Paul’s instructions to Timothy can be summarised as: ‘Fight for unstained teaching & unstained living, & God will give you an unstained crown of glory.’ That’s the “good warfare” & “good fight” Timothy must commit himself to … & every Christian is part of that work too. So, how can our church do this —
1. By being a church that prizes teaching. Timothy is to wage a war with words as his primary weapons (1 Tim. 4:6). Leaders are both steward & soldier. Leaders should guard the truth, follow the pattern, continue in the truth, & remind others of what’s been passed down to them. How? Primarily by preaching the Word (2 Tim. 4:2). There’s no better foundation than a ministry built on patient & even repetitive proclamation of what God’s Word says about God’s glorious Son (1 Tim 3:16). But sometimes the best defence is a good offense. Leaders must both defend truth & destroy falsehood.
There are ditches on both sides of the road to faithfulness. One ditch is for itchy-
ear preachers, nonconfrontational accumulators of crowds. This leaves lost people without direction & saved people without correction. The other ditch is for opposition-obsessed preachers, overly confrontational accumulators of a different crowd. This fails to equip us to navigate the world with love & wisdom.
2. By being a church that prizes character. Both letters are shot through with encouragements about character (1 Tim 1:5). What kind of person should you be? A loving person with a pure heart & clean conscience. A humble person who’s astonished she gets to serve Christ in the first place. An exemplary person who studies himself as much as he studies the Scriptures. A person who fights without being quarrelsome. A person who endures evil & keeps smiling. These two values teaching & character—are interdependent. Church leaders need to remember we defend the gospel & fight for faith through our gentleness, kindness, patience, respect, & love.
3. Be being a church that prizes our future hope. The sum total of our church’s teaching & our church leaders’ temperaments subtly but surely shifts our ultimate hope toward our secure future with the Lord Jesus. They remind us we are, in fact, people between two homes. & yet we’re not homeless exiles, because we have the local church, “the household of God” (1 Tim. 3:15), the best place on earth to see God’s authority on display & our responsibility in action. God in his infinite wisdom has gathered us strangers together & made us siblings. We should feel like exiles least when we’re gathered with our spiritual family. If you look around on Sunday, you’ll see lots of people with whom you have differences— some trivial, some far from it. But if we all confess this “mystery of godliness” together (v16) with a sincere faith & pure conscience, then we have our temporary home. (Edited version of a Gospel Coalition article)
Cameron
