In this week’s message from 1 Timothy 5, we examine Paul’s instructions on how the local church should practically reflect God’s love by honoring destitute widows, while also affirming that families have the primary moral duty to provide for their aging parents. This compassionate care is deeply rooted in the gospel and modeled by Jesus Christ, who secured our salvation by bearing the agonizing judgment for our sins upon the cross while still pausing to ensure His own mother was cared for. Called to value every person as an image-bearer of God, the church must respond by faithfully supporting our most vulnerable members and stepping in to help those who have been left entirely alone in the world.
Transcript
Please turn with me once again to the book of 1st Timothy. I think you’ve probably spent a couple weeks back in Jeremiah, but today we’re returning to our study in Timothy. We left off a few weeks ago having looked at the first two verses of chapter 5. And so this morning I’m going to begin reading in verse 3 and we’re going to continue through verse 16.
So we’re going to look at the church’s treatment of widows who are widows indeed, how the church ministers to them, and also think something about the ministry of these widows to the church. Both ideas are found in this passage as we read them. This is God’s holy, inerrant word:
Honor widows who are widows indeed. But if any widow has children or grandchildren, they must first learn to practice piety in regard to their own family and to make some return to their parents; for this is acceptable in the sight of God. Now she who is a widow indeed and who has been left alone, has fixed her hope on God and continues in entreaties and prayers night and day. But she who gives herself in wanton pleasure is dead even while she lives. Prescribe these things as well, so that they may be above reproach. But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
A widow is to be put on the list only if she is not less than sixty years old, having been the wife of one man, having a reputation for good works; and if she has brought up children, if she has shown hospitality to strangers, if she has washed the saints’ feet, if she has assisted those in distress, and if she has devoted herself to every good work.
But refuse to put younger widows on the list, for when they feel sensual desires in disregard of Christ, they want to get married, thus incurring condemnation, because they have set aside their previous pledge. At the same time they also learn to be idle, as they go around from house to house; and not merely idle, but also gossips and busybodies, talking about things not proper to mention. Therefore, I want younger widows to get married, bear children, keep house, and give the enemy no occasion for reproach; for some have already turned aside to follow Satan. If any woman who is a believer has dependent widows, she must assist them and the church must not be burdened, so that it may assist those who are widows indeed.
Let’s ask God to bless his holy word.
Father, we thank you for being such a great and wonderful God. And we thank you for your care for those who are without and have great need. We thank you, Father, that you are the God who cares and the one whom every believer can look to to bring support when they have need. And so we ask, Father, for your blessing this morning. Help us to understand this passage, to understand the responsibility of the church to people in need, and particularly to widows, to orphans. We ask, Father, that you show us grace and bless us this morning. Help us, we pray, in Christ’s name. Amen.
The Rapid Growth of the Early Church
One of the things that has always interested me is the rapid growth of the church in the first three centuries. It is amazing what took place when Jesus commissioned his twelve disciples, the disciples who followed him after his death, his ascension to heaven, the commissioning of the church to them. It grows from that small group of disciples and it expands across all of Europe to all the known world. And so by the third century, the Roman government has even conceded to become Christian. They left their pagan gods behind and were in name at least Christian. It is an extraordinary thing how something like that could grow so incredibly, especially in the first decades. It’s incredible.
And so thinking about that, what brought that about? Well, that growth, the true growth of the church, people coming to faith, the rapid expanse of the church, people becoming true disciples, that came about because of the power of God’s Holy Spirit to change hearts, to change people. And in changing their hearts, he gave them a love for other people. They had something that the rest of the world lacked. They understood the value of a person, that men and women are created in the image of God. That there is intrinsic value to everyone, no matter who they are. And people that society cast away as worthless was particularly valued by the people in the church. They loved them. They cared for them. They met their needs.
And among those are widows. Among those are people who are left destitute. As we think about this, to just underscore that a little bit from history, in the fourth century… The third century was the time of Constantine, and that’s when he Christianized all of Rome. He made Christianity the official religion of Rome and he put aside the paganism. Well, he was followed by Emperor Julian the Apostate. And although Julian was raised theoretically as a Christian in Christianity, he attempted to dismantle all of Christianity and restore the traditional Roman gods. But he had a problem. And the problem was that Christianity so impacted the culture. In a famous letter to a pagan high priest, Julian expressed his frustration. He said, “For it’s disgraceful when no Jew has to beg and the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well. All men see our people lack aid from us.”
And so he ordered his priests to imitate Christian institutions, but it failed. It failed because they didn’t see other people as made in the image of God. So that was Satan’s first attempt to undermine the ministry of the church, to have the government come in in such a way that it substitutes that work. That’s kind of the world that we live in today.
So what makes the church’s care for people something that is unstoppable? It is that conviction that God loves to care for people in need. People in need are close to the heart of God.
Psalm 68:5, God is explicitly declared to be the father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows.
When Israel fell into decline, one of the things that is mentioned so often by the prophets is that the nation is chastened. As it says in Isaiah 1:17:
Learn to do good, seek justice, reprove the ruthless, defend the orphan, and plead for the widow.
That’s the heart of God for people in need and with difficulties. And that’s true not just in the Old Testament, it’s certainly true in the New Testament as well. James 1:27 says:
Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
The Church’s Responsibility to Widows
This morning as we look at 1st Timothy 5, Paul is instructing Timothy how the local church should reflect the love of God practically for widows who are truly widows. And so there’s four areas of responsibility we want to look at, and the first is this.
Honor Widows Indeed
The basic principle: The church is to honor widows who are widows indeed. The church is commanded to honor, to respect, and to support the widows who are truly destitute. I should point out that when we read this word “widow,” the Greek word that underlies that is an adjective that’s used as a noun. And when I learned that, it gives some meaning and some depth to what Paul is saying. Because it is an adjective that basically means bereft, or robbed, or left alone. And so it means obviously a widow is a woman whose husband has died, bereft. But it means more than that. It covered a little more than that. Because in the first century that word is broad enough to take in a woman whose husband deserted them, or divorced them, or had been imprisoned and taken away from the home. Or sometimes men sent away their older wives in order to marry younger ones. There were all sorts of things that took place, not in the Christian world but in the world, that resulted in a woman being in a situation like that where she had no means of support.
Particularly difficult in the Christian church because in the Jewish community, the Jewish people were supposed to take care of women in needs like that. But they excluded Christians. If you came to Christ, if you became a Christian, then you were put out of the synagogue and so it would be impossible to receive help like that. But the early church picked up that need.
The command to honor widows, it means to show respect and to value them and to care. But it means a little more than that. It means to financially support them. You can see that use of the word in the way Jesus uses the word. Back in Matthew 15, you might remember the Pharisees came to Jesus to complain about his disciples and their practice of the law. And the Pharisees break the law, and Jesus explains particularly the fifth commandment in Exodus 20, that the Pharisees had created a religious loophole called the “corban” gift. They dedicated their wealth to the temple. And so he is condemning the Pharisees because the fifth commandment says to honor your father and your mother. And that means, according to Jesus, that they are responsible to meet the needs of their father and mother if they are in need. But what the Pharisees had done is they said, “Well, if you say that this money that I have is corban, I’ve dedicated it to the Lord, so when I’m gone and die this goes to the temple.” Then they have the use of that money for the rest of their life and they don’t have to use it to pay for their parent’s support. Jesus condemned the Pharisees because of that. But you notice the way that honoring—he equates honoring your father and mother with providing for their actual material and financial needs. And so to withhold financial support from an aging parent, Jesus considers that as breaking the fifth commandment. So he’s saying that families are responsible first of all to care for their aging parents.
The Responsibility of the Family
That’s a lesson in itself we need to consider today because I don’t know how many times you’ve been in nursing homes, I’ve been in a few, and you see people left there in the care of the state. They have family, family who rarely if ever comes to see them. And they’re just left there, and it’s a terrible situation. And it’s not because the children don’t have resources to care better for them, it’s because they don’t see that it’s a responsibility that they have at all. So it is a need when you recognize that that we have today. We are worse off in some ways than the pagans were in the first century.
The first line of care is that children and grandchildren should practice godliness by caring for their own parents and grandparents, supporting elderly relatives. It’s a moral debt owed for the years of shelter and food and nurture that they received. Verse 8 says:
If anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
He’s worse than an unbeliever. It was normal in the first century for a family to see the need of family members and to care for them. That was in the times of the Greeks and the Greco-Roman system, that was part of the law. They were legally bound, not just morally bound, to support their parents. And anyone who refused the duty in that period of time lost their civil rights. And so to quote a couple pagans, William Barclay in his commentary lists a couple of quotes from Aristotle and from Plato.
Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics lays it down. He says:
It would be thought in a matter of food, we should help our parents before all others, since we owe our nourishment to them, and it is more honorable to help in this respect the authors of our being even before ourselves.
In other words, he says if you have to decide whether you’re going to go hungry or your parents go hungry, make sure your parents don’t go hungry. That’s what he’s saying. So that’s Aristotle.
And Plato says:
Next comes the honor of loving parents, to whom, as is meet, we have to pay the first and greatest and oldest of all debts, considering that all which a man has belongs to those who gave him birth and brought him up, and that he must do all that he can to minister to them, first in his property, second in his person, and thirdly in his soul, paying the debts due to them for their care and travail which they bestowed upon him of old in the days of his infancy, and which he is now able to pay back to them when they are old and in the extremity of their need.
So that’s an interesting historical situation. That was what the pagans taught. And so Paul picks up on that thought and he says that if you, pretending to be a Christian, acting as a Christian, don’t support your own parents, then you’re worse than these unbelievers who do support their parents. So a Christian family or a person, a family that is in the church, professing Christians, if they turn their mother over to the care of the church and assume no responsibility for them, then they are basically not only defrauding their mother, but they’re also defrauding the church. They are guilty of a kind of financial fraud and moral neglect.
We are not to do that. That is not the practice. The family should care for its own. God instituted the family and he instituted the church, and their roles are somewhat different and they both need to work together. The church shouldn’t take over the role of the family when the family should meet those needs.
But the church does have a responsibility. And it was a responsibility that wasn’t being met by the pagan world in the first century. What about those people who don’t have family to care for them? The widow indeed, who was put out, or the woman who was abandoned. And she lives destitute without help. The Roman culture had just contempt for her. They thought it a weakness to care for someone in a situation like that. They did not care for those people. They didn’t care for the infants that were continually being put out and exposed to die because the family didn’t want them. That was one of the practices in the first century Roman world. If you have a baby and you feel like that baby might be a burden on your family, or particularly if it’s a girl, they would lay that baby out and it would be exposed to the elements. It would starve to death. It would die because of the cold or the heat. And so that was part of that kind of culture.
The church was radically different. Cared for those people that they were not responsible for. People who were Christian, who was in a situation like that, the church met those needs. It met the need of the widow. It took her in and provided for her. That’s the pattern. First, the family should care for their own aged parents. They should look out for them and care for them. But if there is no family, then it’s the church’s responsibility.
It’s an important thing. Family looks after the family first. You remember in John chapter 19. That account is describing Jesus as he’s suffering on the cross. Jesus is bearing the agony of having all of our sin placed upon him. And he’s suffering the very judgment that we deserve. And in all that agony which is beyond what we can comprehend, he looks out and he sees his mother Mary standing next to John the disciple he loved. And he says to his mother, “Woman, behold your son.” And then he said to the disciple, “Behold your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own household. Jesus on the cross looked after the need of his mother and saw to it that she would get the care that she needed. We need to make sure in our relationships that we care for our own family in whatever situations they find themselves. That’s first. And then in situations where there is no family, the widow indeed, the church picks up that need. It’s genuine worship of God to meet the needs of truly needy people.
Qualifications for Church Support
So the next section, in verses 5 through 7 and then 9 through 10, there’s the qualifications for support of these widows. And you notice it’s not everybody that the church will take care of. You could be legitimately a widow, and even have great need, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that the church would care for you. First of all, the widow to be placed on this official roll of the church for permanent support had to meet these criteria:
- She is a widow indeed: In verse 5, she’s left entirely alone. The grammar there is perfect tense, and that means a permanent settled state. This was her condition. She’s not going to get out of this. She has no one to help her. There’s no family members to take up that need to provide for her.
- Her hope is fixed on God: It’s not just that she has this great need, but she has her hope fixed on God. I think about the widow that Jesus points out to his disciples who just gave that little mite, the widow’s mite, put that into the offering to care for the needy. The last bit of money that she had in the world, she’s trusting the Lord to meet her needs. This is the kind of thing that this is describing. She’s trusting God to meet her needs.
- She persists in prayer: She persists in prayer to the Lord, not just for her own survival, but also to meet the needs of other people. And she prays night and day. It’s like the prophetess Anna in the birth story of Jesus. She has a ministry there in the temple and she prays night and day.
The Self-Indulgent Life
Now in contrast to a woman who’s devoted to the Lord is a woman who is living a self-indulgent life. In the very next verse, in verse 6:
But she who gives herself to wanton pleasures is dead even while she lives.
Now the point of this is that’s not a person that the church supports. Here’s a woman who may have great need, but she’s living a very sinful life. And you don’t spend God’s money on supporting sinful habits and sinful behavior. That is not right. You might meet practical needs. When we were downtown, lots of people who were needy people would come to seek help from the church. We had a couple of policies. We would help a person if they were hungry. We would take them out to a restaurant and see that they had something to eat. But we wouldn’t give them money, not generally speaking. Because they’re going to use it for wickedness. They’re not going to use it to get a good meal. They’re going to use it to satisfy habits which they were addicted to. And to use the resources of God to support sinful habits is not wise at all. It’s a misuse of God’s funds.
Age and Moral Character
She had to be, in verse 9 and 10, at least 60 years of age, the wife of one man, and known for good works.
- At least 60 years of age: Why is that? Well, she needed to be older, not younger. I’ll explain that in just a moment from the instructions for younger widows.
- The wife of one man: We talked about that when we were talking about deacons and elders who are to be the husband of one wife. And we pointed out that if you were married and your wife died, and you married again, that didn’t mean that you wouldn’t be qualified to be an elder or deacon. The phrase is describing the kind of person. It means you’re the kind of person who is faithful to one spouse. You have sexual integrity in your marital life. You have purity. If this woman had married and then her husband died and she got married again and he died, and she was left destitute and without a family, the church wouldn’t refuse to support her because she had been married to two different men. It means that she is a one-man kind of woman. And you know that that must be the case because when he talks about younger widows, his exhortation is that they remarry. Why would you say that if that would disqualify you in the future? It’s a genitive of kind, it’s the kind of a person being described here. She is the kind of woman who has sexual fidelity in her marriage.
A Reputation for Good Works
And so, if they are this kind of person, a person who is faithful, a person known for their good works—good works in raising children, or in showing hospitality, assisting people in distress, washing the feet of the saints. If they’re doing these things, doing good work, then they are to be put on the list. Put her on the list of this official order. And I think this list that he’s talking about includes these older women who are committing themselves to ministry in the church in a unique way.
And so what did they do? These women had a ministry in the church. They weren’t just being supported by the church, they had a ministry. And the duties included things like:
- Visiting the sick and prisoners.
- A prayer ministry where they’re devoting themselves to the Lord to continually pray for the needs of the church.
- Discipling younger women.
- Working with orphans that the church took in. (When Christians picked up those babies, slavers picked up those babies too to sell them and to exploit them. But Christians picked them up and they raised them. And part of the ministry of these older women was to care for these children and to see that they were brought into homes that could take care of them.)
And so they had a rich, wonderful ministry. We were talking about the growth of the church, the picture of the church caring for people that was different from the culture around them. Culture didn’t care, the church cared and loved these people. And the growth is that every member of the church, particularly people like these widows, had a ministry. Can you imagine the power of the prayer of these women continually praying for the work of the churches? And the power of God as he answered their prayers? The widows, according to this Roman society, were castaways, they were worthless. They don’t see them as created in the image of God. But they are God’s people, created in his own image. They have value. And they have purpose. And so the church didn’t just meet their financial needs, it recognized their purpose in the church. They had something worthwhile to do. They were valuable to the church, and God blessed their work.
Instructions Concerning Younger Widows
This ministry of the church in this way continued. There was basically an order of widows in the churches for the first 300 years of the church. And then it began to wane, maybe because of the generalized practice of the government, I don’t know. But it’s not something that we see very readily today. The church does meet needs, but it’s sort of an informal thing. And so we miss out on things, it seems to me. Not just to meet the physical needs of people, but where is their purpose? How are they serving God? There is something rich in having these people work in the church and have purpose and significance. They are to recognize that they are servants of God and be used of God.
Now Paul didn’t put younger women on this list, probably because there was a covenant that they entered into to devote themselves completely to this work. And he recognized that younger women were likely tempted to marry. Not all of them would, but some would. And so he wanted to avoid that. He wanted to encourage the younger women to marry, to have children, to be able to be housekeepers, to take care of their own families. And not to make a commitment that they wouldn’t be able to keep.
In the church at Ephesus, apparently there were those who had younger widows who had aligned themselves with the heretics in the church. As Paul says, “for some have already turned aside to follow Satan.” And so he wanted to avoid that. Because of that, he encourages younger women to keep house, to give the enemy no occasion for reproach, to marry, bear children, and to have that type of life which is preferable and wiser.
Conclusion
God calls the church to meet needs. We need to recognize the church’s responsibility to meet needs. We tend to delegate things like this to our government. The government seeks to meet needs in this way, but it fails in the same way that it failed with Julian the Apostate. Because our government doesn’t recognize the holiness of a person. It doesn’t recognize the sanctity of a person. While they practically meet needs with social programs, our society encourages all sorts of things that certainly fall short of giving a person human worth. They encourage abortion. They encourage euthanasia. They don’t really value life.
We delegate it. We give it away. The government takes so much of our money, we feel like they should take the responsibility. But really, we should ask ourselves, are we doing the job? And even if the government meets needs of, say, widows, do we consider them as worthless too? Do we consider them as having no purpose? In a lot of churches, seniors are delegated to the back corner of the church where they are to keep to themselves. And they don’t mix with the rest of the church. That’s not right. Every person who is saved by God’s grace, who is filled with the Spirit of God, is a minister of God, a servant of God. And you have a ministry. And your spiritual, eternal worth is evidenced by your ministry. And these women had worth, they had value, they were certainly valuable to the church. They prayed for needs to be met, they ministered to the older women, taught younger women how to care for and love their families. They ministered in ways that were substantial and worthwhile. They discipled, they encouraged, they blessed. And God used their ministry, and blessed the church through them.
Family members need to recognize that we are responsible for our older parents. Children, grandchildren are responsible for their aging parents. They shouldn’t consider them as a burden, but they should recognize that they have a sacred debt. And as an act of worship to God, they should see that their needs are met. And that means not just that they’re provided for and they get something to eat, but that they are loved, that they spend time with them, that they meet their needs as a family.
And as a church, we need to look out for the vulnerable people, the orphans and the widows and other people who have a genuine need. We should be a congregation that seeks the lonely, the bereft, and the financially destitute, who are believers especially, and meet needs that are genuine needs. We should love people. When you think about the gospel itself, what Jesus was doing on the cross was giving us an abundant grace. We who were spiritually destitute, with no resources and no hope and absolutely nothing to offer, Christ in his mercy gives us abundant spiritual riches. He brings us into his household and he provides for us at the cost of his own life, the sacrifice he made for us. And when you consider that, shouldn’t we be generous to meet the needs of other people? Isn’t that Christ-like?
I opened this with a historical quote, I’m going to close it with another. There was a church historian, his name is Aristides. And in the second century he wrote to the pagan emperor Hadrian. He wrote a letter defending Christianity. And he explains what made the believers so different from the rest of Rome. This is a time of persecution, and he’s writing a letter to the emperor. And he says:
They love one another. The widow’s needs are not ignored. They rescue the orphan from the person who does them violence. He who has gives to him who has not, ungrudgingly and without boasting. And if they find poverty in their midst, and they do not have spare food, they fast two or three days in order that the needy might be supplied with the necessities.
Now that is something. That’s the early church. They see somebody who has a great need and they don’t have the means to meet it, they starve themselves for two or three days to have something to give to those people. Now that is a passion and a love. And you can see how such passion and love would bring about people that devoted. You can see how that would make an impact. The love of God has transformed their hearts, and so that they love with a passionate love. We need that. May we as a church be gripped by the grace of God and the love of God, so that we are willing to sacrifice our own comforts to ensure that the vulnerable among us is honored, provided for, and loved.
Let’s pray.
Father, we thank you for this passage. We pray, Lord, that you help us. It’s difficult today to sort through the way we do church, the practices that we have, and to be confronted with your word, to see the difference between our church and what has gone before. And Father, to find practical ways to meet needs that is real and not foolish. It’s one thing to just give out money or to support sinful people, it’s something else to actually truly care and especially care for the people of God. Help us, Father, to care for the people of God. And Father, we live in a world and even among us there are needs that should be met. I don’t know, Father, I don’t know how we are to do this exactly, but I do know, Father, that you will lead us and teach us. Help us, Father, to have hearts that submit to you in everything. And give us what we need, we pray. Thank you for your care and kindness for us. Thank you for taking us in when we were destitute and bringing us into your own family. I pray, Father, that you help us to minister to those with great need. And that the love of Jesus Christ would be evident in each of us. Help us, Father, to minister in your name, so that you receive the glory and the honor. We ask this, that Christ be honored. And pray in his name. Amen.
