The Church as a Family // 1 Timothy 5

county? And as a church, we want to make a difference and we want to make a dent in that. And we care about foster care and adoption. And I want to tell you why we care about this. Because someone told me one time that as soon as Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie looks okay, when they got into adoption, you can kind of mark this. It becomes popular in American culture when beautiful celebrities start to adopt. Christians have always cared about adoption. And here's why. Adoption is a gospel issue for Christians. Because God, think about this. If you're a Christian, God did not just forgive you. He became your father. God did not just forgive you. That would have been good enough. Forgive me. Take me to heaven. I'm not going to complain. But he forgives us and makes us part of his family and we're not just his creatures. We become his children. And here's the other thing about adoption. And you know this. In the gospel, there's something else we learn about the, about adoption. And it's that adoption is unbelievably costly. What did it cost God to adopt us? His own son. And so here's the thing about adoption. Adoption is amazing and foster care is amazing, but it's also like, it's very, very complex. And it's very costly. And so what we want to do as a church, listen, we want to reduce friction and remove barriers

for couples, families in our church who are interested in adoption and foster care. We've tried to reduce, reduce the financial barrier by having scholarships. And we've given away tens of thousands of dollars because of the generosity of this church to help people begin foster care and adoption. We've done this. If you'll put it on the screen, if you want to, if you're interested, just in, how can I come alongside families who are fostering and adopting? Or maybe I'm interested in getting some more information. If you go to that QR code, you can find out more information. But we're trying to bring teams alongside people who are interested to help with funding, answer questions, connect foster families to foster families, adopting families to adopting families. And we're very, very excited about it. In fact, I was able to last week record a podcast with three different people in our church all talking about adoption. So starting tomorrow, we're going to drop that podcast and you'll be able to hear in much more detail what we're doing as a church and how, if you're interested, you can get involved. Secondly, Monday night, we had an incredible night of prayer and worship. I want to show you guys some pictures. Yeah, if you were there, you know, it was awesome. We had like 900 plus people come on a Monday night after they'd been here on Sunday and after they worked on a Monday in the singing, I mean, this in the best sense of the word was just like so loud. And what we're trying to do here, guys, is we are trying to buy the grace of God. We're trying to build a response culture. And a response culture is a culture where you respond to what God has said in his word. By the way, that's the definition of worship. And sometimes you respond by singing. That's why we'll sing after the sermon and other times you respond by bringing and that's

why we'll give our ties and offerings after serving. But also every day we were supposed to respond to God's word through obeying and praying. So let's pray and then we got a lot of work to do in 1 Timothy 5. But I want to just take a moment right now and we want to make a dent in a difference with foster care and adoption in our city. And the church is called to care for widows and orphans. And that does not mean that every Christian, couple or family is called to adopt and enter foster care. But I imagine that in a room this size, there are some couples who've been praying about it. And I just pray that people would take their next step. There's some people in here who need to take the next step for foster care, others for adoption and still others just to come alongside these families and we're building systems and structures to do all three of those. Or would you continue to build a prayer culture in our church, a worship culture in a church, would it not just be a couple of events we do every year? Would you do that in our hearts and our homes in Christ's name? Amen. All right. Well, relationships are beautiful, aren't they? And relationships are also very, very messy. And relationships are also very complex. See, when I was thinking about it, I was thinking to myself. Why do people stick and stay at church, a church, it's any church, right? We know why people come. They can come because of the building or they can come because of the program or they come because someone invited them or they come because of the preaching or they come because of the worship, but why do people stay? People stick and stay at church in large part because of the relationships and the opposite of the street.

Why do people leave churches? Well, I mean, you think about it. It's like, I mean, how many people you know end up leaving a church because they couldn't get along with somebody, right? Sometimes it was a conflict with another family in the church. Sometimes it was that their kid didn't fit in at the student ministry and he, some guys there weren't maybe nice to them. Sometimes people leave a church because they felt like they had a need that was being overlooked and wasn't being met by the church. because they get frustrated and angry at leadership. Well, guess what? In 1 Timothy 5, Paul deals with all three. He deals with how to relate to one another. He deals with how to care for the needs in the church. And he deals with how to deal with both honor and hold accountable the leaders in the church, okay? So here's the big idea for this sermon, that the world can offer you friendship, only the church can offer you family. And when you realize that the church is a family, you're gonna realize, okay, we'll fight like family, we'll forgive like family because today, we're gonna see how do you relate like family, how do you care like family, and how do you lead like family, okay? So let's start going to the first two verses. We're in chapter five of 1 Timothy, here's what it says. Do not rebuke an older man, but encourage him as you would a father.

Younger men as brothers, older woman as mothers, younger women as sisters in all purity. So he uses family language here, okay? And what I want you to notice, he's talking older, younger men and women, what Paul is doing in verses one and two is an HR nightmare. 'Cause what did Paul say? You could write this down in your notes. Don't treat everybody the same. By the way, what we're doing when we're meeting together is we're like thinking through, what are all the wrong thoughts I have? How have I been wrongly indoctrinated by my culture? And what is the Bible actually says? What does the Bible actually say? Do you notice in verses one and two, it says treat people differently. And then it even says treat people differently based on their age and their sex. Treat men differently than women. Treat women differently than men. Treat old people different than younger people. It's like, wow, we're gonna talk about this and what this actually looks like. It doesn't, by the way, just let me clarify, he's not saying treat certain groups better than the other. We know that everybody is equally made in the image of God and deserves dignity and honor and respect and all that, okay? But also I want you to notice that Paul assumes

in verses one and two. Sometimes you wanna read a verse and go, "What is assumed?" Paul assumes a multi-generational church. Do you see that? He says in the church there should be old people and young people and there should be men and women. Now, by the way, we'll see this a little bit later. It's like, what does he mean by old? Well, he calls young widows anyone under 60. So if you're over 60, we might call you older. Okay, that's what I might do 'cause the text says older. But here's the thing, the local church might be, I think it is, the only place in America left where you have multiple generations interacting with one another. We live, have you noticed this? We live in, you probably don't think about this. We live in an age-separated society. It starts in school and I'm not knocking on the school system, but it starts in school where we send off Johnny and we're like, "Johnny, go ahead. "Spend all day with people your age. "We'll give you one teacher." And then it's exacerbated in college. We're like, all right, go away for four years of your life and mostly hang out with 18 to 22-year-olds, right? I mean, you can see a college student on a campus going, "What's that? "That's a kid, that's a child."

I mean, it is possible, think about this, it is possible. You live in the dorms, it is possible to live on a college campus for four years and never see a child and never see an elderly person. But then it's like, we're so isolated, right? Everybody's working, quote unquote, working from home. Oh, you're alone all the time. And then everybody's a lot more and more people are living alone. Here's what we know, young people are struggling to have face-to-face real relationships. Why? 'Cause what happens when somebody texts you? You keep back, well, let me think of it. Let me act like I didn't get it. Turn off your read receipts, right? And then you just think about it for a little bit. How would I respond? Maybe you cut and paste it into chat GPT, respond to this. What would be a couple of ways I could respond to this? Oh, there's bubbles, there's no bubbles, there's bubbles, there's no bubbles. This is why that doesn't work in real life, where there's facial expressions and people expect you to respond and it's a little bit more back and forth and people don't know what to do with that. So Paul's trying to give us instructions for how to relate and we need to learn how to do that. So let's break each one of them up.

First he says, if you look, he says, "Do not rebuke an older man." Now that word rebuke is a unique word only used, this is the only place that word's used in the New Testament, the Greek word for rebuke. Which means basically to speak harshly, here's the whole idea. And this starts at the home. So almost everything I'm saying is super practical for parents, it's like teach your kids to respect adults. You know We're such a casual, informal culture. We don't even like when people, the younger generation, we don't even like when people say Mr. I find it in myself, if my kid's friend say Mr. Mercer, I'm like, it's my dad's name. You know, call me Mr. Kyle, right? We're just, we're just such an informal culture. I don't, you don't hear a lot of sir. You don't hear a lot of ma'am. You should teach your kids to respect adults. You know why? 'Cause one day they're gonna be one. You should create a home where it's like adults are awesome. You should wanna grow up and you should wanna spend the rest of your life being one and the way that you'll learn to respect or want to be them is learning to respect them. This also speaks particularly Paul's talking to Timothy. Here's the problem.

Young men think they have more to say and more to offer than they do. And we love young men. We think they have a lot to offer. I'm not saying that. But young men in particular need to learn how to listen to older people. This is also to honor the age. So would you guys remember we had Sam James here. Sam James was here. He's 92 years old and we had him on the podcast and I sat across from him and I just, I'll be honest with you, I just couldn't stop thinking. You're really old. I was just, I was like, you know, don't ask questions about his age the whole time. Don't ask questions about his age, you know, just like, but anyway, so he starts telling the story though. And I think this is right. I think this is the right way to respond that he's 92. He starts telling stories and he's like, well, I got married and then, and I was in the military and I was in Vietnam and I came back and we went back to Vietnam. Anyway, he tells me the story of the first 50 years of his life and I realized it's only like 1982. And I'm sitting across from going, I won't be born for a couple more years. There's just, you know this, there's something about a long life that is to be honored and admired.

We need to relate, the Bible says as brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, but then let me get a lot to talk about today, let me focus on what I think is most important for right now, where he says at the end, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters in all purity. So how should men and women relate? Let's talk about purity, okay? And he doesn't just say, if you just said purity, I'd still talk about it, but he says all purity. So I have to talk about the word purity, which isn't like a fun word to talk about. And the reason that is, is because if you take the suitcase term purity, okay? That word has a lot of baggage because of a lot of things that happened in churches. If you don't know this in like the late 90s, early 2000s, there was the purity culture movement. There's like many people who critique it. Let me explain it to you. What happened is there was a bunch, there was a bunch of groups, different groups, but they kind of all did this at the same time and they went to churches and they encouraged biblical values, which were abstinence, before marriage and chastity and marriage, but they would do some things with it. Like here, if you commit, you get a ring and all this kind of stuff. And if you don't stay pure,

flush the ring down the toilet and they would do, okay. And so here's what happened. I think a lot of good things happen out of the purity culture. But here was the negative. They said, and I'm gonna try to correct this and explain this, but they said, here's what happens in purity culture. It makes men afraid of women. And it makes women afraid of men. Because it's like, I gotta stay away from me. You're dangerous to me. And I gotta, let me get my hazmat suit on before we, you know, it's like, that's what it kind of, and it made women, in particular, this is what women said, some women. It made them feel like they're basically sexual objects that we need to avoid. And it put a lot of, some women would say, put a lot of pressure on them. You need to really be modest. You need to guard your, you know, all that kind of stuff. Well, here's, so here's what we're trying to avoid. We're trying to avoid two extremes. We're trying to avoid like men and women. Staying so far away from each other that they can't be the brothers and sisters in Christ they're supposed to be. At the same time, we're trying to be pure, actually have all purity. And here's why this is hard. Think about this for me for a second.

Think about how much time you spend with somebody of the opposite sex, who is not your spouse and you're not related to. My guess is you spend way more time with that group of people than almost anybody else has in human history. Because until very recently there were no opportunities to hang out for long periods of time with somebody of the opposite sex who wasn't in your family. It just didn't exist until about, in some ways 50 years ago. So we're having a mass experiment. Can we hang out with people we're not married to who are good looking and spend a lot of time together planning and dreaming and architecting and traveling and see if we don't get emotionally tied together? Well, good luck. Here's how this works. I want you to listen. This is true. And I'll speak to all different groups here. But if a man, this is the issue. I don't understand this from an perspective. If a man finds a woman attractive, the attractional element or potential of that relationship is always present. He always knows he's attracted to her. I'm not saying he's going to act on it. I'm saying it's always, here's how it is for men. If a man is hanging out with a man of high status,

he's always aware of the man's status, always. It's always there in the relationship. It might be his fame, it might be his competency, it might be the amount of money he has, he's always aware of it. If a woman is interacting with another woman, she's always aware of how beautiful that woman is. If she's stunningly beautiful. It plays into the, okay. So it's the same things we've always talked about. Some of you can't do this because of your job, so I don't mean this in a wooden religious way, but as much as you can practice the Billy Graham rule, which is do not be in the room alone with the opposite sex, who you're not related to. Especially with the door closed, no windows, I mean, you know, oh, and here's the simple principle. It's like, look, if you never spend time alone with a woman or a man who is not your spouse, you'll never sleep with them. It's literally that simple. But it's more complex kind of, so there's a second thing. You have to be very careful with your communication, with the opposite sex, who's not your spouse. And I'm not talking, I am talking about how you talk at the workplace or whatever. But I am, here's what I'm talking about. Watch how easy it is for a relationship to move from platonic to playful. It can happen through the sharing of memes,

the sharing of reels, the back and forth texting, the long email correspondence. I'm telling you, this stuff is way more common than you may think. I wouldn't spend so much time on this if this wasn't such a big deal for people. Do you remember what it said in the story of Abraham? Do you remember when Abraham lied and he said, Sarah's my sister. Do you remember how he got caught? The king said, I saw you two laughing together. Be very careful. We wanna be brothers and sisters in Christ. I'm just saying, I'm gonna go a little bit on the side of saying the extra careful. Because we're in the wild, wild west of relating to one another. And we've only been doing this for about 50 years and it's not going very well. Secondly, we need to move from relationships to need. So we're gonna spend a lot of time on a very short verse. Honor widows who are truly widows. So Paul moves from, guys, we gotta learn to relate to each other and do that in purity and be mothers and fathers and be brothers and sisters. Then he goes, guys, okay, there's gonna be like a lot of need in the church, okay? Remember, didn't Jesus say the poor you will always have among you? It's like, need is, it's never going away.

Okay, when I read widows, he's gonna particularly talk about widows and I'm gonna talk about widows. But think of the larger category of need, okay? You could think of the larger category of poverty because the problem with the widow was that she was poor, that was the problem in this situation, okay? And so you have to start with a couple of things. First of all, you have to go, what is poverty? Okay, you need a high resolution, not a low resolution view of poverty. Most people think poverty is, oh, poor then, they don't have money, it's like, that's not poverty. Here's what poverty is. Poverty is a lack of relationships. That's what poverty is. It's a lack of relationship with money. It's like, well, maybe they have money, they don't have a good relation with money. Maybe it's a lack of relation with drugs. Whenever I see a poor person, I think this all the time, I see a poor person, literally, it's like involuntary. I see somebody on the streets. Where are their family? What has happened? What has happened in this person's life? That everything is so broken in their life that they have no relationships that they're out here. You need to understand that what poverty is and what need is, is often, and Paul's gonna address it this way,

it's often a lack of relationships that need fixed. Now, Paul's gonna say something else. Well, let's start with widows. Okay, I need to do a little background on widows. Jesus uniquely cared for widows. God uniquely cared for widows. God calls himself the defender of the widow and connects his heart in the Old Testament with the widow. He puts up systems. He puts it, and that was a theocracy, it's a little different, but he puts systems together in the Old Testament for the poor and the widow. And he basically says, hey, you got a nice big harvest? Good, eat all the harvest, harvest it. And then he says, but on the very edges, leave it, so that if the poor and the widow wanna work and come on out, they can go get it. In the New Testament, Jesus uses the widows, by the way, as an example, we think this is normal, it wasn't. To use a widow, which we would consider like the vulnerable, okay, in the needy, he uses the widow as an example on at least two accounts of what to do. in comparison what they have. And then he uses the widow, hey, the widow is like really persistent even when she has an unjust judge and she's an example of persistent prayer. And so, Paul cares and widows must have been from what we can put together, a big deal

in the early church. And the reason I say that is the first problem in the church in Acts chapter six is about widows. Okay, so then he says this. Honor, which by the way, that word honor can mean respect but actually probably means, well, we know it does, actually in context means financially assist. Which is by the way, when someone comes to speak, we give them a honorarium. That's where we get the word from, it's financial assistance. So anyway, so he says honor, so financially assist, widows who are truly widows. Can you go, wait a second, isn't every widow the same? No, isn't every poor person the same? No, is everybody with need in our church the same? No, Paul's gonna, let me give you one of the categories because we're gonna unpack a lot of stuff in a second. This fits under the larger Christian category of social concern. Okay, you're not gonna hear that phrase very often. That's a uniquely Christian idea. We have social concern. What you will hear, it's less so now, but like this idea exploded like three to five years ago was the phrase social justice, okay? Which is not a phrase that you will ever hear me use, okay? I think now certain Christians and churches use it, but social justice in my humble opinion and experience of reading about it and dealing with people who believe in it has underneath it a spirit of resentment

and a spirit of revenge. And we're gonna redistribute things, that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do this big scary, well short scary word, but equity and we're gonna make everybody equal, please don't. And it has a little bit too much of a utopian vision of how things can be, oh, and here's the other thing. Social justice is abstract. Social justice is worried about every single person who's ever potentially been oppressed somewhere. Social concern is concrete. Here's the social concern is, based on God's character and the Bible's commands, "Who can I care about that I know?" By the way, the other interesting thing about this is this passage that we're reading today has nothing to do. Jenna, I'm being serious, you can go read it, check me out on this. This passage, not reading 1 Timothy 5, has nothing to do with the church taking care of need in the city. There are other verses about that that we can look at at another time. This is literally about the church taking care of its own. And let me give you two principles to start. The first principle is the principle that we are to discriminate in regards to need. No one likes that word, I mean, but we need to redeem these words. Discriminate means to make distinction into judge.

In some of you would go, "I would never discriminate." Well, I bet you discriminate and who can babysit your kids. You don't just let anybody babysit your kids, would you? You'd think about them, you'd get to know them, you'd figure out their character, you'd think about the safety of the kids, you'd think about their expertise in knowing what to do, and then you would. Now, what the Bible says you shouldn't do is have prejudice, prejudice, to pre-decide based on appearances. But Paul is gonna say, "Not all needs are the same." And the church, by the way, this is talking about what the church, listen, this is what the church as an institution organization should do, not what you as a Christian might choose to do. Paul's like, the church has limited time, limited energy, limited money, limited people, and I'm gonna tell you a framework on how to think about this. If the Christian in here says, "I just uniquely have a heart for this, "that and the other thing, and I wanna give it great, "I'm giving us a paradigm for us to think for us as a church." Okay, let's continue on. Here's what Paul says. The first principle is the principle of discrimination. The second principle is the principle of moral proximity. Okay, moral proximity.

This will make more sense in a second. He says this, but if a widow, and Paul cares about widows, he's actually gonna say, by the way, at the end, he's gonna say, "I'm doing all this," and I said all these hard things because I wanna take care of widows who really need help. Here's what he says. "But if a widow has children or grandchildren, "let them first learn to show godliness "to their own household, and make some return "to their parents for this is pleasing in the side of God." Basically, okay, so here's how. If somebody in this church gets in need, here's a question, what is the first line of defense? The first line of defense, according to the Bible, is not the church, but it's the family. Moral proximity says that there are concentric circles of care, and you have to go through So in other places, the Bible teaches, basically, you take care of yourself. If a man, you know, doesn't work, you should need kind of thing. If, but we fall into different situations, we suffer the, so if someone comes to us with a need, one of the first questions, we pray for them, we hear their story and then we say, tell me about your family. Because the first line of defense should be the family. And by the way, the almost every nonprofit has started because of the breakdown of the family. So Paul starts out and he says, listen, the family is, it needs to meet most needs. In fact, he says, this may be the strongest thing Paul says in First Timothy, drop down to verse eight, but if anyone does not provide for his relatives and especially for the members

of his household, look at this, he is denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. Yikes. It's, I mean, it's fairly intense. Paul basically says, if you do not take care of yourself and your family, and instead you think the church and the government exists to meet all your needs, you're worse than an unbeliever. Now it doesn't, let me just say this though, Paul's not talking to the man or the woman who's trying and they're unemployed or they're underemployed and they're working super hard and they're trying to get by and they feel like they're not doing a good enough job and they want God to provide and they're praying for it and that's not who he's talking to. He's talking to people who are abdicating and abandoning their call to provide. So there's the family, but then look here, Galatians 6, 10, let me show you this. I'm jumping out of this book just for a second to show you this principle. So then as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone. So here's the call to Christian, let us do good to everybody, but especially to those of the household of faith. Once you've taken care of yourself, but say you can't, then you go to the family, then here's the thing, the church needs to take care of itself even before it reaches and serves and blesses the city and I don't mean that in a selfish way, think of it this way, could you imagine a dad who goes out into the neighborhood to feed all the kids, but his kids are starving? There's no one who would say that's a good dad and you actually couldn't even say that's a good neighbor because can you be a good neighbor through that bad of a dad? The principle of scripture is you have to, not in some luxurious way, you have to take care of yourself, the church has to care for its own, every local church should be caring for its own, and then you're free to go, serve and bless and reach the city. Okay, now real quickly, Paul, Paul gets even more detailed, he gives three tests. Here's I think the principle, do not just be so quick to respond to need. Everyone are more likely to do this, they just feel compassion, compassion is a great virtue if checked and ordered by all other virtues.

So you can't just see something, feel something, do something every time, there needs to be more thought, so let me show you what he says here, let me just quickly, all right, we'll get into it, verse five, he calls the test of godliness, she who is truly a widow left all alone has set her hope on God and continues in supplications and prayers day and night, but she who is self-indulgent is dead even while she lives, command these things as well so that they may be without pressure. Okay, it's not wrong when help, I'm going to give you an overarching principle, when you're helping somebody who's in need, it's not wrong to ask how are you living. Do you want help or are you trying to change? Do you want help or are you willing to do something yourself? But then there's a second test, the test of godliness is the first, look at this one, verse nine, let a widow be enrolled. By the way, we don't know if he's saying to be enrolled, this is commentators are divided. Is he saying be enrolled on a list to receive support to the church or to be put on a list to serve in the church so that the church will pay them for their service and help them work at the church? We don't know. Who says, let a widow be enrolled if she is not less than 60 years of age, having been the wife of one husband and having a reputation for good works, if she has brought up children and has shown hospitality, has washed the feet of the saints, has cared for the afflicted, and has devoted herself to every good work. Okay. So if we're going to help somebody in church, I just want to tell you, this is the kind of thing that Paul tells us to think about. How invested and involved are you in this church? Is that an okay thing to ask? If someone falls in and eat, man, well, how invested and involved in this church were you? And that might depend on how much support the church offers. Do you give nothing, serve nowhere, and connect with no one, but then when life gets hard,

you're going to show up. It's like, well, we're still going to be gracious to you, okay? By the way, it doesn't mean that church can't do more than this, it just means that we're not under any biblical requirement to do more than this. Paul's giving us a standard that can scale at all the local churches. [BLANK_AUDIO] hey, listen, if somebody falls into need and they need help, we're gonna check if they've been tithing. If they've been tithing at least 10% of their income for a consistent amount of time, we will 100% help them. He didn't say it wouldn't help the other people, but he said, if somebody is that invested in our church and trusting them lower their finances and something happens, of course, we're gonna help them. But if they've shown up because life is ultimately difficult, we're gonna still love them, but we don't necessarily have a responsibility to meet that need. And then he has one other category. He talks to younger widows. He says this, but refuse, kind of intense, but refuse to enroll younger widows for when their passions draw them away from Christ, they desire to marry and incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith besides that they learn to be idlers, going about from house to house. And not only idlers mention twice, but also gossip and busy bodies saying what they should not. So I think Paul's saying something like,

if we start giving these younger widows, in this case, a bunch of support, they're not gonna work. And instead of using the energy they should be to be working, what they're going to do is get themselves in a lot of trouble, that's what he's saying. This is this, so I would have younger widows, marry, bear children, manage their households and give the adversary no occasion for slander. For some have already straight after Satan. If any believing woman has relatives who are widows, let her care for them. Let the church, here's Paul's heart, just hear that, 'cause I know Paul said a lot of things that may sound more intense, but here's what he says. Let the church not be burdened, why? So that it may care for those who are truly widows. It seems like Paul says, if you have other opportunities, pursue those not living off of the support of the church. And he particularly mentions to the widow, remarry. So, okay, three things. Paul says, relate to each other as family. Paul says, care for one another, but with wisdom. And then Paul talks finally about leadership. Let me show you this. In verse, verse 75, 17, here's what it says, "Let the elders," so we talked about this last week, 'cause it showed up in chapter three, but it says, "Let the elders," which, by the way, again, is in the plural, who rule well, be considered worthy of double honor,

so we'll talk about that again, because honor shows up. Especially those who labor in preaching and teaching, so just bear with me for a few minutes, 'cause I have to talk about elders and myself, and it's a little awkward, but I wanna be faithful to what the text says, okay, so a couple of different things. First of all, I want you to understand that elder, which I told you last week, are pastors, they're synonymous. Pastors, the Bible talks about pastors being given to the church, not churches being given to the pastor. What that means is, pastors exist not to be served, but pastors exist to serve. And leadership is not about power, it's about service and responsibility and sacrifice and all of that. So, here's what's interesting. So, in this verse, I just read you, we get the two things elders should do. So, if you wanna know, what are elders doing? Ruling and teaching and ruling sounds intense, basically leading. And here's what happens, that every age of a church, the leadership of the church needs to figure out how to reorganize itself, so that the elders of the church can do those two things super effectively. And so, without boring you and getting all the details, I want you to understand that our elders are connected relationally to every community group in this church, and we have over 120 community groups. And we're doing that because we felt like by being

that deeply connected to people, we can actually genuinely lead people. So, we're told two things, to lead a rule and to teach. And it says, here's what you should do. It says, you should honor the elders. And it says, give double honor to the teach. You can preach and we'll talk about that in a second. But let's talk about honor, 'cause we don't live in a society that talks a lot about honor. Let me tell you how honor gets weird. Some of you have been in a church with this. Honor gets weird when one person is honored and no one else is. You don't want to work for that business. You don't want to live in that family. You don't want to go to that church, I promise. If one person is honored and nobody else is honored, weird, strange, get out of there. Here's what honor is. Honor is to give somebody worth or wait, or to give something worth or wait. Think about it this way, here's what dishonor is. Dishonor is not to disrespect somebody. Well, that would be dishonor. But here's what dishonor literally means, to treat as common or ordinary. And so here's, we all love, what's interesting about us is we all love honor when we see it. When you see like a military salute, when you see the military interact with one another,

I mean, we love honor. And here's the, here's the, let me give you a principle for honor. Honor goes up, blessing comes down. So you honor up, and if you honor up, blessings come down. And honor creates order and dishonor creates division. So here's what I can tell you about your home. If your home is full of division and chaos and some of your homes are, there's dishonor somewhere. Because what here's what honor does, honor creates an environment where you can receive from somebody. So let me just tell you something very, very interesting. And I only know the pastor realm, that's why I'm talking about this fear. The more a pastor is honored, the better people think his preaching is. I've been in churches before where the pastor is not, I mean, not, not that great of a speaker, but he's very honored. So everybody thinks his messages are way better than they are. The opposite is true. So here's what happened during COVID. People got mad at pastors because they're stance on COVID. I saw this at all these different churches and then guess what they said about their pastor? He's not a good preacher anymore. Nope, that's not what happened. What happened is you didn't honor him anymore. So you couldn't receive anymore. This is how the family dynamic falls apart. Somewhere in your teenage years, you begin to dishonor mom and dad and you can't receive anymore. Scary because they have so much to teach you. Usually what has to happen is sometimes the relationship is remended when the kids in their twenties because they're ready to honor again. And as soon as they can honor again, they can receive again. Well, he says that there should be double honor just so you know, this is the same term. He's talking, yes, about what I just told you, honor, respect all that. He's actually in the context, you'll see he's talking about financial. He's talking about paying your pastor. We'll get there in a second. But why do you uniquely, this is weird for me to talk about because I know I'm the one who mainly does it here, but I still need to teach what the Bible teaches. Why do you give double honor to somebody who preaches and teaches the Bible for a living? It's very simple. It's because what I'm doing right now is going to be the most critique thing in the church. There is nothing in this church that is more critiques than the teaching ministry. Obviously, I talk for 50 minutes fairly fast without notes. A good rule, seriously, a good rule for any public speaker is 10% grace. Anybody, pastor, politician, I give them 10% grace because they do this for a living. There's a lot going on. Maybe it's out of context. Maybe they were tired. Maybe they forgot to say the sub point of it that clarified it. But the preaching and teaching ministry of any church

will be attacked. And in an age of YouTube and social media and comments and likes and shares, it's accelerated, amplified, and exacerbated. So the church is told that you are to uniquely honor the person who everybody else is going to critique. That's the principle. Now it talks just quickly about paying pastors. Now, we want to avoid extremes. Let me read the text. It says double honor, but here's how we know it's talking about money. Because of verse 18, so he says, let the elders who were well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor and preach and teach. Verse 18, for the scripture says, and then he quotes scripture, "You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain, and the labor deserves his wages." Okay, so he quotes the Old Testament, New Testament. The Old Testament goes, "Hey, guys, listen, if the ox is working in the field, let him eat." It's like, one, he deserves to eat, and two, it's not going to be good for you if he doesn't. It's like basically, okay, let me say it this way. Oh, he also quotes the labor, deserves his wages, which he's actually versus really neat. He's quoting Jesus from Luke chapter 10. Let me be very clear. You don't have to pay pastors. We have 30 pastors in our church, 18 of them are not paid by the church. They work another job in there. You don't have to have a 62% from what I checked out this week. 62% of churches in America do not have a full-time paid pastor. 62%. In other words, the guy's working for freer. He's being bi-locational. I mean, I guess you could say kind of what we're doing is unique. But at the same time, Paul says, you want, basically, if you can, and our church does a great job of this, if you can pay your pastor as well, you want your pastor to be fully devoted to what he's doing. You don't want him thinking, where I probably need to get a second job on the side right now. and it's really hard to do everything that I'm doing, 'cause I'm thinking about this all the time. And so our church has a great job with this. And we're trying to avoid poverty theology, which is let's pay the pastor very little, so he has to trust God. That is a mindset in some churches. And we're avoiding prosperity theology, okay? Where I've been to that church before.

Every one time I was hanging out with this, should I tell this story or should I not tell this story? I'm not gonna tell this story. I'm not gonna tell this story. Okay, okay, okay, okay. I was hanging out with this, it was somewhere, okay? And I was hanging out this past, well, I actually were waiting for this pastor. And the lady that was at the church, she goes, hold on, he's driving the Hummer today. And I just had this moment of like, okay, the honoring of the pastor to such a high level, to celebrate being here. I'm not saying it's wrong to drive a nice car or even to be a pastor driving this car, but it was just a culture I thought of, this guy can do no wrong. And they actually rejoice. It's a culture thing. They rejoice in paying him so much more money than everybody else in the congregation, 'cause he's kind of the goal that everybody's shooting toward. We would say, you know, avoid poverty theology, avoid prosperity theology. Okay, finally. So it's interesting. So Paul goes back and forth, 'cause this whole section, by the way, is about honoring your pastors and holding them accountable. So it's like both hands, right?

So we just had the whole thing of like honor the pastors and pay them well. You're like, this is awkward. I'm like, you think it's awkward for me, okay? But then this is the other part of it. It's like, well, now here's the other awkward part for me to talk about. Hold them accountable, okay? So it's like, there's certain churches where it's like, the man of God can do no wrong. It's like, now we all have clay feet, we're all sinful. Everybody needs to be held accountable, okay? So look what it says. Okay, dealing with accusations. Do not admit a charge against an elder except on the evidence of two or three witnesses. So, okay, I already told you this. The cost of leadership is criticism. And so think about it. There are two reasons you could say pastor or anyone, leader, could be a community group leader. There's two reasons that a leader could have a charge against them. There's probably 10 reasons, but here's two reasons. Okay, reason number one, he really did something wrong. That's very likely. Reason number two, people lie. And I mean, just so you know, you should know this about people. There are people who would love to take down this church.

I hope you know that obviously, not at any church. I want you to say, there's people who they just love that because there's two ways to get famous. You know this, right? You build something great, you tear down somebody who builds something great. That's two ways to get famous. And there are people who would love to see that happen in our church. And they would love to destroy a reputation 'cause a reputation takes a lifetime to build in a few moments to destroy. Do you remember the Duke La Crosse story? I hope you do, it was like the most famous story in North Carolina for years. Basically a woman lied and destroyed the lives of three men. And it took multiple, multiple years to try to staple it back together through court. It's a mess, okay. So here's Paul says, if you're going to have witnesses, you have to have two or three and they have to agree. This is why here's what happens in dysfunctional goofy, silly churches. People come up and they speak for everybody else. They're upset about something, then they come up, well, yeah, yeah, and there's a whole group and they agree with me. It's like, then bring them. You can't have anonymous people, I'm sorry. If three people or two people come forward

and they say, this happened, then we're going to take it very seriously. But nobody gets to speak for other random people that they won't name, that's what he's saying. And here's what he says. Here's what you're looking for. Verse 20, this is what I'm looking at. This is what we should be looking, not just in a leader's life in all of our lives. This is what you should be thinking in your parenting. As for those who persist in sin, and rebuke them in the presence of all that the rest may stand in fear. So what you want to watch for in your life are patterns of sin. I'm not saying there aren't certain big sins that can disqualify, we're all thinking that. I'm talking about what's interesting, that Paul doesn't mention a massive sin. He mentions patterns of sin. You know, this is what happens sometimes. I remember we used to give you an example. Someone missed his church. Hey, listen, it's not a big deal to miss church. It's a big deal if it becomes a pattern in your life. Everybody occasionally lies, you shouldn't lie to sin. There are people who become compulsive liars. It's a pattern in their life. what he calls a leader, the leader needs to be particularly careful for patterns of sin in his life. And so it says, here's what you should do. Look at this, it's pretty intense.

It says, rebuke them in the presence of all. Now we don't know, listen, we don't know if that's the whole church or all the elders. It's not clear in context. Now we have to remember that back then the church was like 15 people an ounce. It seems to be, so when somebody is disciplined, and this has happened several times in our church, when somebody is disciplined, two things, there's two purposes of discipline to restore the person living in sin and to wake them up to repentance. But honestly, it's honestly when you watch, and I have a front receive the stuff because I'm on staff and one of the pastors, but like, it's like watching the final judgment happen. It's not very fun. You watch somebody like, dude, you're just like completely running away from God, and we don't even think you're a Christian. It's terrifying. And when you see somebody else fall, you should not ever be excited. And you should say, God, please, no, don't let this happen to me. And God, this is the whole testament. God, use the failure as a warning to me. Lord, I also pray you to restore that person, but use this as a unique warning to wake me up in my heart. Here's what Paul says. Paul says this. The last thing about leadership. In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of the elect angels, I charge you to keep these rules without prejudging. Do nothing from partiality. Do not be hasty in the laying on a fan. So Paul says, okay. Paul says, here's the thing. When it comes, the leaders don't be partial. There's two extremes. Again, I've been in churches where the other leaders in the church and the people in the church are sin seekers and heresy hunters. And that's no fun to lead that church. And that's where everybody's waiting for me to say something wrong. And everybody's watching everybody's life. It's like we're spying on one another, waiting for someone to fail and be excited and maybe get a picture of them, maybe whatever. It's like, we don't want to live in that church. But you don't want to live in the other church, which can be common, which is the church that enables leaders to live in sin. Because they're important to the organization. And I've seen that. And behind closed doors, people are having conversations. Well, I know he's very domineering, but it's a very important disorganization. And I don't know what would happen to our budget if he wasn't here. And so Paul says, we have to not show partiality. This is why we should deal with things early. Notice the next thing he says, we're almost done. He says, do not be hasty in the laying on a

fence. Let me tell you another secret. You guys know this, but it's a leadership. Almost every problem that you have in leadership was there from the beginning. Almost everyone. You're like, yeah, we saw he had issues of self control. Yeah, he, yeah. We never thought he had a great marriage. We just kind of, it's like, that's the problem. Paul's like, if you're going to fix the problem, you got to fix it early. But here's where we end. Paul says enough about all that. Enough about leaders, enough about needy people in the church, enough about your sisters and brothers in Christ. Paul just ends with this. You think about you. Look here, do not be hasty in the laying on of hands nor take part in the sins of others. Keep yourself pure and no longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments. The sins of some people are conspicuous. That means easy and obvious going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later. So also, good works are conspicuous. And even those that are not cannot be hidden. Okay, here's what Paul says at the end of this. We're going to close. Paul says, I'm done talking about everyone else. I want to talk about you. And Paul says, I want you to do three things. And this is what I'm a challenge us to do. Paul says here, Timothy, here's what I want you to do. I want you to be pure. Do you hear him? He said that? Timothy, I don't know what your leaders are going to do. Timothy, I don't know what needs are going to come. And I don't know how your sisters are going to act toward you. But here's what I want you to do. I want you to be pure. Because guys, that's the one thing I can't do for you. And you can't do for anybody else. Only you got it. You don't do it for yourself because I can't see your heart. Christianity is not about behavior modification. It's about heart transformation. And so I don't know if your heart's pure. The Bible says, bless another pure and heart though, for they will see God. But Paul goes three things at the end, Timothy. Focus on yourself. Okay. And he says three things. Be pure. Secondly, he says, be healthy. We may think it's a throwaway verse. Timothy is dealing with some health issues. He's going to drink a little bit of wine. In other words, you've got to take care of your physical health. We talk about this during the mold's punishment. Some of you need to recommit to taking care of your physical health. And you're going to need to figure out how to think about yourself without being selfish. You're going to think about it. You need to take care of yourself so you can take care of others. But then I love what Timothy says. Timothy says, guys, he says, or Paul says, Timothy at the end.

He says, Timothy, like there's some good works that we're not going to see right now. Here's what I mean. I just talked about a lot of things. Let me just tell you this, Church, we're going to get things wrong. We're going to pray. We're going to seek out. We're going to try to be the best version of the local church we can. But if you read Acts chapter 6 about the widows, you know what I think it was? It's like, I think the apostles are like, we got overwhelmed. We didn't. It wasn't malevolent. We weren't trying to not meet these needs. We're just trying to figure everything out. And here's what I want. I want to point you away from our church. We talked about the church as a family, and I want to point you to Jesus as we close. Because though we can't meet all your needs, the great thing about Jesus Christ is he can meet all your needs. In fact, while Jesus is dying for the entire world, he meets an individual need, his mom. Isn't that amazing? The last act of Jesus before he dies is to care for a widow. Somehow only Jesus can die for the world and care for the individual at the same time. And I want to encourage you that everything this passage calls us to do, Jesus modeled for us. Are you struggling to honor Jesus honored his parents? Jesus honored God by going to the cross. Are you struggling to relate in purity? Watch Jesus as he related to women throughout his ministry and was close, but the whole time being pure. Do you feel like you're in leadership and something you're afraid to be falsely accused and not sure how you'd ever respond if you were falsely accused? Look at Jesus, whose life ended with false accusation. Jesus is the great example of our great hope, and he's the one who died to make us family. Let's pray. Lord, lots that we talked about. Would you help us to relate like family, Lord? There's some people in here who there would have to be in a room this size. There's some people here who are flirting with being way too close to somebody, the opposite sex. And it's time right now, right now in this moment to commit to repenting. Turning away from that, Lord, there are people in here who are in genuine need. They would be the widow that is talked about. They would be the person who says, hold on, no one else right now, because this person, where would you help us in this church see the people who are really in need? Who have no family, who have no other opportunity and who've been faithful to our church and love Christ and let us help those people. Uniquely, we're called to God. Lord, would you help us? What I pray for our leaders, especially our elders and pastors, but our leaders all over the Lord, would you help us to to mingle honor with accountability?

Would you help us take serious sin? And Lord, would you help us together? Be pure, be healthy. Trust you, pray for Jesus in the middle. Church, we... [BLANK_AUDIO]