A Call to Godliness

Turn with me in your bibles to One Timothy, chapter three,

verse fourteen. We continue in our study of One Timothy,

and we're continuing in verses fourteen through sixteen of chapter

three after a pastor Jonathan has taught the rest of

the chapter, and we're going to finish this chapter today.

So if you'll stand with me and let's read the

scripture One Timothy three fourteen through sixteen, Paul says, I

hope to come to you soon, but I am writing

these things to you so that if I delay, you

may know how one ought to behave in the household

of God, which is the Church of the Living God,

a pillar and buttress of the truth. Great indeed, we

confess is the mystery of Godliness. He was manifested in

the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed

among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up

in glory. Let's pray together, Father God. We just come

to you this morning, and we asked that you would

be here with us. Father, we pray that you would

guide us in the study of your word so that

we would know truth and that it would affect our lives.

Father God, your word is a lamp and too our

feet and a light into our path. And we ask

that you would reveal your truths to us and to

our hearts today so we can see your glory and

our hearts would be drawn closer to you. Father. We

pray that you would open our eyes to see wonderful

things in your word. And I pray that you would

guide me from error. Father, guard me and my speech.

I teach your word, and I pray that you would

teach us all now in Jesus name, I pray Amen.

My message today is called a call to Godliness. So kids,

if you have your sermon guide, the title is a

call to Godliness. And so what I want us to

see this morning is that God calls his people to

live lives that match the truth we confess. Right, And

so I want to give you a little picture. When

you say your last name, you carry your family name right.

Whether your name is Warfield or Dobson or Barbie or

every other last name in here, the name carries a

maybe a reputation or a wait. That was one of

the things that my seventh grade history teacher taught me.

He said, you want to honor your family name, And

I think he was referring to cheating. You know, don't

cheat in my class because that will that will taint

your family name, right, it will hurt your family name.

And so he wanted us to do that. And so

people expect certain things from hearing a family name. Not

that somebody has to live up to or like earn

a reputation, but because you already have it and you

want to protect that family name. You want to tect

your reputation. And so if one of my kids is

out somewhere and they hear the name Warfield, what they

do reflects our family right in an even greater way.

If you belong to God, you carry his name. And

the question Paul is answering in this passage is what

should the family of God actually look like? And what

we do will proclaim his name? And so God calls

his people to live lives that match the truth that

they profess. So first James has a oops, messed up there,

Let's go back. Paul has a word for us. Look

in verse fourteen, I hope to come to you soon,

but I am writing these things to you so that

if I delay, you may know how one ought to

behave in the household of God. So Paul has been

writing to his church at Ephesus and to Timothy, it's leader,

and he's been telling them how they ought to practice,

how they ought to behave right. In chapter two, Pastor

Jonathan showed us that there's proper worship, there's proper authority,

there's proper submission. And then as we move to chapter three,

there's a model for elders and there's a model for deacons.

I guess those are models for the church and those

two offices, and he talked about those models are primarily character.

The qualifications that are given for elders and for deacons

in the church is who they are as men, and

they represent the Lord in what they do and how

they live. And so Paul is writing here in verse fourteen,

he says, I hope to come to you. You see

that desire in Paul. He is a shepherd for his people,

and so he wants to come to them. But he says,

I'm writing these things to you so that if I delay.

Paul is not sure whether he's going to be able

to meet them in person or not. And the original

language makes it sound like he's probably not gonna make it.

So it prompted him to write this letter to the

church to tell them how to behave or what their

behavior should be in the church. He says, how one

ought to behave in the household of God. And this

word behave is not necessarily just be behavior in the

in the church and the building, but also it's it

has to do with character, right, what we believe is

going to shape what we do and how we live, okay.

And so Paul has been talking about what our character

has been and what actions have been shown by that

character through worship and authority, and how what the lives

of an elder and a deacon are. And so he's

talking about how people are behaving where their heart is,

what their character is, okay, And so that's his main

point here. He wants the church to see that they

how one ought to behave in the household of God.

And notice that word household, That household isn't isn't just

mean church. When you read it, you might think, okay,

it's a synonym for church, but it implies more of

a family relationship, right, It's a how hold where there's

different relationships among people. And so the context of this passage, right,

is the false teaching in the church at Ephesus. Paul

wants to correct and he wants to deliver right teaching

or correct false teaching. Okay, And so he's saying, the

way you treat one another, the relationships that you have

with one another inside the church, that's what I'm talking about.

That's what behavior I want to address in my letter

to you. And so that's what Paul is talking about.

Paul is saying, if you profess to have faith, if

you profess to be a Christian, a believer, then your

behavior should be as such, it should be consistent with

what you profess to believe. Right. And James has a

similar a similar warning to us. He says in James one,

verse twenty two, but be doers of the word, not hearers,

only deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of

the word and not a doer, he is like a

man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror.

For he looks at himself and goes away, and at

once forgets what he was like. But the one who

looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres,

being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts,

he will be blessed in his doing. Okay, so James

is saying, you can't look at the word and understand

it and profess to believe it. Yet when it comes

to your behavior, something different happens, and it's like you

forgot what you had just read. Right now. Maybe you're

like me sometimes when I read and I get distracted,

I read a whole paragraph and I don't remember what

I read. Anybody out there like me? So you you

might have to go back and reread what you read. Right.

So that's a struggle. But James is saying, and Paul

is saying, if you profess to have faith, and you

profess to know Jesus, then your life and your behavior

ought to look like it. If you are seeking God

as your one and only God, and you are drawing

near to him, you will begin to look like him.

Aw Tozer spoke about this same idea in his book

I'm forgetting the name right now. But he says, has

it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos, all

tuned to the same fork, are automatically tuned to each other.

They are of one accord by being tuned not to

each other, but to another standard to which each one

must end July bow. So one hundred worshipers met together,

each one looking away to Christ are in heart nearer

to each other than they could possibly be were they

to become unity conscious and turn their eyes away from

God to strive for closer fellowship. Tosar is saying that

we shouldn't look at one another to compare ourselves and say, well,

I'm not as godly as this person, or my prayer

life isn't as good as what they do on stage. Instead,

Tosar says, just like pianos tune to one tuner, we

should be tuned to who God, The Lord Jesus Christ

is our tuner to tune our hearts in righteousness and

justice and faith. And if each one of us in

this room are tuned to the one Lord Jesus, we

will start looking like one another. Right. And so Paul

is saying that in order to in order to have

that right behavior, we must look like the Lord Jesus.

We must try to be like him to be more godly. Right,

and God calls us to be more godly, But how

do we do that? We look at God. Paul calls

us to be godly, not just to change our behavior.

But number two this morning, because God calls his church

to uphold the truth. Look in verse fifteen, I'm gonna

read the tale end of fourteen and go into fifteen.

Paul says, so that if I delay, you may know

how one ought to behave in the household of God,

which is the Church of the Living God, a pillar

and buttress of the truth. Paul says here that this

Church of the Living God, he's describing the household of God.

And I loved that phrase living God. And that phrase

right there comes as a contrast to the way the

pagan nations worshiped. They worshiped a false God who was

typically a physical idol that they created or crafted, and

so it was dead. That false God could do nothing

to help them or change them. But they worshiped this

statue or this idol. But not Israel. Israel was called

to worship the one true, Living God. Do you know

how we know he was living? Remember how God guided

them through the wilderness, guided them across the Red Sea.

It was the pillar of fire by night and the

cloud by day. And when Moses went into the tabernacle

to speak with God and to be with God, the

cloud came and settled over the tabernacle. Israel's God was

not dead but living, and he followed them, and he

walked before them to show them the way. But can

you believe when the Living God was meeting with Moses

on top of Mount Sinai, the people were down below,

and they said, I think Moses must have been destroyed

by God's glory. Let's make a golden calf to worship.

And Aaron created the calf, the idol, the statue that

had no life, and the people said, behold the God

that rescued you from Egypt. But the Living God was

up on the mountain, and they were so blind that

they thought they wanted to see a physical representation of God.

No church. Paul says we are to be the Church

of the Living God. And then he says we're supposed

to be a pillar and buttress of the truth. Well,

we probably know what a pillar is, right, A pillar

and a buttress, those are both. They're both building building terms.

Right for a structure. We have some pillars out here

in the front that you probably walked through. They hold

up the roof, they hold up the breezeway outside that

you drive under. Right, that's a pillar and then a

buttress is just another word for foundation, okay, And so

he says that we are a pillar and a buttress

of the truth. Paul says that we, as the Church

of the Living God, should be a and a foundation

of truth. Right. And so when Paul is speaking to

his people through Timothy about who the church in Ephesus

is supposed to be in reference to false teaching, he says,

we instead of following false teaching and having false teachers,

we must be this church who is a stronghold, a

pillar to keep truth alive, to support and to defend

and to proclaim the truth. Right, Paul is saying we

the church must keep the truth pure and not follow

false teaching. We don't create the truth as a church.

We support, display, and defend the truths that God has

given us. Amen. And if the Church doesn't stand firm

in God's truth and proclaim it, how will the world

know what truth is? Church? We have to know the truth.

There's an old adage that says, if you don't stand

for something, your fall for anything. And so if we

are not in our Bibles, in the Word of God,

studying who God is and what God is like, we're

going to struggle to know this truth for ourselves so

that it will transform us and transform our hearts. And

we're also going to struggle to defend the truth when

someone has a question about it. And so I want

to challenge you this morning, what is the truth of Christianity?

What is the truth truth that is unique to salvation

and to the Gospel message. I asked our children and

youth volunteers a few weeks ago to write down the Gospel.

And I do this with our kids too, and I

say what is the gospel? And an adventure club often

they want to write down you know, Mark, Matthew Luke,

And yeah, those are the gospels. Those are the books

that communicate the good News, that communicate the Gospel message.

But the gospel message, that is the truth of Christianity

is is good news. And so if someone were to

come to you tomorrow and say how can I be saved?

We ought to know how to respond to them, right.

We ought to know what the truth is to share

with them to have life. Right. This good news is

the truth that brings death had sinners to life everlasting,

and so we ought to know what it is. And

so I want to challenge you maybe today or tomorrow,

write down the good news, write down the gospel. And

it's something as simple as for God loved you so

much that he gave his only son to die for you,

to take away your sin, so that if you believe,

you will not die, but you will have eternal life. Now,

those of you who know your Bibles probably know where

I took that from. It's not my idea. I just

changed John three sixteen a couple words so that if

I'm speaking to somebody, I can say, for God loved

you so much that he gave his son to die

for you and make you write with him by his

son on the cross. That's the good news of Christianity

that we as the church, Paul says, should be supporting

and defending and proclaiming so that dead sinners would have

life in the name of Jesus. And that's who we

are church. We are meant to proclaim and defend that

truth to our death so that more people will join

us around the throne and seeing, Holy, Holy, Holy is

the Lord God Almighty. Right. I think one of the

problems though, for us, is that we don't spend the

time that we need in studying and seeking and praying

for more truth and for more knowledge. Right, how many

times do we prioritize work over prayer? How many times

do we prioritize entertainment over Bible study, or maybe we

prioritize time over a relationship with our Savior. And so

I think our knowledge of the truth not just that

good news, because that's super important, but what leads to

that good news, and what's a product of that good

news that we should know from Genesis to revelation, about

how that good news helps us and saves us, and

what the character of God is from the beginning of

time to lead to that good news, that truth that

we profess. And so I think the one single thing

that you could do church, to grow in your knowledge

of this truth is to read the Word of God daily.

And I admit it's hard to make time for that,

but if we're all honest, we choose to make time

for other things and we don't prioritize the Lord and

his truth and that relationship with him. And so my

suggestion is to take two or three chapters every day

and read them. It takes about it takes me, and

I'm a slow reader. It takes me about fifteen minutes

to read two to three chapters and a little short

devotional every day. And I've been doing that, trying to

do that every day. You know, I fall short. Some

days I forget. Sometimes I don't wake up on time.

But it has opened my eyes to who God is

so much more than I had before. And so I

encourage you church to start today read two to three scriptures,

two to three chapters of the truth that we profess

to believe, so that we'll be ready in the moment

when we have to defend the truth. Amen, let's move

on lastly this morning, when we fail in being godly

or in upholding the truth. Number three, God reminds his

church to acknowledge the greatness of Christ. So after Paul

has given us the call to be godly and to

uphold the truth, he turns our eyes to the good news.

He turns our eyes to Jesus one Timothy three, p. Sixteen.

Paul says, great, indeed, we confess is the mystery of Godliness.

He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the spirit,

seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in

the world, taken up in glory. Paul says, we as

the true church, we confess the mystery of godliness. Now,

Pastor Jonathan told us a couple of weeks ago that

this mystery is not something that is unknown, like we

think of a mystery as a story that is a

little not confusing, but it's not fully revealed until the end.

But the mystery here in scripture is something that was

previously hidden from the eyes and the ears of those

who trusted in the Lord. God had a plan from

the beginning to redeem his people, and it was mysterious

up until the revelation of Jesus Christ. Right. And so

now this mystery is fully known, this mystery that is Jesus.

And so Paul says, and you can tell he's talking

about Jesus here he says, great, we confess is the

mystery of godliness. And then what's the first word of

the next sentence he So Paul is saying, this mystery

of godliness is Jesus, This mystery of godliness is Jesus.

And so he he presents in six more lines the

story of Jesus that if we study and if we

make it our own, if we profess it, then we

will turn up more godly like our savior. So he says,

in your pursuit of godliness, in your pursuit of upholding

the truth, Jesus, look at these six lines with me. Now.

Commentators and scholars mostly agree that these six lines is

divided into two okay. And so the first two lines

he was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit.

Scholars say, is his describes Jesus's accomplished work on the cross.

So he's sharing the gospel here, okay. And so the

first two lines are like, Jesus was manifested, he was

made known. God the Father made himself known, revealed himself

as Jesus in the flesh. Right, Jesus was made manifest.

He was revealed in the flesh. So he was born

of a baby and then vindicated by the spirit. The

Spirit set him free from the death that he paid

for us. Right, he was brought back to life by

the spirit. And so he wasn't kept in the flesh

in death. He was vindicated or justified, made right in

the spirit. Okay. Next, he was seen by angels, proclaimed

among the nations. Scholars say this pair of lines reports

Jesus's work was seen by angels and shared as good

news among all peoples in the world that this is

his work being made known. So the first two Jesus

came and died for us, the second one Jesus came

and died for us. That's the proclamation. That's the good

news that's being shared with people who need to hear it.

It's revealed and it's known by people and angels in

the world that Jesus resurrected and he is now available

for us to have salvation. The third pair describes the

response to the work being made known. The second or

the last two lines are believed on in the world,

taken up in glory. So in these six lines, Paul

declares Jesus's work on the cross, Jesus's work being made

known or proclaimed, and number three Jesus's work the response

to Jesus's work made known, and that has to do

with you and me. Right when we proclaim the Gospel

the good news, lives are changed, and Paul says that

they are believed on in the world and taken up

in glory. Jesus has been taken up in glory, and

now he is at the right hand of the Father,

waiting to bring us home and to see us face

to face one day. So in these six lines, Paul

describes the work of Jesus. I think it's a beautiful

way to end this half of Paul's letter and calling

us to godliness and to uphold the truth, and he

ultimately points us to Jesus. Imagine someone hands you a

written description of someone, and they were to say, my friend,

my friend, Joe is kind and loving, he's good, he's

a good man. You're gonna like him. He's courageous, he's patient.

And so you study this description of what Joe is like,

and you prepare to meet Joe. You have this expectation,

you try to picture him, you maybe try to imitate him. Okay,

this is what Joe's gonna be like. And then the

door opens and the actual person walks in. Finally, Joe's here.

Suddenly you don't need the description anymore. Everything becomes clear.

What was only written is now made visible. And that's

what Paul is doing here. He's been describing godliness and truth.

And then in verse sixteen, it's like he says, stop

trying to imagine what godliness is like. Here he is

look at Jesus. The mystery of godliness is not a

concept to imitate. It's a person revealed to us. God

didn't just give us instructions for godliness. He gave us

God in the flesh. So, Church, how can we avoid

false teaching? How can we behave right in the church?

How can we know the truth and defend it? We

look at Jesus. Jesus is the pinnacle of God's truth,

and in him God has revealed himself and given life

to those who believe. Hebrews says it like this. Therefore,

since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,

let us also lay aside every weight and sin which

clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the

race that is set before us. Listen looking to Jesus,

the founder and perfector of our faith, who, for the

joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising

the shame, and is seated at the right hand of

the throne of God. We don't imitate an abstract standard.

We reflect a revealed savior. If we want to increase

in godliness so much that it changes our behavior, we

must strive for a deeper and more profound relationship encounter

with Jesus Christ, who loved us enough to come here

as one of us and to die for us so

that we can be set free from the sin in

our life. The band is going to come up now

and we're going to sing songs of worship to the

Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And if you have felt

convicted this morning, if you have felt the Lord lead

you to a place of I don't know the truth

well enough because I haven't devoted my time and my

energy and my efforts to read about him and to

see take him personally, Or if you don't feel like

you have been living in a godly way that you

profess you've been a Christian for a long time in

your life, and you're convicted that your life does not

look like the truth that you proclaim. This time is

for you to surrender to Jesus and to look at

the one who gave his life for you. It's your

time to take this him, that Paul says, and hold

it as your hope and your stronghold that in the

midst of failure and sin and shame, we have a

Savior who died on the cross for that. And so

at this time, if you feel like you don't know

Jesus person the one who was revealed for you and

died for you. This is the time to meet him

and you can pray right there where you are if

you need someone to pray with you. That elders and

I are going to be up here at the front

of the church and we would love to pray for

you and to talk with you and encourage you to

look at Jesus. Let's pray. Father, God, we praise you

this morning because you've revealed yourself in a loving savior

who died for us. You have given us the truth,

and you have shown us what you expect of us.

But Lord, we fall short, and so we need you.

We can't fix it on our own. Father, we need

you to rescue us when we call out to you,

and that's what your word says you will do if

we confess our sin to you. You are gracious and

merciful and you will forgive us of our sins and

cleansifal of all unrighteousness. So now, Father, I pray that

you would guide us, that your holy spirit would convict

us and lead us to your throne and help us

to commit to be faithful followers of Jesus and his name.

We pray, Amen, say all to