Older Ones

So here we are listening to a conversation between Paul and Timothy. What advice does he give, what things are so important that Paul includes them in his advice to a new Minister. What does he say and why?

1 Timothy 5:1–2 NASB95

Do not sharply rebuke an older man, but rather appeal to him as a father, to the younger men as brothers, the older women as mothers, and the younger women as sisters, in all purity.

It should not be surprising that Paul includes advice about how to treat others. How to treat older men and women and how to treat younger men and women. After all what is church really about? It is about people. The very word we use for describing a church means the assembly or the group of people.

Have you ever been out somewhere and seen a child yelling and screaming at their parents? What did you think, how did it make you feel. When I have seen it happen I can tell you it makes me very uncomfortable. It just seems so wrong, so disrespectful. It doesn’t really effect me any, its not my kid, they are not yelling at me, but it still makes me feel bad, I don’t like it.

In the same way I don’t like it when an adult child yells at their parent. I have seen this in nursing homes and among elderly couples. I know that sometimes as we get older we lose some of our abilities. We are not as physically able and if we live long enough we often start to lose our ability to concentrate or to think clearly. I have seen this happen many times with people in my own family and in churches I pastored or nursing homes I visited.

These people have lived their lives, often caring for their children and their grandchildren for years, helping out financially, helping out by fixing things and lending their experience and their help over years and years of life, whether it was easy or hard. Now they can’t do what they used to do, they can no longer help others or sometimes even themselves. Now after years of giving and helping they need help themselves and time after time I have seen their children get frustrated and angry with them, yelling at them and treating them badly.

Of course not every parent was so helpful or so wonderful. In fact my dad was an alcoholic, he was foul mouthed and abusive. I see him now, he can hardly stay awake to carry on a conversation and he struggles to get around. Today he is almost helpless, I try to treat him with respect and honor. He did raise me, he provided food and shelter for me. It would be wrong for me to treat him badly while he cannot do for himself. Even if he was a schmuck that doesn’t give me the right to be a schmuck back to him in his old age.

How do we treat those older than ourselves, with respect. You may say that respect has to be earned but that is trap. How do I want God to treat me, do I want him to treat me how I deserve, according to the way I have treated him and according to the way I used to act or do I want God to treat me with mercy and with grace. As we consider how to treat those that God brings into our lives we should not stop to consider how they treated us or what they deserve, but how we want God to treat us and whether or not we want to receive the penalties due to our behaviour and our sin. As for me I want to be treated better than I deserve and so I try to treat others better than they deserve so that I can pray that God would forgive my sins even as I forgive those who sin against me.

So what about younger people, can we mistreat them since they are younger than us. Of course not. We are to treat them as brothers and sisters. Not the way you treat your brothers and sisters but the way you are supposed to treat brothers and sisters. In fact we often call other Christians brother or sister.

Everyone is due respect and honor. I know that everyone will not always treat you with respect and honor but think about this. I often hear people say that they will treat someone with respect when they are treated with respect. They will do the right thing when others do the right thing. They tell me that they should not have to treat someone well until they deserve it. Of course if everyone waits for the other person to make the first move then nothing ever gets better, nothing ever changes, but lets leave that alone for a minute. The strongest reason for treating others better than they deserve is so that God will treat us better than we deserve. Forget treating others as you want them to treat you and treat others as you want God to treat you. That should be a sobering thought.

As for me I need lots of grace from God so I need to give lots of grace to others. I need all the help I can get. Maybe you think you don’t need much grace, maybe you think you are doing fine but if you say you have no sin the bible says you are are deceiving yourself and the truth is not in you.

There is another aspect of this type of thinking that we don’t often consider either. If I say that I will not do this or that until someone else does their part then who is really in control. If I refuse to act honorable until my father, or my boss or my spouse acts honorably then I have turned over control of my actions to them. Since they decide when they do the right thing and I have decided not to do the right thing until they do then I never get to decide whether to do the right thing or not. They get to decide. I have put them in control of my life and my actions. If I say that I will never say I am sorry until the other person says it first then I no longer have a say in how or when the relationship will be restored. In fact we admit this when we say it is up to you, or the ball is in your court.

If we make our decisions and our behaviour depend on what someone else decides or how someone else acts then we are no longer controlling our life, they are. The person we are angry at or the person we can’t seem to forgive is now in charge of how we feel and how we act. The person we think is doing the wrong thing, the one who makes the bad decisions, the one who doesn’t act right is is the very one who is deciding for us and determining our actions. And the crazy thing is that we gave them that power. By refusing to act or decide until they act or decide we have handed over to them the power to make the decision for both of us. We have given them the power to decide when we act, we literally take our own freedom and our own ability to control our own lives and make our own decisions and hand it over to someone we believe with all our heart to be wrong. Someone we are convinced makes bad choices and does wrong things and we have turned our freedom over to them.

In fact the only way to take our lives back from someone like that is to make the first move. As long as we are waiting on them they are in charge and we are dependent on them. They are making our decisions for us and controlling some aspect of our lives because we let them do it, in fact we told them to do it, we gave them that power over us and we refuse to take it back. Makes us look kind of silly doesn’t it. To turn over our freedom of thought and actions to someone we believe thinks and acts poorly. Take control of your life, make your own decisions, don’t let others determine how you act or how you live.

While you are at it let me offer another piece of advice. Don’t let others control your feelings and emotions. Have you had someone make you mad. How did that happen. Has someone ever called you a name or talked bad about you and made you angry? Have you ever noticed that one person can say something that offends you or makes you angry and another person could say the same words and you just blow it off. Have you ever found yourself having a harder time forgiving someone for doing something to you when it was easier to forgive a different person for doing the same thing? Why the difference.

There is a lady in this church that I have given significant control over my emotions and feelings to. If my wife says I am a terrible person or that I am acting like my dad or that I am being a jerk it has a great effect on me. I respect her opinion, I care about what she thinks. Her opinion mattes to me and her words make a difference in my life. There are other people whose opinions just don’t matter as much to me. If some guy on the highway flips me off or if someone at work thinks I am a jerk it just doesn’t effect me much because their opinions are not that important to me.

There are also people I have met in this life whose opinions are just not that great. They speak without thinking or when they do think I disagree with the conclusions they come up with so much that I really don’t care what their thoughts and opinions are. I know people who often say things they don’t really mean, contradict themselves or talk loud and long about things they know nothing about. I don’t worry about these people’s opinions. some of them are related to me or they are coworkers that I have to work with but their thinking processes and opinions are so bad I just ignore them.

I don’t mean that I don’t listen to what they say or that I don’t care about them, I just mean that I would never take their advice or give weight to their thoughts because I believe that their conclusions are terrible. If they were to tell me to do something, make some recommendation about what I should do or if they should express an opinion about something I have already done I would just ignore it. Some of these people are very young, I may sincerely love an 8 year old child but would probably not take marital advice from them.

I once worked with a man that I respected immensely for his knowledge of the job we did. His technical expertise was above that of almost everyone he worked with and his commitment and dedication to his job was something to admire. A young man who worked for me was once talking to me about his marital problems and he mentioned some advice that this person had given him. I told him he was a grown man and he should make his own decisions but I would personally be cautious about taking marital advice from anyone who started the sentence with the phrase, well my third wife...........

What I mean is that there are people whose opinion I value about marriage, others I would listen to about finances, others I would pay attention to about my job, others who I would listen to about God and about Christian living and a very, very small select group that I would give serious consideration to anything they had to say. In the end though I would make my own decisions. I would not turn my life over to any particular human being and let them make all my decisions for me or let them run my life, so why would I let them run my feelings and emotions.

I try not to let people make me mad. Sometimes I do get mad, if I do it right it won’t be because someone acted like a fool and forced me to act like a fool too but because I evaluated their behaviour and my own reaction and decided that anger was the proper response. I would remain in control. There are people that I have decided to treat well and people I have decided to treat badly. If I do it right I won’t treat you how you treated me or treat you how I want you to treat me, I will treat you how I have decided to treat you based on what I believe to be true and what I believe to be right and wrong.

If someone cut me off in traffic it might make me feel irritated or upset. I might have an urge to speed up and cut them off or get in front of them and brake check them. Of course either one of these things could potentially put my life and the life of the other person in danger. It could endanger the passengers in my car or even other drivers who had nothing to do with the incident. I hope that I would choose not to risk my life or anyone else’s life in order to get revenge on a bad driver, it’s just not worth it. It is frustrating and it is irritating, but I get to decide what I do about it. Allowing the other person to make me so mad that I risk my life and the lives of others is giving that person, a person who has proven to have poor judgement, the power to decide if I live or die, how dumb is that?

Why do we treat the old and the young well, why do we treat anyone well, because God says to do it that way, it is the right thing to do. Because I get to choose my own actions and how to run my own life and you get to choose your actions and how to run your life. Don’t ever let someone else’s bad behaviour make your decisions for you, don’t ever let someone else’s poor judgement control your life. You do the right thing because it is the right thing to do regardless of what the other person does or does not do. You do what God says to do, you take control of your life and responsibility for your actions and never give that control to anyone else but God. Take control of your life, take responsibility for yourself, be your own boss and no one but God can judge you or control you. After all you are made in the image of God, act like it.