Friday, October 7, 2011

1 Timothy 3:1-9

"These people...honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me" (Isa. 29:13).

This indictment of the people of the church in Timothy's time seems all too modern. I can think of people like that. But better still to look closer still at myself.

Yes I am often trying to make short cuts to righteousness. I want to put other things before God.

We are still in the last days. Paul mentions that they are in the last days. Two millennium later we are still in the last days.

When I was in my twenties I knew men who did what verse six describes, play on the insecurities of weak women to get sexual favors. These people were all Christians and I had much less respect for the men than for the women. Sadly there were times that acting as those men did seemed appealing. I never did but mostly for the wrong reasons. But that comment by Paul is so telling. We often think of Paul as innocent in the affairs of sexual love but he was not at all. I am sure as a pastor he had to pick up the pieces from such dalliances and he knew the power of those hormones.

When we come to verse seven I hope that is not me, always learning but never becoming mature. It is always a temptation for me to love the facts more than the God that I am proposing to learn them for. If I never get out there and serve then I am learning for purely selfish motives.

In verses two through four we have a vice list. Paul is talking about Christians here, those who are supposed to be living like Jesus. Timothy has a tough job. Any church probably has such people. Are we any better? I hope so. But I should look at myself first. At one time or another I have probably been all those things.

I notice it is men who are called malicious gossips, not women, chuckle. I suppose this includes all people though.

Perhaps most of all I am convicted by verse five, "holding to a form of godliness while denying the power of it." To me that describes legalism. It shows faithlessness, a form of atheism. We go through the motions without really experiencing God. We have tamed God, which means we have denied him because God can never be tamed.

Paul is talking here about the negative side. He is talking bluntly to a leader. But there is a gracious side of this. All these people are saved by grace, not by their own actions. God has determined to love these people (and us) despite their unfaithful actions.

This is a wonderful reminder of God's gracious love: "There is no pit so deep, but Christ is deeper still" (Corrie ten Boom).

We should determine to accept God's love and endeavor love God more dearly.

The fight is still on for the souls of men. Satan was defeated by Jesus on the cross. But the battle will not be totally over until he comes back again. He has delayed, I guess so that more can be saved. Lord give us opportunities to help others to choose Jesus as savior and start on the path to discipleship.

The commentator's final prayer: Lord, my own life has been stained by the darkness of these last days; cleanse my heart, and relocate all my loves and desires more closely in Your will.

2 TIMOTHY 3:1-9 [1] But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. [2]For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, [3]unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, [4]treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, [5]holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these. [6]For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, [7]always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. [8]Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men of depraved mind, rejected in regard to the faith. [9]But they will not make further progress; for their folly will be obvious to all, just as Jannes's and Jambres's folly was also. NASB

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