1 Timothy 4:13 | "The Priority of the Church"

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Thank you, Nick.

Good morning.

Welcome.

If you are our guest this morning, we want to welcome you.

One of the wonderful things that we get to do on a Sunday morning as God's people is to set aside the stresses and the anxieties and the polarizing elements of our world and lift our voices in praise and worship of our great God together.

Amen?

You know, there are several highly polarizing issues today.

Even that are polarizing in our midst on a Sunday morning.

We may not give voice to them, but there are many.

I'm going to pick one for a few minutes.

COVID.

Let's take a moment and approach that polarizing issue of the COVID virus and approach it with greater love.

I pulled this on you a couple of weeks ago and I'm going to do it again.

So now it's your turn.

How many of you know somebody that has been impacted by the COVID virus?

Okay, most of us have, right?

Most of us know somebody, whether very closely or by extension.

Just take a moment, take a few moments, bow your head, and pray for somebody that you know that is being impacted by COVID right now.

Would you just do that?

Bow your head and pray for them.

And then I'll lead us together.

How small and weak a tiny virus makes us.

We realize that we have very little control.

We have very little power to have an effect.

It makes our view of you so much greater.

And so, Lord, we come to you this morning and we ask of you in your greatness, remove this scourge from our land.

It is a scourge in that it it steals life from loved ones, young and old alike.

It is a scourge in that it separates loved ones and spirit.

It drives wedges.

Lord, it is it is at least in part spiritual.

And we know that you are greater than all of these things.

So we ask that you would step in in our weakness and our and our lowliness, forgive our sin, cleanse us, and wash us free.

And as we confess to you our smallness, that you would demonstrate your greatness by taking away this scourge.

Give strength where strength is needed.

Give encouragement where encouragement is needed.

Help us all along the way.

We ask in your name to the praise of your glorious grace.

Amen.

COVID is polarizing.

So polarizing.

I'll show you how polarizing.

If you prayed just now, if you prayed for somebody that's been impacted by COVID, you must not believe in vaccines.

This is great.

I love seeing the faces.

Now some of you are hearing that and wanting to shout, yes, finally.

Somebody's saying that.

Then there are others among you that are saying on the inside, hey, wait a minute.

I've been vaccinated.

What are you saying about me?

And all of that is going on right here, right now, as I say that.

You're trying to figure out what is he saying?

You're trying to figure out what does he mean?

What is he trying to communicate?

Is he saying something about me or something about him?

And my wife is sitting there saying, Jason, what are you doing?

Am I wrong?

No, yeah.

Welcome to my life.

We didn't talk about this, so she had no idea that I was going to open with that.

Notice that I said nothing about faith.

Said nothing about trust in God.

I said nothing about God's power to heal or trusting the government or trusting medical workers to develop a vaccine.

But you likely had an instant reaction somewhere within you to that statement.

In which you assumed something about what I meant, about what I was getting at, about what I was implying.

That's how polarizing COVID is.

And we can pick any number of elements in our world today that do similar things.

That's just one of the most prevalent ones currently.

But do you realize that we do that to Scripture?

That when we open the Word of God and we read it and it is read to us, we do that same kind of thing.

Maybe not to the same intensity.

But when we open the Word of God and it is read to us, or we read it ourselves, we have an internal reaction to it.

Positive or negative, cheering or groaning.

Maybe we say, uh, huh?

What do you mean?

Our text for this morning is 1 Timothy chapter 4 and verse 13.

1 Timothy 4 · chapter mention

We've been working our way through a section here, just sort of taking a break from Matthew and working through some sections here.

And there are many ways to approach this passage.

Originally I was going to work all the way through the end of chapter 4, and then I decided, no, I just want to deal with this one verse.

And there are many ways to approach this one verse.

This verse in 1 Timothy chapter 4, verse 13, says, from the Apostle Paul to young Timothy, he says, Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, and to teaching.

1 Timothy 4:13

This is the Apostle Paul's command to his disciple Timothy as to how Timothy is to conduct himself in the gathering of God's people.

That goes all the way back to chapter 3, verse 15.

This is really nearing the pinnacle of Paul's instruction to his disciples, saying, Timothy, here's what you are to focus on.

Timothy is to devote himself, give himself over to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, and to teaching.

Now, I want to go in a different direction that may feel to you as though it's a completely different, divergent direction.

But stick with me, because we're going to get back to 1 Timothy, I promise.

But we need to answer a key question about this command to Timothy.

It's what I think is perhaps the most key question about this one sentence to Timothy.

Why?

Why?

Why is Tim to read Scripture, to explain Scripture, to instruct in Scripture, and to exhort from the Scriptures?

Why is he told to do that, to give himself over to it, to devote his life and his ministry to that in the context of behaving himself in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and buttress of the truth?

Why is Timothy supposed to do that?

That's our key question.

Now let's go on a journey to see if we can figure that out.

Let's begin with the Old Testament prophet of Jeremiah.

Old Testament prophet of Jeremiah.

If you were able to find Ecclesiastes, just keep flipping right a bit and you'll find it.

You'll go past the prophet Isaiah and then you'll get to Jeremiah.

And I'd like to begin just in Jeremiah chapter 1.

Jeremiah 1 · chapter mention

The book written by Jeremiah the prophet begins with nothing less than an astounding assertion.

It recalls the calling of Jeremiah to the place of God's prophet, to being God's prophet to nations, to tear down nations, to pluck up nations.

And God says, Jeremiah, you're going to do this.

Notice what it says in Jeremiah chapter 1, in verse 4.

Jeremiah 1 · chapter mention

It says, Now the word of Yahweh came to me, Jeremiah says, saying, Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.

And before you were born, I consecrated you.

I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

What does that mean?

This statement is often used as a basis, as a pretext for being pro-life.

We often use it when we're speaking against abortion.

But technically, that would be an implication of what God said, not what God meant.

If we observe this statement a little carefully, we can see that there are four first person verbs of action.

I formed.

Now if we observe a little bit more than that, further observance shows us that those verbs are all past tense in English.

And the subject performing the action is Yahweh, Israel's God.

Yahweh, Israel's God, is speaking to Jeremiah, saying, I have done this, this, this, and this, and I've done it all in relation to you, Jeremiah.

But what does it mean?

Or better yet, who gets to determine what it means?

Now Jeremiah certainly knew what God meant.

Because he immediately objects to its meaning.

Look at verse six.

Then I said, Oh, Lord Yahweh, I don't know how to speak.

I'm only a teenager.

I'm only a youth.

Jeremiah knew what God was saying.

But he objected to what God meant.

Said differently, we might say that Jeremiah's reaction to God's statement is, you can't mean that, God, because I'm too young.

Or whatever.

I've not lived enough life yet for you to say, I've appointed you to do this for me in my service.

Jeremiah objects to the meaning of God's statement.

I don't know if you've ever realized this before, but God doesn't take it too well when his intentions and his meaning are questioned.

Look what God says back to Jeremiah.

Shut up.

Okay, he doesn't say that.

But Yahweh said to me, verse 7, do not say, I am only a youth.

For to all to whom I send you, you will go.

And whatever I command you, you will speak.

God told Jeremiah, Yes, you are a youth.

And yes, I said what I meant, and yes, I meant what I said.

And the rest of the book proves what God meant as Jeremiah lived out and fulfilled God's purpose for him.

I want to give you a contrast to this.

Later, Jeremiah is given a command by Yahweh in chapter 36 to write a book.

To write a scroll.

In chapter 36 and verse 2, God says to Jeremiah, Take a scroll and write on it all the words that I have spoken to you against Israel and Judah and all the nations, from the day that I spoke to you, from the days of Josiah until today.

It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the disaster that I intend to do to them, so that everyone may turn from his evil way and I may forgive their iniquity and their sin.

Notice what God says.

He says, Jeremiah, write down everything that I've said, because in it I mean to communicate disaster for my people, and when they hear about this disaster, maybe they'll come back to me and I will forgive their sin and will be good.

So Jeremiah writes out the entire scroll.

Actually, he doesn't write it, he communicates it to his scribe, and his scribe writes it out.

That scroll eventually made itself to the king in his winter palace, the king Jehoiakim.

In his winter palace, the king is staying warm by his fireplace.

And as he's keeping warm, a reader is reading Jeremiah's scroll to the king.

And what what is God's hope?

What is God's intention?

To communicate disaster, hoping that repentance ensues, right?

You can look in verse 23.

As Jehudi read three or four columns, the king would cut them off with a knife and throw them into the fire in the firepot until the entire scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the firepot.

If I make you something out of wood, please don't burn it.

But that's what the king did.

The king read God's scroll, right?

The scroll that was designed to communicate what God was saying and what God was intending to do and what God meant, and the king heard it and said, Yeah, slice that off, burn it.

Slice that off, burn it.

Slice that off, burn it.

Look at verse 24.

Yet neither the king nor any of his servants who heard all these words was afraid, nor did they tear their garments.

Even when El Nathan and Deliah and Gemariah urged the king not to burn the scroll, he would not listen to them.

And he commands Jeremiah the king's son and Sariah the son of Azrael and Shalemiah the son of Abdel to seize Baruch the secretary and Jeremiah the prophet, but the Lord hid them.

So much did he reject God's meaning that he said, I want you to seize the people who made this scroll and imprison them.

And God said, Oh no, you don't.

Not so quick.

Not gonna happen.

There are two responses here to God's revelation found in Jeremiah.

Jeremiah, first in chapter one, questions God's meaning and God's intention for his life, but then he submits to it.

And it's not an enjoyable life, my friends.

Jeremiah becomes a living object lesson, being put to shame and embarrassment for God.

But God protects him, he submits to it.

Then later on, we see the king of Judah rejecting God's meaning and God's intention, and he doesn't believe it, nor does he submit to it.

Instead, he burns it up.

He says, I'm done with this.

I'm not giving any attention to this.

None of my time is going to this.

And there we then see the results.

One is protected by God, and the other is condemned by God.

Later on, Jeremiah is told to write the scroll all over again.

Verse 28, God says, Take another scroll, and write on it all the former words that were in the first scroll, which Jehoiakim, the king of Judah, has burned.

And concerning Jehoiakim, king of Judah, you shall say, Thus says Yahweh, you have burned this scroll.

Saying, Why have you written in it that the king of Babylon will certainly come and destroy this land and will cut it off from man and beast?

He's not going to do that.

God doesn't mean that.

God doesn't intend to do that.

God says, Therefore, thus says the Lord concerning Jehoiakim, king of Judah, he shall have none to sit on the throne of David.

And his dead body shall be cast out to the heat by day and the frost by night.

I will punish him and his offspring and his servants for their sin.

I will bring upon them and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem and upon the people of Judah all the disaster that I pronounced against them, but they would not hear.

Two responses.

One submitting to God's intention, God's meaning, and other saying, No, I don't want to hear any of that, and not submitting to it.

And God says, Here are the results.

I protect Jeremiah, and Jehoiakim is going to die.

And in there we see a tool that Satan uses to polarize God's people.

He works to use our own sinfulness, our own sinful desires, our own sinful natures to bring suspicion to God's word, to bring questions to God's word, so that it becomes undermined and it causes us then to dismiss it or to question it such that it has no impact upon our lives.

God, why would you write that you're bringing in a foreign army to invade us and destroy us?

You're not going to do that.

In New Testament times, we find another tool in Satan's toolbox.

And that is weaving in all kinds of worldly ideas and teaching with the truth of God's revelation.

For example, the church in Colossae was warned about philosophies and empty deceits and human traditions and elemental spirits.

We've already seen in our study of 1 Timothy that the church in Ephesus was warned about twisted things making their way into the body of Christ, about irreverent and silly myths taking place of God's word, and doctrines of demons even finding their way.

Into the church.

And we sit back in the 21st century and think, really?

How could that happen?

Go forward about a hundred years from those writings to Colossian Ephesus in the second century, the church father Irenaeus wrote of heretics of his time that were mixing in worldly ideologies in with Scripture to give them a sense of support and truthfulness, to make it sound good.

And Irenaeus called that work that they were doing weaving ropes of sand to describe the utter worthlessness of doing that.

And it's no different today, such that people have been led to believe and to think and to understand Scripture, to understand what God means in such a way that Scripture's truthfulness has been undermined, devalued, and even rejected.

It's lost its rightful place, its authority, and its sufficiency in the lives of God's people.

And Satan is clever.

I don't think that we view him as influential and as clever as he really is.

You know, we celebrate the Reformation.

This calendar year, Reformation Sunday, is on a Sunday.

October 31st is on a Sunday, and so we'll be hearing about God's work in the Reformation.

We celebrate the Reformation period because out of that came a revival of sorts focused on sola scriptura, scripture alone.

And we we sort of lift that out of church history, and we fail to realize that almost immediately after that time of reformation, of that return to sola scriptura, arguments began to ensue about scripture's meaning.

And from those arguments about scripture's meaning, even among well-intended believers in Christ, movements began that separated people who believed differently into the beginnings of denominational groupings.

So we have one group believes this, and one group believes this.

They're looking at the same scriptures, thinking, yes, we believe in scripture alone, but they're looking at it all differently.

Satan's clever.

Satan's clever.

Not saying there shouldn't be denominations, just saying, look at what Satan did.

Celebrating Scripture alone, and then he starts to work differences among people so that it's.

Oh.

Wait a minute, it's not so much scripture alone anymore, is it?

But then it got worse.

The enemy of truth accomplished something even more sinister.

Along the fringes of religion, philosophers started to question the very nature of meaning.

How is it that we know?

Some of you are thinking, what?

Yeah, I know, I'm with you.

How do we determine things like existence?

How do we know that things really exist and that we're not just seeing things?

How do we know?

How do we determine things like meaning and understanding and grasping truth and reality and all of these kinds of things?

And it wasn't long before philosophers were proposing new ways of thinking about these things.

And a significant shift occurred.

For much of world history, meaning and understanding was primarily found in the speaker or in the writer or in the communicator's mind.

Let me give you a down-to-earth example.

Okay.

If my wife asked me to stop at the store on the way home, it would be natural for me to ask her, okay, what store?

What do you want me to get?

Right?

And every man in here thinks, oh, you're setting yourself up for failure.

You're going to get the wrong thing.

Yes, I know.

That's why I ask questions.

Because I know I'm going to do the wrong thing.

So we know.

She wants me to do something particular.

So I ask, what do you want me to get?

What store do you want me to stop at?

Do you want me to stop at a department store or a grocery store?

Do you want me to go to Hugo's or do you want me to go to Walmart?

Or something else entirely?

If my wife communicates something to me, then she meant something by that communication, and the meaning of her statement is found in her mind.

So if she meant the grocery store, and I go right on by Hugo's to go to O'Reilly's auto store instead, I missed what she meant.

Right?

Some of you guys are noddingly.

You know exactly of what I speak.

That's much of world history in a nutshell.

In more ways than one, that I just now realized.

But in the 1800s and the early 1900s, a theory gained momentum that meaning was based in the recipient.

Whether you're a reader or a listener or whatever.

And so my personal context now suddenly becomes the most important thing in determining what something means, not what you want to communicate to me.

That's why I pointed us to Jeremiah chapter 1.

Jeremiah 1 · chapter mention

You could also look at Moses' objections to God's calling of him.

Jeremiah and Moses looked at their context and God's calling and said, No, God, you can't mean that.

You must mean something else.

Because my life, my context, does not fit with that.

Therefore, I'm making the conclusion that you don't mean what you said.

That way of thinking grew in academia and it worked its way out into society, and it's still common today.

Let me give you an example.

I was on a golf course once when a golf course attendant came zooming through on a golf court like a crazy guy.

Came zooming through the golf course, telling everyone that he could find to get off the course immediately because a severe thunderstorm was coming.

So you see people getting off of the golf course, and then you see these two stupid, crazy, idiotic, I don't know what term to put there.

Guys just ignoring him.

Going on playing their game because they listened to what he had to say and they they looked at the sky and they saw clear skies and sunshine and calm, calm air.

Nothing wrong.

And so they interpreted his warning according to their own circumstances.

So as I'm observing out in the parking lot in my car, as rain and thunder begins to pound down, here these two guys come running into their cars, soaked, pulling their carts behind them.

They interpreted their situation, and then they used their context to interpret the warning given to them.

We do this kind of thing all the time.

Now, if we're to carry over my previous illustration, that shift in meaning would look like this.

My wife texts me and says, I need you to stop at the store on the way home.

And on the way home, I start thinking, okay, what store does she mean?

And I decide, you know what?

We need to fix this on the car.

And so I'm deciding that she means O'Reilly's.

Or Napa, not the grocery store.

Because I'm thinking about the car, not what's for supper.

I interpret it according to my context.

That makes a whole lot more sense when you understand that she's never asked me to stop at O'Reilly's.

See, the enemy of truth succeeded in many ways at moving people in the direction of believing that I get to decide the meaning of communication.

Now let's take this a step further.

What about today?

What is it like today?

Now remember, Satan is clever, he's manipulative, he's been around since the beginning, so he knows what works and what doesn't work, and he also knows what he's working towards.

Here's where we are today.

What began as sort of exploratory questions of existence and meaning has evolved into an announcement that we cannot definitively know.

If there are U and D students here, this is what you will be taught.

You cannot definitively know.

Everything then must be held loosely because we can't know anything for sure.

There's no definitive basis for meaning.

But the problem with that is we still live and act on meaning.

We communicate to one another and we we live out life in this world based on what meaning we think there is.

And so you get to determine what things mean, and I get to determine what things mean, and somehow everyone is happy with their own version of meaning.

Except no one can communicate anymore because we no longer have the same basis of meaning, with one exception.

In a world where meaning is found in the individual person, the only ones who can genuinely communicate are those who have established that they have the same individualized sense of meaning.

So the only ones who can truly communicate about a COVID vaccine are those who trust vaccines, believe in vaccines, or those who don't.

To put it differently.

Because we don't have the same basis of meaning anymore.

Here's an example.

Let's follow this through.

Genesis chapter 1, verse 27.

Genesis 1:27

So God created man, generally, humanity, Adam.

He created humanity in his own image.

What does the outworking of that creation look like?

In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them.

Are you all with me so far?

Alright, good.

Great.

Thank you.

Now let's think about this.

If you believe that God meant what he said, and that God said what he meant, then you're likely going to come away from this statement in Genesis chapter 1 with the understanding that God created two genders of human beings.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

If you believe that God said what he meant and meant what he said, that God has meaning, that he's communicating to his people, you're going to walk away from this thinking, okay, God created everybody and he created everybody in two genders.

But if you believe that whoever opens up this book and opens it up to Genesis chapter 1 and reads it, if you believe that the meaning is found in the reader, that the reader gets to determine what it means, you might come away with the idea that, yeah, okay, God maybe started things that way, but they didn't necessarily stay that way.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

Because you get to decide what the meaning is.

And if you believe that meaning is fluid or entirely personal, personal to you and to your context, to your feelings, to your emotions, to your sense of reality, you might come away from this verse saying, yeah, you know, those were just the only two terms for gender in the Stone Age.

And now we have a whole lot more terms that we can use today, and there's so much variation in people that I just get to choose my own gender.

Do you see how our world is wrecked when the location of meaning changes?

Makes sense why we're polarized, doesn't it?

We have no similarities of where to begin.

Communication becomes more difficult and increasingly unclear when we shift the meaning away from the one who's who's speaking, the one who's writing in this case, the one who's recording history.

It's like we have a new kind of the Tower of Babel.

You remember Babel, called Babel because of all the babbling?

God came down and said, Yeah, you think you're mighty and you think you're something.

Well, let me show you.

I'm going to change all of your languages that you're all speaking different languages and you can't communicate.

And now it's all been reversed.

We all speak the same language, but we can't communicate because we don't have the same meaning.

Speaking the same words, but we don't understand one another.

Let's take this yet one step further.

Because the enemy of truth is so crafty, so deceitful, and so manipulative that he has succeeded in blinding God's people, even God's children, to the reality that this has occurred and that we might even be victims of his effort to deceive.

Here are two, just two, of the many ways that this has worked its way out.

Number one, we assume the role of telling God what he meant.

Rather than laboring to discover what he meant.

We come to God's word and we open it up and we read it and we approach it like Jeremiah and say, yeah, yeah, God, that no, you couldn't have meant that.

Instead of really doing the hard work to figure out what did he mean.

And the second of many ways is that we effectively treat one another the same way.

We place our context and our values and our meanings on others rather than seeking to understand what they meant.

And then we begin to hold them to our standards.

That's why we can't have a conversation today about gender.

It's why it's so polarized.

It's why Christians get so up in arms about all kinds of things.

Are you still with me?

I looked over this way yet last time when I asked that question.

I'm looking over this way.

This is important stuff, friends.

It's one of the things at the heart of why our society and our world is so divided today.

Our basis of communicating with one another has been utterly eroded from underneath of us.

And yet we shouldn't be surprised, should we?

We shouldn't be surprised at all because it's been Satan's goal from the very beginning.

Do you remember when Satan asked, did God actually say that?

If you've grown up in Sunday school, you know where that comes from.

It's page two of your Bible.

Garden of Eden.

Eve looking at some really beautiful fruit, untainted by anything.

And Satan asked, did God really mean what he said?

The serpent questioned God's directive.

But even more than that, he questioned God's meaning.

He questioned God's intention.

And who suddenly then becomes the determiner of meaning?

The snake.

Satan did, and Eve bought into it.

And Satan's work to get Eve to question whether God said what he meant and meant what he said, then brings her to buy into all of his lies and suddenly all hell breaks loose on earth.

Literally.

And we are reaping the rewards of it today, even in the church.

And we're seeing, we're seeing it in the approach to Scripture, we're seeing it in our approach to relationships to one another.

But again, we ought not to be surprised, should we?

Consider what Timothy faced 2,000 years ago.

I told you, I promise you, we get back to 1 Timothy.

Look with me at what Timothy actually faced in Ephesus.

Okay, this is a real city.

This is a real city, a major city in the ancient Roman Empire.

1 Timothy chapter 1, verse 3.

1 Timothy 1:3

I urge you when I was going through Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, meaning there are people teaching different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.

Meaning not just in the Word of God, you've got to add in these other things.

Verse 6 of the same chapter, certain persons, by swerving from these, literally, by missing the mark, have wandered away into vain discussions, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they are making confident assertions.

They're saying, this is what it means.

And Paul says, No, it doesn't.

You've wandered off, you've gotten deceived, you're you're you're you're misconstruing things.

You can look over more at 2 Timothy chapter 2 and verse 16.

2 Timothy 2 · chapter mention

So apparently things didn't really get all the way worked out.

Verse 16 of chapter 2, 2 Timothy, avoid irreverent babble, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene.

Yikes.

Verse 23 have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies because you know they breed quarrels.

That's what Timothy was enduring.

So Timothy was already 2,000 years ago facing issues that developed from the Garden of Eden, approaching the Word of God and saying, Did God actually say, Yeah, no, God, you didn't really mean that.

You must have left something out.

Back in 1 Timothy, consider what the Apostle Paul told Timothy to expect as time continued to go on.

Chapter 4, verse 1, the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons.

Timothy, demonic influence, even in the church, is going to get worse.

2 Timothy chapter 3.

2 Timothy 3 · chapter mention

Verse 12 indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

While evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.

Timothy, this is what's coming.

Second Timothy chapter 4, verse 3.

2 Timothy 4:3

The time is coming when people will not endure sound, healthy teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.

Because who can communicate to one another in a world in which meaning does not exist?

Only those who have the same passions.

That's why that happens.

And they will turn away from listening to the Truth and wander off into myths.

Do you feel like things are just spiraling out of control in our world?

They're spiraling, yes, right to where God intended them to go.

It feels out of control in your world.

It's not out of control.

It's right where God told Timothy, this is what to expect.

This is where things are going.

This is what you can know will happen in our world and even within the church of God.

It's fascinating now what Timothy is told to do.

Timothy stood, as it were, in the middle of history.

Not long after a riotous beginning to the church in Ephesus.

You can't really read 1 Timothy without going back to Acts and learning how the church in Ephesus came into being.

A riot happened.

What a great way to start a church.

Let's have riots and differences of opinions and views and all of these things, and let's bring a church out of that.

Everyone has their own ideas, their own grasp of meaning, and Timothy has warned over time it's going to get more and more difficult to remain tied to the truth and have clear communication.

And so he is told in chapter 4, verse 13, until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, and to teaching.

Timothy, why is Timothy told to give himself over to this?

Starting to make a little sense, doesn't it?

And Paul's second letter to Timothy gets even stronger.

2 Timothy 4, verse 1 and 2, Paul says, I charge you, Timothy.

2 Timothy 4:1

I'm issuing you a charge in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing in his kingdom, preach the word.

Be ready in season and out of season by reproving, rebuking, and exhorting with complete patience and teaching.

Nearly 75 years ago, a young J.I.

Packer said, We must expect to find error constantly assailing the truth.

Therefore, Christendom will always be a theological battlefield.

He wrote, the church, therefore, has two constant needs.

Number one, instruction in the truth by which it must live.

And number two, correction of the shortcomings by which its life is marred.

And then he said that Scripture is designed to meet this need.

And it is the church's responsibility to use Scripture for its intended purpose.

Until I come, Timothy.

I don't know when that's going to be.

So the Lord Jesus says to his churches, until I come, you don't know when that's going to be.

Until I come, give yourselves over.

Devote yourselves.

That word devote is used like three or four times in 1 Timothy.

Every time except for here, it's used in relation to false teaching.

People devoting themselves to things that are not true, are not real, do not have biblical meaning.

And Timothy is told, Timothy, here's what you devote yourself to.

Here's what you give yourself to.

Jeremiah chapter 1 displays a dialogue between God and Jeremiah.

Jeremiah 1 · chapter mention

1 Timothy 4 is not a dialogue between God and Timothy.

It's not even a dialogue between Paul and Timothy.

But there are similarities between this passage of Scripture and Jeremiah chapter 1.

Jeremiah 1 · chapter mention

Both are directed to men who, in the eyes of some, were young.

Both are directed to men whom God had chosen, specifically prepared, and called to active service to God's people.

Both were called to boldly declare God's word.

And neither was allowed to be the determiner of meaning.

They were to write, in Jeremiah's case, and to read in Timothy's case, the word of God.

They were to explain what God meant.

Not to provide their own contextualized meaning.

They were to instruct in truth, because as Jesus said in John 17, God's word is truth, right?

We believe that.

And God's truth, as God meant it, is what God uses to be effective in doing God's work.

It's why he says that God's work does not go out without accomplishing its intended purpose.

This is how the church exists as the pillar and the buttress of truth, back in chapter 3, verse 15.

Interestingly, I love this image.

The Roman historian Pliny lived in the first century.

So he lived and wrote his Roman history during the time that the Apostle Paul is living and during the time that Timothy is likely in Ephesus.

Pliny records in his history that edicts of the Roman emperor and legal decrees were often posted on those gigantic pillars that you see in archaeological pictures.

Those pillars had decrees and edicts posted on them and on courthouses, royal, and religious buildings so that everyone could see those postings and be aware of them.

It's today's version of the internet, I guess.

Now the Roman, the Reformation, pardon me, the Reformation theologian Francis Turitan applied that historical picture to 1 Timothy 3.15.

And he said, So the church is the pillar of truth upon which the word of God is posted.

Both by reason of proclaiming and making it known, because she is bound to proclaim the law of God.

And heavenly truth is attached to it so that it may be known by all, and therefore by reason of guarding it, she ought to not only set it forth, but also vindicate it and defend it.

What a picture.

Timothy.

If I delay, here's how you know that one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the assembly of the living God, that exists as a pillar and a buttress of the truth.

Vindicating and defending it means, at least in part, that like Jeremiah and Timothy, we are we are not free to say, this is what it means to me.

Rather, we are bound to say, here's what the king said.

And here's what he meant by what he said.

Our question becomes, Lord, what did you mean?

This is the lesson to Timothy and the lesson to every assembly of God's people.

Devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhorting one another through that scripture, to instructing one another in it.

This is the priority of God's church.

And it's how God transforms the mind of his people.

Isn't that what Romans 12, 1 and 2 says?

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

You don't get renewed in your mind by deciding that you get to determine what everything means.

You just get polarized and separated.

Timothy is told, read, explain, exhort according to what God meant when God communicated to his people.

Often we we ask, God, why aren't you doing something?

God, why aren't you why aren't you active in your world and fixing this?

And God says, I am.

Read your Bible.

This is God's means of fighting against the wiles of Satan.

Listen to Martin Luther.

Martin Luther called Satan a master of a thousand arts.

Now, you might may or may not know, Martin Luther was known to be a little vulgar at times, so I apologize in advance.

I'm quoting.

What then, if Satan is a master of a thousand arts, what then shall we call God's word, which routes and destroys this master of a thousand arts with all of his wiles and his might?

What do we call the word of God?

It must indeed be a master of more than a hundred thousand arts.

Shall we frivolously despise this might, this blessing, this power, and this fruit?

If so, if we despise it, we deserve not only to be refused food, but also to be chased out by dogs and pelted with dung.

And if it is the church's priority to set forth and defend the truth of the living God, then it also then must be the priority of God's children, of God's people, who are the pillar and the buttress of the truth, to be discerning about the truth, to listen and hear truthfully, to speak truthfully, to understand truthfully, and so to act in truth according to God's way of truth.

And as the assembly of God's children gathers together in a polarized world on a polarized Sunday, we gather together unpolarized.

Do you know why?

Because we have the same basis of meaning.

God said.

As the assembly of God's children are molded by the truth of God, and they gather in the truth, they then become those pillars upon which are declared and proclaimed the truth of the living God, and we defend God's truth against the devil's lies and against a tide of culture seeking to erode everything that God has established.

And we uphold genuine communication and ultimately truth itself.

And we do that, devoting ourselves to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, and to teaching, knowing that Jesus is coming back.

We don't know when.

Sometimes it is so confusing.

Sometimes the way before us does not seem clear, and sometimes we get weak needing and trying to stand firm.

We know at least at some point in our being that we face a spiritual battle and a spiritual enemy that is far greater and far more cunning than we can ever imagine.

We cannot know all that there is to know.

We cannot grasp all that there is to grasp.

But we bow before you, committing our trust to you, to your word.

And so with the psalmist, we pray that you would teach us your word, so that we might know the way in which you would have us to walk.

Cause your word to stand firm.

As we anticipate that day when you will cause that evil one to fall by the power and the might of your word.

We wait for that day, praying that it might be soon.

Until then, be our fortress and our strength.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.