There is profound theological depth in passages of Scripture that we usually tend to skip over, passages like the opening verses of 1 Timothy. This is the first message in a new sermon series at Mayflower Hills Baptist Church on the book of 1 Timothy.
Transcript
If you would open your Bible to 1 Timothy, we’re going to be looking at this book this morning. I won’t read through all of chapter one, but let me outline chapter one for you. We’re not going to look at all of chapter one; we’ll be looking at chapter one over the next few weeks, but it’s good to keep this in mind for context. The chapter divides into four subjects:
- Salutation (Verses 1-2): The beginning, the address, and the addressee. We have that beginning as the chapter begins, and that’s what we’re going to be looking at today, so I’m not going to spend much time talking about it right now.
- Warning Against False Teachers (Verses 3-11): Paul is giving warning against false teachers that are in that church of Ephesus where Timothy is shepherding, and he is giving Timothy some instruction concerning those false teachers.
- Testimony to the Grace of God (Verses 12-17): Paul gives testimony to the grace of God in circumstances. We go through difficulties in life of all kinds, and we have all kinds of responsibilities, and God meets those through us through grace. Paul gives testimony to that in verses 12 through 17.
- The Charge to Timothy (Verses 18-20): Paul charges Timothy to fight the good fight.
The Purpose of the Book
Even now before I read this text, let me give you something about what this book is about. If you turn over to chapter 3 and verse 15, Paul writes Timothy:
“But in case I am delayed, I write so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth.”
The point of the book is so that we know how we ought to conduct ourselves in the household of God. The book deals with this in various ways for various people. Generally speaking, for the people of God, this book is intended to preserve the integrity of the gospel by establishing sound doctrine, qualified leadership, and orderly conduct within the church. It’s going to tell us how to structure the church. That’s part of what this book will be about. It’s the primary standard for how we’re to live and conduct ourselves together as a church.
That’s determined by the fact that we are the family of God. We are brothers and sisters in the Lord, connected spiritually, which is more important than any other physical relationship we have in this world. We’re to live together as a family of God, people who love each other, taking into consideration each other. When the book focuses on the leadership of the church, the subject seems to focus on the credibility of the gospel. The most effective way for a church to silence its critics is for us to have leaders whose private godliness and public teaching reflect the sound words of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Himself. I could go on with this, thinking about the ways 1 Timothy deals with that idea as we work through the book, but we’re going to look at each of these things more specifically and a few others as well.
Reading of the Word
Let me read verses 1 and 2, pray for God’s blessing on His Word, and then we’ll begin looking at this passage. All we’re looking at this morning is this greeting. This is God’s holy word:
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus according to the commandment of God our Savior, and of Christ Jesus, who is our hope, to Timothy, my true child in the faith: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Let’s ask God to bless the reading of His Word.
Father, we thank You for this Word that was written by the Apostle Paul but inspired completely by the Holy Spirit of God. We thank You for the preciousness of what we have just read. We ask, Father, for Your special mercy and grace on us this morning that we would be able to comprehend something of the truth that we have just read, to comprehend its significance and see how it fits into the book as a whole, and why the Apostle Paul wrote in the way that he did. We ask, Father, that You guide us in this and make application to our heart of these truths. Bless us in these ways, we pray, that our Savior, the Lord Jesus, might be honored and glorified. Amen.
The Significance of Greetings
When it comes to greetings, we don’t think much about them. They don’t mean anything much. We say, “Hello, how are you doing?” What do those words mean? They don’t mean very much usually, do they? What does the word “hello” mean? I don’t know what the word “hello” means. I know why we use it, but I don’t know what it means. We go around saying stuff we don’t even know what it means, because frankly, it doesn’t mean much.
The Origin of “Hello”
Do you know why we say “hello”? You would think that English speakers have been saying “hello” for centuries, but that’s not true. The word “hello” has a beginning, and it has a beginning because of one man in particular. His name was Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison, because he was basically deaf, didn’t hear correctly the word “ahoy” when it was given over the telephone. So he wrote a message to David, the president of the Central District of the Printing Telegraph Company in Pittsburgh. He said:
“Friend David, I don’t think we’ll need a call bell as ‘hello’ can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think? Edison. P.S. The first cost of a sender and receiver to manufacture is only $7.”
For that reason, the telephone operators of the time began using the word “hello,” because you could hear that all the way across the room and you didn’t need a bell necessarily. So in 1889, the central telephone exchange operators were known as the “Hello Girls.” When you go to the telephone and talk, you call them and they say “hello,” and so you say “hello,” and pretty soon we’re saying “hello” to everybody. We could be saying “ahoy,” but we say “hello” instead. We don’t think anything about it, do we?
Ancient Letter Writing
The same thing is with letters that we write. With letters, which we don’t do much anymore, they’ve almost gone away. What we did in the 20th century is we shifted quite a bit from taking a good bit of time to write long personal letters to people, and we began to stop doing that probably because of the telephone in part, and because we were taking up all of our time with more entertainments and things. So we took less time to write to friends. When we did, letters used to be pretty substantial. But then we shifted to cards, like Hallmark cards. When someone is having a birthday, instead of writing them a nice letter, you just send them a little Hallmark card. Or when you go on a trip to Miami, you write them a little note on the back of a postcard that says, “Johnny and Becky, how are you? Fine, I hope. Greetings from Miami. Wish you were here.” Lots of thought to that.
But greetings, especially salutations in a business letter, you have a certain form and you expect it. When you get that business letter from a company or an inner-office letter, you skip over a lot of that, just glance at it, and get down to the heart of the thing. You would think when you think like that, then we’re not prepared for what we have just read. Because we read what we just read so casually, we often haven’t comprehended it at all. So this morning we’re going to take some time to think about Paul’s greeting.
Even in Paul’s day, what I just said was basically true. I’ll give you an example. Here’s an actual letter from the 1st century:
“Claudius Lysias, to his Excellency, Governor Felix: Greetings.”
That was his salutation. That’s pretty much just like what we do in a letter. That covered everything. It tells who wrote the letter, it tells who received the letter, and it gives the little greeting, the salutation. Compare that to what we just read. Think about that. First of all, we’re coming to this letter that Paul is writing to Timothy. Even in this salutation, there are lots of rather mysterious things until you start thinking about it and beginning to understand it.
Analyzing Paul’s Greeting
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus…” That’s who he is, and it begins with his authority. Now, he’s writing to Timothy, who he calls his true son. Timothy and Titus have a long relationship. Timothy in particular has been working and serving Paul for 15 years when this letter is written. Timothy knows the Apostle Paul extremely well. They have a father-son relationship; that’s what Paul is saying in verse 2.
Can you imagine me beginning a letter like that to my true sons? If I wrote a letter to Justin and I wrote the letter beginning like, “Steve, Pastor of Mayflower Hills Baptist Church, to my true son Justin…” Doesn’t that sound a little strange for someone in that close of a relationship? Question one: why did he do that? What is this about?
There’s a sense, this letter is to Timothy, and if you received a letter from someone that you had special affection for, and you’re back in high school or college and you have a crush on somebody, and you receive a letter from them, you’re going to read over every little detail of that letter. You’re going to know, because you know the person, pretty much everything that it says. But we’re looking at a letter written not to us, but to someone else. It was written 2,000 years ago, and they spoke a different language. Are we going to understand what it says? We are, and we are because of a great deal of work. It takes some work to translate the language, to come to have this wonderful English translation that we are reading. If we’re going to really appreciate it, we have to treat it somewhat like a love letter, where you think about the salutation and the closing in a different way than you would if it was from somebody else. If a guy got a letter from a girl he had a crush on and she said, “Love sincerely” at the end, he would think, “Did she mean that?” You’re going to think about every word. Well, we need to do that when we look at a passage, especially this one.
Paul’s Authority
We’re looking over Timothy’s shoulder as he receives this letter and reads it for the first time, and we’re not the only ones. “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus according to the commandment of God our Savior…” Paul is giving his authority right at the beginning of this letter, and his authority, he’s not a self-appointed apostle. He didn’t have any choice in it. That word “commandment” is the word for a royal command, like the command a king would give to a person, or a lord would give to a servant, a command that cannot be disobeyed. Paul is an apostle of Christ Jesus because God commanded him to be.
That’s authority, because his authority is coming from the very commandment of God. And it’s the commandment of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus who is our hope. Now we’re just at the beginning of this greeting, this letter to Timothy, and we have a profound theological statement. We have an incredible statement of theology that covers from the Old Testament work of God all the way to the distant future. Look at this statement: “according to the commandment of God our Savior.” That phrase “God our Savior,” if you’re writing to a Jewish person who knows the Old Testament, that’s a phrase that’s used over and over in the Old Testament going back to God who saved Israel from slavery and bondage in Egypt and brought them out. That idea of salvation, God is the Savior.
Well, he’s linking “God our Savior,” and connected with that is “Christ Jesus, who is our hope.” So you’re looking from eternity past, from all the history back from the beginning of creation till up to that point, and then you’re looking at the history forward to the return of our Savior, the Lord Jesus, and the completion of that salvation. See, that’s an incredible thing to think about, the whole comprehensive view of salvation and the hope that we have in Christ Jesus coming about because of God our Savior and Christ Jesus our hope, linking those names together as one God.
This is rich and powerful and theological; the doctrine is deep right here in verse one. You could preach far more than one sermon on that. We could explore what it means for God to be a Savior, we could look at the doctrine of salvation, we could look at its past, present, and future, we could look at the idea individually of us coming to faith in Christ in a point in time in the past, our continual sanctification, and the future glorification we have in Jesus. All that stuff is compacted in this one little earth-shaking phrase. Every phrase is powerful and rich and deserving of our thinking and meditating on.
Timothy, a True Child in the Faith
So this is the way Paul writes an introduction to a letter. And he writes to Timothy. “To Timothy, my true child in the faith.” This is a personal letter to this man, Timothy. Who is Timothy? You’re familiar with his name, and you know that he is connected with the Apostle Paul as one of Paul’s associates. You can’t avoid being familiar with his name; two books of the Bible have his name featured. But did you know that in addition to 1st and 2nd Timothy, where Timothy is the one who receives the letter, he is mentioned in six other books? He’s listed as a co-author with the Apostle Paul. I think maybe “collaborator” is a good word, because he’s called a co-laborer in the book of Romans. Timothy is listed in 1st and 2nd Thessalonians, 2nd Corinthians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. His name is listed right alongside Paul’s at the beginning of the letter as the one who’s sending the letter, which is interesting.
There’s a very, very close connection between Paul and Timothy. That’s what he’s saying when he says, “my true child in the faith.” Let me tell you, think back yourself to Timothy and his connection with Paul to begin with. We know from Acts 16:1-3, that Timothy was born to a Jewish mother, her name was Eunice, and he had a Greek father. His father was a pagan. And he was raised in the Jewish faith by his mother and grandmother Lois. They taught him the Old Testament scriptures. He grew up in the Lycaonian town of Lystra in the Roman province of Galatia.
How did he come to faith? He was raised in a Jewish background; how was he saved? The Bible doesn’t give us that exactly, but it gives us enough to figure it out. Paul’s first missionary journey with Barnabas (Acts 13 and 14), he goes to this city of Lystra. He’s preaching the gospel, and it’s being received well. Lots of people are coming to faith. He enters into Lystra, he’s preaching the gospel, there’s a man there who’s lame, and he speaks to the man and heals him. The man has never walked in his life, but suddenly he can stand up and walk. The people in this little town think the gods have come among us, and they think Paul and Barnabas are two of the Greek gods. They send out for their pagan priest to bring a sacrifice, and Paul and Barnabas are horrified and tell them they’re just men, turn from this foolishness to the true God.
Then Jewish people show up from the other cities, turn that group against them, the Apostle Paul is stoned, dragged out of the city, left for dead, then his disciples come and stand around him and he gets up, walks back to the city. That’s probably where Lois and Timothy came to faith, almost certainly during that encounter when Paul preached the gospel in that city on his first missionary journey.
As we continue, 2 to 3 years later Paul returns to Lystra on his second missionary journey, and Timothy is one of the believers in the community of Lystra. He had a terrific reputation as a genuine believer. So Paul chooses him to join his missionary team. Timothy is raised in the Jewish faith but with a pagan father, so he has a problem being accepted anywhere in the community, the Jewish people wouldn’t accept him. He had never been circumcised. So Paul does this: he has Timothy circumcised so that when he comes to these Jewish synagogues, there won’t be an offense, so that they won’t reject him outright at the beginning. Timothy complies with that, and that’s the beginning of this ministry together. It’s an incredible thing, this man Timothy who has both sides: the Jewish side understanding the Old Testament, being trained in Judaism, and also that Greek side knowing the marketplace and all the stuff of the Greek community because as they travel from city to city, Paul is taking the gospel to the Jewish people first and then to the Greeks. Timothy certainly could be an aid in both sides of that ministry.
The Situation in Ephesus
Paul leaves Timothy in charge to put this church in order. That’s a tough job. Timothy is put in place to teach true doctrine and to teach the people teaching false doctrine to shut up. That’s not going to go without resistance. Timothy is a man who had a Jewish mother and a pagan father; he doesn’t have much of a genealogy. When you look back to find out whether you have authority or not, he’s subject to attack by these people. In Jewish culture of the 1st century, your genealogy gave you credibility. Remember in Philippians when Paul is talking about all the things he counts as loss, but there are things that were so valued? He says, “I was a Benjamite, circumcised on the eighth day…” He’s looking at his genealogy because that was important to them. Here Timothy is placed in charge of this group of people, where does his authority come from? His father was a pagan, he’s not going to carry weight in the Ephesian church. Look at how young this fellow is. What can you expect of him? They’re ignoring his history of the last 15 years.
You see, you’ve got that kind of background, and Paul is saying to Timothy, “My true child in the faith.” The word “true child” means a legitimate heir. He’s my real son. Our spiritual relationships trump our physical relationships. Paul is the Apostle whose apostleship is given by the commandment of God Almighty. He has commissioned Timothy, and Timothy is his true son in the faith.
Why do we have this formal greeting? Because this isn’t meant to be read just by Timothy. It’s meant to be read to the church. The very closing of the book, “Grace be with you,” the “you” is plural. This is establishing in a powerful way Timothy’s authority as the person commissioned by the Apostle Paul, whose apostleship is given by the commandment of God. Timothy has the authority he needs to act.
Grace, Mercy, and Peace
Timothy: “My true child in the faith: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.” Paul usually says “grace and peace” in his letters. Here he adds “mercy.” I think that’s particularly for Timothy. Timothy is suffering in this ministry. He’s being accused, his authority is questioned, he has stomach problems, he’s suffering persecution. He needs mercy.
- Grace: God’s undeserved favor. The love toward a guilty sinner who deserves nothing but judgment, but God frees them from the guilt and eternal consequences of their sin.
- Mercy: Deals with the consequences of the guilt and sin in the world. It has to do with pity and compassion. It’s like the Good Samaritan showing compassion to the wounded man.
- Peace: The result of receiving grace and being reconciled with God, experiencing the blessing of wholeness with God.
I think that mercy is added for Timothy because Timothy is suffering and he needs that compassion. He needs to be prayed for. If you’re in ministry, you’re going to suffer. If you’re living in a sinful world, you need mercy. Paul prays for Timothy: Grace, mercy, and peace that can only come from the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. The source of this goodness is God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. They are one.
This is a rich and powerful book, and we need this truth. We need grace and mercy and peace. We need to know how to live godly in this world as this book will teach us.
Father, thank You for Your care and kindness in Christ. Thank You for the richness of Your abundant grace which saved us. Thank You for the great hope we have as we anticipate the coming of our Savior, the Lord Jesus, who will bring about the final completion of our salvation. Father, thank You for all that You have given us in Christ, and will give us. Thank You, Father, that You care about us, so You give us mercy when we need it. We know that anyone living in this sinful world needs mercy. We ask that You help us. Please bless this church, strengthen us, give us the spiritual things we need to be sanctified as we should be, and that we might be true servants of Yours, growing in Your grace and love. Help us, we pray, in Jesus’ name. Amen.