Keeping God's word good

The internet

The internet has become so entrenched in our society that it’s hard to imagine life without it. Yet as young as I am, I do remember life before it.

I actually remember when I was in high school in the 90’s when one of my teachers showed our class a short video which talked about the information super highway. It all sounded so fancy, but I had no idea at the time how integrated it would become.

As broadband became available, suddenly the number of applications ramped up, and now we are increasingly seeing it in all number of different objects.

As the internet has become more and more popular, the question remains, is it a good thing or a bad thing.

On one side, we can argue that the internet has provided society with much good. It has enabled us to share information in a way that can be of benefit to society. With quicker forms of communication we can collaborate in far more effective ways. We can also argue that it is has opened up new business opportunities.

On the negative side we can see that the information that is shared is not all good, in fact some of it is bad. People who are addicted to pornography or gambling, now have far greater access to these, fueling their addiction further. In the age of social media (or should I call it anti-social media) we see new forms of really destructive bullying.

The truth is (in my opinion), the internet is actually neither inherently good, nor is it inherently bad. I do however believe that it was built with good intentions, and so it goes to show how something good can be used for evil.

Today we are starting a series on 1 Timothy and what we are going to see is a very strong exhortation to stop making the good gospel into something ugly.

This analogy of the internet is far from perfect, because for starters as I mentioned, the internet is not inherently good, whereas God’s gospel is inherently good. However, what we do see in the example of the internet, is how sinful humanity can take something good and bring so much bad out of it. Unfortunately, as we will see in this letter, the exact same thing can happen with the gospel, and we need to be really vigilant about this.

Context of 1 Timothy

Well, this being the first in the series, it’s worth spending a bit more time getting the background of the letter in place.

So let’s start with some of the basics.

The first two verses tell us who it is from and who it is to.

So we know straight up that it was written by the apostle Paul. Note that Paul wasn’t actually one of the twelve apostles that were with Jesus during his earthly ministry prior to his death and resurrection, but he is placed on the same level as these apostles because of the special commission given to him by the risen Lord Jesus on the road to Damascus.

Who is Timothy?

The recipient, we’re told in verse 2 is Timothy. Now, I’m going to assume that most of us are quite familiar with Paul, but probably a lot less familiar with Timothy, so let’s briefly explore who he is.

We first come across Timothy in . This chapter occurs early in the second missionary trip of Paul. You may recall that Paul’s first trip centred around many of the cities in the region of Galatia. As he started his second trip Paul travelled through these cities including the city of Lystra, and it is in this city that he comes across a young disciple named Timothy. We learn from that his mother was a Jew and his father was Greek. We also learn from this chapter that the believers in this region spoke well of him, and so he ended up joining Paul on his second trip which goes up into the region of Macedonia.

But what else do we know?

Young

Well, he’s described as being young in these letters. But how young is young? Well, we’re not actually told, but we can have a guess. I’ll get to the chronology shortly, but there for now, there’s good reason to think that this letter is written some time after the three missionary trips, and so if he was a teenager when Paul took him on the second missionary trip, then based on estimates of when this letter was written, he was probably in his mid-thirties, in other words, not too dissimilar to my age now.

Shy

There is also some reason to think that despite the gifts he possessed, Timothy was a bit shy or timid. This is based on references to Paul asking the Corinthians to put him at ease, and references aimed at Timothy to not have a spirit of timidity.

Ailments

It is also evident that Timothy suffered from some ailments that made him unwell, in particular there is a reference to a recurring stomach problem, which incidentally Paul prescribes a bit of wine - but we won’t get into that now.

Interestingly, as we consider this young, shy and sickly man, we might wonder, was he really the best person for the job, but then if we compare him to many other people God chose at other times throughout the bible, we see that it is fairly typical of God to choose the people you might consider weak in the world’s eyes.

Further context

So we know a little about Timothy now, but when and where was he when this letter was written.

Well we know that Timothy travels differed at times to Paul’s which I won’t go into all the details now. What seems apparent however is that Timothy ended up having Ephesus be a bit of a base for him.

If you look at verse 3 of , you’ll see that Ephesus is then the place in which Timothy finds himself in when this letter is written.

Dating the letter can prove a little tricky. You see, if we maintain Paul as being the genuine author, the position which I have certainly taken, then it is next to impossible to link Paul’s movements noted in this letter with what we know about his three missionary trips from Acts. This has led some to think maybe someone else wrote it, however the quite comfortable solution is that it is written after the time of Paul’s confinement in Rome where leaves us, with the assumption that Paul did further travels not recorded for us. Therefore we are probably some ten to twenty years after the missionary trips.

False teachers

Well, let’s dive in to the passage for this morning and we can look more specifically at the immediate context being faced by this church in Ephesus.

It starts in verse 3, with Paul urging Timothy to stay in Ephesus for a particular purpose. That particular purpose is to command (and notice that strong language - to command) certain people to not teach false doctrine any longer.

It’s not in the part of the passage I read earlier, but if you jump to the bottom of the chapter, in verse 20, Paul is so outraged that he actually names two of the perpetrators of this false doctrine - that is, Hymenaeus and Alexander.

Along with this false doctrine, we’re told in verse 4 that they are also devoting themselves to myths and endless genealogies.

With regards to the false doctrines, we’re not specifically told what those doctrines are in this chapter, but if I briefly jump ahead to the start of chapter 4, we see references to people who are forbidding people to marry and stopping people eating certain foods. We’ll explore that a bit further when we get to those chapters, but it is probably this sort of false doctrine that Paul is thinking about here.

But he also refers to these myths and endless genealogies. Now we can’t be entirely sure what myths and genealogies Paul is referring to here, however, there are two ancient Jewish documents from around this time which very well could fit the bill. One is known as the Book of Jubliees, and the other is referred to as the Biblical Antiquities. Both books take the creation stories as we know it, but then places many embellishments into the stories, and in particular make the law into a far more dominating and controlling mechanism, far beyond what was ever intended.

By following such documents, you would well be led down a path that forgets salvation by grace and instead stresses the need for works - clearly a contradiction to the good gospel given to us by Jesus.

And so here in Ephesus, this young, shy, frail man in Timothy is faced with a challenge. He is tasked with shining a light on the beautiful gospel, but there are others, most likely older and far more confident people, who are staining it and making the gospel ugly.

They’ve taken what is beautiful and dragged it through the mud - to the level of their own sinfulness.

So as we look at this passage, I want to first highlight what we should be doing with what God has given us, but then look at what Paul has to say about the two main errors we make with it.

The point of it all

Well, I suspect in any message I give, or for that matter any message you hear from anyone else, the majority of what I have to say will be forgotten. However, sometimes, little bits will catch in your mind and stay there.

Well I’m hoping that if that’s the case, the part that will stick in your mind is what I’m going to say about verse 5.

You see, verse 5 becomes really critical in understanding the crux of this whole matter.

Let me read it again for you:

1 Timothy 1:5 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

You might notice that this also brings us to the vision that we as a church have affirmed.

It’s all about love!

We’ve just looked at this last month. At the heart of the gospel is love. Almost always when we start to err, it’s because we’ve stopped loving.

You see, that’s exactly what happened when these false teachers of Ephesus started leading others astray. Rather than remembering God’s great love, they instead made it about the rules and regulations. Those rules had (and still have) a place which we’ll get to shortly, but it’s not about that. The rules were pointing us to something far better, and that better thing was God’s love.

But let’s just break down verse 5 a bit more.

It starts by saying the goal of this command. In the context, the command is the command given in verse 3, namely to stop certain people from teaching false doctrine.

It then says that the goal of that, is love - the very thing at the heart of the gospel. In fact it is the reason the gospel exists in the first place, because God loves us!

But verse 5 continues, it says of this love… “which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith”

Here he gives us three elements which will stand us in good stead:

Pure Heart

Firstly, there is a pure heart. This is particularly important because it is absolutely essentially for us to understand how the law works. You see, as you read through the Bible, what you begin to understand is that God isn’t so much worried about your specific actions (although that’s not to say he doesn’t care at all), but what is more important is what’s in your heart.

In other words, we’re not talking about a list of things to tick off. This was one of the gripes that Jesus had with the Pharisees. They had made the law into a series of sub-laws, but God wasn’t interested in that, he was interested in seeing that your heart is in the right place. As we’ll see shortly though, this isn’t a license to do whatever you like.

Good conscience

Secondly, Paul talks about a good conscience. Now there is actually a lot we could say about the conscience, but I only want to touch on it now. You see, in many ways the conscience goes deeper than just following the letter of the law.

Take the law of the land for example. There are a whole heap of really dodgy dealings that you can do and still legally be within the law. Having a good conscience however means not just staying within the law but doing it in a way that is inherently right.

A good conscience comes when a pure heart works out in practice.

Sincere Faith

Thirdly and finally, he says in this verse 5, to have a sincere faith.

I believe that to keep a pure heart and good conscience as I’ve just been describing, it is actually imperative that we look to God, and this has to be done through faith.

Faith is like the currency that we work in as Christians. And so to do this right, we need faith.

Summary of Verse 5

So let me just sum up verse 5: The whole point of what Paul is trying to do here, is to bring people back to the love of God, but to do this we need the essential ingredients of a pure heart, a good conscience and a sincere faith.

Where it goes wrong

But while Paul highlights how this can work well, there are two main ways in which this can go wrong, and that’s what I want to look at now.

Essentially you can boil the two main errors down to legalism, and the opposite to legalism, which is to think yourself free from the law.

Legalism

For the first error, I’ve used the word ‘legalism’ but that might not quite be the right word to describe what Paul here is talking about. You see in verse 6 he talks about those who have departed from the true way and to what he calls meaningless talk.

But I’ve called it legalism because it boils down to understanding the law apart from grace. This is the myths and endless genealogies Paul referred to in verse 4.

What you need to see in this error is that whenever you start adding to the gospel, you are staining it.

A few years ago our family had a holiday to the snow where we built a snow man. When we were there, somebody else had left behind some lumps of

I remember once seeing a small stain in something one of my children was wearing. So I thought, lets quickly just wash it out. But, whatever it was didn’t wash out so easily. Instead, as I tried to wash it out, it actually just spread over the clothing and got bigger.

When we try to add to the gospel, this is what happens. We can sometimes think that we are just trying to make it better, but in fact, we make it worse and the stain just grows.

There is nothing that can be added to the gospel. The gospel is about being saved by faith alone because of Christ alone. If you try to add anything else, you will end up in a huge mess.

Paul knows the danger of this and that is why he is so strong in urging Timothy to stop it before it goes too far.

Free from law

The other error however is to think we are completely free from the law.

It can sometimes be easy to come to this conclusion when we’ve focused too much on grace. Grace is a beautiful thing, but grace is most beautiful when we understand the context it comes in.

Now I’m going to maintain that there are no strings attached when it comes to grace, otherwise it wouldn’t be grace, but at the same time, grace is not a license to do whatever you want. Grace is there to pull you back when you inevitably fail.

But for this reason we need to have something to help us know what it means to fail. You see, when I say fail, I essentially mean fail to live up to the standard of God’s character - and what is the standard of God’s character? Well this was given to us in the law.

Therefore, even though we are people of grace, it is the law that points us in the direction of what we should do. It’s the signs showing us the character of God. That is why in verse 8, Paul says that the law is good if one uses it properly.

From verse 9 it then goes on to say some thing that are easy to take out of context. It says that the law is not for the righteous but the lawbreakers and rebels - and just to make the point even stronger, adds multiple other descriptions.

It’s easy to take out of context because we can look at people who we think have those characteristics, and the one that stands out today is the practising homosexual, and say, well there you go, you see the law applies to them but not to me!

That’s actually not the point. We know from elsewhere that all are sinners, therefore in that sense, the law is for all of us.

But I think there is another sense we can think of this, and actually I think this is the point that Paul is trying to make.

You see, God’s character is completely holy. The law points us to that. But we constantly find new ways to break those laws. As we do, God has shown us how that moves away from his character.

I’ll take homosexuality as the example because this has been quite a hot topic of late. It moves away from God’s character because it is not in his good design. Therefore a law was revealed to us to show us that. In this sense, that law was created for that situation because those people have deviated from the way it should be.

We could make the same argument for the other descriptions that Paul makes in verse 10.

Conclusion

If I step back and look at the full argument that Paul is making in the passage, what we see is that Paul wants to put an end to those who are deviating from the gospel. They’ve added all these extra parts that just aren’t there.

But at the same time, he doesn’t want them to think the law isn’t important at all.

You see, the gospel is beautiful as it is. It is a gospel centred on love, and whenever we deviate from this we create huge stains on it.

Don’t add anything to it, and certainly don’t think that it is a license to do what you want. The gospel is beautiful when you see it through the love of God and through the perspective of God’s character.

If you take nothing else away from this message, then please look back at verse 5. The goal of this is love. And where does that come from? From a pure heart, a good conscience and a sincere faith.

Let’s pray...