Fight for the Gospel

We are going to break with tradition this week and, instead of preaching about moms and the role women play, we are going to keep moving in our study of 1 Timothy, so go ahead and open your Bible to .

As you are turning, let me ask you a few questions: How many of you have gone to church for most of your life?

Maybe you have fond memories of sitting next to your mother in service on Sundays.

You may remember singing Sunday School and VBS songs around the house, with your mother leading you in songs like “Jesus Loves Me” and “Jesus Loves the Little Children”.

Some of you didn’t have that kind of childhood, but at some point, you started coming to church, and you learned the truth that you were a sinner, that Jesus came to save you, and that you could follow him as Lord of your life.

Many in this room made that decision to follow Jesus years ago, and because of that, we find ourselves in danger.

The

How many of you know the phrase, “familiarity breeds contempt”?

As we will see this morning, you and I are in danger of losing sight of the powerful, life-altering message of the Gospel.

Let me remind you of some of the background of the letter we are studying this morning.

We saw last week that the book of 1 Timothy is going to encourage pastors and church members alike in how to fight the good fight of the faith.

We saw last week that the book of 1 Timothy is going to encourage pastors and church members alike in how to fight the good fight of the faith. In fact, we will see the first use of that phrase this morning.

In fact, we will see the first use of that phrase this morning.

The aged Apostle Paul is writing to a young man named Timothy. Timothy was a young elder or pastor who was serving in the city of Ephesus.

By the way, since it is Mother’s Day, let’s acknowledge the important part Timothy’s mother and grandmother played in him coming to follow Christ:

2 Timothy 1:5 CSB

I recall your sincere faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and now, I am convinced, is in you also.

Timothy’s mother and grandmother laid a firm foundation of faith to follow, which highlights what an impact moms can have.

Back to 1 Timothy, we see that this young pastor is facing a number of challenges as he seeks to lead the church in Ephesus.

As we saw last week, one of the main challenges he was fighting is the same we fight today—people teaching false doctrine, things that aren’t true, and getting people away from following the true message of the gospel.

Last week, we saw that it is all of our responsibilities to join together and fight for the truth, both in our hearts and in the lives of others.

In our message last week, though, there were some other challenging truths.

In 1:9-11, we had a list of a variety of different sins that God’s law condemns, which may have sounded incredibly judgmental.

I encouraged you to come back next week so we could see the full context of what Paul was saying.

As we look at the rest of chapter 1 today, I want you to see what it looks like to fight for the Gospel.

Here’s the main principle I want you take a way from this passage this morning: if you and I are going to fight for the truth, we must first fight for the Gospel to take root in our own hearts.

Yes, Paul did list off a wide variety of sins. Yes, those things are contrary to God’s law and the message of the gospel.

Yet, as he listed off all those sins, Paul never lost sight of what the message meant in his own heart.

In the same way, you and I must anchor any fight for the faith, for the truth, or for the Gospel in the reality of the Gospel in our own heart.

Read with me, starting in verse 12-17.

1) Remember who you were.

Paul starts off by remembering who he was when Christ found him.

In verse 12, he acknowledges that if it wasn’t for what Jesus did, Paul would have been like the false teachers we talked about last week.

When he said that God appointed Paul to this ministry because “he considered [him] faithful”, he wasn’t saying that it was because Paul had done a pretty good job of living before Jesus.

No; God gave Paul this ministry because he knew Paul would be faithfully obedient to carry it out.

It can’t be that Paul was being faithful when God called him into the ministry, because look at how he describes his condition in verse 13...

We see all this clearly in the book of Acts, where we are first introduced to the man then known as Saul.

Quick side note: God never changed Paul’s name from Saul to Paul. Instead, his name was Saul around the Jews and Paul around the Greek-speaking Gentiles, so we see his name shift in Acts when he stops trying to reach the Jews and start really reaching the Gentiles.

He was a zealous Jew who hated the Christians and did everything he could to stop them.

In fact, on the day that Jesus saved him and called him into ministry, Paul was on his way to the city of Damascus with the authority to arrest any Christians he found there.

Paul was a blasphemer, which meant he spoke evil against the things God was doing.

He was persecuting Christians. The first time we meet him in Acts, he is holding the coats for people as they killed Stephen, who was the first Christian to die for following Christ.

He was an arrogant man, thinking he was doing all this out of a love for God when in reality, he was fighting against God with everything he did.

Although verse 12 is talking about his call to ministry, the remainder of the passage is talking about his salvation.

Isn’t it awesome to read that God could take a blasphemous, arrogant, persecutor and save him?

As we see in this passage, Paul never allowed himself to forget just how bad he was when God saved him.

Great, but what about you? Have you lost sight of where you were when God found you?

I got saved when I was 9 years old; how bad could I have been?

Well, let’s think about it for a minute.

Let me give you a pop quiz. I am not going to ask you to answer out loud, but we’ll walk through it together.

For the sake of argument, since most people are familiar with it, let’s just use the 10 commandments as a quick test to see how good we are. We find these in . In fact, I just want focus on the last 6:

No other gods before the one true God.

No idols.

Don’t take God’s name in vain.

Remember the Sabbath

Honor your father and mother.

Do not murder.

Do not commit adultery.

Do not steal.

Do not give false testimony against your neighbor.

Do not covet.

How did you do?

If you are like me, when God saved you, you would have to acknowledge that you were 0/10, and that is just off that list!

Paul never lost sight of his need for the Gospel. Jump back down to verse 15...

Never lose sight of who you were when God called you!

Did you notice the tense of that last phrase?

Paul never lost sight of his need for the Gospel. Jump back down to verse 15...

He didn’t say that he used to be the worst sinner; he still said he was.

How could he say that? This is the guy who literally wrote the book on salvation and justification by faith. Didn’t he know just to get over it?

Besides, how could he say he was the worst sinner ever? What about those kings in the Old Testament who came in and defiled the temple and all of that?

Paul could say he was the worst sinner of them all in large part because he knew his sin better than anyone else.

I want you to get gut-level honest for a minute in your own heart and let the Spirit of God shine his light into the dark corners.

What has your thought life been like this week? How have you reacted to stress at work and home? What have you been watching or listening to?

Would you be comfortable if I was able to show everything that had gone into your eyes and ears, gone through your mind, or out of your mouth this week up on the screen?

“Yeah, but Sean. Doesn’t everyone mess up sometimes?”

This side of heaven, everyone still battles temptation, but that doesn’t give you an excuse.

If anything, it makes it worse because we know better!

In verse 13, Paul acknowledged that he didn’t know who Jesus was. That didn’t lessen his guilt, but it did put his sin in a different category than the false teachers he was fighting who said they knew Jesus and were following him.

I don’t know your sin. I don’t hear the thoughts in your head. I do know mine, though, and I know how often I fall short of God’s plan and purpose, and that makes me the worst sinner I know.

Never lose sight of who you were when God called you!

Some of you got saved later in life than I did, so you had a longer history of sinful choices behind you than I do.

I am not telling you to wallow around in those and keep dwelling on them, but I am saying that you shouldn’t lose sight of just how incredible it is that God saved you or any of us!

If you and I are going to fight for the truth, to fight for the Gospel, we must be willing to see just how desperate we were for salvation!

That puts our heart in the right place to address those who we see are in sin and teaching false doctrine.

We aren’t correcting them because we were somehow better than they are; we have been graciously saved from our sins and want the world to know what that looks like.

That doesn’t mean we shy away from the truth, but it means that we speak the truth in love, remembering where we were when God found us.

Once we have a clear picture of where we were when God saved us, it helps us see even better...

2) Recognize what God did.

Paul barely speaks about where he was before he immediately turns to talk again about all God did.

Paul lists at least four gifts God gave Paul when he saved him.

Look back with me at verses 13b-14.

Having shifted from his call to ministry to his salvation, Paul first says that God gave him mercy.

Mercy is the idea of God withholding from us what we do deserve.

We just said a few minutes ago that you and I broke God’s law, and we deserved to be condemned for it.

Yet, if you are here and you have entered into a relationship with Jesus as your Lord and Savior, then he has withheld that punishment from you.

Isn’t that incredible?

How did he do that? Well, with the second gift God gave Paul when he saved him: an overflowing grace.

If mercy is the idea of God not giving us what we do deserve, then grace can be thought of as God giving us what we don’t deserve.

Not only did God withhold punishment from us, he actually punished Jesus for our sins as he died in our place.

In exchange for our guilt, God gave us Jesus’ righteousness:

2 Corinthians 5:21 CSB

He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

1 Corinthians 5:21

He gave us mercy and grace, even knowing just how sinful we would still be after all this time.

Not only that, but Paul says he gives us two more gifts: faith and love.

These are gifts that God places inside us.

Faith is the ability to trust and believe that God is able to work and do what he says he will.

Love is the sacrificial response that causes us to fight against sin in our hearts and in the world around us.

Romans 5:8 CSB

But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

These things are found in Christ as we look at what he has done for us.

You will notice that the gifts Paul talks about God lavishing on him weren’t the gift of health or the gift of money or power or a beautiful family or a perfect job.

God can do any and all of those things, but fighting for the truth and the gospel means fighting to keep the blessing of salvation fresh in our hearts, with the grace, mercy, faith, and love it brings.

That leads Paul to give us clear statement for you to hold onto: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”

We don’t have time to look deeply into that passage, but write down to go back and look at it.

That is where Jesus reads from a prophecy, given by Isaiah, that talks about Jesus’ role.

God sent Jesus into our world to save sinners of every kind, whether their sin is spelled out in verses 9-11 or verse 13 or anywhere else in God’s word.

There is no person too far gone that God cannot save.

He saved you, so that means he can save your neighbor or your boss or your professor or your spouse or your child or the person in Congress or the White House or anywhere else on this planet.

As we already mentioned, you don’t know anyone who has sinned more than you, so that means he can save anyone!

He can save the murderous Apostle Paul and the good boy named Timothy and everyone in between.

Jesus came into the world to save sinners, so let’s make sure we are telling people about the truth of the Gospel so they can find the hope that we have!

If you’re here today and you are still in your sin, listen to me: Christ came to save you!

If you will acknowledge your sin and turn to Christ, then you too can be saved.

Perhaps you are a regular here, though, and you feel like we talk about this every week, so you are tired of hearing it.

I would remind you that the Apostle Paul, who had one of the greatest minds in history to understand God’s plan of salvation, never tired of going back and seeing it again.

In fact, over and over, you see Paul displaying what you find in a classic hymn we sang when I was younger. It is called “I Love to Tell the Story,” and the final verse goes like this:

I love to tell the story/For those who know it best/Seem hungering and thirsting/To hear it like the rest./And when, in scenes of glory,/I sing the new, new song,/’Twill be the old, old story,/That I have loved so long.

When you and I take a good look at our own sinful hearts, and then we turn and see the beauty of what God has done in us, it leads us like Paul to:

3) Rejoice in who God is.

Look back at verse 16...

Paul said that Christ saved him so he would demonstrate his incredible patience and set Paul up as a trophy of grace.

That’s what you and I are: as broken as we may seem, we are to demonstrate the power that God has to redeem the broken and make it beautiful for his name’s sake.

That caused Paul, then, to overflow with praise in verse 17.

He is quick to acknowledge that Jesus isn’t just being a nice guy in saving us; he saves us because he is the benevolent king of the universe who deserves our allegiance.

He is the eternal king, showing that he is over every ruler throughout history.

He is immortal, which means he will never cease to be.

He is invisible, meaning that he is spiritual, and he is the one and only God.

May we, like Paul, fight for the Gospel in our own hearts so that God alone will receive honor and glory forever and ever.

With a firm grasp on the truth of the Gospel, having been reminded of Paul’s testimony, Timothy was challenged to jump in the fight. Read verses 18-20.

Here, Paul puts a bookend on this section of the letter, echoing much of what we saw in verses 5-6.

It serves as a great contrast: the false teachers, men like Hymenaeus and Alexander, have tried to come up with their own schemes and appointed themselves teachers, even though they have no idea.

Paul and Timothy, though, have been graciously granted salvation and a call to ministry. Instead of their goodness, this salvation is based off God’s mercy and grace, resulting in a love of God and others, faith in God the King’s eternal plan.

May we fight for the Gospel, never letting this message grow cold in our own hearts, in our homes, or in the life of our church.