Series Introduction

‘1 Timothy’ is a handwritten letter from the heart, from the much older apostle named Paul, whomentored a much younger minister, named Timothy, almost 2,000 years ago. Now in 2020, wefour ministers from four sister churches have put together this series called ‘The Household of God’to teach you 1 Timothy, from our heart.

We’re listening to 1 Timothy this term as a church family. As ‘God’s Household’, in fact. We’ll listenand learn as we gather on Sundays, as will our children in Kids Church, and we’ll learn moretogether during the week in our growth groups. It’s a 9-week series.

Paul wrote this first pastoral letter in the mid-60s AD while in Macedonia (Eastern Europe), to Timothywho he’d sent to Ephesus (modern-day Turkey). Although written privately to Timothy, it was readout publicly in front of the church in Ephesus at that time, and the letter is all about the ministry ofthe whole Christian church across all of time. So, it’s in God’s Bible, in the New Testament, as ateaching letter for churches just like ours. To instruct ministers like me, elders like ours, and menand women like you, on how to conduct ourselves in God’s family, His church. In chapter 3 Paul tells Timothy:

Although I hope to come to you soon, I am writing you these instructions so that, if I am delayed,you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church ofthe living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.

For our Stanthorpe and Rose City churches, we’ve just come out of our ‘God’s Dysfunctional Family’series - where we spent a whole term looking at how God’s people are NOT to conduct themselves.

So thankfully, this term we’re doing the opposite! Our key purpose in doing 1 Timothy is straightfrom the letter:

‘To know how we ought to live as God's household’ (3:15).

A Family Letter

Timothy had ridden shotgun with Paul on many of his travels around the Roman Empire. In the NewTestament, Paul mentions Timothy in the opening greetings of 6 of his other letters, mostly to newchurches around the Mediterranean. Timothy helped Paul plant churches, supported Paul inpreaching the gospel and most of all, he learned from Paul. Timothy was Paul’s disciple, as Paulfollowed Jesus. Timothy disciplined himself, as one who learned the disciplines of his mentor. Wemight say Timothy was Paul’s apprentice, his offsider, his ‘right-hand man’. But Paul had a betterword for Timothy. Paul called him, ‘my true son’:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Saviour and of Christ Jesus our hope, To Timothy my true son in the faith: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

It seems Timothy didn’t know his own father. We know Timothy had been raised by his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, who’d both taught him the Scriptures since he was an infant (2 Timothy 1:15). We don’t know if they were single mums or widows, but we do know they were two of the many faithful women the New Testament tells us about. It seems Timothy’s father was absent, and that in such absence Paul had taken the young man under his wing. In this way Paul was modelling the God he worshipped, the ‘Father to the fatherless, the defender of widows’ (Psalm 68:5). In the Roman world at the time, your family, your ‘household’, was sacred. And in that culture, to call someone who was not from your family, with a term reserved only for family, was. Yet Paul treated Timothy like God treats us: bringing us into His household, treating us as his very own children, calling us His ‘true sons and daughters’.

In fact, as we’ll see from the letter, our new identity as children of God radically reshapes how we are to treat each other in the church, God’s own ‘household’. For example:

Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity. (1 Timothy 5:1-2)

A Confronting Letter

Paul had been confronted by the risen Lord Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). And Timothy had been confronted by the truth of Christ Jesus since before he could remember, having ‘known the Scriptures’ since he was a child (2 Timothy 3:15).

But Timothy, Paul’s ‘true son’ in Christ Jesus, and now a grown-up minister of the gospel, needed encouragement. He’s often been called ‘Timid Timothy’ throughout church history, but perhaps Timothy just found ministry intimidating. You see, overseeing the ministry of a church is hard. It’s very confronting. People are difficult. And when you’re a minister, elder or deacon there’s great temptation to quietly give up and go AWOL in the face of shameless betrayal, false teaching by others and sabotage by people who pretend to have the best interests of the church at heart. So Paul opens his letter by commanding Timothy ‘to stay’ in Ephesus, and throughout the letter he keeps encouraging Timothy to hold his ground, don’t give up, to ‘fight the good fight of faith’ (1 Timothy 6:12).

More confronting in 1 Timothy is Paul’s insistence on the reality of God’s judgement for sin. That there really is a devil. And that there is danger for us, of suffering ‘shipwreck’ of our faith, if we don’t hold on to a good conscience, and healthy doctrine – as we’ll see.

This was a confronting letter in the pre-Christian Roman culture of Timothy’s time, but the letter is also confronting in ours. More so as we live into a post-Christian culture that’s trending antiChristian. The cultural pressures for us to give up on godliness, embrace the values of this world, and become an ‘unhealthy’ church, are growing. But hopefully, joyfully, with great encouragement from Paul, we’ll see that one of the biggest antidotes to unhealthy churches is ‘healthy’ doctrine (translated as ‘sound’ in your NIV). Paul loved good doctrine. Timothy was to teach good doctrine.

And we are to love living out good, sound, life-giving truth – ‘healthy doctrine’, as we’ll see.

A ‘How To’ Letter

Much of what Paul teaches in 1 Timothy is about how we are to live. Conduct ourselves. How we’re to treat others in God’s Household, yes, but especially out of how we manage our own self. For Paul, the first of his ‘trustworthy sayings’ is all about managing our ‘self’:

Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am the worst. (1 Timothy 1:15)

This means that the beginning of the Christian life is repentance. It’s acknowledging the depth of our sin. It’s owning our failure to live good and true lives on our own. It means admitting that we can’t do life on our own because all we seem to work towards, is death.

You see, in Paul’s fatherly letter to his true son, 1 Timothy wakes us up from delusion. It fires a gunshot across the night of our sleeping. It wakens us to the truth that comes not from our own choices – as though you have your truth and I have mine – but to the truth that only comes from God:

For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all people. (1 Timothy 2:5-6)

Therefore, your elders encourage you to be at church every Sunday, to find your place here in ‘The Household of God’ and to discipline yourself as a disciple of Christ Jesus to help others grow, by joining in one of your church growth groups each week.

Rev David Bailey (Rose City)Other Series Contributors: Revs Andrew Purcell (Biloela), Peter Evans (Stanthorpe) and Jeffrey Keighley (Manly Lota)