(Exodus 18:13-23; 1 Timothy 3:1-13)

We’ve seen a spate of high-profile sexual scandals lately; among pastors, the big name was Gary Lamb down in Georgia, and of course in politics we’ve seen the revelations about Nevada Senator John Ensign and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. I have to say, even as strange as politics can get sometimes, the whole story with Sanford is one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen in a long while. Usually those sorts of affairs are targets of opportunity—but Argentina isn’t exactly the next office over; and then to abandon his wife and four sons and the government of South Carolina to sneak down to Buenos Aires for a week (over Father’s Day, no less!), turning his disappearance into the talk of the tabloids . . . it’s hard to imagine how a man that smart could be that stupid. And this was a guy who would have been a real player in the presidential primaries next time around, if his life had matched his image; but now he’s wrecked himself.

The thing that blows my mind, though, is to see people popping up and defending these wretches on the grounds that “people deserve a private life,” and “what they do in private is nobody’s business but their own.” To which I say—and not just me; I say it with St. Paul—no! That is, and I say this very precisely, a damnable lie, because it’s a lie that can bring damnation. The first job of leadership is self-leadership; the first challenge of leadership is whether one can keep in honor the vows one swears. Someone who has failed in leading themselves to the extent of breaking the highest and holiest vow they will ever swear cannot be trusted to lead anyone else, or to be faithful to any other task.

Now, is that permanent? Does that mean that if your sin is bad enough, you can never be trusted to be faithful? No, for there is forgiveness and redemption with the Lord; restoration is possible, with repentance, and time for growth. But leadership isn’t a right, it’s a privilege, and the first qualification is real and demonstrated character. 

That’s why, when Paul lays out what must be expected of the leaders of the church—overseers, whom we would call elders and pastors, and deacons—he doesn’t talk much about gifts or experience or skills; indeed, even though we know overseers were expected to teach, he doesn’t even focus on their knowledge of God’s word, though that’s mentioned. Mostly, he talks about character; he talks about what kind of people should be overseers and deacons. Put another way, he talks about leadership not as a job but as a way of life, and how it must be lived, and what people must be like to be ready to live it.

This goes to the heart of the problem with the false teachers in Ephesus. The crisis in the church was, at bottom, a question of leadership—who would the church follow? Who should the church follow?—and the issue with the false teachers was at its root not an issue of intellect but of character. The folks pushing the heresy in Ephesus weren’t innocent seekers after truth who’d gotten a few of their points wrong—they were doing it deliberately. They were people like the late science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, who said repeatedly that he wanted to get rich, and that the best way to do that would be to start a religion; thus we have Scientology, and Tom Cruise has never been the same since.

 The false teachers in Ephesus had much the same approach, and much the same spirit. They had been given some authority—it seems pretty clear that at least some of them were among the leaders of the congregation—but they wanted more; they wanted to take the church away from Timothy and run it themselves. What their reasons were, we don’t know; but it’s clear that they were determined enough to refuse to listen to any voices telling them they were wrong, even the voice of God.

As such, Paul sets out to tell the church what kind of people they ought to listen to, and what kind of people they ought to follow. He’s already made it clear what message they ought to follow—namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, which he had proclaimed to them and which Timothy was continuing to preach; now he connects the character of the gospel to the character of those who are fit to lead—namely, people whose lives incarnate the gospel, showing its truth by the way they live. Overseers, Paul says, most be “above reproach,” and deacons must be “worthy of respect”; the whole picture of their lives has to add up, with no glaring flaws and nothing that dishonors God—to the extent that even those outside the church honor and respect them.

This is not to say that only perfect people are qualified to lead—were that so, no one would be qualified—but it rules out those who are living unrepentantly in sin of some kind or another, and those who have simply surrendered to their sin. A certain level of maturity in dealing with one’s own sin is necessary for anyone who would lead others in confronting, turning away from and refusing to turn back to their sin. We don’t need sinless leaders, but we do need leaders who show us by their honest example that growth in holiness is possible.

This is true across a range of areas. Sexual morality was a major one in that day, which tolerated a broader range of sexual sin than even our own; as the Presbyterian pastor-scholar Philip Ryken says, “Marriage was undermined by frequent divorce, widespread adultery, and rampant homosexuality.” Thus Paul insists that leaders in the church must, in the words of our denomination’s Book of Order, “live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.” (Not the most elegant way of putting it, I know, but it does make the point perfectly clear.) Sexual morality is not optional; it’s not something where you can say, “The culture knows better than that dusty old book”; it’s not something that’s private and has no bearing on one’s fitness to lead. It’s a necessity; it’s a requirement; it’s non-negotiable.

Why? Well, in the first place, because wrong is wrong, whether we like it or not. And as a practical matter, there’s probably no sin short of open idolatry that damages people as deeply as sexual sin; it warps us at the core of our being, and has power like few things do to pull us loose from the vows and commitments and promises that anchor and buttress us for godly living. We can’t simply accommodate ourselves to the way the culture wants to do things—which means we can’t afford to follow people who do. Christian leadership is, in part, an act of standing up to the world and saying, “There’s a better way—let me show you.” We need leaders who are willing and able to do that.

You can see this theme in other qualifications Paul lays out for leadership as well. Leaders must not be greedy—aside from an uncontrolled libido, there’s likely nothing that corrupts leadership faster than greed—but must be able to manage themselves; sins of lack of self-control are explicitly ruled out, and so Paul says that leaders must not be drunkards, must not be violent, must not be quarrelsome. Rather, they must have proven their ability to lead themselves and others, beginning at the most intimate level—with their households. (Even those who were single might well have had households, by the way, of servants or slaves.) As Paul says, if you can’t handle the people who are closest to you, those for whom you bear the most immediate and intimate responsibility, and if you can’t lead them in a godly way, how can you claim to be able to lead God’s church?

There are other things here as well—deacons must not be double-tongued, for instance; this makes sense, because the church entrusts its deacons with the care of those who are vulnerable. Elders must not be recent converts—it’s important to give people time to steady down and grow a bit before handing them that responsibility; name someone an elder before they’ve had time to learn how much they have to learn, you run the risk that they’ll figure they’re mature already and never learn otherwise. Elders must be hospitable, which seems odd to us because we undervalue the gift of hospitality; but it makes sense, because the leaders of the church should be people who make others feel welcome here. And most of all, elders must be able to teach, and deacons must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience: the leaders of the church should be people of the truth, people who know Jesus Christ and his gospel and are able to communicate that with others. That’s what this all comes back to, because that’s what this is all about. This is why Paul cares, because the church is being led astray by people teaching lies, and they need to sit up, realize what they’re doing, and start following the right leaders.

The bottom line here is that those who lead the church need to be people who embody what it means to live the gospel life, and who model that for the church as a whole. Elders, including pastors, and deacons need to be people who understand what it means to do all these things that Paul talks about here—sexual morality, gentleness, hospitality, not being greedy, honesty, integrity, the whole ball of wax—not out of a sense of duty or morality or compulsion, but out of gratitude for grace received. The people whom we call as leaders—whom God calls through us—need to be people who don’t just know the gospel up here as a bunch of things we say, but who know it down here, and in our guts; we need to be people who are viscerally aware of our own sin, and who feel the power and the significance of Christ’s redemption and God’s grace all the way down, and for whom love and gratitude for what God has done for us are driving factors in how we live each day. We need to be people for whom that reality shines through, so that others can see it in what we say and how we live our lives. That’s what it means, first and foremost, to be a pastor, an elder, a deacon; that’s our first and greatest responsibility.

For reasons of length, I opted not to take time in the sermon to address one much-disputed question on this passage:  when Paul addresses women, what wo­men does he mean? Most people offer one of two answers:  either wives of deacons (which makes no sense to me at all), or female deacons. These answers attempt to make verse 11 part of the flow of the paragraph, which is understandable—but, I believe, misguided. It doesn’t fit, and it doesn’t need to.

Remember, Paul didn’t actually write his letters, he dictated them—which meant he had a tendency to forget to say things at one point and then stick them in later. I think that’s what happened here:  in the middle of talking about deacons, Paul remembered something he’d meant to say and just stuck it in. On my read, this is a general comment about women in leadership (whether as deacons or as overseers) which is prompted by the fact that the false teachers in Ephesus were particularly successful among the women of the church.  In describing the qualifications for Christian leadership, he adds a comment specifically about women, not because he’s saying anything new or different—he isn’t—but just to underscore the point that under the circumstances, any women in leadership positions needed to be particularly careful.

(Malachi 1:8-11; 1 Timothy 2)

I said a few weeks ago that our big problem with 1 Timothy is that we read it as a manual for how to run a church; we reduce it to a practical handbook of disconnected instructions on church government. To be sure, this letter says a lot about how the church should be led, but to read it in that reductionist way is to miss why Paul is concerned about that; it’s to read these commands right out of their Ephesian context, and to fail to see that everything Paul says here is for one purpose: defeating the false teaching that is turning the Ephesians away from the gospel and destroying their relationship with Christ.

That’s true no less of this passage than of the rest of the book. We tend to read it, as we tend to read a lot of the Bible, as if it was written about five years ago to the contemporary Western church to address what we think are the most important questions—and it wasn’t. It applies to us and our situation, it’s the word of God to us and we must listen carefully and obey it, but it was written to different people in a different time and place and culture who had different issues and were asking different questions.

If we lose that and try to read this as a random collection of practical instructions, we miss the heart of this passage, because it follows right on from Paul’s concern in chapter 1. False teachers have arisen within the church in Ephesus, and they have set themselves above the authority of Timothy and the faithful elders of the congregation; they probably gave a wink and a nod to Paul, but only to try to convince people that they were teaching a higher form of what Paul had taught. In truth, though, it was nothing of the kind. According to the false teachers, only those who followed their teaching and the practices they prescribed could know the truth—they were the spiritual elite, and everyone else was cut off from salvation. They were preaching a religion that was elitist and exclusivist; it was only for people who were good enough for them, and smart enough to follow them. Against that, Paul hammers back that salvation is for everyone, the gospel is for everyone. That is what this chapter is about.

So, then, what’s all this about women? The answer is, not as much as you might think. The core of this passage is the first seven verses, which set out the basic imperative: God desires all people to be saved, salvation comes only through Jesus Christ, and the church’s job is to get that message out. Verses 8-15 address issues in the church that were getting in the way. It’s not just issues with the women, either; Paul has to tell the men of the church that they need to gather to pray without anger or fighting. This doesn’t mean they were fighting while they were praying (though they might have been); the point, rather, is that their arguments were dirtying their prayers. That’s the reason for the reference to “lifting up holy hands”; the standard posture of prayer in those days was standing with hands raised, and you were supposed to have purified them before worship began. Paul’s concern is that the men in this church were praying with hands that had been made unclean by their anger and their fights, and that they need to clean up their act.

With the women of the church, he addresses a different concern, because their behavior was interfering with the work of the church in a different way. It’s important to note a couple key things here. First, where the NIV reads, “A woman should learn in quietness,” the Greek word here and in verse 12 is the same as in verse 2, where Paul says to pray for those in authority “so that we may live peaceful and quiet lives.” His point here is about having a quiet and peaceable demeanor, not being noisy, disruptive, and quarrelsome—much the same as he told the men in verse 8. Second, in verse 12, the NIV reads, “I permit no woman to teach,” which sounds like a general command that applies everywhere—but that translation gets the tense wrong. A more accurate one would be, “I am not permitting a woman to teach”; you can still read that as a general command that applies everywhere, but it doesn’t have to be. Given the context, I don’t think it is; I think it’s here because it bears on Paul’s primary concern, which is the spread of false teaching in Ephesus.

If so, though, how, and what does dressing up have to do with it? It may seem strange to us that Paul should take the time to tell the women of the church not to dress expensively, braid pearls in their hair, and wear jewelry, but his audience knew why he said it. Every culture has its own set of signals. In that culture, for a woman to dress up and wear jewelry was the equivalent in our culture of wearing the miniskirt and the bikini top: it was understood that she was declaring herself available, or even intent on seduction. Thus for instance the Roman satirist Juvenal wrote, “There is nothing that a woman will not permit herself to do, nothing that she deems shameful, when she encircles her neck with green emeralds and fastens huge pearls to her elongated ears.”

Now, granted that what we wear affects how we feel about ourselves, that’s over the top; I suspect that many women really felt that as unfair and unreasonable, but there wasn’t much they could do about it; legally, a woman belonged to her father as long as he was alive unless she was married, in which case she belonged to her husband. Roman women didn’t even get names, they got numbers. You can see why the message of the gospel, of freedom in Christ and a God who loves us all as individuals, was liberating and greatly appealing to women in that culture; and you can see, I think, why the false teachers in Ephesus would have particularly targeted women, and why they found their most receptive audience among the young women, and especially young widows, of the congregation. Under the influence of those false teachers, it seems clear that some of the women of the congregation were using using their freedom and equality in Christ in ways that were extremely unwise and disruptive; combined with that, they’re spreading a false version of the gospel within the Ephesian church. Paul knows that Timothy has to put a stop to that and shut them down if he’s going to keep from losing the church entirely.

His concern, then, isn’t gender roles in the abstract—his concern is what people’s behavior is doing to the teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ in Ephesus. He’s focused on the particular need to root up and stomp out the false teaching there; to that end, he tells the women of the church that they need to back off, settle down, stop talking, and find their bearings again—just as he tells the men of the church much the same thing, in a different way. The key here is that whatever the people of Ephesus are doing that’s disrupting the church and its work and worship, they need to stop doing—right now.

That’s because, as I said a minute ago, the church has a mission, with which nothing must be allowed to interfere—and the false teachers are doing just that, and so are the men and women Paul addresses. The mission is to bring the message of salvation through Jesus Christ to all people in all the world. Paul makes this clear in verses 5-6. There is only one God, and there is only one mediator, Jesus Christ; there is no other God in whom the peoples of this world may find life, and no other mediator through whom they may find salvation, and if they do not find this way, there is no other to be found. And this Jesus gave himself a ransom, not for some, but for all, for God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The good news of Jesus Christ is for all, because his salvation is for all—all peoples, all nations, all languages, all times, male and female both—and the job of the church is to proclaim this truth to any and all who will listen, wherever they may be found and whatever they may be doing.

This is why Paul says to offer every kind of prayer—he uses four different words there, just to make sure his hearers get the point that he means every kind of prayer—for everyone. The false teachers in Ephesus were preaching a religion that was only for “special” people, and so bred a narrow, superior attitude. I suspect from Paul’s command in verse 2 that they even considered themselves superior to the rulers of the day; they saw themselves as the true elite, while the people in positions of power and authority didn’t deserve their eminence. In any case, it seems clear that they lacked any real concern for anyone but themselves, and so they only prayed for those whom they considered worthy of their prayers; the rest of the world could go hang, and in fact deserved to.

Paul has no use for this, and so he says, “Every kind of prayer shall be offered for everyone, without exception; and indeed, you should especially offer every kind of prayer for all those in positions of authority, not only for their own sake, but so that we may live quiet and peaceful lives in all godliness and proper conduct.” The command to pray for those in power is a slight digression, but well taken: if the authorities are opposed to the work of the church, it can be extremely difficult to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. At that point, it’s possible to have a peaceful and calm life, or to live life in accordance with the will of God, but not to do both. For those in authority, then, we pray not only for their own sake, but also that they will use their power in such a way as to help the mission of the church, or at least not to hinder it.

And to those in the church, he says that we, too, must do everything in our power to carry out that mission, and not to hinder it in anything we do. That’s why he tells the men of the church to set aside their anger and their quarrels, which are hindering their prayers—and no doubt turning off people who might otherwise be open to the message of the gospel. That’s why he tells the women of the church not to flout the social conventions of their day, but to adorn themselves instead with their good works—not because jewelry and nice clothes are sinful, but because their dress and behavior was sending the wrong message to people outside the church, giving the enemies of Christianity something to use against it. Believe me, more than one book was written against the church, and more than one law decreed against it, on the grounds that Christianity was undermining the morals of the Roman Empire. And finally, as many of the women in the church were preaching the false gospel of Timothy’s opponents, Paul forbade the women of Ephesus to teach. Anything to keep the false teaching from spreading.

The fundamental point here is clear: we’re called to be people of the gospel, and only of the gospel. We can’t change the message we’ve been given, and what it reveals about God, to conform it to someone else’s expectations or desires—not even if we think it will help us attract more people, since if we’re attracting people to something that isn’t the gospel, we’ve done nothing good. And we can’t let anything other than the gospel get in the way of proclaiming the gospel message—we need to be committed to doing whatever we can to reach whoever we can reach with the good news of Jesus Christ in such a way that they will listen. We need to be committed only and wholly to the service of the Lord, and to doing whatever is in our power to ensure that people who don’t have a relationship with Jesus are introduced to him in the fullness of his truth and love.

Which means that we need to be clear on what’s worth fighting about—and for—and what isn’t. Anything that diminishes the gospel, anything that seeks to take away from the seriousness of human sin, the glory and holiness of God, or the greatness of his grace, we have to fight that, as Paul fought the legalists in Ephesus. That fight’s going on right now in this denomination, and we’re committed to staying Presbyterian so we can keep standing up for the gospel. But what about the other things we fight about—such as the role of women in the church, which drives most of the preaching on this passage? I had somebody call me a heretic in print a few weeks ago because I don’t believe, on my best reading of Scripture, that the word of God forbids women to lead and teach. I don’t claim to be infallible—we’re all fallen, we’re all sinners, none of us get everything right, and I’m no different—and if I’m wrong, I pray God shows me differently, but as I’ve studied the word of God, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to; and in the meantime, does it advance the cause of the gospel for Christians to beat each other up on this issue, or baptism, or communion, or how we do worship, or other such issues?

No, it doesn’t. Those sorts of fights don’t draw people to Jesus Christ, they just draw lines that people won’t cross. That’s not to say that those issues don’t matter, just that getting them wrong doesn’t keep people from perceiving and being captured by the heart of the gospel, that there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all so that we might be saved from the power and penalty of sin and brought to the knowledge of the truth—which needs to be the heart, the essence, the focus, of our preaching, our teaching, and everything we do. It all needs to be about the gospel, for the sake of the gospel, in the service of the gospel, so that when people look at us, yes, we have beliefs about what women should or shouldn’t do, and how we should do baptism and communion, and how we do worship, and all sorts of other things, but so that people recognize that those things aren’t what we’re about: what we’re about is Jesus Christ and him crucified.

(Psalm 103:8-18; 1 Timothy 1:12-20)

“Conscience” is a problematic word. That might seem like a strange thing to say, but it’s true. It’s not the word’s fault, mind you—what the word is supposed to mean is plenty clear. In the New Testament, “conscience” means the awareness God has placed within us of his character and will, and thus of right and wrong; literally the word means “to know together with,” and it refers to the things we know together with God about the way the world is supposed to be and the way we’re supposed to live. We might even call it a sixth sense of sorts, as it gives us the ability to perceive reality in its moral aspect.

The problem, rather, is in us. Our sinful nature resists this—this isn’t what we want the word “conscience” to mean. We don’t want our conscience to be something that pokes at us and makes us face the fact when we’re doing something wrong; we tend to want to do what we want to do, and we want to believe that if we can convince ourselves we feel good about doing what we want to do, then it must be OK. And so what a lot of folks in this world end up doing is essentially turning their conscience off—refusing to pay attention to its promptings, finding ways to dismiss it, teaching themselves to feel good (at least on the surface) about doing what they want to do, and then calling that good feeling their conscience. That way, they can tell themselves (and whoever else might happen to come around) that their conscience is clear about their actions.

That, I suspect, is what Hymenaeus and Alexander had done. If you’d asked them, I’m sure they would have said their consciences were clear, but Paul says no; they are, he says later on, “liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron”—so damaged by the lies they’ve told and believed that just like a badly-burned hand, the nerves no longer work and they’re no longer capable of feeling. Their consciences aren’t clear, they’re dead. Determined to do what they want to do and believe what they want to believe, they have closed themselves off to the voice of the Spirit of God speaking within them to tell them they’re doing wrong; they’ve rejected conscience in favor of their own counterfeit, and therefore have shipwrecked themselves, and Paul is writing this letter to help Timothy stop them before they do the same to the whole congregation.

Unfortunately, we see this sort of thing a lot; and it can be hard to distinguish from true acts of conscience. Martin Luther launched the Reformation, in part, with an appeal to conscience, refusing to bow to the power of the Roman church because “to go against conscience is neither right nor safe”; these days, there are a lot of folks running around who want to be little Luthers, condemning the church for its teachings and declaring, “Here I stand.” Some are very convincing. What too many people lack, though, is the central point of Luther’s statement: “My conscience is captive to the word of God”; this is the foundation for everything else. If your conscience is captive to the word of God, if your focus is on obeying God even when it’s the last thing you want to do, if you’ve been training and strengthening your conscience in faithful study of the Scriptures and in prayer—as Luther had—then yes, to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. If not, then you may very well be going against conscience and not even know it.

The issue here is that at some level, we don’t want the conscience God gave us because we really don’t want what God is offering—we don’t want his solution because we don’t want to believe what he’s telling us about the problem. The word of God tells us we are sinners, rotten at the core, who need to accept the mercy of God, to be saved by his grace, through none of our own doing and none of our own merit, and we just don’t want to hear that. Paul pours out gratitude for the great mercy God showed him, giving thanks that “the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus”—and too often, we look at that and we want no part of it. We want to believe we’re basically OK—and if we run up against something we can’t get around, that everyone agrees is bad behavior, we want to redefine it as a disease; that way, we’re not bad, we’re just sick. We don’t need to repent, we just need treatment.

The Bible tells us we’re sinners, that we do bad things just because we like to do bad things, that the purpose of our conscience is to convict us of our sin, not to justify our behavior—and we don’t want to hear that. We don’t want to hear the good news Paul preached, that we’re sinners saved despite the fact that we do not and will not ever deserve it, solely by the loving grace of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ; we don’t want to hear that because we just don’t want to believe that anything’s all that seriously wrong with us. That kind of thinking is for losers, and we all want to think we’re winners; we want to believe that God saved us because we’re such all-fired wonderful people that we just had it coming. And the truth is, we aren’t, and we didn’t, and he didn’t. The truth is, Christianity is for losers—and that means us. Even the best of us.

The apostle Paul understood this, because he understood far more clearly than we do the depth and significance of his own sin. This was a man who, by worldly standards, was a clear winner, a powerful and accomplished person; he was a highly-trained and successful intellectual—in our day, he’d be a tenured full professor at a major university or graduate school, with a list of publications as long as your arm—who’d had an amazing record as a church planter, starting more churches in his career than most denominations can manage in a year, or three, or even five. He was an unrelenting and indomitable voice for truth whose authority was felt across the Roman world. No one in the church today has anything even close to the sort of wide and deep influence Paul had. And yet, when he looked at himself, what did he see? Anything God should be impressed with? No, he gave all the credit for all his success to the power of God. For himself, he said this: “It is a true statement and worthy of acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost.” Now, was Paul really the worst sinner who had ever lived to that point? Not likely, no; but his sense of his own sinfulness and his need for God’s mercy was so great that it drove him to make that statement—as it would for any of us who saw ourselves as clearly as Paul did.

This is important, because this last statement is not just Paul’s personal testimony: it’s the point where he broke with the false teachers who were plaguing the church in Ephesus, and where he called the church to do the same. We don’t know the details, but it’s clear that the likes of Hymenaeus and Alexander were preaching a religion of “you can be good enough”; if you just obeyed their particular version of the law of God, if you believed the myths they spun out of the Old Testament and lived according to the rules they laid down, then you didn’t need this “mercy” stuff—you could be good enough to please God on your own. You could earn your salvation.

The proper term for this, of course, is legalism; and though a lot of folks would be surprised to hear it, legalism is just as much a problem now as it was then. The difference is, most of our legalists take sin far less seriously, and so they tend to offer a lot of warmed-over self-help principles combined with a counterfeit version of grace—one that doesn’t actually require things like repentance, and mercy, and being agonized by our own sin. Instead of understanding that the grace of God to us is his free gift of salvation despite our unworthiness, they see God’s grace as saying to us, “No, no, it’s really not that bad—if it makes you happy, you go right ahead.” They fail to understand that God’s grace isn’t about what we deserve—that’s justice. God’s grace is all about what he gives us that we have not earned and could never even begin to hope to earn. Confusing the two is a major theological error, a fundamental misunderstanding of who God is and who we are (and pretty much everything in between).

And yet this idea that we deserve grace, that we deserve to be forgiven, pops up all over the place. We seem to think that if we don’t think something’s all that big a deal, God shouldn’t either; that if we have an excuse or some kind of justification for our actions, he should be happy to accept it; and that if it happens that there is something that needs to be forgiven, that God should just say, “That’s OK, no big deal,” and let it go, no cost to us or anybody else. It’s the idea that God just wants us to be happy and fulfilled on our own terms, and that he’s good with anything we think will get us there. It’s an idea which is appealing, and widespread—and straight from the pit of Hell.

There are all too many people who want to believe, as the great Christian thinker H. Richard Niebuhr put it, that “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross”; but that isn’t the truth. Our sin is real, whether we want to believe it or not, and so is God’s inability to tolerate it; and Christ didn’t come to tell us all we’re OK, he came to save us from the fact that we’re not. The good news of the gospel isn’t “I’m OK, you’re OK”; it isn’t that if you really want to do something, and you feel good about doing it, God will tell you to go ahead; it isn’t that we’re good enough for God, or that we can make ourselves good enough for God, or even that God’s too good to let such wonderful people as us go. The good news of the gospel is that yes, we are sinners, yes, there really is a problem with us, and that God has fixed that problem, because Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. The good news of the gospel has nothing to do with lessening our sin and our guilt; it has everything to do with the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace of God, this spectacular gift we have been given, which overwhelms our sin and guilt, washing it all away through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit.

(Exodus 20:1-21; 1 Timothy 1:1-11)

While we were living in British Columbia, the governing party—a socialist labor party called the New Democratic Party, or NDP—held a leadership race; the provincial premier, a deeply unpopular little mountebank called Glen Clark, got himself indicted for corruption, so they had to replace him. It was a circus, as BC politics tended to be, and produced some truly funny moments. One of my favorites came from the Agricultural Minister, Corky Evans, who had something of a country-bumpkin image which he liked to play up for comic effect. In announcing his candidacy for party leadership, he told the story of the time he had decided to build a house for his family; being impatient, he didn’t want to take the time to put in a foundation, so he just built the house right on the ground. It seems to have come as a surprise to him when the house began to sink. As he told the crowd, this left him with two choices; he could either tear down the house, or lift it up and put a foundation under it. Either way, it was going to be a very messy business.

Now, Corky Evans used this to describe the state of his party, but it applies just as well to the church. There is and always has been the tendency to try to build the church with, and on, and out of, human efforts. Some churches are built with music; some are built on one person’s charisma; some are built out of programs. Some are built by spending lots of money on advertising and entertaining Sunday services. Then there’s our denomination, the PC(USA), which has concluded that its polity—its structure of governance—is the only thing keeping it together, and is now trying to keep dissident congregations from leaving by threatening to take their property if they do.

The problem is, to build a church in such a way is to do what Corky Evans did: it’s to build a house without a foundation. If you try to build a church on the most popular music, or the most entertaining preaching, or the most exciting service, or the best structure, or what have you, you may appear to succeed for a time; you may produce a large organization, with lots of members and money and a high profile in the community. What you will not have, in any meaningful sense, is a church, and so it will not endure. Sooner or later, it will begin to sink, leaving you with only two options: either tear the whole thing down, or try to lift it up and put a foundation under it, because without the proper foundation the building cannot stand. And as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, there is only one foundation on which the church can be built, and that is Jesus Christ; which means it must be built with the truth of who Christ is and what he taught if it is to last.

That’s the value of 1 Timothy for us, and why we’ll be spending the next few weeks in this book. It’s often treated as a handbook for church operations, because of its practical instructions on such matters as the qualifications for elders and deacons; but that misses what’s really going on here. You see, Paul didn’t write this letter to give Timothy a refresher course in church government, he wrote it because heresy had broken out in Ephesus. Since Paul’s departure for Jerusalem, false teachers had popped up who were pushing some really strange things, and Timothy needed some help in dealing with them. One reason Paul wrote this letter—which he intended for the whole church, not just for Timothy—was to throw his own considerable authority behind Timothy, to buttress his position; but as well, he wrote to remind both Timothy and his church of some very important truths which were in danger of being lost in Ephesus.

This includes the concern for truth itself—the understanding, as I said a moment ago, that the church must be built with the truth of who Christ is and what he taught, and thus that false teaching is a very serious problem. There are a lot of folks who don’t see that, because they assume that what you believe matters less than why and how you believe it; but Paul understands that it doesn’t work that way. The teaching of the truth produces “love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith”; to wander off from the truth, even out of the best of motives, interferes with that and detracts from it. If we leave the truth of God for our own inventions, our heart isn’t pure even if we think it is, and our conscience isn’t good even if we’ve filed it down enough to keep it quiet, and so even if our faith is completely sincere, our love cannot be true.

This means that we must be rooted in Scripture, and must accept its authority; we must let it define us, rather than claiming the right to define it, because it is, in Luther’s phrase, “the cradle that contains the Christ.” It’s through this book that God has spoken to tell us who he is—and to show us who he is, in Jesus. If we deviate from its teachings, as Timothy’s opponents in Ephesus were doing, then we distort our understanding of Jesus and wind up worshiping a false Christ—which distorts everything else about our faith and life. When the leaders of the church turn away from Scripture, this effect is multiplied, distorting the whole church; this is why Paul is so concerned in this letter for how the church is to be led, because false teachers can do damage far beyond themselves.

Only the true gospel builds us up in the love of God; only the true teaching of Scripture, inspired by the Spirit, shows us Jesus in all his true glory. Only submitting ourselves to be transformed by the truth of God, rather than seeking to conform his truth to our own ideas, will fit us to be built up together as the people of God. God calls us to be the body on earth that contains his body, just as the Scriptures are the word that holds his Word; to answer his call, we must be faithful not to teach any different doctrine, not to pursue our own idea of truth, but to submit to the sound teaching that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he has entrusted once for all to the saints.

What does this look like? Well, consider Paul’s greeting. He describes himself as “an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope.” In this, we see present, past and future all together. Paul’s present, his daily life, is defined by his relationship with Jesus, and it’s that and that alone that gives him his identity. He is in Christ, and Christ has called him to a particular task, and it’s that call that defines his life and who he is. Everything else is secondary. In the past, he looks back to God’s saving work, accomplished through Jesus, which is for him—not just God the Savior, but God our Savior, including him—which is the root from which his whole life, every part of it, grows. And his future is sure in “Christ Jesus our hope,” as he looks forward to the day when Jesus will return in power and glory to judge and redeem the world. He sees his life, at every point, as existing on a line which stretches right from the beginning of God’s saving work in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ through history to its conclusion at the glorious return of Christ; that and that alone is the context for everything he experiences and everything he does. May it be so for us as well.