Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome and Announcements

Pre-Thanksgiving Love Feast on Wednesday, November 23rd in lieu of Bible Study & Prayer.

Dinner starts at 7pm and will include the Lord’s Supper.

Pastor Daniel and Natalie will be away December 8th-10th.

They will still be reachable via cell or email.

In case of emergency, please contact Deane Herbst.

Let me remind you to continue worshiping the Lord through your giving.

To help you give, we have three ways to do so, (1) cash and checks can be given at the offering box.

Checks should be written to Grace & Peace; debit, credit, and ACH transfers can be done either by (2) texting 84321 with your $[amount] and following the text prompts or (3) by visiting us online at www.giving.gapb.church.

Of course, everything you give goes to the building up of our local church and the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Prayer of Repentance and Adoration

Preaching of God’s Word (1 Tim 1:1-11)

Introduction

If you have your Bible, please turn it to 1 Timothy 1:1-11.

As you know, we’re starting a new series this week for our Wednesday evening Bible Study & Prayer in which we’re working expositionally and exegetically through what we know as the pastoral epistles—1 Timothy, Titus, and 2 Timothy.

All three letters are shorter letters written to young pastors—Timothy and Titus by the apostle Paul.

Timothy was pastoring the church in the city of Ephesus and Titus was pastoring the church on Crete.

As I’ve said the handful of times that I’ve mentioned this new series, you may have this idea that because these letters were written to pastors, you might think that they aren’t necessarily for you—after all, you might not be a pastor and you might never be a pastor, but let me encourage you to notice that everything that Paul tells Timothy and Titus has significant application for us even to this day—even for those of you that may never pastor a church.

In fact, I would argue that what we’ll learn through the pastoral epistles teaches a lot about who ought to be leading the local church, who should be serving the local church, and what the primary focuses of the local church ought to be—some of which, you may never have heard someone explain or teach before.

Just so you have a little bit of background information, Timothy is the pastor of the church in Ephesus—Ephesus was a port-city in what’s called Asia-minor.

From the port in Ephesus, there were roads to every corner of the Asia-minor province and because the city was a port-city, you could just imagine that there was a significant of wealth brought into the city due to its ability to be a shipping hub.

At the time of the writing of Ephesians, it’s estimated that the city had a population of about 250,000 people of mixed ethnicities, which was common for large port cities throughout the Roman Empire.

Concerning religion, Ephesus was known to be home to many different false religious beliefs—including worship of the goddess Artemis, who had a rather large temple; some practiced imperial cult worship—otherwise known as worship of the emperor; gnosticism, which is similar in concept to Scientology today; and even the practice of magic was popular amongst the pagan people.

You can see how the various religious beliefs might cause some issue for the church in Ephesus.

My hope is that over the next few months as we work through the text, you’ll learn more about the local church, more about the qualifications for those who lead the church—the elders; and the qualifications for those who serve the church officially—they deacons, and that you’ll learn more about your role within the local church as well.

Before we go any further, let’s read 1 Timothy 1:1-11 together.

As we study 1 Timothy 1:1-11 together, we’re going to break it into three parts: (1) Paul’s Greeting to Timothy (1-2), (2) Paul’s Warning (3-7), and (3) The Reason for Paul’s Warning (8-11).

In this text, we see Paul open his letter to Timothy by reminding Timothy to be sure that what was being taught in the church accorded with sound doctrine.

In this case, Paul gives us an idea of what the false teaching being taught was and it will help us see the importance of true doctrine being taught faithfully within the local church.

Our message for this evening will focus on the need for true, genuine doctrine being taught in the local church today; and it will be a reminder that we must take the warning against false teachers seriously even to this day.

Prayer for Illumination

Paul’s Greeting to Timothy (1-2)

Our text starts with a greeting from the apostles Paul to Timothy.

And while most people have a tendency to skip over these sorts of introductions in the epistles, I do want us to look at some of the details concerning what we read in the first two verses.

In v. 1, we see the author of the text, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope.”

There are a few details that we should note:

First, it’s clear that it was written by Paul—and you might hear that and think, well of course, that’s precisely what the text says, but it is important for us to note because it helps us understand the relationship between Paul and Timothy, but I’ll get back to that later.

What we see in this text, is that author is Paul and that he is the apostle Paul who is an apostle because God and Jesus commanded for him to be an apostle.

He points out that concept, that he was commanded to be an apostle probably because he wasn’t one of the original apostles.

Remember, in the history of the New Testament, Paul comes a little later than everyone else—in fact, if you’re thinking of where we are in the book of Acts on Sunday—in Acts 5, Paul is still known as Saul and he is a Pharisee who is about to start murdering Christians.

And yet, after Paul’s conversion, Jesus makes him an apostle—it was God’s choice for Paul to serve Him in the manner that Paul did—as an apostle to the Gentile people.

It’s interesting to see how Paul describes Jesus as “Christ Jesus our hope.”

— Christ meaning the anointed one or Messiah and hope coming from the Greek ελπις, which speaks of an expectation or confident expectation.

The idea being that Jesus is Messiah who we trust or who our expectations are in.

We then see in v. 2 the statement, “To Timothy, my true child in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.”

So, the apostle Paul is writing this letter to a man named Timothy, who Paul considers his true child in the faith.

This gives us a great understanding of the relationship that Paul had with Timothy.

Paul considered Timothy to be like his spiritual son;

And I think that we can all get an impression of what this was like simply by considering how a father considers his own son.

An oversimplification of the father and son relationship is this—fathers care for their sons, teach their sons, trains their sons, and then sends their sons off into the world.

That’s how Paul viewed his relationship with Timothy—he cared for Timothy, he taught Timothy, he trained Timothy, and now he’s sent Timothy off into the world.

It also gives us an idea of what Timothy’s own thinking towards Paul would be like—Timothy would consider Paul a sort of spiritual mentor.

One worthy of honor and respect simply due to who he was and what he had done.

This also gives us an idea of how Timothy would view the words given to him by Paul in this letter.

Paul is like his spiritual father and clearly, Paul is an apostle—thus, the words written have authority and the words written would be taken seriously and of utmost importance by Timothy.

He would’ve taken Paul’s words seriously because Paul was like a father to him and because Paul was an apostle chosen by the very command of God.

Concerning the “grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord” section of the sentence—I think sometimes people put a little too much emphasis into the meaning of these words.

Up to this point in the greeting given by Paul, he had stayed fairly true to what is typically considered normal Greek letter-writing.

It was common for someone to say “from so-and-so,” give his credentials, and then write “to so-and-so.”

This statement concerning grace, mercy, and peace was unique to Paul to some extent in that it was an addition to the usual Greek form—however, it does share a lot with what’s considered a typical Jewish greeting—shalom.

Shalom is the very concept that you hope that whoever you’re speaking to experiences not just peace, but the very peace that only God supplies.

Paul’s essentially making the same statement, that he hopes that Timothy experiences the grace, mercy, and peace that only God supplies.

After greeting Timothy, Paul jumps straight into his letter.

He doesn’t beat around the bush, he jumps straight into his letter and in this case, he starts with a warning concerning false teaching and in particular, concerning false teachers.

Let’s look at vv. 3-7 again.

Paul’s Warning (3-7)

So, Paul makes a statement that when he left Timothy in Ephesus that he pointed out a certain concern to Timothy and that concern had to do with certain persons teaching different doctrines.

The idea being that there were certain people within the church of Ephesus that was preaching and teaching things that didn’t accord with what the apostles had taught.

This was actually a fairly common admonition from Paul to different pastors and churches throughout the world—a significant amount of his teaching is focused on rejecting things that weren’t originally taught by the apostles and being sure that only the Gospel is taught within the church.

In fact, the concept of being aware of false teaching and stopping false teachers is all over the New Testament—Jesus, Himself says in Matthew 7:15 “15 “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”

Paul says in Acts 20:28-29 “28 Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.

29 I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock;”

The Apostle John makes it a point that anyone who doesn’t teach the teachings of Christ isn’t of God and that you shouldn’t even receive a false teacher into your house because if you greet him, you’ll be guilty of his false teaching too. 2 John 9-11 “9 Anyone who goes too far and does not remain in the teaching of Christ, does not have God; the one who remains in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. 10 If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house, and do not give him a greeting; 11 for the one who gives him a greeting participates in his evil deeds.”

It makes sense that Paul would bring this point up again, especially when you consider that Timothy was considered a younger pastor.

Why is his age a point to be made here?

Because younger pastors tends to have to deal with people within the congregation who won’t take them seriously because of their youth.

Which means that those within the church who want to teach false things will claim that there’s nothing wrong with their false teaching—the pastor only has a problem with it because he’s young and he doesn’t understand life yet.

Now Paul doesn’t spell out what exactly the false teaching is in this verse and the reason for that is simple—Paul trained Timothy and Paul taught Timothy.

Timothy already knows that anything that doesn’t line up with the Gospel—what Jesus taught and what the apostles taught is false teaching.

There really isn’t much a reason to reiterate that here because Paul is writing to someone who would know what the Gospel is.

Instead, Paul reminds Timothy not to let someone who teaches false doctrines to teach and then in v. 4, he tells Timothy not to let people “devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.”

Now, you might hear that and you might have some questions as to what exactly Paul is writing against—what does he mean by myths and endless genealogies?

In 1 Timothy 4:3 Paul points out some issue concerning some Jewish false ideology, which has led many scholars to assume that the myths being spoken of in 1 Timothy 1 concerns Jewish false ideas that were sort of passed down person-to-person.

Because Ephesus was a multi-ethnic city with a pluralistic attitude towards various religions, it could also be that Paul’s referring to the ideology from false religions—whether that’s from the worshipers of Artemis or the emperor worship occuring throughout the city.

When speaking of endless genealogies, Paul is referring to the Jewish custom of spending significant amounts of time trying to iron out your own Jewish ancestry to determine exactly which tribe you were from and who your ancestors were.

It was common in Jewish thinking to want to know precisely what tribe you were from and who you were related to—and I think you can tell why.

If you’re Jewish wouldn’t you want to be a descendent of David or someone related to one of the great men or women of faith throughout Old Testament history?

The Jewish people thought it would be great to trace their lineage back to some of these great men and women of the faith—so much so that they would waste inordinate amounts of time trying to trace their lineages.

Paul’s encouragement to Timothy is to not let people get caught up in false teaching, endless genealogies, and and myths and you might think — “wow, thank goodness that we don’t have to deal with all that today!”

But the American church has a significant issue with false teaching—just look at the prosperity gospel and word of faith movement rampant on television or even locally, look at the local churches that we know are teaching false doctrines.

And you might hear me say that and think, “you’re right, those are issues, but at least we’re not dealing with people caught up in endless genealogies and myths.”

Really?

What about those who get so caught up in the study of the eschaton or the end times?

They get so caught up in it that they develop theories of how all this works and they try to prove that certain current events line up with what was written in the book of Revelation—while completely ignoring the fact that the Bible tells us that Jesus doesn’t know the hour when He’ll return, only the Father does—so what makes a human being think that he can figure it all out?

Or what about those who get so caught up in the fact that their parents or their grandparents went to a certain church as if that makes it alright for them to live in sin—just because their parents or grandparents were faithful?

Ignoring the fact that their salvation doesn’t rely on whether their parents or grandparents believed, but rather whether they, themselves believe.

Paul says that those who devote themselves to these sorts of things, “promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.”

And then he reminds us of what the point is in v. 5, “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.”

Paul is telling Timothy that rather than allowing these people to continue seeking endless genealogies and myths that lead to speculation, he needs to charge them or command them or issue them a different goal.

The goal for every Christian is for the Christian to develop genuine love for God and for one another; and this love is to spring forth from a pure heart, a good conscience, and genuine or sincere faith.