Sent as an Example (to UCM)

Focal Point: Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity (4.12)

Transitional Sentence: Because we are sent by God, we must be godly.

Introduction

Have you ever been embarrassed by your belief in God? Imagine you're talking a friend who doesn't know Jesus, and it comes up that you're a Christian. They say to you, "Oh! You're a Christian?! Hmm! Okay, so this means that you believe that God made the universe, that you are a special snowflake, and that there's such a thing as good and evil?" "Wow! That's really nice.""So, you believe that I am going to hell? So you believe that a Muslim or Hindu or a Buddhist are totally wrong? And that everyone should conform to your way of thinking?""Mmm-hm. Let me tell you something about myself. I live with my girlfriend. How can you say that I'm living in sin?"Woof. Tough questions. How would you answer? When I was in Grade 12, I was a part of a band. We played shows in downtown Vancouver, we released an album, we played bars, venues, pubs, parties, that kind of thing. The singer, drummer, and keyboardist were not Christians. But I was. So there was a bit of tension there. Honestly, the difference was that I never drank. I never swore. I never slept with another person. Not to say I was perfect back then! I was 18, if that tells you anything about what I was like. The difference is that the health of your relationships with people who believe differently than you is going to rest more on the example of how you live your life, rather than on the words you use to describe what you believe. The health of your relationships with people who believe differently than you is going to rest more on the example of how you live your life, rather than on the words you use to describe what you believe. What is the example that you show to others in your life? That's the question we're going to be asking. Imagine a young church leader. This church is falling apart. The city the leader lives in is one of the most ungodly cities in the world. This leader was recently sent to the church to try and fix all the problems that were happening. Multiple people were against this leader. It seemed pretty hopeless, like a lost cause. Do you ever feel that way about life?Our Scripture today is 1 Timothy 4:12, which says, "Don't let anyone look down you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity." How can you do this? I'm going to end by saying that you can set an example for others by putting your faith in Jesus. Specifically, we'll be going through three conditions you need in order to set a godly example, and three actions of how you can set a godly example. This will help bring into focus how you can set an example by who you are, and by what you do.

Let's set the stage for the ScriptureThe letter of 1 Timothy was sent by Paul to Timothy and the church he pastored in the city of Ephesus.

Ephesus was located at the mouth of the Cayster River on the Aegean coast—in the Southwestern corner of present day Turkey. Ephesus was the third largest city in the Roman empire, and it was very diverse ethnically. Ephesus was a major commercial port. At dig sites of ancient Ephesus they've found the temple of Artemis, public squares, stadiums, gymnasiums, and theaters. One theater built into the side of Mount Pion accommodated about 24,000 people.

The Artemis shrine in Ephesus provided the area with a lucrative tourist business from pilgrims traveling to the temple. The temple of Artemis was one of the ancient wonders of the world. The temple was bigger than a football field! The Greeks regarded the goddess of this temple as Artemis, and the Romans called her Diana. Artemis was the goddess of fertility, so this temple housed thousands of shrine prostitutes. Excavated inscriptions portray Artemis as a savior who was able to answer prayer. She was considered an extremely powerful deity with the ability to compel the passion of a woman toward a man, and the temple was used and referred to by politicians to exercise their influence over the population. In addition, the temple served as a financial institution and lent out money from the wealth deposited at the shrine. So, to summarize, this temple was important as a tourist landmark, a spiritual center, a political center, and a business center. A lot of the life and wealth of this city revolved around this temple. Okay! So let's talk now about the church in Ephesus. The worst thing about the church in Ephesus was the false teachers who were there. So these people were basically pretending to be biblical teachers of great wisdom, but they literally had no idea what they were talking about! They were spreading lies about the faith! They were causing conflict in the church! They were taking a lot of the money that was given to the church, and the real pastors who needed that money weren't getting paid enough! There was even likely sexual misconduct that was going on between them and young widows in the church! What's more, these young widows would have been enabled by the false teachers to go around town, door-to-door, spreading the false teachings and rumours that the false teachers started! Like, so manipulative! These false teachers were totally selfish, and they were poisoning the whole church community. Remember that the temple of Artemis had a huge impact on the city, run by a pagan ritual sex temple cult, so the church would have been having to deal with issues about faith and purity constantly.This was where Timothy was trying to do ministry. Timothy was a convert of Paul. He was one of Paul's closest companions and coworkers. At the time of Paul's writing of 1 Timothy, Timothy was young compared to the other leaders. He was probably about 30. Timothy was a 2nd generation Christian, his mother was a Jew, and his father was a Gentile, basically a non-Jew. We know from Scripture that he wasn't circumcised at birth. Circumcision is a tradition that Jews follow to show that they are the chosen people, where the men cut the foreskin off of their penis. You can imagine Timothy's mother wanting to circumcise the baby, but the father didn't want that, so they didn't. So we can assume that Timothy grew up in a home that didn't strictly observe Jewish customs. But we also know that Timothy later decided to let Paul circumcise him as an adult. Like, that's pretty intense. He did this because circumcision was really important to the Jews, and Paul didn't want Timothy's lack of circumcision that to be a barrier to Timothy doing ministry. So we have two figures of people trying to lead and influence the church. On the one hand, there's the false teachers. They were older, well-respected, established in the community, holding lots of power, and they were also completely greedy, selfish, manipulative, and destructive to the church. Then there's Timothy, a young leader who wants to serve whole heartedly and is even willing to undergo great sacrifice for the sake of his ministry.

Before sending the letter of 1 Timothy, Paul decided to visit the church in Ephesus with his friend Timothy.

It was not a pretty picture. People in the church were fighting with each other, people were greedy, and worst of all they were believing and talking about lies about the faith! False teachers were distorting the truth of Christianity, and as a result everything was going wrong in the church. Paul was on an important journey, so he had to move on. But he decided to leave Timothy in Ephesus to take care of things. That's how Timothy became the pastor of the Church in Ephesus. After some time, Paul decided to write to Timothy to give him instructions on how to handle the conflict. That's what the book of 1 Timothy is. 1 Timothy was read to both Timothy and the church to help them navigate all of the issues that were taking place in the church of Ephesus. What was Paul's advice to Timothy? 4.12, this is our Scripture, "Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity." PRAY

Body

How can we do this? We're going to go through three conditions of how to godly example in our inner life. We'll start there, and we'll move to application later.

The first picture is through faithfulness

What is faith? Hebrews 11.1, "Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." Faith is belief in a God who saves without us having to do anything extra to add to what God did for us. There were false teachers in the early church at Ephesus, who were telling lies about the faith. Paul even names them in the letter! Hymenaeus and Alexander. What were these guys teaching? Paul says in 4.3, "They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth." Basically, these guys, Hymenaeus and Alexander, were adding to the Gospel. They were saying, "you need Jesus, and you need to also do something to add to what Jesus did. Blake talked about how false teaching says that you need Jesus and ______. Here, they were saying, you need Jesus and you need to abstain from eating certain meats. You need to stay single. Because marriage leads to sex, sex leads to pleasure, and pleasure is evil." The false teachers thought that there was this big divide between the physical and the spiritual, so therefore you had to reject the physical in order to be spiritual. That is not what Christianity says. We believe, by faith, that we are saved through only Jesus, and that the physical world is a good gift that we need to take care of, including sex. We are not saved through anything extra that we do or don't do in this world. It's just faith in Jesus. Prosperity Gospel : Okay, so those were some false teachers of early Christianity. Can you think of some false teachers today? Joel Osteen. Joel Osteen is a false teacher who is distorting the faith. This is a direct quote from him: "Who told you, you can't accomplish your dreams? Your destiny is calling out. It's time to start living large. I'm strong. I'm healthy. I'm blessed. I am a victor, not a victim. I'm gonna live a long, productive, faith filled life." Joel Osteen teaches that religion is there to boost your ego, make you happy, and make you healthy. He teaches that the entire reason God created you and died for you is so that you never have to face pain in your life. There's a verse in Romans 8.37, "No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us," and Joel Osteen teaches that if get sick or something bad happens to you, it's because you don't have enough faith. But that is not biblical!If you read on from that Romans passage, Paul doesn't promise that only good or pleasurable things will come to the Christian. What he does say is that even difficult experiences can be used in God's overall plan for good. And nothing can separate us rom the love of God. Listen to Jesus' words in Matthew 10:37-39, "Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.Faith is distorted through lies. These guys are telling lies. The false teachers in the early church were essentially saying, "Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!" The prosperity Gospel teachers are saying, "I'm strong, I'm healthy, I'm blessed!" But both are forgetting that our path to being saved is through Jesus alone. You don’t need anything extra to add to what he did. You're not going to be saved by avoiding pleasure. You're also not going to be saved when you get more money, marriage, and health. You just need faith. Faith is belief in a God who saves without us having to do anything extra to add to our salvation.

The second picture is through purity

The word used for purity here is Hagneia, meaning pure, chaste, or holy. Purity is a word that implies what you are, but it also what you are not. Impurity wants to take what's pure and to add to it. Purity is life in God without having anything extra to add to what Jesus did for you. The false teachers in the early church were actually quite greedy. They wanted to take their pure life in Christ and to add to it, so they were no longer pure. They were actually manipulating people into giving them money! The false teachers were getting paid extra, and the real teachers, were not getting paid enough! How can this be? The false teachers had manipulated people, especially young widows, to go around from house to house in order to spread their false teaching, and scholars think that this explains why they were getting paid extra. Paul says in 6.10, "For the love of money is a root [notice he says "a" root, not "the" root] of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money" [AHEM, Hymenaeus and Alexander], "have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs." Love of MoneyBethel Illustration : Okay, so again, what does this look like today? I read this in an article from November. This was at a large well known church in the states. Matthew Piercey, 44 years old, approached several church members over a few years. (Opens jacket), "Heyyy…. You wanna invest $50,000 in my cryptocurrency fund?" Basically, Piercey was part of a money laundering scheme, and he was going after church members to steal from them. So the police find out. Try to picture this. FBI agents show up. Piercey hops into his pickup truck. They chase him. He goes off road twice. Eventually, he abandons his truck and pulls something out of it. Piercey swims into the lake. Stays underwater for 25 minutes. This was in November! Eventually, Piercey emerged, and they got him. They found out that he was using an underwater scooter to move through the water. Piercey now faces charges of wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, witness tampering, 20 years in prison, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines." He was a normal church member before!Purity can be distorted by greed. Purity says, "I have just enough and am content with what God gave me." Greed says, "I want to add extra ingredients so that I have more of what I want, but not what God wants." Purity is remaining in God's holiness without having to have anything extra to add to our salvation.

The third picture is through lovePaul says that the goal of his letter is love, in 1.5, "which comes from a pure heart and a good conscious and a sincere faith." Who do you know in your life who has a pure heart and a good conscious and a sincere faith? I know a few. Those people are treasures to me, and I love them. Church Conflict : The early church in Ephesus was not necessarily a peaceful place. People were fighting because some of them wanted to add to what Jesus already did for them! False teachers were fighting with true teachers. People were accusing church elders with no evidence! Church leaders were edgy and quarrelsome. The elderly in the church were fighting with the young. Both men and women were fighting with each other. Actually, one of the main reasons that Paul was writing was to deal with church conflict. Paul says in 6.4, of the false teachers, "They are conceited and understand nothing. They have an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions, and constant friction between people of corrupt mind." Obviously, we can tell that the church here was not a pretty picture. What does this look like today? I read a story about a huge mega church, and a church pastor prophesied on social media that Trump would win the election. Well, after the election, he posted on Instagram, "I was wrong. I take full responsibility for being wrong. There’s no excuse for it.” Meanwhile, another church pastor, disagreed and she said that Biden's victory, "heralded so much destruction.” She said, and I quote, "Listen, I’m a feeler; I’m a seer. I can see what’s gonna happen in the future [UCM, don't trust anyone who says that they can see what's going to happen in the future], and let me tell you, if this man, which if — and that’s a big if — he gets in, we’re going to see so much destruction. You talk about disunity. Oh my gosh.” Love is distorted through conflict. I'm not making a political statement. Let's talk about the example that these church pastors are being. We are called to a life that is marked by love! We need to care for each other, not argue about and spiritualize politics! Can you imagine what people outside the church must be thinking when they see that looking in? Love is treating others according to the love that God has for them and not anything extra to add to that.

Application

Okay, so what's the application? You're looking at me like, "Paul, I'm not a preacher! I don't have a Bible College degree!" I'll say it again, the health of your relationships with people who believe differently than you is going to rest more on the example of how you live your life, rather than on the words you use to describe what you believe. You can have all the knowledge of the Bible in the world, but if you don't live out what it means to follow God every day, then you are only setting the stage for others to accuse you of hypocrisy. We'll talk about three pictures of what a godly life will look like.

First Picture: Set a godly example in speech (say)

What do you say to your friends? Your family? Do you focus on building people up, or do you always try to tear them down? Jesus says in Matthew 15.11, "What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them." and later, "But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them." So you will be shaped by what you say. You will be formed by what you talk about. You can know what you value most by what you spend the most time talking about. Set a godly example. Encourage people. This is huge! Love them! Tell them how much they mean to you! When you see someone do something that you appreciate or respect, tell them! Tell them how much it means to you! You don't have to make encouragements really fancy or eloquent. Just say simply what you like about the person and why you like them.

Second Picture: Set a godly example in conduct (do)

What do you spend your time doing? Do you serve or volunteer? When you see something that's unjust, do you just sit by and let it happen, or do you take action to prevent it from happening again?Jesus said to his disciples, "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me." And Jesus says that we do this whenever we do it for other people who have less than ourselves. So set a godly example. Serve people! Do your chores at home for the sake of whoever you are living with! Give gifts to people to show them that you were thinking about them. Volunteer at a food drive or a homeless shelter. We have awesome partnerships with Food for Families and Homes for Friends to do this. Talk to one of us leaders and we can plug you in to serving somewhere.

Third picture: Set a godly example in love (think)

What do you spend your time thinking about? Where do you thoughts dwell? Do you idolize your personal success, like I have? Are you angry at how the world has wronged you? Do you talk negatively about yourself, as if you were a failure and you'll never do anything right? Stop!Philippians 4:8, Paul writes, "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things." Remember your hope. Remember who you are. You are saved, you are a child of God, and you are sent to be an example to this broken world because you are loved. Remember that God has saved you, and no sin that you do can change that. I said you can set an example in speech, what you say, pure in love, what you think about, and pure in conduct, what you do. You can encourage people, serve people, and love people.

Conclusion

You are not perfect. You may be thinking, "Okay, Paul! I'm only 20! I can't do what you're asking me to do! Your expectations are completely unrealistic!"Let me tell you something about myself. I was in a car accident when I was 18. This left me comatose for a month and a half. I've had to recover from a severe brain injury. I have brain damage. Praise God, Jesus healed me, but I still struggle with symptoms of my injury. I struggle with three in particular. 1) I have an impaired memory, 2) I have a slower mental processing speed, and 3) my judgement is impaired. These are things that I deal with every day in my ministry, in every decision that I make. You may think that I seem normal, but ask the other staff on the team, they work with me and know that I deal with problems in my brain! And yet Jesus called me. He sent me to be with you at SFU, even though I am so broken. UCM, Jesus is sending you. You have such unique and beautiful opportunities to do ministry. You have skills that I couldn't possibly have, and you are in regular contact with people that I couldn't possibly reach, with my Bible College degree and in my ministry. You are in the best position to be a godly example in this world, even more so than me! You are called and sent to be an example of God's grace, life, and love, no matter who you are, how old you are, or what your degree is.You can be an example when you put your faith in Jesus. ____, "Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity." ____, "Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity." ____, "Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity." Only through Jesus can you set an example. God chose you to set an example, in a world which is so far from God. This is why God chose you and why He sent you to study at SFU.

Okay, so I'm going to allow you to respond. If you haven't accepted Jesus into your heart, or if you'd like to recommit your life to following Him, then I'm going to say a simple prayer that you can echo in your heart to accept Jesus into your life. Let's pray.

Jesus, I'm sorry that I've gone for so long without living for you, even though you saved me. Thank you for the gift of your grace that you offer to give me. Please come into my life and help me be an example of your life, grace, and love. Amen.

We're going to go into our small groups now. Robyn will post the question into the chat. If, after the discussion, you want to talk to a staff to help you process what it means to follow God, then you can message one of us on Facebook, and we would love to talk to you.

"What is keeping you from being the example that God calls you to be? Pray with each other to help each other overcome these barriers."

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