Sermon Tone Analysis

*4 Marks of the Man of God*

*1 Timothy 6:11-14*

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This is a notable year, this is the fiftieth year of Grace Community Church.

This is half a century for this church.

We will celebrate that a little more definitively in the fall of this year, but this is, nonetheless, the fiftieth year of this church.

Amazing to think about.

This is also the twenty-fifth year of Shepherds Conferences.

So for a quarter of a century we have been holding Shepherds Conferences here, people have been coming from all over the world.

It started with a few hundred men and has developed now to about thirty-five hundred plus and over a thousand have never been here before.

So we're looking forward to really an important week.

And it's a huge thing for the life of our church.

You make sacrifices in your giving to this.

Many of you have given toward scholarships for the men who couldn't afford to pay.

You volunteer in so many ways to serve and to help.

Your giving allows us to do to the campus what we've been able to do and much of that is sort of directed at this big event in our church life.

We're so grateful for that.

The chapel is finished, wait till you see it, it's absolutely magnificent, more than we ever could have hoped for and for a lot less money than it would have cost to tear to it down and build a new one.

You've made a huge investment.

You've given through the years to support the seminary and the training of the seminary, it's part of our church life to have these 400 men and their wives and their families in our church.

You've invested in the Master's Academies all over the world where we're duplicating in some way or another the training of the seminary and training pastors on the continents of this globe.

This church has had an unusual approach to ministry, it's far beyond just a local church in the confines of a local neighborhood.

And that by the divine plan of God.

And so you're a part of something that's much bigger than just us.

And I feel it in my own life that I have been sort of carried away, sort of swept away.

I...this was not a plan, in case you wondered.

This was not scheme or dream, this is not in any vision that I ever had.

I have been hanging on to this comment from the very beginning and just trusting the purposes of God.

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But from the very start, I wanted my own person ministry to be what God wanted it to be.

And I have always had it in my heart, and I suppose the Lord planted it there, to have an impact on other pastors.

Loving the Lord means loving who the Lord loves.

Loving the Lord therefore means loving His church.

Loving His church therefore means carrying about how His church is treated.

Carrying about how His church is treated ends up meaning you care about how pastors pastor.

I have always had a passion for pastors.

Everywhere on the planet that I have gone, my primary ministry has been to pastors through all these many years.

I've spoken to groups, I've preached evangelistic messages to non-believers, I've preached in churches to saints and in universities to non-Christians, have done it all, but the focus through all the years I can only trust by the purpose of God has been to direct the great emphasis toward the raising up of faithful pastors.

And that means understanding what a pastor's responsibility is.

And it starts with his own life, not so much the function, that sort of in a way takes care of itself if the man is what the man needs to be.

And so the emphasis of our ministry has not been to try to develop a scheme of ministry or to develop a style of ministry and then sort of refine it here and export it everywhere else.

That's not been our purpose.

We have really endeavored to shape the way pastors and the leaders of our Lord's church do their ministry from their own life perspective...not style, not the nuts and bolts of how you do what you do, but far more importantly the motive, the character of that ministry because styles change from period to period and nation to nation.

The Word of God is the one enduring, lasting, unchanging defining source of information about what ministry is to be.

And so through all these years we have been led by the Lord to help pastors all over the world understand what biblical ministry is about.

It was important when I was very young in early years coming to Grace for me to get a grip on this.

I mean, I knew some things about ministry but I really needed to have a cogent clear concise defining perspective on ministry that pulled it all together.

And it happened for me many years ago when I was reading 1 Timothy chapter 6.

And I would invite you to turn there in your Bible.

Because in preparation for this week, this morning, I want to talk to you from this section of Scripture.

You know, this is the twenty-fifth anniversary of Shepherds Conference and the fiftieth anniversary of the church, and those are notable milestones and this is a good time to go back and sort of reaffirm why we are what we are and how we got to this point where 35 or 36 hundred leaders from around the world are coming here to participate in a conference in your church, a conference in which you have such a great part.

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What shaped it?

What formed it?

What are we really trying to accomplish here?

I had planned to say some other things this morning, coming back off of a few weeks of study leave, and I couldn't get past this passage.

It just kept coming back and re-gripping my heart and I kept thinking to myself, "Now I've preached this to pastors all over the world, but I don't think my church really understands this.

In fact, the last memory I have of preaching this was in 1990 and I was standing on the fifty yard line in the Louisiana Superdome which has become familiar to all of us since Katrina because that's where all the refuges were being kept, as you well know.

I was standing on the fifty yard line preaching to 25,000 pastors and this was my text.

And that message that day sort of got a life of its own.

That happens once in a while to the preacher.

It just got a life of its own and it ended up in all kinds of places, in all kinds of formats because it was definitive.

And so it started a long time ago when I as a young pastor began to read this passage almost in a casual reading, trying to understand my responsibility in the church and it just jumped out at me.

And the outline was so simple that those of you who have a MacArthur Study Bible will find in the notes that the outline appears there.

I don't often do that, but in this case it was so clear that I did include it there.

This became for me the defining way to view ministry personally.

And it represents the way in which we've endeavored to influence men through the years, in the Shepherds Conference and in every other outlet that we have to influence pastors.

We've tried to go down this same path and largely everything we say, everything we do sort of extends out from the elements that are in this text.

It is a very good and a very substantial framework to understand ministry from the personal view.

Again, we're not talking about how you do it, we're talking about who you are before God which is the critical issue.

First Timothy, chapter 6, as you well know, the Apostle Paul writing to Timothy, passing the mantle to him to take over for the great Apostle, Timothy who is gifted to preach and teach, who has functioned and will continue to function as a pastor of a local congregation, not only pastoring a local congregation but also will be a pastor of pastors because he will have influence over many others who will be under his teaching and preaching.

He will no doubt be used by God to raise up many others as the one who was himself raised up under the tutelage of Paul.

He needs to have an understanding of the essential elements of effective ministry in the church.

These guidelines from the day they sort of jumped off the page and gripped my heart have been the substantial structure underlying what we've endeavored to do in ministry, helping pastors to be what God would have them to be for the sake of His beloved church, for the sake of His own eternal glory and joy.

Now, look at the phrase in verse 11, "You, man of God...You, man of God," here the Apostle Paul designates Timothy as a man of God.

In a more general sense, in 2 Timothy 2:17, Paul refers to THE man of God, referring not just to Timothy but to all who fall into that category.

All Scripture inspired by God, profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, training in righteousness, that THE man of God may be adequate equipped for every good work.

Twice this expression is used in the New Testament, man of God.

Once to refer to Timothy, and once to refer to all those who fall into that category who are equipped as a man of God by the Scripture.

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Now just exactly what does this phrase mean?

Maybe if we just took a very simple approach to it and said it means, "God's man...God's man."

That is to say, a man who belongs personally to God, a man whom God in the truest and highest sense owns or possesses.

This is not a man who belongs to the world.

This is not a man who belongs to the culture.

This is not a man who belongs even to the church.

This is not a man who belongs to the board of the church.

This is not a man who belongs to the denomination or the association or those who ordained him.

This is God's man.

This is the man who personally belongs to God.

This is a very unique title, this is not generic.

This is a very technical title drawn out of the Old Testament.

And while it only appears twice in the New Testament, it appears in excess of 70 times in the Old Testament, God's man, the man of God.

It is said of Moses that he was the man of God.

It is said of an angelic messenger sent down with a message from God to the wife of Manoah, the mother of Samson, he was the man of God.

It is said of the prophet who spoke for God to Eli, the high priest, predicting judgment on his family.

Samuel is called the man of God.

Numerous of the prophets are called the man of God, Elijah, Elisha.

David is called God's man.

It is a technical term so much so that in every single usage of that phrase it applies to someone who spoke the Word of God, someone who was a spokesman for God.

It is a technical term, a man of God is someone uniquely called to proclaim the Word of God.

In this case, it is Timothy.

In the broader sense, it is any man of God who is equipped for this by all Scripture, and that, of course, 2 Timothy 3, as I read, "All Scripture is provided so that the man of God can be adequate to his work."

How can you speak for God unless you know the message of God?