For This We Labor

So with all that said if you at turning your bibles if you have one I'll be preaching from 1st Timothy chapter 4 verses 6 through 10 if you don't have a Bible That's fine because it's on the back of your order of worship as well So all of that said starting in verse 6. I say to you hear the word of God in Pointing out these things to the brethren you will be a good servant so if you haven't heard yet. There's no officer training tonight Hold down your cheering So with all that said if you at turning your bibles if you have one I'll be preaching from 1st Timothy chapter 4 verses 6 through 10 if you don't have a Bible That's fine because it's on the back of your order of worship as well So all of that said starting in verse 6. I say to you hear the word of God in Pointing out these things to the brethren you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus Constantly nourished on the words of faith and sound doctrine which you have been following But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women On the other hand discipline yourself for the purpose of Godliness For bodily discipline is only of little profit but Godliness is profitable for all things Since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come It is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance For it is for this we labor and strive because we have fixed our hope on the living God who is the savior of all men especially of believers Let us pray Jesus I pray now that you would simply come by your spirit and you would open the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf and that you would show them the good news of your gospel And I pray also for myself that you would be in my head and in my thinking and in my heart and in my understanding and in my mouth and in my speaking In your name we pray Amen Well this week I would talk to my friend Paul Warren in Baltimore some of you have met him And I ask him you say I have three children if you don't know me I have a seven year old, a six year old and a four year old And Paul has six children all under the age of nine I think He has several children and so I called them up and I said Paul I am thinking of taking the girls to see this movie Have you seen it? And he said oh yeah And I said what do you think it would be good and he said I think it would be good for you to watch And I said really he said yeah I just think you would like it And I thought okay I will take the girls so Thursday afternoon I took the girls to see Shrek if you have not seen Shrek Shrek is about this ogre, a few among us a big ogre, a big green ogre who has to rescue a princess from a dragon and rescue all the fairytale creatures from the evil lord far quad and all this kind of stuff And I got home from watching Shrek with the girls and I wrote Paul a letter and I said I will be contacting my lawyers who will be contacting Dreamworks because Shrek has simply stolen my life Shrek is me, Shrek is my persona that Shrek they just put me up there and the part of this great ogre Now why would I think that? Because Shrek not only is me but Shrek is every pastor frankly why? Because he is Shrek on one hand he is this great horrible ogre or at least that is what he looks like You see he is gruff and appearance and he is gruff in his speech sometimes and yet on the inside he is very tender and sensitive Right? Okay he might be a little more tender Then the last Shrek has his great calling and he is the only one who can do it You see all of the fairytale creatures have been exiled from fairytale land and now they are living in Shrek swamp And so Shrek is the only one he has called to deliver them he has called to deliver the princess from the dragon and therefore returning the fairytale land to the fairytale creatures The gingerbread man Pinocchio sold out by Gepetto which was horrible all of these things And at every point along the way in the movie Shrek wants to quit He wants to quit all the time why? He wants to quit because of two reasons One he is called to do this task and the task that he is called to do is so incredibly hard that he looks at it sometimes and he says I can't do it But the thing that actually makes him want to quit more than the task is that the very people that he tries to help actually still accuse him and complain against him even while he is trying to help them So imagine he is a task he is trying to help people and the very people whom he is trying to help are also accusing him And he wants to quit over and over again and he would except for a jackass Right? Literally a talking jackass is the only thing that keeps Shrek from quitting because every time Shrek wants to quit this talking jackass comes in Eddie Murphy plays the part appropriately And says Shrek you can't quit because if you quit everyone loses Shrek it is your calling You have to do this you are the one who has to rescue the princess you are the only one who can You see Shrek would have quit if not at least one person kept telling him to keep going Right? Everyone needs a jackass telling him to keep going Shrek had Eddie Murphy I have a couple people around here Paul or Timothy the subject of this letter Timothy had the apostle Paul If you remember why this letter was written I have been preaching on it it seems like forever If you remember why the letter was written I mean there are all these sort of grandiose theological themes and things But the real reason this letter was written is because Timothy wanted to quit Timothy was called to go into this church and to lead them He was called frankly to confront the dragons which are complaining church members in this case And the job was hard and the people whom he was called to help complain against him And the weight was too much for Timothy to bear and at some point it must have gotten back to Paul that Timothy is about to quit And so Paul writes Timothy and the letter opened Paul in a possible Jesus Christ to Timothy I urge you to remain in Ephesus that's how it begins I urge you to stay Why? Because the very thing that is causing Timothy to want to leave is the very thing he needs to stay in confront It's sort of this way Timothy if you quit the whole church will have an excuse to quit Tommy if you quit the whole church will have an excuse to quit Trek if you quit all the fairy tale creatures will have an excuse to quit Someone at some point has to put their foot down and say the gospel is true It doesn't matter what you say against me and it doesn't matter what they say against me Someone has to stand here and believe it and that's what Paul encourages Timothy with along the way And in fact if you remember last week if you were here last week Paul sort of talked about the false teachers he sort of empathized with Timothy Timothy I know what it's like to deal with people who don't understand the gospel Remember last week we talked about people whose consciences were branded There are people like that at Grace right there are people in our church who think that because if Grace is true Then they can sin all they want and it doesn't matter You know what if that's what you think that's you don't understand the gospel That's what some people in Timothy's church thought They thought well the gospel's truth doesn't matter what I do But you know if the gospel's true God has made you as righteousness Jesus and now you need to live out that righteousness You can form your conscience to what you know to be the truth or you can form the truth to what your conscience is saying And if you do that oftentimes you end up being a moralist right? You just live by externals and no one ever gets to see inside Paul tells Timothy Timothy I know what that's like trust me He said these guys are telling people not to marry and not to eat certain foods and not to do certain things They're telling people to avoid things that God has created for the good I know that And the next passage what we're looking at today he picks up with encouraging Timothy He basically gives Timothy instructions on what it means to be a minister and what he is supposed to do and how he's supposed to carry out his task And he does it by way of encouragement so what we're going to look at today are just three things The first is Timothy's calling the second is Timothy's discipline and the third thing is Timothy's hope and comfort If you look at verses 6 through half of verse 7 Timothy's calling Paul says in pointing out these things to the brethren You will be a good servant of Christ Jesus constantly nourished on the words of faith and the sound doctrine which you have been following But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women What does Paul mean? Timothy's call is very simple you see the biggest the biggest temptation for a pastor is to basically do everything but your call Right? To be a pastor what most people think it means is he's the guy who administrates the church He's the guy who administrates the programs He's the one who does all the counseling he's the one who does all the discipline He's the one who answers the phones he's the one that organizes the meetings And you know what that's not the pastor's calling at all And that's not Timothy's calling for sure Paul says Timothy here's what here at the end of the day God will look upon you and he will say you are a good minister if you do this one thing Point out these things What are these things he's talking about? Is it just the prior verse? I don't think so most commentators don't think so it's probably the whole letter Timothy your job is to point out to your congregation these things All the things that I've given you so far And what are the things that Timothy is supposed to point out? The first thing is the substance of the gospel Remember that the teachers came in these false teachers and they kept telling people basically that the law is good for you That the law is useful for you to be acceptable to God That if you could just obey it enough that God will be happy with you Or they came in with a lot of speculation about the law that enabled you actually to avoid it And Paul says if you really look at the law God's law, right, the 10 commandments, but even worse than that If you just look at your own standard of morality you don't meet it You're not good enough and if you think you're not good enough to meet either God's law or even your own low standard of morality all the time Paul would say you're starting to get it He says then I thank God for the mercy of Jesus shown to me And then you have the first trustworthy saying that is this trustworthy statement that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners That's it Timothy, point that to your congregation That's all you have You know that 10 of you you might have administrative skills, you might have organizational skills, you might have all these things But the only thing that you have that's going to do them any good is this Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners Point that out to them Right? We forget that over and over and over again I was speaking at a church planner's conference and I was so shocked a few weeks ago that I actually had to stop and laugh and tell these guys I kept saying Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners And these ministers were right and they'd taken notes like crazy And I just stopped and I said guys I've not said anything but Christ died to save sinners and you're taking notes as if it were the first time you heard it You know what? For some of them maybe it was the first time they really heard it That Jesus came into the world to save sinners That if you see yourself as broken and simple Christ came for you He died on the cross and he rose again Remember that was the substance of the gospel Timothy never stopped pointing that out The next is the scope of the gospel who gets this message Timothy I urge you to offer prayers and in treaties for all people Everybody why because there's only one mediator between God and man the man Lord Jesus Christ The Jesus is the only way a person can have a relationship with God and since that's the case Timothy You need to make sure that all people get this message The scope of the gospel that it's for everybody that it doesn't matter who you are or what race you are But especially maybe in a congregation like this how simple you think you've been That the gospels for all people And the charge of course is to trust it And then Timothy what did he point out the substance he points out the scope but then even the structure The organization of the church you see it's really interesting because pastors occasionally this would never happen to me of course Think about quitting they think about just giving up they think and they say I would just leave It would be much easier for me to go do something else than to put off with church I mean it's funny I always threaten someone's going to come to me one day and threaten to leave And I always threaten and I'm going to tell them no you stay I'll leave And yet the very thing that you're tempted to leave whether you're a pastor or whether you're a church member Is the place of which the truth resides remember he says in chapter 3 Timothy the church is the foundation of the truth I don't mean just grace Seattle I mean the church universal The church universal is the place in Paul says Timothy make sure it's organized so that you have elders who care for people And you have deacons who are empathetic all of these kinds of things Timothy never stop reminding the people of these things That's it that's Timothy's job that's my job to remind you of these things right and it's you know the joke some of you do People will call me on Thursday morning and they'll say Tommy can't lunch with me today and I'll say no And I said why can't you have lunch with me today and I'll say well because I've got to work on my sermon And the common retort is why do you need to work on your sermon because you preach the same thing every single week Right they say that sort of as a jab but the beauty is that that's really a compliment because my job is to preach the same thing every week Christ Jesus came into the world to say sinners that's it Now what Paul reminds Timothy is Timothy you can only preach this to the extent that you get it yourself Right listen to what he says in verse 7 he says pointing out these things you'll be a good servant constantly nourished on the words of faith and sound doctrine which you have been following The extent to which you can live out the gospel and the extent to which you can point people to the gospel is completely dependent upon your own understanding of the gospel Right that I have to preach the gospel to myself that the thing that keeps your pastor standing in the pulpit is the fact that the gospel is true I think when we started the church I so often was discouraged that I think I memorized all of Joshua chapter 1 Right Joshua as I was with Moses I will be with you do not tremble or be dismayed for I will never fail you or forsake you I'm with you wherever you go be strong and a great courage do not tremble or be dismayed Have I not commanded you be strong and a great courage do not tremble or be dismayed for I'm with you wherever you go go Right if I had to preach to myself the promises of God right because the old and less I did that I wouldn't be able to come and tell them to you Right to the extent to which the pastor gets at the church will get it and to the extent to which the pastors unbelieving the church will be unbelieving Right that's what Paul tells Timothy Timothy you're calling is to point these things out and then there's sort of a little appendix to the calling Timothy You're calling is not only to point out the good things but it's to reject the bad things right that's where Timothy gets in trouble that's where every pastor gets in trouble he says reject in verse 7 but have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women Right Paul's not Paul's being neither misogynistic or contra the elderly that's a that's a cliche or that's where we get the term old wives tales he says Timothy reject old wives tales reject things that are not profitable reject things that are not driven by the gospel and that's where Timothy gets in trouble that's where I get in trouble frankly often because people come in I've heard it once I've heard it a thousand times people tell you something if you don't agree with it they see you haven't listened but Paul says Timothy listen just don't act on stuff that's bogus reject the things that are bad so the pastor's job is to point out the things that are good and to reject the things that are bad now what is it that it's going to keep him going what is it what is he supposed to do well this requires of course self discipline right you think it was easy you think it was easy that my job is only to to point out the good things and reject the bad things that that would be easy but in fact it requires an incredible amount of self discipline and that's where Paul goes next right so what does he say next in verse 7 and 8 he says that nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women on the other hand discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness for bodily discipline is only a little profit but godliness is profitable for all things since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come is it is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance now this is one of those verses that sort of is almost a cliche if you've gone to church and almost every word in here is sort of a cliche godliness and things like that what does it mean for Timothy to discipline himself excuse me Timothy is Paul telling him it is just gutted out to sort of be to gutted out through the ministry and I think not first of all he says discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness and on one hand he could be talking about externals right maybe not completely because remember he says bodily discipline or exercise profits a little he could be saying Timothy you know go to the gym every now and then right discipline yourself that way but it's not completely profitable but what's more profitable is doing these other things discipline yourself to godliness is that what he's talking about probably not what he's probably talking about is he's he's going contra the false teachers because remember the false teachers were all about externals forbidding people to marry forbidding certain foods forbidding certain drink all of these things their life was defined by externals by quote bodily discipline right if you discipline yourself enough and you do the right things like read your Bible and pray and all these things you're going to have a good life and God's going to love you and Paul says Timothy don't discipline yourself that way that kind of discipline is of little use he says discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness now what is godliness mean godliness simply means becoming more and more like God becoming more and more like Jesus so what it means to become more and more like Jesus is to become more and more glorifying to God to give God glory and all that we do and say and that kind of thing and yet we even mess up glory right Paul says discipline yourself for godliness glorify God and enjoy him forever and we tend to think glorifying God means doing something for God right you equate glorifying God with being really obedient you equate glorifying God by avoiding certain sins you equate glorifying God by avoiding certain drink and food right that's exactly what the false teachers did the primary way that the Bible teaches that people glorify God is not by doing things for God but by letting God do things for them the primary way that you and I glorify God is by relying upon him the God will not give up the glory of being the giver of everything so Paul says Timothy discipline yourself for the sake of godliness and if you think about it discipline yourself for the sake of godliness relying on God for everything requires much more discipline than relying on yourself right because if you're relying on God you have to discipline yourself to wait you have to discipline yourself to trust you have to discipline yourself to look to him instead of looking to yourself that is very hard remember Braveheart now gives in the best scene in the movie I think is when he has gathered this ragged bag of soldiers and they have all spears and they're going to face horsemen for the first time in Calvary or infantry men people on foot have never beat horsemen ever and they make these sharp spears and they're all holding them and the horses come running and they don't know what to do right I mean Mel Gibson is going to tell him when to put the spear up but if they put the spear up too soon the horse will stop and they'll lose that they put it up too late of course they'll get trampled and so what does Mel Gibson do Braveheart he stands in front of the line it says hold hold right that's what the gospel tells you to do right you feel like the the issues and cares of this life are trampling in upon you you feel like your sins are overwhelming you you feel like people are complaining against you you feel like you're in the midst of conflict it's like a cavalry riding in upon you and what you and I most often do is we either turn and run from our problems and our issues or we pick up the spear too quickly or we don't pick it up at all and we get trampled and what the gospel says is hold why because Jesus the great warrior will stand in front of you but it takes a discipline because you're waiting for him and if you're saying hold to yourself what that means is you're trusting that everything that is coming your way is for your good and most of us don't think that most of us don't trust Jesus at all when it comes to finding a spouse right we sit around and complain and I say that because most of our church is single so you complain about the fact that God hasn't given you a spouse on one hand or you move too quickly right and you marry someone maybe you should have married and then you're in marriage counseling and the gospel says rely on Jesus all the time and that requires extreme discipline now is there anything that can foster our glorifying God our reliance upon him and answers yes it's all the three things that we tend to misuse it's reading your Bible and it's praying and it's the sacraments it's what the theologians call the means of grace you see in the Bible are all the promises of God and what it means to have faith is to believe the promises of God and the reason most Christian struggle with having faith is because they don't know God's promises and the reason they don't know God's promises is because they don't read their Bibles I'm not telling you to read your Bible because to convince God to love you I'm saying read your Bible so you know that God loves you Charles Spurgeon had this great quote to his congregation one time and he said there's dust enough on some of your Bibles to write the word damn nation with your fingers some of you aren't laughing you read the Bible and you begin to understand God's promises and then you apply God's promises by way of prayer all prayer is preaching God's promises back to him God you promised you would never fail me or forsake me and then of course you apply both of those when you come to the Lord's table or in baptism that you come forward and you said Jesus I will feed upon you not only do I trust your promises but I feed upon your very body and blood you brought me in to your kingdom that's the way Timothy is to discipline himself that's the way you and I are to discipline ourselves and do we discipline ourselves in vain do we just do it because that's what Christians are supposed to do know we discipline ourselves because there's an end Paul says for to this end we labor and that's what we see it lastly is Timothy's hope and is comfort listen to verse 10 and verse 10 Paul says for this we labor and strive because we have fixed our hope on the living God who is the savior of all men especially of believers notice in verse nine he says it is a trustworthy saying worthy of all acceptance that's the third time he's used that phrase and you see the first time he used the trustworthy statement he said that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners that's the beginning of your faith this trustworthy statement if we discipline ourselves for godliness it holds it holds hope for this life in the life to come that's the third one and basically that's this promise to the first one promises the beginning of our faith and this one promises that God will sustain our faith and since we know that God will sustain our faith then we can labor and strive Paul says for this we labor and strive because we have fixed our hope on the living God the word strive here means to agonize and what does he mean? You see when you start struggling and striving for godliness glorifying God relying on him what that enables you to do first is agonize and struggle with your sin most of us either ignore our sin or run from our sin and what the gospel says is that Jesus has forgiven you of your sin and he has given you all of his righteousness he has bolted you into the chair if you will and now you can deal with your sin because you know even if it comes up he's not going to kick you out he's not going to fail you or forsake you but in fact because he has died on the cross for you because he has risen from the dead now you can look your sin in the face and say you don't own me anymore most Christians and frankly most people in general go through their life struggling to be free from certain sins struggling to be free from certain bad habits and what the gospel says is that you don't have to struggle to be free but that you're now free to struggle will you Paul says for this we labor and strive because why we fixed our hope on the living God in other words we know that God is alive and he keeps his promises not only that we know that Jesus has risen from the dead when he died he took our sin with him and when he rose he is making all things new and because we have fixed our hope on that we can have assurance that he's going to work in us to deal with our sin but even more than that we can have assurance that he's going to work with other people and on other people you see we labor and strive with our sin but also now we're able to labor and strive with self denial what the gospel calls us to a self denial plain and simple that's what the call is to Timothy the reason Timothy wanted to leave because it was basically came down to him or the church Paul says Timothy I urge you to remain in other words deny yourself deny the fact that you have born injustice and stay and live out the gospel in front of these people because they need it and Timothy you have fixed your hope on the living God who's the savior of all men because by denying yourself they will get to hear the message of Jesus and finally what Paul does here is we tend to look at this last verse he says that we have fixed our hope on the living God who's the savior of all men especially of believers now it's Paul somehow sort of pulling back on the gospel here if he's sort of saying that God is the savior of all men but really specifically for Christians and so really you can trust Jesus or not and either way it sort of lets you off the hook well you know what I'm going to say the answer is an emphatic no but when Paul says especially believers he's not letting people off the hook but in fact he's setting the hook you see because in most of Greek literature this word especially is usually translated as to be precise or namely in other words Paul is affirming that the gospel is for all people that is to be precise those who believe or namely those who believe in other words the message goes out to everybody the only people who experience God as savior are those who trust him and so the question is if you're not a Christian have you trusted him will you trust him will you at least consider him now the question if you are a Christian is this have you trusted him will you trust him will you at least consider him you see both Christian and non-Christian need the same thing they both need to look to Jesus over and over again that's your only hope and comfort in life and in death think about that let me pray Jesus we thank you that you have seen fit to come and give yourself graciously on our behalf and I pray that you would make grace Seattle a church that glorifies you because it is known for its reliance upon you I pray that you would help us to be honest with ourselves and honest with our sin and honest with you and so we thank you for all of this and your name we pray amen and amen