Tonight we conclude this series of sermons on Paul’s letters to his younger colleague Timothy; there were twenty-three in all. Next Lord’s Day evening we begin with one of the few remaining books of the Bible that I have never preach…
I tell you often enough that the best way to read the Word of God is to accept the force of its teaching and truth in any passage without necessarily seeking to reconcile that particular emphasis with other emphases that we find in the Word of God…
Text Comment
v.10
The “You, however” or “but you” is one of five instances of that short phrase — just two short words in Greek, su de — in the two letters to Timothy. Timothy has not been and is not like the…
It has been a month since the last sermon in this series, so a brief reminder is in order. We are in the midst of Paul’s last letter, at least the last of his letters to have made its way into Holy Scripture. He wrote while in prison in Rome anticipa…
It’s always important to remember when we are taking the Bible paragraph by paragraph that very often the connection with what has gone before would be more obvious if we had read the entirety of the chapter up to and through the text that we are goi…
Text Comment
Now the paragraph that we are about to read explicitly concerns the church’s teachers: good teachers and bad teachers are contrasted in various ways. However, there is little in the Bible that applies to the church’s leadership …
Text Comment
v.1
Four times in 2 Timothy, five if you count 1 Timothy 6:11, we have a short phrase with the singular second person pronoun “you.” The Greek pronoun “ su .” Three times we have “But you” (3:10, 14; 4:5), and here “Y…
Second Timothy is one of Paul’s most personal letters. I mean that in it he talks a good deal about himself and his life. There is no surprise in that; he was writing to one of his closest friends. But it is a reminder that human life is a s…
As you know there are three of Paul’s letters that are typically grouped together as the so-called Pastoral Epistles : two to Timothy and one to Titus. In the Bible, understandably, they appear in that order: First and Second Timothy and th…
Tonight we conclude our sermons in 1 Timothy; next Lord’s Day evening, God willing, we will begin 2 Timothy.
Text Comment
v.11
“Man of God” is a title often used of prophets in the OT but may be used in 2 Tim. 3:17…
Text Comment
v.1
You’ll notice that Paul describes the condition of a slave’s life as being under a yoke. It is a revealing metaphor not only because it likens slaves to an animal, for yokes are borne by animals, but is a …
Tonight is another of those sermons devoted to a text that deals with nuts and bolts issues of only occasional interest to Christians. They are important issues, to be sure — the Bible doesn’t talk about unimportant things — but they are no…
Paul has written Timothy so that he “may know how one ought to behave in the household of God” (3:15) and in chapter 5 he continues to offer some specific instructions regarding Timothy’s behavior and that of particular groups of…
We considered the previous paragraph last Lord’s Day evening with its positive view of God’s creation. Paul begins this new section by urging Timothy to teach the Ephesian believers the “things” he had just mentioned. Paul …
In the opening verses of chapter 4, Paul becomes more explicit in his condemnation of the false teachers who were troubling the church in Ephesus, ruining its reputation, and threatening its foundations. And it is not enough for Paul to identify t…
We have completed Paul’s lists of the qualifications for those men who hold offices in the church. But now we proceed to consider the church these men must serve, its calling, and so what theirs must be as well. Whether we think of the final ver…
We considered the qualifications for the office of overseer or elder last Lord’s Day evening. Now Paul turns to the qualifications for the office of deacon. There is comparatively little said about the office of deacon in the New Testament. There …
Remember, in this letter Paul is teaching us, as he says in 3:15, “how to conduct ourselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God.” These particular instructions, among many others that might have been given, are no doubt direc…
I had to think about how to treat this next paragraph. As you may be aware, it has been the focus of intense scrutiny over the past thirty years, ever since the feminist revolution transformed American life and profoundly changed the way people th…
In the previous paragraph, Paul has summarized the gospel that had transformed the lives of both himself and his younger associate, Timothy, and which both of them were appointed to proclaim. That good news is “Christ Jesus came into the world to …
In verse 11 of chapter 1 Paul had referred to the gospel of God with which he had been entrusted. He now embarks on an explanation of the gospel and his calling to be a servant of that gospel. The situation in Ephesus is still front and center in …
We are just getting started in 1Timothy, having taken the first seven verses of chapter one last time by way of introduction. But, as you can see from the way the editors of both the NIV and the ESV have divided chapter one, the four verses we are…
From Colossians and Philemon we move to the Pastoral Epistles, or at least to First and Second Timothy. They come next in the chronology of Paul’s life and writings and they happen to be the only two books of the New Testament that I have never…