You shall not with your tongue strike blows upon this one.

Rebuke may be necessary. Rebuke might be necessary, but it's to be done judiciously.

And here in this context, keeping in mind

Leviticus 19 and all the things I've told you quickly about Leviticus 19 with a keen eye towards their dignity.

The idea of dignity is not imported. It's what Paul is telling

Timothy this. This is the reason Paul is telling Timothy this. It's the import from Leviticus 19.

It's all right here in the text really. Chapter 5 verse 18.

God willing we can get to that soon. It speaks about not muzzling an ox while he's treading the grain.

That's a quote from Deuteronomy 25 .4. What has that to do with dignity? I'm saying this has to do with dignity.

You say do not rebuke an older man. So you're talking to a young man, Timothy, and the way he speaks to the older.

Common sense, discernment. We'll say the same thing to the younger ladies to the older.

What does all this to do with dignity? Deuteronomy 25 .4 says you shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.

Look up just one verse from that and it says 40 stripes may be given him but not more lest if one should go on to beat him with more stripes than these your brother will be degraded in your sight.

Do you find that interesting? Now I'll tell you again in the proper order. I'm talking about dignity.

I'm talking about do not rebuke an older man. Do not rebuke an older woman. Do not take away someone's dignity.

40 stripes may be given him. You remember Paul says five times

I was given 40 stripes less one. The Jews used to give the 40 stripes but they would stop at 39.

They'd have a count. They stop at 39 just in case somebody got the count wrong. So they stop a little bit early.

Paul says five times I got 40 stripes less one. So 1

Timothy 5 .18 which we're not going to get to this morning but it's about pastor sharing in the fruits of his labor.

The original context has to do with not humiliating a man even in his punishment. Even under discipline dignity is to be protected.

Now society at large praises this concept don't they? They praise dignity, the value of human life.

That's why jails and prisons are so humane. We may have gone over the top here but humane treatment is a

God -honoring goal. The founders who forbade cruel and unusual punishment did this because of passages like the one we're on this morning or this afternoon.

But society at large has no real basis for this for preaching or teaching or thinking about humans as dignified.

They really don't. A random collection of molecules fueled by the lucky chance of amino acids and so forth has no inherent dignity.

But the church we hear we see it differently. We promote human dignity because all men all men are made in the image of God.

Christians have been reborn remade by God's regenerating spirit into Christ's image and this is really where dignity is found.

In the testimony of God's word that we are created by God all of us and if you're a

Christian recreated by the same God and it's because of that it's because of God's creative power in you that you have dignity.

And Paul's telling Timothy here really you shall not detract from the dignity that is in a fellow believer made again remade reborn into the image of Christ Jesus.

That's why Timothy is to be careful with the older men. They're to be encouraged to follow the way of the gospel.

He says do not rebuke. Do not strike him with blows from your mouth. Do not take away his dignity. Do not take away his face so he can't show himself.

He's been humiliated by you. Don't do that but don't ignore the correction. The thing that you wanted to go to him and strike him with blows about the issue remains but the way of bringing it up is very different than what we by nature might want to do.

He says don't do this. Don't do the blows. Don't do that way but encourage him.

Encourage him. They're being encouraged to follow the way of the gospel. Now what does this do to us?

Well this is hard work dear ones. This is patience. This demands deference.

Wisdom must find the encouraging way to accomplish what the rebuke was meant for.

Let's just assume that the thing you wanted to rebuke the person for is correct.

You saw the error. You see that the person needs to be taken aside and spoken to and told in essence don't do that.

You've been caught. Don't do that again. Word of the Lord says differently. This sort of thing.

Okay so the issue is correct but encouragement is so much harder than striking with blows.

It takes time to compose encouraging, gentle, appropriate words.

It takes hard work to put those together. It takes an overcoming of our normal striking with blows kind of nature to do it that way.

But this is exactly what Paul says to Timothy. Do not do this way but do this way.

Do not go the easy route, the other. It takes patience to forego the immediate and work towards the prize with gentleness and dignifying patience.

So now the rest really falls pretty easily into place. Young men like brothers, neither

Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, nor as ruffians, nor respecting their wealth, brothers together in Christ.

What is Paul pushing Timothy towards? What is he pushing us towards? Simply God's view of your brothers and sisters in the

Lord, looking at them through God's eyes. And how does God see us?

Through the lens of Christ's blood, his own son's precious blood. Older women like mothers.

They are not your mother except for the one if she attends here. I think the lack of rebuke as we defined it, this striking with these verbal blows, it has to apply here between the younger and the older women.

There's too much entertainment in this world that makes the elderly look like fools just because of their age.

And those who lorded over them are then shown as sophisticates to be emulated somehow. And no says the

Word of God. Absolutely not says our Father.

He says they are your mother. Treat them that way. You know Jesus as I said in Matthew 12, he waved his hand and said, this one, this one doing the will of my

Father, she is my mother. Let's try this again though. Let's put the emphasis a little different and think of Jesus Christ.

Not the soft Jesus Christ who speaks gently. He's got that medieval thing they do with his fingers and all that.

Think of Jesus Christ, the man with calloused hands who swung a hammer for his father Joseph and learned how to work hard.

A muscular man with calluses in his hand. And he says, this one doing the will of my

Father, she is my mother. Let us hear Jesus Christ looking at the way we treat one another and saying eye to eye with you.

You said what to this one that I paid for with my blood? You treated my mother how?

Can we see Jesus Christ looking and saying, come again? Which part of my word did you get that from?

Younger women like sisters with all purity. Remember my motif here this afternoon, what is it?

It's dignity. The dignity that we have from God. Not a conceited dignity.

Not I'm going to get my way. Not I'm worthy or anything like that. The dignity with which God speaks to us.

Jesus. Younger women like sisters with all purity. Do you see a young woman here? A young girl here?

Or at work? She's a sister. A blood -bought child of God. Not an object.

Not an object. Younger women like sisters with all purity.

That addendum is so important. Again, looking outside these walls, the world out there claims to respect all people, especially women, as they try to compensate what is seen as such a long time of wrongful male dominance.

They pretend to dignify women by obliterating the God -given distinctions between the sexes.

They look at commercials, look at billboards, look at advertisements, TV shows. They are more objectified than any 1950s

Neanderthal could have ever imagined. Not so here.

Not so in the church. Of all places. Not here. She is your sister, and she's to be treated with a moral purity in thought and in action.

She's to be treated as someone adopted by God on the basis of the blood of the

Lord Jesus Christ. You know, Jesus said lust was adultery in the heart.

The heart, the inner part that we can hide from each other but is laid bare before God. Don't listen to that silliness that says you can appreciate her beauty just so long as you don't lust after her.

The glance is okay, but it's when you break your neck turning around for her. That's all nonsense. That's all nonsense.

Look at her and think of her the way God does. Think of her right now before you see the person.

Think now the way God does towards that one. I think moral purity would find an easier foothold if our thought comes that way beforehand.

See her like God does as his image bearer whose spirit has renewed her, applying to her the benefits of his son's cross.

Well, the dignity God demands for his creatures, I think, is very clear. I want to stop at these couple of verses.

I found them very convicting. I found the wording here and the message to Timothy and to us to be an extremely strong one.

And so I would have us think of these words. Every time we deal with one another, doesn't have to be young girls and a young man to an older man, a young woman to an older.

All of us together have to have this view of one another, and that view is nothing other than God's eye view.

I think I've said four times. I'll say one more time. How does he see us? Through his son and his son's cross.

There's an inherent dignity we have as humans, only humans, not the dogs as much as we love our dogs.

And we do. Not the pets, not the animals, not that incredible variety and diversity that God gave us in this creation of all these living creatures.

Only man is in the image of God. So man in general has that dignity.

It's part of the separation of humankind from animal kind. How much more so, how much more so a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, an older woman, younger woman, older man, younger man, all those categories.

How much more so one of them who's been reborn, remade, recreated by God the

Spirit into the image of God the Son. That's what

I would have us to take from just these couple of verses. And I think it was worthwhile to just focus on these two and pull this out of it.

Because the next verses could so easily be turned into just a procedure.

I could spend a lot of time telling you, well 60 years old then is not what 60 years old is now. So if it was 60 then, well if we look at the actuarial tables it becomes uh 83 .6.

The way to understand the widows, God willing next week, starts with verses one and two.

Is to understand their inherent dignity, God's view of them. So we'll save all that for next week,

Lord willing. But for now I think the point is made about the way we interact, what our dynamic is here amongst us together.

As we look at just these first two verses, these strong words from the Apostle Paul to Timothy. To treat each other with this dignity, with this respect, to take the time to not do the easy way out, to strike with blows, to humiliate, to take away someone's face, but to spend the time to invest ourselves both beforehand as we pray and as we think and as we work out how we can say whatever it is needs to be said because it does need to be said.

And then take that time, do that extra hard work, but do it because it is a view that God has of that one.