Amen. Do you have a Bible that invites you to turn with me to 1 Timothy 5 verses 1 and 2 as we continue our study in Paul's letter to a young minister and to the congregation at Ephesus. We begin a new section of the book tonight in subways. It's about relationships.
Let me invite you to hear now the word of God from 1 Timothy 5 verses 1 and 2. Do not rebuke an older man, but encourage him as you would a father. Treat younger men like brothers, older women like mothers, younger women like sisters in all purity. Amen.
This is the word of God making cut our hearts with it. Let's look at him in prayer. And our Father in heaven help us to hear this word tonight. I pray that you would give us ears to hear and eyes to see and behold wonderful things in your word.
And I pray that you would shape us by teachers, rebukas, and this correctness and train us in righteousness that we may be thoroughly equipped for every good work and service in your kingdom. Remember we asked this in Jesus' name. Amen. How should we think of other Christians and how should we relate to them?
Four points tonight from this passage. The first is this. We are to live as a close spiritual family in the household of God, in the church of God. We live as a close spiritual family.
That's what's behind all the language of this. God has made every believer in Jesus a member of the same spiritual family. We are His family. And we are the fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters to each other.
That doesn't mean we have to go around calling one another, bro. I lived in a Christian community where that's how people addressed one another so regularly. What's up, bro? Hey, bro, too often it was because we hadn't actually learned the name of the person we were talking to.
And more often than not, we didn't really intend to do that either. We weren't actually living like we were brothers, but we would address one another that way. I was talking about living out these relationships. Don't overlook the importance of this.
God has made us a family and calls us a family. Family is His idea. A mother and a father raising children is His idea, not man's. And it's important.
Ben Hooper, the former two-term governor from Tennessee from 1911 to 1915. He liked to tell this story of his life to friends and strangers. It seems that he says my mother wasn't married when I was born. So he says, I had a hard time.
Now remember this is America in the late 1800s. When I started school, my classmates had a name for me, and it wasn't a very nice name. I used to go off by myself at recess and during lunchtime because the taunts of my playmates cut so deeply. What was worse, he said, is going downtown on Saturday afternoon and feeling the eye of everybody burning a hole for you.
They were all wondering just who my real father was. When I was about 12 years old, a new preacher came to our church. I would always go out late or go in late and slip out early. But one day the preacher said the benediction so fast I got caught and I had to walk out with the rest of the crowd.
I could feel every eye in church on me. And just about the time I got to the door, I felt a big hand on my shoulder and I looked up at the preacher. Was looking right at me. Who are you, son?
Who's boy? Are you? He said, and I felt the old weight on me. It was like a black cloud.
Even the preacher, he thought, was putting him down. But as he looked down at me, studying my face, he began to smile. A big smile of recognition. Wait a minute, he said, I know who you are.
I see the family resemblance. You are a son of God. In fact, slap me across the road and say, boy, you've got a great inheritance. Go and claim it.
And in his old age, says this governor, that was the most important single sentence ever said to me. You are a son of God. You have a great inheritance. Don't ever look what Paul is saying here.
You are family in the family of God. This is true for every Christian. God is our Father. We are His children.
Jesus is our elder brother. Every Christian is family to us. How encouraging this ought to be for those whose beloved families don't believe the gospel and perhaps even have distanced themselves from us because we're Christians. We aren't alone in the world, the Bible is saying to us.
As Peter said that Jesus wants, we have left everything and followed you. And Jesus said, truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mothers or father or children or lands for my sake and for the gospel. You will not receive a hundred fold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands with persecutions. And in the age to come eternal life, when Jesus brings you to himself, he brings you into his family and you have a permanent home with his people now and forever.
We must not overlook this point. And Paul says therefore to a young minister and by extension, we ought to think this way ourselves. Treat fellow Christians like they are the most closely related members of a nuclear family. Don't say about fellow believers.
Well, look, that nut over there and he might be a nut, even a Christian nut. But don't say he's just an uncle and we can pretend he doesn't exist. And don't think to yourself, well, you know, that kid down the pew, well, he's really a spiritual third cousin twice removed. He doesn't really matter.
He doesn't belong with the family reunion. No, say to yourself, they are my father and mother or brother or sister and deal with them accordingly. Love them. That's the first thing he says.
Now, how do we do that? This is the second thing. We are to confront one another's sin in the family. That's the second thing.
We're to live as a close spiritual family and we are to confront one another's sin in the family. Things are supposed to love one another. That's the ideal. And part of that is confronting sin in a family.
No thinking parent would ever say, well, I certainly wouldn't want to bring up anything evil about anyone in my family. I certainly wouldn't want to confront my kids. After all, they have to live their own life. No, if you love your children, you'll point out their sin.
And children, if you love your parents, you'll point out their sin. And sister, if you love your brother, you'll point out his sin. And brother, if you love your sister, you'll point out her sin. That's family.
That's the way it's supposed to be. And it springs in a family from love, ideally. Because love says, I care that you know the blessing of God. I care that you prosper spiritually.
I care about you being happy and joyful. I care that you live a life that's useful to God. I care that you know about the grace of God in Jesus and that you know that you need that grace. In fact, I care so much about you that when I see sin in your life, I want to bring it to your attention.
That's family love. And that's what these two verses call. Timothy 2 and us two. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 5 and 6 says this, better is open rebuke than hidden love.
Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Profuse are the kisses of an enemy. An enemy flatters you endlessly, says the writer. But a friend rebukes.
A friend even wounds. A friend tells you like it is, even if it hurts. Not because they really want to do that. Not because they find pleasure in doing that, but because they feel constrained by love and out of love for your well-being to help you and not to hurt you.
They seek redemptive confrontation, restorative confrontation. We are to do this with a sense of being family together, Paul says. So as I said to my family at dinner last night, I've said to the people countless times over meals. Usually when I've come back from the bathroom and discovered it for myself in a mirror, that I've been talking to everybody about lettuce in my teeth.
If you won't tell me I have lettuce in my teeth, I don't think you've loved me. The way that I need to be loved. Certainly the way I want to be loved. And suddenly don't let me walk out the door and go out in public with the lettuce hanging in my teeth, right?
Let me ask you this question. More seriously, can anybody in your life call you out? Do you welcome other believers into your life to correct you? Do you even want that?
Or are you too proud for that? Are you so sure you're on exactly the right path? That you never step off of it. That you don't need anybody to tell you otherwise.
Or maybe you're not so much proud as you are ashamed. Maybe you keep your head down and you hope nobody notices you and your sin or speaks to you about it because it would be too painful and embarrassing for you. I understand that desire. This is why it's so important that we keep the Gospel front and center in our walks as Christian and in our church life together.
What's the Gospel chapter 1 verse 15? This is a trustworthy saying, deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners among whom I am foremost of all. This Gospel humbles us for sure. I am the chief sinner.
I need Jesus. But this Gospel also lifts us up. God knows all my junk and all my filth and Jesus went to the cross for me. Five bleeding wounds he bears received on Calvary.
They poor, effectual prayers. They strongly plead for me. I say to him, oh, forgive they cried or let that ransom sinner die. That Gospel gives me the freedom to be honest.
Jesus loves me. He is not ashamed. The Bible explicitly says he is not ashamed to be called my elder brother. He doesn't turn his face away.
He doesn't want to duck and hide when it becomes known to others that you're filthy. He doesn't run from you. He's not ashamed. He loves me with an always and forever love.
My God is reconciled. His pardoning voice I hear. He owns me for his child. I can no longer fear.
I need no longer fear with confidence I now draw an eye and Abba father cry. So this is the Gospel. This is why the Gospel must be front and center in our church. It's the glue that binds us together that holds us together that keeps sinners kneeling together at the foot of the cross.
We're all in this together. And Jesus has his arms wrapped around all of us in his body. Throughout this Gospel we will never welcome the correction of others. It will be too painful as a blow to our pride or too painful in exposing our shame.
But with this Gospel we can accept correction from others without resentment. We are a family. We are to confront one another. Look specifically at the details of this text.
Verse 1, do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father treat younger men like brothers, older women like mothers, younger women like sisters in all purity. Let me say this third thing. You're to confront those who are older than us as we would a father or mother. Do not rebuke an older man as how he begins.
He's saying when you confront someone sin you're not to beat them with blows or to hammer them with words. Don't do it with anger and your voice and bitterness in your heart not with a sense of contempt or disgust. That's not how you're to do it he says. But in the intimate loving relationship of a family you don't do this harshly.
But instead if he's older you encourage him as you would a father. Why do you do that? Because correction is a hard build as wallow. It can be tough to choke down.
Nobody likes to be told they're wrong. It's a classic mistake of a new young minister to say too much too soon about his people's sins. Perhaps that's why Paul is reminding a very young minister named Timothy. I know the preacher was called to a mega church as the pastor.
It was his first time as a senior pastor. He was a young man like Timothy. He was coming out of college campus ministry and going to the church of thousands and the church was full of seniors and elders and people older, mothers and fathers in the faith. Within just weeks he was publicly telling them how wrong they were about so many things.
Soon he was sent packing. He hadn't earned their trust. He may have been right on every point but he hadn't softened the blow with trust one over time and the demonstration of a commitment to the gospel that heals that wound when it's opened. It's hard for older men to take correction from younger men just as it's hard for parents to be instructed by their children.
It takes great humility to hear it and Paul is saying it ought to be done with great humility and gentleness. You treat that older man like you would a father. He also says you treat that older woman as you would a mother. If you imagine you're an adult and your mother is in the last years of her life, think what it would take to go to her to correct her.
Think how you would do some soul searching. How you would pray over it. How you would be gentle with your words. Tender and loving.
This is what Paul is saying we are to do. For those who are older, we are to give them respect due to age and the affection due to parents. So we are to confront those who are older as if they are a father or mother and the final thing is we are to confront those who are younger as we would a brother or sister. Notice he says young men as brothers or treat young men or encourage young men as brothers.
How interesting this language. If you're going to treat older ones like their father or mother, you might expect him to say and treat younger ones like their children. But he says to the younger ones like they are your brother. Like they are your sister.
Don't pat them on the head and say just wait till you grow up little Johnny. Some of us who are the youngest in the family. So often find that no matter how old we are, we are always the baby brother and we never grow up. Instead, Paul says we are to come alongside those younger Christians, wrap our arm around them and act like we are simply fellow pilgrims on a journey together.
Like we are siblings in the same family with one father in that family, God himself and one elder brother, Jesus. No condescension here. No superior attitude, no contempt for their youthfulness. A wonderful example of this early in my life as a minister when I was just out of seminary, barely 30 years old with three kids under the age of three, I was called to be a youth minister at an historic Southern Presbyterian mega church, not the mega church I mentioned before.
I was responsible for at least 200 junior high and senior high students with oversight of a college ministry in my area of responsibility. I had a large staff. I had never had a staff in my entire life. And here I was.
I had a full time secretary. I had a full time female director for the girls. I had multiple three even college interns doing a college ministry. I had multiple high school interns, multiple junior high interns and all the interns were seminary students so they were all winding down on theology and figuring ministry out.
I was told by others it was the hardest job in the PCA. A seminary professor warned me, you know if you take that job, you'll have a bull's eye on your back. But I accepted that call. I started the work and got called me to that work for a time and I was overwhelmed.
I was in way over my head and I didn't know it. Well ignorance isn't bliss. There were about 60 elders overseeing this church. Every age group that I was responsible for junior high college had committees made up of caring and interested parents, deacons and elders overseeing those works.
And many parents had, as you can imagine, strong opinions about how ministry to their beloved children should go. They loved their kids of course and they didn't all agree with one another of course nor did they agree with the elders always or with the ministers always or with the young bus still in seminary or right out of seminary. Well a high school committee meeting, a father, a very large hearted loving man who loved Jesus who loved the church, who loved his children and who loved his youth ministry, asked some questions about what we were doing and why we were doing it. All very appropriate questions, nothing wrong with them but I got very defensive for myself and for my staff.
The meeting reached no conclusions. I left very heavy hearted and confused and defensive. And then a couple of days later called me up and he said let's go to breakfast and he bought me a meal and we chatted about life and he loved on me. And somewhere in that conversation I don't remember how he got there.
He said you know you are very proud and he was very right. I was being self-reliant, not leaning on the Lord for the work of ministry. I wasn't open to questions. I wasn't open to correction from others.
I was wise in my own eyes. I was the professional. They hired me. And to this day I look back on that experience with a thankful heart.
He grows more thankful the older I get. He didn't call me on public. He didn't name my sin to shame me in front of others. And he didn't dismiss me as a young punk but he treated me like a brother even when he told me the truth about myself.
And just to be clear even 15 years later I'm still in way over my head. All ministry is like that. And I need older men to put their arm around me like brothers. And you if you are young you need mothers and fathers in the church to wrap their arms around you and treat you like you are their brother.
You are their sister. This is what we need in the church Paul says. And then he turns from brothers to sisters. He says finally treat younger women as sisters in all purity.
Notice a couple of things. Notice that Timothy was expected to be a pastor to a shepherd of, a decipler of women. He was to teach and instruct and correct and rebuke and train women to follow Jesus. The church isn't to be segregated here.
We're not to have separate sanctuaries for males and females and separate pastors. Male pastors for the men and female pastors for the women. That doesn't mean there's no place of course for learning from one another among the women. And of course there's a place for that.
It's right and necessary and best where we needed that the women of the church would so love one another. Paul even commands it in another epistle. The older women should teach the younger women. They say they had to love Jesus and live life.
Of course. But Timothy is to be a pastor here. This is part of God's plan. Yet Timothy is to be very careful and cautious in his relationship with females and especially he highlights younger females that everything would be above reproach in the way that he relates with them.
Last week we saw in the passage just before this and I preached on this that Timothy was to set an example for the believers even though he was young. He was to set an example for them in life and in purity. And I mentioned the failures of some fellow ministers here just over the border in Oklahoma and in the PCA world. And I was preaching to myself and warning myself in light of Paul's commands here.
And then I went home and I flipped on the news and I heard of another man following the grandson of Billy Graham. The PCA minister at a mega church, the third one now in this service, a mega church in Florida. He has committed adultery. He's self-confessed and he has left the ministry.
Paul's command here is wise. There is an appropriate caution for how familiar a man is to be with a woman who is not his wife. I was with a bunch of ministers at General Assembly just weeks ago. Some began to talk about their continuing corruptions as Christians.
Their anger, how sometimes in their hearts they think, I just want to punch that fool sitting in that seat over there. And how sometimes in their loss how easy but for the grace of God it would be for them to commit adultery. To encourage them, I told them a story I once heard, and I didn't confess my own, the privacy. I told them the story of somebody else.
But it encourages me. I once heard an R.E.F. campus minister teaching a room full of hundreds of campus ministers and interns and describing how there were times in his life that he could wish that his own wife would die, that he might have the experience of being with someone else before he died. Are you shocked by that?
Do you think people don't have those kinds of thoughts? Do you think ministers don't have those kinds of thoughts? Anger so much they want to knock a guy out. They're blessed that they wish they could have opportunity to satisfy.
Why else would Paul warn Timothy and caution him and command him to treat the younger women with purity? If it's a given, then of course he will and always will and doesn't even need to talk about it. Now maybe these aren't your sins and these really do shock you. Maybe your sins are greed or the love of this world or shading the truth or refusing to ever talk the truth in love to anybody or maybe your sins are coveting what belongs to others and resenting the good things that they have or maybe your sin is judging people who have just these kinds of sins.
But if you are a Christian, don't you know that even in the redeemed there is a war going on between the flesh and the Holy Spirit. As Paul says in Galatians 5, the desires of the flesh are against the spirit and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh. They are opposed to each other to keep you from doing the things that you want. And don't you know that a true Christian is with Paul in Romans 7 saying, oh wretched man that I am, who will rescue me?
Who will deliver me? And don't you know that the gospel says Jesus will, that Jesus was condemned for you and there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ. And that Jesus lives in you, he's alive in you, his spirit indwells you and he is your hope and your only hope. And so we must look to him for the grace to treat one another well as fathers and mothers, as brothers and as sisters.
Three points of application then. First, notice Paul says, don't treat everyone the same. People aren't the same. That cuts against our most cherished cultural assumptions.
After all, our Declaration of Independence tells us that all men are created equal and in our day and time that has been taken to mean that all human beings are equal and all of them are to be treated in exactly the same way. And here's Paul saying to Timothy, you know in God's Church, don't treat everybody exactly the same. Isn't that interesting? It is interesting.
Treat those who are older as fathers and mothers with respect and affection and gentleness. Treat those who are younger as siblings with equality. Treat those who are the opposite sex with self-control and purity. Treat all with love because they're family.
That's the first thing, don't treat everybody the same. Secondly, desire this for yourself and others. We want Redeemer to be a place where you can be known and loved and encouraged and corrected by people who you consider family, by people who consider you family. And we will only be that place if we are secure in the love of Christ, growing more and more convinced that He died our death for our pardon, that we're accepted by the Father in His righteousness and so freed up to commit ourselves and love to other sinners who are on a journey to glory.
And as we look ahead to the day that the Lord gives us as our own community, our own elders from among us, we want elders here Redeemer who have a bit of backbone, not elders who relish rebuking people, not elders who love to tangle with people, but elders who know sometimes growth and change occur when others we respect, disagree with us, and when they love us enough to tell us the truth. That's the second thing. Desire this for yourself and others. And the last is this, we aren't this kind of church the way that we ought to be.
And we will never arrive, but let's commit to this journey. Let's commit to speaking the truth in love to one another. And if our deficiency in this frustrates you, remember as an older Father in the faith told me, Jesus loved the church enough to die for her. You can love the church enough to be patient with her.
Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you that you do love your church, that Jesus loved the church and gave himself for her, that He takes her as His bride and He holds her and He takes every spot and blemish away. He washes her clean and He presents her faultless before your face in glory to be married to him forever. And I ask you to thank you for that story of love.
Make it our experience we pray in Jesus name. Amen. Amen.