Foundations of a Biblical Church

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Please enjoy the following sermon. Well, we're in 1 Timothy chapter 1, and I want to tell you why we are in 1

Timothy. And to illustrate some of this, I'm going to take us into the past.

The not -so -distant past, but into the past nonetheless. It was the middle of the 16th century.

Scholars think likely the year 1548, when the

Protestant reformer John Calvin first published his commentary set on 1 and 2

Timothy. And as Calvin often did when he would write these books, he dedicated this commentary to one of the highest members of royalty, in this case

British royalty. In the opening pages, John Calvin specifically addressed

Edward Seymour, who was the Duke of Somerset, that is a county in southwest

England. And the reason why Calvin addressed this Duke in particular was because he was the

Lord Protector over his young nephew, King Edward VI, who was at that time the 10 -year -old

King of England. Now for the young men and the young women in the room, if I can have your attention for a moment, imagine what that would be like to be the king of one of the most dominant countries that the world had seen in a thousand years before you're even a teenager.

And to think that King Edward was actually appointed king earlier than that at the ripe old age of nine.

And it begs the question, how does a country get into that kind of situation where they are led by a 10 -year -old or earlier 9 -year -old king?

Well, just a few years earlier, King Edward's father, King Henry VIII, had died.

Now maybe some of you know King Henry VIII. That rings a bell. He's a man who made a royal mess of his family and of the church in England.

He was infamous for having his many wives and his many marriages. Before the time of his death, he was married six times.

Two of those marriages ended in divorce. Two of those marriages ended in the beheading of his wives.

One outlived him and another died during childbirth. And in the midst of all of these despicable actions as King Henry was engaged in these multiple marriages and divorces and murders, he was led to abandon the

Roman Catholic Church because, as it turns out, they frowned upon divorcing your wife and murdering your wife and other things like that.

And so to solve his problem, he did one of the most remarkable things. He simply created a new church.

He created the Church of England. And coincidentally, he was the head of that church.

And so though the church did not look upon divorce and remarriage as a good thing, it was more than willing to give the head of the church,

King Henry, a pass. Now as God's providence would have it, Henry would only live about another decade after establishing the

Church of England. And because he didn't leave or didn't have a legitimate male heir until he married his third and favorite wife,

England was left with a child king. So why was Calvin writing to the

Duke of Somerset and young King Edward? Well as it turns out, he saw this as an opportunity dedicating 1st and 2nd

Timothy to the Duke and to the King. And he saw it as an opportunity for these two to right the wrongs of Edward's father.

As Calvin saw it, he saw that the Church of England was still filled with the poison of Rome, still coursing through its veins.

And so he saw it as an opportunity to bring about reformation in the Church of England.

And these were some of his concerns. The church's worship there in England was nearly a carbon copy of Rome's.

And 1st Timothy dealt with that. At the same time, the preaching of God's Word was a lifeless reading of pre -prepared sermons written by someone in the upper echelon of the church and then divvied out to all of the other churches to read.

Calvin saw that what the church truly needed was lively preaching. Not lifeless preaching, but lively preaching that was marked by accurate instruction and exhortation.

The church's government needed to be radically conformed to Scripture. They didn't have priests and leaders who were qualified to do that work.

And still more, the church needed to rightly understand and rightly proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And so as Calvin was finishing and publishing his commentary on 1st and 2nd

Timothy, he dedicated it to the Duke and to the young child king because he saw that the church in England needed to be conformed to the

Bible. And in Calvin's mind, there was no better place to go than Paul's letters to Timothy.

This body of teaching to him was the strongest antidote to that church's many problems.

So he commended Timothy to the Duke and to his nephew king, calling it highly relevant in our time.

Highly relevant for their situation. And the reason why we are now entering into a study of 1st

Timothy is because I think, like Calvin, it is highly relevant to our time and to our situation.

I praise God. You have seen it with me. I trust that God continues to grow our church.

We spoke about that a few weeks ago when I preached on deacons. And as he grows this church in number, so that the need grows for this church to understand what it means to be a biblical church.

Every time a church grows, it runs the risk of losing its DNA. Or even more importantly, losing the biblical

DNA of a true church. And so if we are going to embrace this understanding of being a church that is, according to the

Reformation, ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, the church reformed and always reforming, we need to be reforming it by the precepts of God's word.

And 1st Timothy is a great place to go. So I've had us turn to 1st

Timothy chapter 1. In these opening verses, even in the introduction to this letter, we're going to find some important instructions for our church today.

And what I want to show you here in these first five verses, we find some of the foundations of a biblical church.

Well, what is the church built upon? What is the substance upon which we build it?

Not on sand, but on bedrock. And so as we make our way through this text, we're going to look at what

I'm calling four foundation stones. I could probably word that better, but four foundation stones that form the bedrock of a biblical, healthy, local church as Paul delivers this to Timothy.

Okay, so that's where we're going. I'm going to read verses 1 through 5, and then we will divide the text up into its four parts and look at these foundation stones together.

So Paul writes to Timothy in chapter 1 and verse 1, 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 so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.

The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

So as we as we look then at this text, the first foundation stone that I want to give you, something that is that is foundational to a biblical, a healthy local church, is this.

The authority, number one, the authority of the sovereign saving God. And we see this in verse 1.

In verse 1, as Paul writes to Timothy, he begins in what I might say is a surprisingly familiar way.

Here he's writing a very personal letter to his young apprentice, a man that as we will see later he considers to be his beloved child in the faith.

And yet as he writes to Timothy, he identifies himself, Paul, as an apostle.

And not only as an apostle but with, you might say, his full title.

He says to Timothy, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our

Savior and Christ Jesus our hope. Here at the onset you can see

Paul. He is flying the the royal banner of his apostolic authority as it were as he addresses

Timothy. And it begs the question, why? When I write a text message to our brother

Alex, I don't say to Alex. This is Shane, one of the elders of Grace Fellowship Church.

Grace and mercy and peace be to you. Maybe I should. I'm not sure. But Paul doesn't do that.

Or I should say Paul does do that. And here what we're seeing is this, that Paul identifies himself in such strong terms and yet with a very close friend.

And many scholars have looked at this and have scratched their heads and wondered at this very question.

Why would he do this? And I think the answer is strikingly simple. That as Paul writes right out of the gate, he writes to Timothy and he recognizes that that this letter will not only be read by Timothy, but likely it will be read by the churches to which

Timothy is ministering. And because circular letters were circulating, letters were common at that time, it might be that it would be copied and circulated amongst other churches.

And whether Paul knew it or not, I am not sure. What we know for sure is that this letter would later become part of God's inspired canon.

The canon of God's inspired word. Not only for Timothy, not only for the churches in Ephesus, but for a millennia, millennia, thousands of churches across the world.

And what Paul is seeking to do in verse 1 is to establish that his instruction, even in this very personal letter, is not coming with the authority of a man.

But Paul's letter is coming with the authority of Almighty God. Paul wants

Timothy to know that he is a man under divine authority. As such, Timothy then was also under this divine authority.

And then the church in Ephesus, under this divine authority by extension. And still today, we at Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, are under God's divine authority.

And if we are ever to be a biblical, faithful, healthy church, we must embrace the fact that we are under and accountable to God's sovereign authority.

Now, if we expand upon Paul's opening sentence in verse 1, we can actually learn a great deal more about this authority that we are under and how it must guide everything that we do.

First, as Paul addresses himself or identifies himself, he calls himself an apostle.

Now this word apostle literally means a sent one or a messenger, sometimes used as a naval term, where a ship is sent out for a particular mission.

And this tells us something about how God's authority comes to us. Some might say, how does

God exercise his authority over the church? God's authority is exercised through, we might see in Paul's letter, his authoritative communication.

And his authoritative communication does not come by public address or by direct address.

Meaning that God does not appear in the sky with a thundering voice every time he seeks to communicate with his people.

But rather, instead we find that God himself appoints messengers through whom he communicates his authoritative message through his written word.

And when it comes in writing, it comes, and many of you have heard me say this already, when God's word comes to us in his written word, it comes with the same authority as if God were here behind this pulpit speaking to you face to face.

That this is God's authoritative word. But Paul goes on, not just an apostle, but he is a special messenger and not on his own accord.

But he says it is by the command of God. And this really requires us to go all the way back to the beginning of Paul's life and ministry.

As many of us know, Paul did not choose to be an apostle. If you think about this,

Paul did not choose to be an apostle. Paul chose to be a persecutor of the church. And he was more than happy to do that.

Going from Jerusalem out into the countryside to hunt down Christians and to take them back captive to Jerusalem.

And so when we study, it's really interesting, when we study the

Apostle Paul's life, we see how it is that it wasn't Paul who chose

God, but it was God who chose Paul. Demonstrating the sovereign authority of God.

And when we see Paul's upbringing, we can really begin to appreciate that everything about his life providentially directed him to this very path.

Now whenever we get at the beginning of a letter, I'm always tempted to take a deep dive into Paul and to Timothy.

And we won't do that because we've done that, I think, in several epistles already. But we'll look at just a couple of examples of this.

How the Lord God prepared Paul for this very purpose. We're told in Scripture that he was a

Roman citizen by birth. That he was meticulously trained in the

Old Testament as a Pharisee under the rabbi Gamaliel. He grew up in one of the largest cities in the

Roman Empire, the city of Tarsus. There he learned about things like the famous Greek poets.

We see him use these poets, in fact, in his ministry to the Gentiles.

When he was on Mars Hill in Acts chapter 17, he quoted from Aratus who said, in him we live and move and have our being.

Paul says, as some of your poets have said. Elsewhere, in 1st

Corinthians 15, I'm not sure if you knew this, but he immortalized the words of a playwright named Menander who wrote a play called

Face. And in that play, he came up with a proverb that says, bad company corrupts good morals.

They are coming right out of the Greco -Roman world in which Paul was living. Speaking to the

Corinthians in language that no doubt they had heard already. Elsewhere, likely when he was in Tarsus, he learned about the 7th century

Cretan poet -philosopher. A man Epimenides who is credited with saying this,

Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. And so we can begin to see how

Paul's formative years would later shape his life and ministry.

Under God's providential care, he learned how to read and write and travel by land and sea.

He memorized whole books of the Bible. In fact, most of the Old Testament, if not all. His religious zeal was fostered and sharpened.

And when it came his time, when his time came, God called him into his service to be a messenger of Jesus Christ.

Some will ask, as many have no doubtedly asked you, give me one example in the

Bible where God sovereignly calls men to serve him apart from the exercise of their free will.

You can say probably one of the most prominent men in the Bible after Jesus, the

Apostle Paul, who chose to be a persecutor of the church, but God chose him to be an apostle by his authoritative command.

So I want you to see where I'm going here. That when we talk about us being under the authority of God, we are under the authority of his word.

We are under his sovereign, powerful, perfect authority. But I also want you to see this.

That not only are we under that sovereign and powerful authority, but we are under the gracious authority of God.

And this is something that as we go and make our way through the book of 1 Timothy, each letter has its own character.

Each book of the Bible has its own distinct marks. And one of the things that Timothy has is it is filled with these little gems.

I don't use the word Easter because it's pagan, but you'll hear things when movie writers do movies or their video games and they hide

Easter eggs all throughout the game. Little things that people can learn and discover and find in that movie or game or whatever it might be.

Well, here we have a letter that is full of gems. And the reason for that is because as the

Apostle Paul writes to Timothy, he is writing to someone who is very familiar to him and who is very familiar with his teaching.

And so he does not feel the great need to expound upon his theology. It is a thoroughly practical work, 1

Timothy is. And yet, because the Apostle Paul is the Apostle Paul, we find these little gems that pop up here and there.

Things that are likely assumed between Paul and Timothy, and yet for us are wonderful and formative, glorious things.

Some of the deepest and richest truths of the grace of God are found in little sayings, little gems that Paul delivers to Timothy.

Elsewhere, we find truths about the attributes of our glorious God. In other places, we find exalted sayings about the local church that almost seem scandalous in how

Paul holds up the local church. I want to show you a couple gems in verse one.

Paul says that he is an Apostle of Christ Jesus. By command of God, he could have stopped there, but he doesn't.

He says, by command of God, our Savior, and of Christ Jesus, our hope.

This is a saying, God our Savior, that Paul uses only a handful of times in the

Bible, every single time in his pastoral epistles. He wants us to know that not only does his authority come from God, but his authority comes from a

God who desires our good, who has used that very authority for our good, who has used that authority for our salvation.

Here, Paul gives this phrase that shows that God himself has used his immeasurable power to save his people.

He could have used it to crush us, but instead he has used it mercifully for our eternal salvation.

That God's authority is good. But he goes on. He adds, and Christ our hope.

Christ is not only our master. He is, but he is not only our master.

Christ is not only our Lord. He is, but he is not only our Lord. Christ is, if you are in Christ, he is our hope.

Christ came to a people who were without hope and without God in the world.

He came to you for your soul, that you might have hope. Christ came to his own when his own did not know him, nor did they receive him.

And yet through Christ, those of us who are in Christ have become partakers in the glory of this mystery,

Christ in us, the hope of glory. And the profundity of this statement that Paul would write to Timothy and say that Christ is our hope, it is perhaps lost on us to some extent in a world in which we have, we can hope for a lot of things that are before us.

We have, generally speaking, a stable government, generally speaking. We have, generally speaking, a prosperous existence here in Canada with freedoms and all kinds of really novel things that most of the world has never known, like antibiotics.

Just little things that we often overlook. But Paul was writing, speaking into a hopeless culture.

And there is, I always like looking at these historical sketches. There is a quote from a historian in the first century, a man named

Tacitus, who really tells us about the dark context in which

Paul is speaking. These are the words of Tacitus referring to the Roman Empire in the first century at the time of Paul.

He says, I'm entering upon the history of a period rich in disaster, gloomy with wars, rent with seditions, nay, savage in its very hours of peace.

Four emperors perished by the sword. There were three civil wars. Rome was wasted by fires.

The sea crowded with exiles. Island rocks drenched with murder. Everything was a crime and virtue was the shortest way to ruin.

All was one of delirium and hate and terror. Slaves were bribed to betray their masters, freemen their patrons, and he who had no fault was betrayed by his friend.

This is the world to which Paul is writing. And yet, even as I write that, does it not sound like that is perhaps eerily on the horizon of the world in which we live?

So how does this apply to us? Brothers and sisters, we live in an age that recoils at authority or even the thought of authority.

We see this everywhere. The authority structures of the family have been cast aside and with it, darkness and confusion has reigned.

The authority structures of the government have been dismantled or corrupted. And we see that when we defund the police and we release the criminals to wreak havoc on society.

The authority structures and the authority of God's word in many local churches is at an all -time low.

And all we need to do is to look around and realize that such a base attitude with respect to authority will be the ruin of us.

We live in a culture that needs authority and yet it hates authority. And what

I want to tell you, brothers and sisters, is that we don't get to choose whether we are under God's authority. We are under God's authority.

And a faithful, healthy, biblical, local church submits to and embraces that authority.

There will always be many churches that will chase every fad under the sun, that will exchange the

Bible for human wisdom, that will... I don't know how you do this, but to give up the gospel for a progressive, social, non -gospel, where the biblical authority structures lead us to having women pastors pronouncing the sparkle creed.

We must submit to God's authority if we are to be a faithful church.

Never mind what man says, what does God say? That must be, these must be our marching orders.

And this means that this church is not ours. This church is not yours.

I assure you this church is not mine. This church is not, does not belong to Kapilano Krishna Assembly.

It does not belong to the government of Canada, though they may think it does. This church belongs to God and to God alone.

And we must submit to Him. We must submit to God's sovereign authority in everything that we do.

We must trust that everything that God commands and does is ultimately for our good because He is an authoritative

God who is the God who is our Savior and Christ who is our hope. We must trust and obey

God's authoritative word. A healthy church must be built upon the foundation of the authoritative word of a sovereign saving

God. And I ask how is our church doing in this respect?

Imperfect, I will tell you right now. Imperfect. And so then the question becomes how can we be reformed more and more so that we might be better conformed to the word of God?

This is certainly a question that the elders ponder every day and I encourage you.

I want to ask you how can you live and how can you pray and how can you sit under sound preaching?

How can you sing? How can you partake in the Lord's Supper? How can you interact with the elders and with one another?

How can you come or not come to the corporate meetings of the church in a way that says

I submit to God and to His authority for this is His church.

God must be our authority, period. Now the second foundation stone that we find in this passage is this, faithful servants in the church.

You can tell I like my first point because I went long but it does get shorter. Faithful servants in the church and we'll look at verses 2 and 3a together.

Paul says, 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.

We'll stop there for a moment. So we need to know, I think, what is happening here.

We come to 1 Timothy 1 and verse 2 and verse 3 and we go, okay, so the play has started.

We've missed the first act. What has just happened? Where do we find ourselves in this context?

And I think for us to understand what is happening here, we need to do a bit of backwards reconstruction, not deconstruction, but reconstruction to determine the circumstances that led up to Paul's writing of this letter.

It's almost universally recognized that Paul wrote this letter sometime after his

Roman imprisonment, perhaps in the mid 60s AD. In doing that backwards reconstruction, we can know this because the circumstances of this letter simply don't align with any other period during Paul's three missionary journeys.

And meanwhile, the mention of Ephesus and Macedonia, and you'll see if you have a bulletin,

I've given you a map. I don't use visuals often, but there it is. You have a visual. The mention of Macedonia and Ephesus gives us a bit of context as to what has come before and what exactly

Paul and Timothy are dealing with. There's this saying that when you're preaching, you should never give the people a tour of the kitchen.

You should serve them their food. I'm not going to give you a tour of the kitchen today. I'm going to serve you the food, but if you want to see the kitchen, come to me afterwards.

I'll give you a tour of the kitchen. But I'm how it is that we got here. In the book of Acts, we're told that the apostle

Paul went on three missionary journeys. We see that beginning in chapter 13, as the apostle

Paul was commissioned to go out from Antioch as an apostle to the Gentiles. And the course of these missionary journeys in his first missionary journey, where he went was to the

Northeastern coast of the Mediterranean. And so Crete, and Lystra, and Iconium, and Derbe, and other places in that region before returning to Antioch to his home base.

I think that that gives us good precedence when we send a missionary out, that not only do we send them out for all of eternity, but at least in modern day with modern travel, we can expect that they can go out, they can minister, and at some point they will come back where they will encourage us and we will in turn encourage them.

And so that's what Paul does on his first missionary journey. It is likely that during his first missionary journey, he met a woman named

Eunice and Lois, two Jewish women who had a son named

Timothy. And we're told that they were God -fearing, devoted Christians who read their son

Timothy. They read the Old Testament scriptures to him. And some scholars would even say that during that time when

Paul met Eunice and Lois, he shared the gospel with them, and in turn, they and Timothy were saved.

We don't fully know all of those details, but that's what some believe. Now, Paul returns to Antioch, and eventually he heads out for his second missionary journey.

And this is a good reason to give us, it gives us good reason to believe that Timothy was converted on that first missionary trip, because as Paul is going through Lystra, in that eastern part of Turkey, he picks up Timothy and they carry on.

And we're told that Timothy was well thought of by the believers there. We see it in Acts chapter 16.

And because Timothy was half Jew and half Gentile, he was not circumcised. Paul saw that as an impediment to his ministry, and so he was circumcised and off they went to minister to the

Gentiles. Now, as they went, we're told that they were barely in, they're barely into chapter 16, when

Paul had a vision that he saw as God calling him to Macedonia.

And Macedonia, if you can picture that map, it's, or you have it right in front of you, is in modern -day

Greece. And there in Macedonia, we find a few key cities that would be familiar to us.

We find Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea amongst others. And so Paul, feeling that he is called there, he goes and preaches the gospel to the people of Macedonia.

And preaching the gospel to them, by the glory of God, by the grace of God, people are saved. And he establishes churches in those regions.

He then carries on through Athens, where he preaches that great sermon on Mars Hill, quoting from that poet that he likely learned about in his childhood before carrying on to Achaia, where Corinth is, and then back to his home base in Antioch.

So here we see, we've picked up Timothy in the second missionary journey. He has made his way through Macedonia, not all the way through every place that Paul would later go, but at least that far back to Antioch.

And then comes the third missionary journey. And Acts chapter 19 tells us about that third missionary journey, because, and it's one of my favorite chapters,

Acts chapter 19, because there we see that the apostle Paul went to Ephesus, preached the gospel there, established a church.

And I just love the idea of being in Ephesus in the first century, as Paul is preaching for three years, for an extended period of time, every day in the hall of Tyrannus.

Imagine that, how many people quit their jobs so they could go listen to the apostle Paul. Probably not that many, because he was telling the

Thessalonians, he who does not work should not eat. But nonetheless, they were there listening to the apostle

Paul preach God's word. And so there, perhaps, Timothy became acquainted with the church in Ephesus.

We're not fully sure. But as the story goes, Paul returns to Jerusalem and eventually is taken prisoner and taken to Rome.

Now during those first three missionary journeys, we see no period where Timothy would have been left in Ephesus while Paul went on to Macedonia.

And so what likely happened is around AD 62, the apostle Paul was released from prison.

And having been released from prison, historical accounts, tradition tells us that he made his way to Spain.

And amongst that time, he also passed through Ephesus and then went on to Macedonia, where he left

Timothy in Ephesus. That was almost a tour of the kitchen, but not quite.

There's more to it than that. Now, what likely happened as Paul was going through Ephesus is that he saw that there were a great many number of problems that were occurring in that church.

And so he sent Timothy, left Timothy to go there to deal with those challenges while he went on and carried on to places like Philippi and Thessalonica and Berea.

And the letter, it's an introduction to the letter here. The letter deals, we get a good sense of what those problems were because the letter deals with them.

It appears that in Ephesus, as Timothy is there, he's dealing with false doctrine. He's dealing with disorderly worship, including how the church prays in chapter 2 and how the women are functioning in the life of the church at the end of chapter 2.

He deals with the qualifications of elders in chapter 3 and then the qualifications of deacons in that later chapter.

We see an exalted view of the local church at the end of chapter 3. In chapter 4, he deals with personal godliness.

In chapter 5, social responsibilities, caring for the widows and the elders and slaves at the transition between chapter 5 and chapter 6.

And then finally, materialism and some final instructions in chapter 6. So with Paul's delegated authority,

Timothy was sent as the human means to address these problems. Now some would argue that Timothy then became the pastor of Ephesus.

I would say that that is not the case. The fourth century church historian

Eusebius, who was at that point steeped in Roman Catholic ecclesiology, he said that Timothy was the first bishop of Ephesus.

I do not think that is the case. Rather, I'm inclined to agree or to think, I agree with some others who have said that Timothy was

Paul's apostolic delegate. He went there as the hands of the apostle

Paul, as it were, to address the issues in the church. And in as much as Timothy faithfully carried out

Paul's instructions, he came with the authority of an apostle. But otherwise, he was simply a slave of Christ and a servant of the church.

Now Timothy's name is fascinating to me. Timothy's name means this, one who honors

God. And this really is a picture of the life and the ministry and the character of Timothy.

And we see this in the language that Paul uses. I'll bring our attention back here to verse two, where Timothy is called my true child in the faith.

This gives us good reason to believe that it was Paul who led Timothy to the Lord. Paul was known for saying this.

He said to the Corinthians, for though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for I became your father in Christ Jesus through our gospel.

At several points in the pastoral epistles, Paul refers to Timothy as his beloved child, as his dear child.

And so we see this relationship, the relationship between a discipler and a disciple.

But more than that, I think we see a picture of Timothy's faithfulness, that he was a faithful servant to the churches.

And we see examples of this in 1 Corinthians chapter 4 and verse 17.

Paul says there, this is why I sent you Timothy, my beloved and faithful child in the

Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ as I teach them everywhere in every church.

Or elsewhere in Philippians 2, he says, you know, but you know Timothy's proven worth, how as a son with a father he has served with me in the gospel.

I like what one commentator says, they say, Timothy was the man whom Paul could trust and could send anywhere knowing that he would go.

Happy indeed is the leader who possesses a lieutenant like that. And then he adds,

Timothy is our example of how we should serve in the church.

How would our church be strengthened, brothers and sisters, if we not only submitted wholeheartedly to the authority of God as he reveals it in his word?

And not only that, how would our church be strengthened if each one of us had a heart like Timothy?

To be a faithful servant, to play second fiddle as it were.

It has been said that the church runs on regular and in many ways

Timothy was incredibly regular. He was a normie as the kids would say it.

He grew up in Lystra, a place that was described, I'm glad someone got it, a place that was described as being an insignificant city on the farthest reaches of the civilized world.

He seemed to struggle with fear and timidity. He was not always the most bold with the gospel, hence

Paul is having to instruct him, do the work of an evangelist, Timothy. He's not given us a spirit of fear as to shrink back.

He had frequent health issues, hence Paul's special instructions to take a little wine for the sake of his stomach.

It makes me wonder how many of us feel like I'm just so normal.

I'm incredibly regular. I'm incredibly, I don't wanna use the word insignificant, but I'm not easily noticed in a crowd.

There's not much that draws people's attention to me. And I want to tell you that that is the same language that described our

Lord Jesus Christ. That there was not much that drew our attention to him.

There was nothing lovely about his appearance. There was nothing that drew people that they might be attracted to him.

Well, here we have another example to imitate in Timothy. An incredibly normal guy, and yet he was one, according to his name, whose great purpose in life was to honor

God. And yet he was a beloved child in the faith.

He was a Christian of proven worth. He was one who eagerly served in the gospel.

And my prayer is that the Lord would fill this church with Timothy's. That we would have

Timothy's and Barnabas's everywhere. Sons of encouragement, and those who live and make it their life's aim not to be noticed, but to go wherever the

Lord sends you, that the Lord himself might be honored. One of the challenges,

I think, when we establish this church, and once we found someone who could build a pulpit, you can tell we wanted a big one.

It needed to be short, but big. And that might give you the idea that only what happens behind this pulpit is important.

Make no mistake about it. What happens behind this pulpit is very, very important.

And yet, every member of this church is vitally important.

That when you are not here, when you're gone for a week, this church is missing an arm, or a leg, or an elbow, or an eye, or a mouth, or an ear, or whatever it might be.

That God has put you, do you believe it, that God has put you in this church to be a regular, faithful,

Christ -exalting servant? That he might get all the glory.

And that is how a biblical church functions. And Paul adds another gem when he says, grace, mercy, and peace from God the

Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. He's using here, and I've pointed this out before, a play on words, that the expression kairo means greetings or rejoice.

It's how they would greet one another. Well, instead of saying kairo, he says kairos and airene, which means grace and peace.

In this case, he adds as well, mercy. Grace and peace and mercy to you.

Here one observer rightly points out that these three words capture the essence of the gospel message.

That it does not matter how much of a regular, faithful servant of the church you are, you will always need grace, mercy, and peace.

You will always need the gospel. And what a gospel it is to think grace, mercy, and peace.

I love singing that song. You know there are songs that you love to sing. You can sing it almost every

Sunday. Grace and peace. Oh, how can this be for lawbreakers and thieves, for the worthless, the least.

You have said that our judgment is death for all eternity without hope, without rest.

Oh, what an amazing mystery that your grace has come to me. Brothers and sisters, that not only are we the normies in the church, but we're the recipients of grace and peace from God our

Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. And the question that we must ask every day is this.

Oh, how can it be? Let songs of gratefulness ever rise, never cease.

Oh God, if you would do this for me, there is nothing too great that I can do for you. God builds healthy churches, built on his authority, built by the faithful, regular investment of his saints in the body of Christ.

We're going to look at a third foundation stone, the stewardship of God's gospel in verse 3b and 4.

So he says, I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus, we carry on, so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculation rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.

Verse 3 begins to give us a flavor as to what was happening in the church and why

Paul was left there, Timothy was left there, excuse me. That there were certain persons who were teaching different doctrines.

Now, Brother Sam and I were just away for a week. If while we were away, someone texted us and said, they're teaching different doctrines.

I don't know when the first flight out of Washington leaves, but I'm on it. This is a terrible threat to the church that they are teaching different doctrines.

And here we get a hint at those doctrines when we look in verse 4, where it says that they were devoting themselves to myths and endless genealogies that word myth comes from the

Greek word mythos. It's a legendary story, usually about false gods.

In this case, it might be a Jewish myth. As Paul is dealing with Titus in chapter 1 in verse 14, he says, avoid

Jewish myths or not to devote themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people.

And what was likely happening was that there the churches were becoming infatuated with mythic

Old Testament books and figures. This is something that sadly some of the churches fell into.

There's a Jewish book known as Jubilees. And in Jubilees, there are these mythical stories about these angels and creatures that lived around the time of the flood.

Probably not unlike Russell Crowe's movie, if you've ever seen the Noah's Ark movie. That would be a

Jewish myth. And here the church was devoting themselves to myths, non -truths, stories that were entertaining, but that ultimately were futile and were dangerous to the souls of those who focused on them.

Moreover, they were focusing on genealogies. It's interesting. We were just dealing with Gnosticism in 1

John. Do you know that this here is an appearance of Gnosticism in 1 Timothy? The Gnostics loved genealogies.

They wanted to talk about the origins of the world, and where we came from, and the origins of evil, and all of these things.

And so they would engage in endless speculations about who was the child of who, was the child of who, who is the child of who.

It was highly speculative and it was foolishness. And we see that Paul is dealing with Gnosticism because if you go with me to the end of 1

Timothy in chapter 6, we actually see him use that very word at the very end of the chapter in verse 20.

Oh Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions.

See, these are myths, genealogies, speculations of what is falsely called knowledge.

Gnosis. So here we see Gnosticism taking hold even before 1

John in Ephesus as Timothy is there to address the problem.

And I want you to see the true danger of this and what we must learn from it. I think every one of us to some degree enjoys a good story.

I think we all to some degree even enjoy a good conspiracy theory. You know, just something that's a little bit zany and it's entertaining at the very least.

What was happening in the church is that as they devoted themselves to myths and genealogies and endless speculation, they were exchanging that for this.

The stewardship from God that is by faith, he says at the end of verse 4.

Now this is perhaps a confusing phrase, but this is what it means. That they were exchanging these myths and interesting stories and speculations for the body of the gospel and the communication of it.

God's plan of salvation in the gospel and its communication, as one brother has said.

What made this situation especially egregious was that the leaders of the church and the believers in Ephesus had become preoccupied with these foolish pursuits and had turned from the glories of the gospel to foolish and useless stories.

They had traded the gospel for an inferior host of fables and speculation.

And some of us would look at that today and say, how foolish. We would never do that. But is that true?

It might seem a ridiculous thing to trade the gospel for fables and myths.

But how often this very thing happens in churches all over North America, where we become so obsessed with this little idea that this becomes the main thing rather than the main thing being the main thing.

And you can do that today. You can drive down Argyle Road and drive past the Cowboy Church, where it's just as important,

I imagine, to be in chaps and a cowboy hat than anything else. You can go to flat -earther churches today, to prosperity gospel churches.

You can go to to Reformed -type churches, who I fear have made expository preaching the gospel rather than the gospel.

It is far too easy to become distracted with theological novelties. It's easier than we care to admit.

All of us are in constant danger of chasing any number of amusing rabbit trails down all kinds of theological or amusing little rabbits, excuse me, down all kinds of theological bunny trails.

We cannot, brothers and sisters, if the Lord takes me tomorrow, commit to this in your minds.

We cannot exchange the gospel for anything, no matter how big a crowd it draws.

I think the new thing amongst conservative churches is that we are going to be about the gospel and about conservative politics.

And there are lots of churches that are growing on that very formula. We must, let me repeat, never exchange the gospel of the

Lord Jesus Christ for anything ever.

We must be dependent upon the gospel, the gospel word, and the gospel word alone.

You want to grow as a church. You want to thrive as a church. You want to be a biblical church. We must be a gospel church, a church that is about the unadulterated word of God only.

The moment one of us comes up here and this Bible goes down there, you walk out that door.

I'm telling you. And when we ask why you walked out that door, you tell us.

Because I'm not here to listen to you, to hear from you. I'm here to hear from God and what

He says in His word. And if you will not tell me what God says, I don't want to hear it. We see this.

The Lord will. He will prosper His church when the church is built upon His word and His gospel.

I was just thinking about it in the life of Martin Luther this week. It came to me spontaneously how he spoke about when someone asked him, what was the secret recipe behind the

Protestant Reformation? I love his answer. It's very Lutheran. He says,

I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote

God's word. Otherwise, I did nothing. And while I slept or drank

Wittenberg beer with my friend Philip and Amsdorf, the word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it.

That is the power of the gospel and God's word. And this church must be built upon it.

Now, we have one last foundation stone, and that is what

I'm calling the bullseye of all Christian instruction. In verse 5, the aim of our charge, the aim, there's the bullseye language, the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

Why do we study the Bible? When you wake up in the morning,

I presume that you do this. You go to be alone with the Lord, your God, and you open his word and you draw near to him in prayer.

Maybe it's at the end of the day. Maybe you work a crazy shift work. I don't know. Why do we preach in this church?

Why do we sing songs, aim to sing songs that are full of truth?

Why do we have fellowship? Why do we teach on Thursday nights?

Why do we meet for prayer? Why do we do any thing that we do?

I fear that we might do those things, seeing them as an end in and of themselves, that by reading or that by listening to preaching,

I have read and I have listened to preaching, and hence all this concluded.

Why do we study theology? Why has the Lord given us elders, and we pray deacons one day, to this end?

The aim of our charge is love. That love is the goal.

The goal of God's word is love. Love to God and love to one another.

The aim of this church and its word ministry and everything that we do must be, it better be, love for God, the glory of God, by the saints loving

God with all of their hearts, souls, mind, and strength, so that we open the Bible and you hear about God, and because you hear about Him, you love

Him more, and He is glorified and exalted and magnified in you.

This should be our great goal every time we wake up in the morning, every time you memorize a passage of Scripture.

I'm going to take you to your kitchen table for a moment. Every time you open your Bible and then open a commentary next to it, you're not doing it to fill your head with knowledge.

You're doing it to fill your heart with love to God, so that God would make us a church that loves

Him more and more and more, and that this would be the fruit of the instruction in this church, love.

And we have so far to go that it's unfortunate in one respect that we don't love

God and we don't love one another as we ought to love, and yet, if you're an athlete and you're two minutes behind the fastest 100 -meter runtime, that's a long ways behind.

I assure you, we're further behind than that in the department of love. We say, we have all of this room to grow.

We have all of this room to love. We have all of this room to be more like our

Christ who loved us and gave Himself up for us.

William Gurnall, a Puritan, he says, love is the great conqueror of the world.

If we as a church want to go out and conquer this city, we will conquer it by love to God and love to one another and love to neighbor.

Love is our aim. Richard Baxter says, love is the commander of the soul. And therefore, God knows that if He has our hearts,

He has our all. Love sets the mind on working, the tongue on speaking, the hands on working, the feet, no, the mind on thinking, the tongue on speaking, the hands on working, the feet on going, and every faculty obeys its commands.

And how do we get that love? It is issued from,

Paul says, a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

A pure heart in the words of one is this, a pure heart stands for the totality of man's moral affections.

And without purity there, nobility of character is clearly impossible. It is a heart pointed only at God in everything.

In several places in scripture, we're told, we're commanded, it is upheld as ideal that we would have a pure heart.

In Matthew 5 and verse 8, the Lord Jesus said, blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see

God. One of my favorite Psalms, Psalm 24 verses three and four, who shall ascend the hill of the

Lord and who shall stand in his holy place, he who has clean hands and a pure heart and does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully.

And how do we get such a pure heart? It is about, it is by orienting everything about us to our

God. You want to love God more, orient your heart to God.

And every time you waver, confess it and reorient your heart to God.

David, after he committed that grievous sin, both of adultery and murder, in Psalm 51 10, he said, create in me a clean heart,

O God, and renew a right spirit within me. How often do you ask

God for a pure heart, for a clean heart? We must.

We have the Bible as our example. It issues as well, he says, from a good conscience.

God has given each one of us an internal faculty that helps to self -judge, if I can say it that way, to distinguish between right and wrong.

This is an important concept for Paul. He's always speaking about the state of the conscience.

He comments on it over 20 times in Scripture, keeping a good conscience, a clear conscience before God.

Or conversely, avoiding, as he says in 1 Timothy 4, a seared conscience that has lost its ability to self -judge.

I want to ask you, how are you conditioning your conscience? Are you keeping short accounts with God, bringing everything to him, seeking to have a clear conscience before him?

Or are you doing what you know is wrong, hitting the snooze button on the conscience and searing it in the process?

We can only pursue a good conscience through obedience and an open heart, an open communication, open confession with God.

So as to say, and we were speaking about this on repentance this week, not just to confess my sin in general, but to confess my sin in particular.

To say, Lord, I want to lay it all out before you.

Are you doing that? For that is how you grow in your love for God.

And then lastly, a sincere faith. Characteristic of false teachers in 1

Timothy is this, that they don't actually believe what they claim to believe. Paul says to Timothy in 1

Timothy 4 .2, they are insincere liars. By contrast, those who truly love

God, believe the truth of God with all of their hearts. And they feed that faith by learning more and more, instructing more and more, meditating more and more on the truths of the gospel, on the object of our faith.

Their faith is found genuine when tested and their faith produces more and more love.

Now, there's so much more that I can say, but I have said lots already. And so I put this question to you just to conclude.

Are we building a biblical church here? Are we building this church upon the authority of God and his word?

Are we building this church by servant heartedness?

Every man, every woman busy at work, not to build this empire, but to advance the kingdom of God.

Are we building this church on the gospel? Are we building this church to the end that God would be the great object of our love?

We must. Let's pray. Thank you for listening to another sermon from Grace Fellowship Church.

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