Don’t Send Me Away

It’s good to see all of you that I know and for those of you that I don’t know, that I haven’t met yet, my name is Joel May, I’m the pastor of youth ministries here at Christ Covenant Church.  Maybe one quick introduction to my family will help this first illustration be a little more poignant.  I have a wife named Maddie.  We’ve been married for quite a while and we’ve got a 3-year-old son named Jack and a 1-year-old son named Barrett.  Jack would correct you right now, he would go, “No, no, no, Daddy.  I’m 2.”  Because he knows he’s about to be 3 in September.

But we have these two sons.  They’re strong-willed and opinionated just like me.  As I was thinking about maybe an illustration for what we’re going to jump into here in 1 Timothy chapter 1, we’re going to be in verses 18 through 20, if you want to go ahead and get your Bibles out, as I was thinking and just sort of living life as one does, an illustration came to mind just today actually, and that’s this – that there might not be a better example of reckless independence than watching a toddler who’s just learned how to hold a fork try and feed themselves at mealtime.  It is infuriating, it is something, it is a spectacle to behold, because what happens is that this child wants to release himself from the constraints of his family.  He wants to be completely self-sufficient.  He wants to cut himself off from any assistance that his family, that the structure of the household, could provide.  And what ends up happening is he sort of gets a little bit of rice or some macaroni or God forbid some spaghetti and he gets it on his fork and then he tries to bring it to his mouth and he just drops it all over himself.  So by the end of the meal what’s gone down with this child, who will remain nameless, whose name rhymes with Schmarret, what happens with him is he ends up making a total mess of everything and he completely deprives himself of actual food.  So he gets angry at us and he says, “How could you let me go throughout this mealtime not being fed?”  He gets mad and he starts kicking against the structure that would provide life and support and sustenance for him.

I thought to myself, that’s actually a great example of what happens when we reject, in our own sense of independence and self-sufficiency, when we reject the God-given designs and structures that He has put in place to lead to His children’s flourishing.

What we’re going to see in this passage is something very similar to that.  If you have been coming to evening service, you know that we’re going through this first pastoral epistle 1 Timothy.  This is Paul writing to his protégé, this younger pastor named Timothy.  What he’s going to highlight, sort of the big idea of this passage tonight, is the reality that the structures that God has ordained for the Christian life, actually provide safeguards for the substances of the Christian life.  So the structures, the God-ordained structures of the Christian life, they safeguard the substance of the Christian life.    

What happens when we reject that can be catastrophic.

Let me read this passage for us, then I’ll pray as we jump into this sermon.

This is verse 18.  It says:  “This charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you, that by them you may wage the good warfare, holding faith and a good conscience.  By rejecting this, some have made shipwreck of their faith, among whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.”

The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever.

Let’s go to Him in prayer.

Father, we would be audacious to come into Your presence today and assume that we know everything there is to know and assume that we can immediately figure out exactly what You would do in our hearts through a reading of Your Word, so we ask that You would do more than we can ask or imagine and conform us into Your image, even with this simple passage tonight.  It’s in Your Son’s name we pray.  Amen. 

So what we’re going look at here are sort of those three parts, the structure, the safeguard, and then the substance.

So let’s jump first into the structure, and specifically what does it look like?  What do we learn about the structure of the Christian life, and namely the structure of the Church through the relationship of Timothy and the Church?  So Timothy and Paul, Timothy and the elders, Timothy and his role in the Church.  What do we see about the structure of the Christian life?

Well, right off the bat we see that he’s being charged by Paul.  Paul says, “I am charging you, Timothy,” so we immediately see Paul understands that he has authority to charge this younger man Timothy with a task, with an objective.  So we know here that there is such thing as an authority structure that God has ordained for His church.  Paul is saying I charge you, Timothy, and I entrust this to you.  What he is asking him to do, he’s recalling what he started the letter with. 

So last week we saw a famous, beautiful aside where Paul in the midst of talking about the fact that Timothy needs to protect and safeguard the Gospel from false teachings, he then, as he often does, he kind of goes off and he says, ” and here’s the reality of how good the Gospel is.  Here’s how the Gospel has shown up in my life.  Here’s how the Gospel has transformed me.”  And he goes off on this little rabbit trail, ending with the doxology, and then he comes back and he revisits and he says, “All right.  Now let’s go back.  This is the charge that I’m entrusting to you in accordance with the prophecies that have already been made about you.”

So what do we see about the structure here?  Number one, that the Church and the Apostles and the elders have the right and the authority to hand down that authority.  So in accordance with the prophecies made about you.

Statement here.  Don’t worry.  I know in this good Presbyterian room some of us are going, ohh, uh oh, what’s he going to do about that?  Prophecies made about him?  Well, a lot of really wise commentators have said that what is likely being referred to here is what we’re going to see later, actually mentioned a few times, probably at Timothy’s ordination service, or installation service, is sort of how we would title that today.  In the laying of on hands, the elders, the authority structures of the church, prophesied, they spoke forth the reality that God had given Timothy the power to lead the flock and to shepherd the people of God, and not just the power but the charge, the role and responsibility to do that.

So Paul is saying, “I’m charging you with this.  I’m entrusting you with this.  This is actually something, it’s the external call that you need to receive and respond to, Timothy.” 

And sort of in my own language, if I can, he’s saying, “Timothy, as you step into this role, remember that you’ve been called by God, first and foremost, our great shepherd of the sheep and you’ve also been affirmed externally by the under shepherds, the elders of this church.  So, Timothy, knowing that, don’t shy away from or step back from the responsibility that you now have.  Don’t shy away from what needs to be done.  God is with you and we are with you.”

Now for a pastor and for elders, especially me as the youngest pastor here, it’s a huge encouragement, this passage, that the external testing and affirmation of what I sense is an individual internal call to ministry, can actually give me confidence that that is not just something that I in my own brain think, oh, maybe this would be a fun thing to step into, but that others have also said, “Yes, we see the Lord calling you to this.”  So if I can, as a young pastor say, I’m encouraged by this.

Timothy is a younger, again, younger pastor who’s being raised up, trained up, by Paul and the elders and then being given a call, being given a role.

To all the pastors and elders in this room, we need to find encouragement, we need to find comfort and confidence knowing that we have the Lord’s commendation because He has set up the Church, He has set up and structured the Christian life in such a way that we are meant to flourish and function in this structure of authority and responsibility.  That’s a good thing.

Many of you will know the name G. K. Chesterton.  I don’t know many Chesterton quotes, I have to be honest, but the one that I do know, I never know it’s from him so I always have to look it up and I realize that’s the Chesterton quote I know.  Here it is.  It says, “The more I consider Christianity, the more I found that while it established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”

You may have heard that quote before, but I love it.  It’s such a beautiful reality that within the Christian life, when it’s lived out as it’s supposed to be, then it allows the good things of God to run wild in our community.  That’s such an encouragement.

As a congregation, as congregants, a couple things that you can do here.

Number one.  Please pray for your pastors and elders.  Pray consistently that they would remain faithful.  Remain faithful to the calling that they have been given.  Remain faithful to guard and teach and preserve the flock of God.  Pray that we as pastors and elders and leaders would love Christ and that we would love His Gospel and we would love His body even more than we love to hear ourselves talk, even more than we love to see ourselves executing the functions and duties that we’ve been given.

And yet understand that we do as pastors and shepherds have roles.  We have responsibilities.  Namely to safeguard the truth.  To safeguard the Christian faith.  So that takes us to the second point.  First one is structure, second thing safeguarding.

Now this mention of Hymenaeus and Alexander is not just a random dis.  He’s not freestyling in a rap battle, and all of a sudden he’s like these guys are the worst.  No, what he’s doing is he’s actually highlighting a really severe issue, a big doctrinal problem that had risen up in that community.  Hymenaeus we hear about later in 2 Timothy.  Commentators say not the most common name in the world, so we can safely bet that within the pastoral letters if he uses Hymenaeus specifically a couple times, probably the same guy.  So what we learn about Hymenaeus is that his teaching that he’s trying to dish out there is that the resurrection of the dead has already occurred, that the second coming and the resurrection of the dead, the new life in Christ, all of those prophecies, all the things that Jesus taught about, that that had already taken place, it was behind us, it was past.  So that was his teaching.

Alexander we don’t know exactly, just to hedge our bets here.  Alexander, very popular Greek name.  We don’t know specifically is it the exact person that we see in Ephesus in the book of Acts, is it the exact person that we hear mentioned later?  We don’t know but what we can feel pretty good about is that he, along with Hymenaeus, are representative people, are representative of people who have rejected God’s Word, who have rejected God’s authority, who have rejected good teaching, sound doctrine. 

What has happened is that they have been handed over.  They’ve been surrendered.  In today’s language, again we would call that excommunicated.

By surrendered and handed over to Satan, Paul is saying that it is because of their rejection of the truth, it is because of their insistence on their own independence and their theological exploration and laxity and deviations, because of this, because of the consistency of this, they’ve actually proven themselves to be insincere about the faith.  They’ve proven themselves to be unbelievers.  They do not hold to the traditions that have been passed down to the saints.  They’re not truly members of the household of God.  They’ve rejected God and they’ve shown that they’re still lost in darkness.  They are still in the kingdom of Satan.

Now verse 20 is a subtle, sobering reminder that when we reject God’s truth, we don’t just become different or quirky or unique.  When we wholesale reject God’s truth and refuse to believe the things that Scripture teaches us about God, we’re not even just wrong.  It’s not even like, oh, the person’s wrong but like whatever, just let them kind of do their thing.  No, when we reject God’s truth, when we make ourselves an enemy of God, we’re actually waging war on God Himself and we’re waging war on the people of God.  It’s subtle, but it’s sobering. 

It’s also a stark reminder that being a Christian isn’t ultimately about denominations or Bible translations or music styles or choir size or even your seminary degree.  Being a Christian is not about these things.  Ultimately, verse 20, the fact that Paul is saying I’ve handed them over to Satan, because a Christian, you have to remember is about the reality that God transfers people from the kingdom of Satan into the kingdom of His beloved Son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Redeemer.

It’s not just about saying I like the church’s music.  It’s not just about saying I like that so-and-so is a good strong leader and they have a loud voice and I can hear them.  No, ultimately, being a Christian is about being transferred from death to life, from darkness to light.  There’s nothing more serious here we see than a distortion of the Gospel, than a perversion of the Gospel, because false teaching keeps people trapped in the kingdom of Satan.

You see how that works.  False teaching and error keeps people in darkness.  There’s nothing more serious then than a distortion of the Gospel.  The true Gospel is such a serious priority that God has actually ordained a process of excommunication in order to help preserve and guard the truth, in order to help preserve and guard His sheep.

That’s good news.  It’s also hard news.  We can be honest about that.  It’s a hard reality. 

Now keep in mind that as Paul says earlier, remember again he’s going back to an argument that he’s already made.  He’s going back to a charge, going back to content that he’s already touched on. 

So look back here at verse 3.  It says I urged you when I was going so that you may charge, here’s the charge, charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrines.

Look at down at verse 11.  He talks about being entrusted once again.  Verse 11, Paul is saying in accordance the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.

Now putting those two things together, the charge that Paul is giving Timothy, which with he is being entrusted, is to charge other people not to teach anything that does not accord with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God.  It’s a weighty call and it’s serious.  He’s serious about safeguarding the truth and specifically he’s serious about safeguarding the beauty of the gospel, of the true gospel.

That brings us to our last point here, the substance of the faith.  So we’ve seen the structure of the Christian life, we’ve seen how the structure safeguards, now let’s see the substance of the faith, the substance of the Gospel of the glory of the blessed God.

What’s the problem here?  Let’s go back to Hymenaeus here.  Specifically how would Hymenaeus’s false teaching about the resurrection have impacted this community?  How would it have had an effect on these young believers?

Well, Hymenaeus again was spreading a lie, a false teaching, that the resurrection had already taken place.  Now in theory you can kind of spin off a false doctrine and take it a few different places and you say, well, it might have ended here, it might have ended here.  But functionally, as I was meditating on this passage, as I was praying through this, the thing that came to mind over and over and over again was this idea of hopelessness.

So if someone is teaching you that the resurrection, the hope of new life in Christ, has already taken place and you are sitting here in your human body, how is that going to cause you to respond?  If you know that you’re still a fallen, wretched sinner and yet the resurrection has already taken place, how might you feel about the Gospel in that moment? 

Here’s what it might sound like, here’s maybe the message that Hymenaeus would have been putting out there.  He could have said, “Well, folks, got bad news for you.  Here’s the deal.  It looks like Jesus has already come back and unfortunately we missed the boat.  We missed the window.  We missed the resurrection window.  I guess everything that we’ve heard about the Gospel, all the promises about the new bodies and new creation and resurrection life and being glorified with Christ and risen with Christ and being brought into the presence of Christ, looks like none of that’s true, because the resurrection happened.  That ain’t our situation.  We blew it.  There’s no hope.  Twiddle your thumbs.”

That might be what that message would have sounded like.  Now hopefully you see the severity of this issue.  Hopefully you see that this message of absolute defeat is incredibly hopeless.  And you guys probably know this just from experience, that there’s nothing, can be nothing more defeating than hearing someone say that all of your biggest problems can’t be solved.  There’s nothing more defeating than knowing everything that is wrong with your world and your heart and your family and your community and your situation, knowing deep inside it’s not the way it’s supposed to be and yet someone out there is saying, well, bummer, because that’s the way it’s going to be.  It can’t be resolved.  Sorry, man, the window has passed.

Now Paul confronts this mentality over and over and over again in his letters, in many different ways, but even just this afternoon one of the things that I realized, and I’ll be honest, I don’t know exactly what to make of this, maybe someone can do a forthcoming paper in pastoral ministry or something like that, RTS students listen.

In the broad general epistles, you get a pretty standard greeting from Paul over and over again – grace and peace, or grace, mercy and peace, grace, peace, mercy, yada yada yada.  It’s a pretty basic introduction.  Sometimes you see him defending his own pastoral calling, his apostleship and he goes off on the fact that God ordained Paul to be an apostle before the foundations of the earth, but there’s a really interesting thing that he focuses on, actually in only 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus, the three Pastoral Epistles. 

Listen to the through line here.  1 Timothy you can see it right here.  It says, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus, our hope.”

It’s not coincidental.

2 Timothy, you can probably just flip over, and you can see something similar, a similar through line.  He says, “According to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus.”  So he’s encouraging them with this letter and he’s saying there’s a promise and I’m proclaiming to you all that’s true according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus.

Titus he expands it even more it seems like.  He says, “For the sake of the faith of God’s elect in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began.” 

I don’t think it’s coincidental that in his introduction to all three of these pastoral epistles, where he’s combating a specific lie, that the resurrection had already taken place and that now there was no hope for believers to gain new life in Christ, and especially not eternal life in Christ, he focuses over and over and over again on the reality that our hope is secure.  He says, “God, who never lies, promised eternal life before the ages began.” 

Listen to the way that Paul confronts these errors and he wants his people to know the gospel is true.  The hope of the promise of eternal life is what drives Paul and knowing who he’s writing these letters to, it needs to be what drives us as well.

As shepherds and as sheep, the thing that animates us, the thing that sends us out, the thing that controls us and compels us, needs to be the hope of the eternal life in Christ, which has been promised by God, promised to us by God, who never lies, before the ages began.

Really, who’s a better witness to this hope of the Gospel than Paul himself?  He drops two little almost Easter eggs, even in these couple of verses.  He drops these little notes here that highlight how much he experientially knows this to be true. 

Two words that he uses.

Number one.  They have made shipwreck of the faith.

And number two.  He calls them blasphemers.  Or he says, in order that they may learn not to blaspheme.

So in line with this hope that Paul has, let’s think about this.  Who knows better that even a shipwreck can be recovered from than Paul, who was shipwrecked and recovered from a shipwreck?  Paul knows that literally in the world you can be in a shipwreck and yet God can sustain you.  He can revive you. 

And if we weren’t sort of focused on this passage specifically, we would be able to go back, which we’re going to do right now, in verse 13.  Look at what he says – though formerly I was a blasphemer.  Yet he knows the Gospel to be true.  He knows that the hope of the resurrection is hope for those who have made shipwreck of their life.  He knows that it’s true for those who have blasphemed the faith because he himself was shipwrecked, he himself was a blasphemer, and yet God saw fit to save him.

Yet God poured out His love upon him and He called him His own, called him into His family.

That’s why when he tells Timothy to wage the good warfare, you have to know it is a good warfare.  It’s a good fight.  It’s a fight that’s worth it.  People need to know that it’s not too late for blasphemers.  People need to know that it’s not too late to repent and believe.  People need to know the fight is worth fighting, to get the message out there that it’s not too late to be forgiven if you have made shipwreck of your life.  It’s not too late to cling to the hope of eternal life.  It’s not too late to cling to God and hold onto faith and to be given a new conscience.  It’s not too late.

I’ll close with the lyrics from one of my favorite artists named Andy Gullahorn.  He has a song, wouldn’t you know it, called “It’s Not Too Late.”  He was at a training thing that I did one time with our staff and he did a concert, and before each one of his songs he would kind of tell the story about what led to him writing the song.  And this song, “It’s Not Too Late,” he wrote for a friend of his, who, to put it simply, was well on his way to making a shipwreck of his life, was well on his way to completely rejecting God’s authority, to completely rejecting the Word of God and to becoming a blasphemer.

He’s just telling the story and he wants to give him hope, he wants to instill in him that hope of the gospel, and the promise of salvation, and here’s what it says. 

It says:  “It’s not too late to change your mind, it’s not too late for the truth this time, it’s not too late to fall on your knees, it’s not too late for apologies.  It’s not too late to come clean, to face all of the fallout that there might be.  It’s not too late to understand grace is more than just a concept to believe in.  It’s something more real than your beating heart that runs to the depths of where you are.  It follows you, retraces your steps, whispers over and over again, it’s not too late.”

It’s good news.    

Let’s pray.  Father, help us to humbly acknowledge the way that we need to hear these words, whether we feel like we’re on the way to being a Hymenaeus or an Alexander, or whether we feel unsure about our role in the Church, or whether we know that there are people who we need to challenge, to step up and to instill with assurance and confidence.  Lord, we don’t know what’s going on in every heart in this room and certainly not every heart outside of this room, but we do know that You are the good physician, that You’re the good shepherd.  We ask that we would hear Your voice as Your sheep, that we would respond in faith, that we would cling to You as our hope.  It’s in Your Son’s name we pray.  Amen.