We're going to be looking here
this morning in 1 Timothy. Again, we'll read this. 1 Timothy
1. It says, Paul, an apostle of Jesus
Christ by the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus
Christ, which is our hope. Unto Timothy, my own son in the
faith, Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus
Christ our Lord. As I besought thee to abide still
at Ephesus, when I went in to Macedonia, that thou mightest
charge some that they teach no other doctrine, neither give
heed to fables and endless genealogies which minister questions, rather
than God the edifying which is in faith, so do. Now the end
of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart and of good
conscience and of faith unfeigned, from which some, having swerved,
have turned aside unto vain jangling, desiring to be teachers of the
law, understanding neither what they say nor whereof they affirm. But we know that the law is good,
if a man use it lawfully, knowing this, that the law is not made
for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient,
for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers
of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, for whoremongers,
for them that defile themselves with mankind, for men-stealers,
for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing
that is contrary to sound doctrine, according to the glorious gospel
of the blessed God, which is committed or was committed to
my trust. And I thank Christ Jesus our
Lord, who hath enabled me, for that he counted me faithful,
putting me into the ministry. who was before a blasphemer and
a persecutor and injurious, but I obtained mercy because I did
it ignorantly in unbelief. And the grace of our Lord was
exceeding abundant with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus."
This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation that
Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am
chief. Howbeit for this cause I obtain
mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show forth all longsuffering
for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life
everlasting. Now unto the King eternal, immortal,
invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever and
ever. Amen. This charge I commit unto
thee, son Timothy, according to the prophecies which went
before on thee, that thou by them mightest war a good warfare,
holding faith and a good conscience, which some, having put away concerning
faith, have made shipwrecked, of whom is Hymenaeus and Alexander,
whom I have delivered unto Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme."
And we'll stop right there. And of course, Paul, as he does
often in his letters, begins with his calling that the Lord
had given him an apostle of Jesus Christ by the commandment of
God our Savior. He didn't earn it. He didn't
seek it. He didn't even know about it.
You know, it wasn't that he went to school in order to become
an apostle. He was an apostle by the commandment
of God our Savior. He was given a charge. That's
what that word commandment is there. It means given a charge.
That is, He charged him just like He says down here, Now I
charge you, Timothy. to do these things. So it was
that the Lord commanded that Paul be an apostle. And when
did the Lord command that Paul be an apostle? Did He decide
at some point along Paul's journey? He said, well, you know, I think
old Paul would make a good apostle. No, before Paul was ever born,
The Lord had determined that he was going to be an apostle.
Now, the natural man looks at that and says, Well, why on earth
did Paul's life take the turn that it did? Why was he a persecutor
of the people of God if he was ultimately going to be one of
the Apostles, wouldn't it have made more sense that the Lord
Jesus would have come along and chosen Paul and said, well, Paul,
come on and go with us? No. You see, the way of the Lord
is not the way of men. And though men might think sometimes
that they've got a better way or that they would have designed
it differently, they would have made a mess out of it. And you
know, so the way that the Lord does things is the way. It is the right way. It is the
only way. It is the way in which those
who desire to worship Him always acquiesce to. Now this flesh
sometimes does not lightly except the things that the Lord does.
Sometimes we say, well, Lord, why did You do that? I wish You
hadn't have done that like that. But as the Lord works in us according
to His good pleasure of His will and He subdues that fleshly spirit
that's within us, we must come to that place and we shall come
to that place of saying, even so, Lord, because it seemed good
in Thy sight. And to be glad that the will
of the Lord is done. Some people seem to spend their
life trying to second guess the Lord and figure out what the
Lord is going to do next. I have no idea what the Lord
is going to do and don't really know all the reasons why He has
done what He did. But I know that the chief reason
He has set forth before us is that He might have glory. And
you know, in all things he will have glory. And Paul, as he recounts
this to Timothy, he gives glory to God. As Al pointed out there
this morning very ably in the first commandment, Thou shalt
have no other God before me. And he began that statement with
the same thing that he said to Moses. When Moses said, Who do
I tell of sin? He says, I am. He says, I am
the Lord thy God. And so it is that Paul acknowledges
this. And he says, I am who I am by
the grace of God, by the commandment of God. It was according to his
purpose that he made me such. By the commandment of God our
Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope. Now he very plainly in my estimation,
he says, that he sets forth that the Lord Jesus Christ is indeed
God. Now we know that and we are not
in opposition to it, but sometimes people try to kind of, when they
think of Jesus, as being God, they kind of want to put Him
on like a second tier wall. You know, He wasn't really God. I mean, you know, the Father
was God, and then you have the Son. He's kind of like in a second
place. And then the Spirit's down here
in the third place. That's not at all what the Scripture
indicates that it is, because when the Lord Jesus stood before
His disciples and Philip asked Him, Lord, will You show us the
Father? He said, Philip, if I've been
so long time with you and you haven't known who I am. He said,
if you've seen Me, you've seen the Father. The only Father that
we shall ever see is The Lord Jesus Christ, because He is the
manifestation of the Father. He is that One who can be seen
because He has revealed Himself. Apart from the revelation of
Jesus Christ, we couldn't have known God. There wouldn't have
ever been any way we could have known God except that He came
into our presence. How could we have lifted up ourselves
to where He is? No, had He not come to where
we are. And that's the whole beauty and
glory of what's revealed in the Gospel is that He has come. What is man that thou art mindful
of him? Or the Son of man that thou dost
visit him? Now you see, the way that a lot
of people think about what the Lord has done is that, well,
He just kind of almost had to do something. I mean, He put
man, God in this bind, and so the Lord had to do something. I mean, he couldn't just let
man go on his way. Well, if that had been his purpose,
he could have. I mean, what is man? Man doesn't
have any intrinsic value except as the Lord has given him value
in his own heart and mind, and he has been mindful of man. But man, as he is, has no worth. to call on God or to cause God
to do anything any more so than any other part of His creation.
I mean, is man any less a part of the creation of God than a
tree or a dog or a cat or whatever? Except that the Lord made man
as He made him, not because man has that of his own self. It is because God placed worth
in man, because God saw fit to make man in His image as we read
in the Scripture. So Paul says he is an apostle
by the commandment of God our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ. Now notice, he does not separate
that. He says God our Savior and Jesus
Christ. In other words, he is the same
One. God, our Savior, and Jesus Christ. He's all the same. And
so, then he says something that is at the very heart of the faith
of God's elect. He says, which is our hope. Now, Christ Jesus is our hope. Our hope doesn't exist apart
from Christ. We don't have a hope apart from
Christ, do we? Now, a hope is that which we
look for. A hope is something that is out
beyond us. It's that which we expect. It's
an expectation. And He is our expectation. He
is our hope. He is that One upon whom all
our Desire is placed. And we don't expect that we should
receive anything else that does not come from His hand. He is
our hope. Unto Timothy, my own son in the
faith, grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus
Christ our Lord. Now, Timothy, as he speaks of
him as his own son in the faith, we have to be careful when we
think about that. that we don't place more emphasis
on what he means here than he does. He didn't cause Timothy
to believe, because evidently if you read the account of Timothy,
he was already a man who was a believer when Paul came along. But he was one whom the Lord
put into Paul's life, and Paul ministered with Timothy, and
the Lord knit them together. In fact, in one of the letters
he says, I have no man who is like-minded with me other than
you. He looked on him as a son because
of the dear affection that he had for him. And he loved Timothy,
and he had confidence in Timothy. that Timothy would be faithful
unto those things. My own son in the faith, grace,
mercy and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. Is that not how we desire for
all of God's people to be blessed, to have grace and mercy of God
upon them? Now, if we really believe that,
how could we ever have any hard feelings towards the people of
God? I mean, if that's really how we feel about it. We do desire
the blessing of God upon men. Now, we don't desire the blessing
of God on those that would tell other men lies. But we do desire
that those who name the name of Christ and worship at His
footstool, we do desire the blessing of God upon them, grace, mercy,
and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. As I besought thee to abide still
at Ephesus, when I went unto Macedonia, that thou mightest
charge some that they teach no other doctrine. Now evidently,
as he's saying here, that he advised or he recommended, he
charged in the sense that he said, this is what I think you
ought to do. And Timothy, of course, had confidence in Paul
and looked to him as a father figure, and so he obeyed Paul. He says, as I besought thee to
abide there in Ephesus. Because you remember, he had
the dream and the Macedonian call came and he said, come over
and help us. And that's when he went from
there into Macedonia. That thou mightest teach some
that they teach no other doctrine. Now obviously, from the very
earliest days, there were men that came in among the children
of God who were teaching false doctrine. You have to keep in
mind that they didn't have the New Testament. I mean, they didn't
have the written Word of God as we do now. I mean, we can
go and read through the doctrine of Paul, and we can judge whether
or not somebody is preaching truth based on those things we
read in the Scriptures. So we have a pretty good basis
and understanding of what it is that the doctrine of the gospel
is, because it is recorded for us in the pages of the New Testament. We say they did not have that
then. And so there were men who were coming along with mixtures
of Judaism, Because let's face it, most of the early believers
were Jews, although there were Gentiles mixed in among them,
yet Judaism was... many Jews, they believed that
the Messiah was coming, yet they didn't see the clear demarcation
between that which Christ had done and that which Moses had
given them in the Law. You remember even back in the... with the council at Jerusalem. There were some among the Jews
who were saying, well, you know, we want to follow Christ, but
we still need to have these dietary laws, and we need to have these
things in place. And they couldn't get rid, they
couldn't move away from those things. And of course, the problem
with that is, is that it causes men to get their focus off of
that which is true, and that is what Paul is speaking about
here. And he said that they might teach no other doctrine. Well,
what doctrine was he talking about? He's talking about the
doctrine of Christ. Now, he gives an illustration
here, and I'm going to skip over a couple of verses and then we'll
come back to them. And he says, from which some having swerved,
have turned aside to vain gambling." Now, this he says, some are teaching
another doctrine. And then he says, because they
have swerved from it. Now, if you've got a straight
line, if you're going down a straight road, and you've got the beginning
and the end, now we know that Christ is the beginning and Christ
is the end, is He not? Now there's a straight line between
those two points. Now the only way that you can
get off of that road is to do what? Swerve. Now sometimes you
might be going along and the road might look good over here. Well, I don't think it's as bumpy
as this is here. But we'll get over here. Or we'll
get over there. And it doesn't make any difference
what it is, that you get involved in. Now, as he speaks here, he
says, neither give heed to fables, endless genealogies, which minister
questions, rather than godly edifying in the faith. Now, what's
the faith that he's talking about? The faith of Christ, which is
where it's on that straight road. It's from the beginning to the
end. See, you can stand at the beginning and you can see the
end. Now, the end is way on out there. But you know, on a straight
road, you can see it, because there is a light shining down
there. And when you turn over this way, guess what? You are
not looking at the light. You are looking at something
else. And so it does not make a difference what it is that
a man gets turned aside on. If he is not looking at Christ,
he has swerved. If he's not preaching Christ
and Him crucified, if that's not the sum total of the message
that comes forth, then he has swerved. And that's what he's
saying here. Some have swerved. Neither give hate to endless
genealogies which minister questions rather than godly edifying. See,
the more questions that you get to, to entertain them when you
swerve off the road and you get to looking at this doctrine and
that doctrine and this thing and that thing, and it's something
other than leading men to Christ. And when I say leading men to
Christ, I'm talking about pointing men down the road that is Christ. When it's something else, it's
turning men away from the faith. Now, the end of the commandment,
And he's using the example here, I believe, of the law and the
purpose. That's what the word end means,
the end of the commandment, the purpose of the commandment. And
Thou pointed this out very clearly today. The end of the commandment
is charity or love out of a pure heart and of a good conscience
and of faith unfeigned. The whole purpose, if you're
going to be... because in a minute he's going to say, they're wanting
to be teachers of the law. That's what he says down here.
He says, but if you want to know what the purpose of the law is,
he said, here it is. He said, it is love out of a
pure heart. The law, the purpose of the law
is summed up in what the Lord Jesus Christ said, thou shalt
what? Love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul, and thy neighbor
as thyself." Now that is the purpose of the commandment, is
it not? Now we know that in the greater sense of the word, the
giving of the law was given for something else, but that is not
what he is I'm referencing here, he's speaking about the fact
that if you want to boil the law down and if you want to teach
the law as the gospel sets it forth, here it is, like the Lord
Jesus Christ said. Now the end of the commandment
is love out of a pure heart. Thou shalt have no other gods
before me. There's not a mixture. Well, I like this this way or
I like this that way. No, it's according to the way
of God. He said it and that's the way that we go. And of a
good conscience. We're not doing that to be seen
of men. When thou doest thine alms, do
it in secret. Don't let your right hand know
what your left hand is doing. Don't do it so men can see you.
When you pray, what do you say to do? Go in your closet. When you fast, don't appear to
men to fast. I mean, don't do it so men will
say, you know, boy, old brother so-and-so, he's really a holy
man because I can see all his dedication here, because look
how skinny he's getting because he's been fasting so much. You know, that's not it. He said
do it out of a good conscience. Do those things in secret, and
then the Lord Blessing will be manifested as God's people serve
Him out of a pure conscience. Not because they serve Him out
of a good conscience, but that is the manifestation of the blessing
of God, is that a man serves God out of a good conscience.
Not because of legal reasons, And he said, "...which some,
having swerved, have turned aside." They lost sight of these things,
he said. And they took their eyes off
of the light and they got off. He doesn't say, you know, they
might have been one way or they might have been another. Now,
he does point out, he says, here was their problem, and that specifically,
he says, "...desiring to be teachers of the law." Now there's plenty
of folks that desire to be teachers of the law. And I would venture
to say that a great portion of preaching today is centered on
what men need to do. Now you'll hear that a lot. This
is what you need to be doing. And if you was really serving
God, you'd be doing this, and this, that, and the other, and
all these things. Now there's not a thing in the world wrong
with exhorting men to walk in obedience to the commandments
of God. Not a thing in the world. But
when we start to use the law as the means whereby we feel
like we can hymn God's people in, then we have swerved, and
we have not used the law lawfully. The law is a good thing. He said
the law is a good thing. Desiring to be teachers of the
law, understanding neither what they say nor whereof they affirm.
They don't know what they're talking about, basically, is
what he said. They don't know what it is. They think they do,
but we know that the law is good if a man uses it lawfully. And so we're going to stop right
there because we've got other things to attend to here. But
the lawful use of the law is a needful thing for a man to
understand. And we know that the law was
given, as he's going to point out here, a law not made for
a righteous man. The Lord didn't give the law to the nation of
Israel because there was a bunch of people that just loved Him
and served Him, did He? What did He do? He gave it to
them because they were a bunch of rebellious, disobedient, unkind,
unconsidered people. That's who He gave the law to.
And that's who the law is for today. And you know, if a man
sees in the law some description of his own holiness or some manner
in which he can become holy, then he has not used the law
lawfully. Because when the law is used
lawfully, it does one thing, and that is it breaks the hearts
of those that look at it. It's like that rich young ruler
that came to the Lord. And the Lord used the law lawfully. A rich young ruler came, Lord,
I've done all these things for my youth up. The Lord didn't
say, no, you haven't done none of that. He didn't say, you've
been a wicked man. He said, well, if you're going
to be perfect, go sell all that you have and give it to the poor.
Now, he went away sorrowing, and I've mentioned this before,
but a lot of people think that that means that he went away
and he never came back. I'm not so sure that that's true,
because the Scripture does say the Lord looked on him and he
loved him. And he used the law lawfully, and what did the law
do to that young man? It smote him in the heart. And
he said, you know, I've got all these possessions. And here I
am. I've been coming along all this
time thinking I've been doing all these great things for the
Lord. But it says, if I really was doing what the Lord said
to do, I would have done exactly what the Lord said. I'd give
it all to the poor. I remember reading something
about Charles Spurgeon. in his day, and you know, I'm
not sanctioning everything Charles Spurgeon said or anything else,
but I'm just using him as an illustration. And I think he
did demonstrate what I'm talking about here. He was actually a
wealthy man in his lifetime. I mean, he had all kinds of books
and stuff that he sold, He was more or less like a rock
star of his age in that time, that Victorian era. But when he died, he didn't have
nothing. Of course, his wife was mad at
him because he had basically given away everything that he
had. She wound up, of course, having
to sell off his possessions or the things that they had in order
to be able to live. And I'm not speaking specifically
about what a man needs to do with his goods, but I'm just
saying this, that it's the illustration of considering the law lawfully. to love the Lord our God with
all of our heart, all of our soul, and all of our mind, and
our neighbor as ourselves. May the Lord give us grace to
do so.