MCC Podcasts
Working It Out - Keeping the Faith Fighting the Fight
You got a little mini sermon in you, can you get that? We got that left in you today, that we do that before we go home? I think 51% of you nodded, so we're going to go ahead. (Laughter) Yeah, I know a lot of the up-down thing in church, you know, we laugh about that sometimes, but that's about us attending to the moment, and what's at hand, and taking that seriously. So let's stand and put our hands out like this, as you stand as we pray for our time in the Word, very briefly. If you're comfortable, just hit your palms up, and this is our symbol that, as a body, we're ready to look into your Word and receive from you this morning. And so pour out whatever you have, God, from your heart, from your Holy Spirit, into us, that we wouldn't miss it. Our hands are outstretched, God is a symbol of our receptivity to you. Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening. If that is your prayer, say amen. Amen, you may have a seat. Sweet day already. I want to read our text this morning. We're in the Book of 1 Timothy as a sermon series, and it's called "Working It Out." This is us trying to figure out how it is that we live according to what the church should be. We're in this to work it out together, and we do it as pretty inexact science. We do it in the Spirit of the Lord, we do a lot of grace toward each other, and we're working it out. And so we're studying 1 Timothy because it's a book where Paul wrote to Timothy who was pastoring the church in Ephesus and had some stuff to say to him. Here's our text for this morning. Here's the Word of the Lord. This is chapter 1, 18 to 20. "Timothy, my son, I'm giving you this command and keeping with the prophecies once made about you, so that by recalling them you may fight the battle well, that may say fight the good fight in your Bible." Holding on to faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and so suffered shipwreck with regard to their faith, among them are Hymenius and Alexander, whom I've handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme. Wow, ready for that mini sermon? So I brought with me my gym bag from the 80s. Do you guys have one of these in this color? Is that awesome? And, you know, not to wreck the rest of your worship time, but can you imagine me maybe in spandex that's this color? You know, I don't know. I know, sorry. So I got this gym bag in the 80s because I decided that it was probably time I've been a jogger runner for a while, but I thought about, I should join a gym and go in and do full body and, you know, I know the ladies love the big guns, you know, so I was going to go in and work the weights and, you know, I never really got there. I think I joined a gym or two. I've paid a lot of money in membership fees. Anybody have an 80s gym bag that sits in the corner of your office or now the back of your closet and it speaks of those goals that didn't quite get fulfilled? Well, there's my gym bag. I know Greco had one. I think he belonged to the Y for two years without ever going. I found this too. You know what this is? The little Berlitz Italian phrase book. I was going to learn Italian. Again, the chicks dig Italian, so... Once you've had Italian, yeah, never mind. Phrase book. And you know how long ago it was? Because here's the accompanying cassette tape that goes along with it. I just pulled this right off the shelf in my bedroom. I mean, I carry this around. I've moved this five times and four jobs and about 30 times 30 years. So I was going to learn Italian. I'm going to do that one of these days. I also found this book. I pulled this off my shelf. Same thing. I've packed this so many times. This is the classic Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities." This is a book every American, of course. It understands and is rad and is familiar with. Who's read "A Tale of Two Cities"? Who's lying right now with your hands up? Yeah. I haven't ever gotten to this. I just thought somewhere along the line I should probably read this book. And so I bought it. And it's lined up right next to crime and punishment and a whole bunch of other classics that I probably should have gotten through. And this book's all new and perfect. I stopped at just three illustrations. I stood in my garage and there was an unbelievable amount of these kinds of things, of ideas and plans and goals that were sort of set aside. I got a treadmill that's in pretty good shape somewhere there underneath the pile in my garage. You resonate with that at all? Here's what I discovered when I looked at all that stuff. Apparently, this stuff just doesn't matter all that much to me. Is that just not the truth? I mean, apparently, it's just not that important to me. But friends, when I read this text, I realized the message here is, "There are some things in life that are worth fighting for and holding on to." There's some things in life that are worth fighting for and holding on to. And that's what this text is about. That's what the sermon is about. That when Paul wrote to Timothy, he said in this deal, basically, "You got to keep the faith and you got to fight the fight because it is important enough." Our lives are full of things that we start that sort of then get pushed off to the side because in the end they're not that important. And Paul says to Timothy, when it comes to walking with the Lord, serving the Lord, living for Jesus, you cannot let it go and you have to hold on and fight the fight. Some things in life are just worth fighting for. If you go back to the text that this is Paul's message to Timothy. Timothy, I'm giving you this command in keeping with the prophecies. If I had to summarize it, if I had to paraphrase it, here's what Paul is saying. Listen, Timothy, here's the deal. You know the call of God on your life. We'll parse that in just a minute, this text about prophecies, et cetera. He goes, "You know what God called you to do when you became a Christian, when you got saved, when God touched your life, when you entered into this journey of faith, you knew what God had for you. You knew God's call and dream and vision on your life. Now, don't forget it. Hang on to it and fight for it. Some things in life are worth fighting for. This is how I would sum all that up. I think there's some stuff in Paul's message to Timothy that we can get a hold of. Let me just offer them to you in our not very long sermon we've got this morning. The first one is this, that Paul's message was, we have to hang on to, we have to, how did I phrase it? I could see the slide that I'll see it. There you go. Hold on to God's vision and calling on your life. Everybody, every one of us has come in a contact somewhere along the line with God's calling and vision for our lives. He's got a plan for us. He's got a calling on our lives. And when I say calling, you think, well, it's easy to think of Timothy or Pastor Jeff or Art or Ben. You know, it's Peter, you know, but he has a calling on your life. And I feel like I've said this a lot lately. I think my sermon a couple of weeks ago was, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, a lot lately, I think my sermon a couple of weeks ago was about us, you know, the story of God using us in the place where he's put us. But he says, Paul says to Timothy, you have got to hold on to what God's vision is for your life. And you knew what that was at the beginning. You've got to hold on to what God's calling is on your life. And you cannot let it go and you cannot forget it. Let me go back to the text for just a second and look. He goes, Timothy, my son, and that's always a great way to start, but I love that. There's a mentoring relationship there in the earliest verses. He calls him my true son in the faith. But you have some relationships with people like that here, my true brother in the faith. That's just the sweetness about being part of God's people. But Timothy, my son. But you also know when he says my son that he's going to say something really super serious, don't you? Listen, son, you hear that? Right? Doesn't that how that comes off? This is why I was so excited that after three delightful, beautiful little girls, God gave us, Tommy, because I got this son where I could say that, where I could eat all the stuff that was most important to me, and I can always now preface it with son. You don't do that with the girls, right? When the girls you go, sweetheart, listen, honey, pie, princess, it has a different feel to it. But now I get to live with my poor kid. Now, everything that's all pent up in me after all these years, I go, son, listen. That's why my girls are out of control, and Tommy is so perfect in all ways. Son, and we know something serious is coming up. I'm giving you this command and keeping with the prophecies once made about you. This is what he means by this. He says, I'm telling you this. I'm writing you this letter about how to work it out. I'm writing you this letter about how to live out your role as pastor in Ephesus and how the people that you're pastoring are going to live this journey out. I'm giving this to you, and it's nothing new. It's the same stuff you've always known about God's purpose and call and vision for who you are. Do you hear me church? Do you see what I'm saying? He's saying, you know what God had for you because you remember the prophecies that were made about you. Now, parenthetical thoughts, some of you were like, well, if I had some prophecies, that would be cool. I kind of know some stuff. Prophecies, this is them living in the fellowship of believers, walking together, using each other's gifts, somebody along the line who said, yeah, man, as we pray and worship, and I can show you some scriptures of both Timothy's calling and Paul's calling and being sent out. You know, some believers somewhere along the line said, man, listen, as we pray, I cannot get it out of my head, but I think, dude, you ought to be preaching the Word. Every time you talk, God speaks to me. And somebody else said to that guy, well, dude, whenever you hear from the Lord, it's often true. We ought to be praying about that. Timothy's like, no, you got the wrong guy. I suck. And they're like, no, I think the Lord is kind of saying this. Well, they prayed about it. They fast about it. And then they come to the place. And he's going, you're right. I think God's saying that. Friends, can you get your head around that way of doing stuff? I mean, that's prophecy. So that's somebody had the gift of prophecy when I'm there and said, I think the Lord's saying this. They all worked it out and figured it out. You can look that up in Acts 13 where Paul got called by prophetic thing, first Timothy 4, where Timothy gets called by a prophetic thing. It's these guys praying and fasting and listening to the Lord and working it out. We live like that too. So don't be thinking you don't have a call in your life. Don't be thinking you don't ever get to hear about God's will for you. This is how we do it. We live together. And people go, you know what, man, every time I'm with you, this is how God seems to show up. Okay. That's parenthetical. Because he goes, this isn't keeping with what you know to be your call on your life. Friends, every one of you has known at some point when you gave your life to Christ, when you got saved, when you were at camp, when you were at the, you know, when God, you sat across the room from your pastor, you were in the back row thinking that you could escape from Jesus. And that morning you gave your life to Christ. You caught a vision of what you could be the man or the woman that you could be for God, where every thought was going to be submitted to obedience in Jesus, where every day was going to be given to be in a servant of Christ, where every person was going to be an opportunity to love them for Jesus, where every dollar in your bank account was committed to his service, where every minute was listening to the lordship of Christ. You had a vision for who it is that you could be as a man or a woman of God. That's what we're talking about here. It's not just a specific one of you need to go to East Asia. That's not the deal. It's hold on, if you go back to the outline of the sermon, you hold on to God's vision and calling on your life. You hang on to that because you know what that is. Every one of us has a story when we began our journey of faith and it might have been young love with the Lord, it may have been a camp high, it may have been the beginning of our discipleship of growing, but we said somewhere along the line, some version of I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. I mean, I am his and I'm in. Now, I'm going to do this to the glory of God, so all my money and all my time and all my words and all my thoughts and all my days there for Jesus. That vision that each of us caught when we thought exchanged my life and my life plan for the will and the life that God would give me, yes, please. All says, you know what that vision was that God had for you and now you cannot forget it and you cannot let it go. You with me about what his point is here, go like this and I'll just move right on. I'll get going. You hold on to it. And the way that this looks generally, a couple of things he says, you hold on to faith. You hold on to faith. What does that mean? You hold on to faith. You hold on to living like Jesus is your Savior, is real, the Holy Spirit is in you and that this thing is really what life's about. You hang on to that truth because don't we get confused? We go through our days, our weeks, and we kind of just go, I don't really know about the God thing. All I know is I got to get on the freeway before 515 or it's going to be an awful commute and I wonder if I got any more Cabernet when by the time I get home. I mean, we just cruise through life, but he goes, you got to hold on to faith. You got to hold on to faith that God is, that I'm his, that Jesus exists, that he saved me, his spirits in me, and I live for him today. You got to hang on to that and we're like, oh, that's right. This is what Paul is saying to Timothy. You hold on to faith. You hold on to belief even though you don't see God in every minute of every day. You go, wait a minute, there's evidence that God's there, wait a minute, God got hold of my life, wait a minute, God's got a call on me, wait a minute, I'm his servant. We hang on and we walk with God and we try to listen to God, we organize our days so that we might get some time alone with Jesus and say, God receive you, Holy Spirit. You have ministry for me today. You want to do transformation in my life today? How do I live for you today? And we walk trusting that when we feel like the Lord has given us a direction that he's got to come through, you got to come through God, you got to come through, and then I'm going to keep going, trusting that God's going to come through for me and not just keep grabbing back areas of my life that I don't like maybe how Jesus is either not showing up on time or showing up in ways that I don't like and I'll just be in control of that part. Thank you very much. This is what it means. Hold on to faith. Hold on to the faith. He says, you can't let it go. You keep the faith, and he goes on to say, and hold on to faith and a good conscience. You know God's vision on your life, so you hold on to live in like God is real, and you keep a good conscience. That's an interesting thing to say, isn't it, a good conscience? I think that's an interesting way to put it. But see, in Paul's mind, the good conscience means obedience, consistency, purity. It's living it out. It's living out that vision and calling on our lives. It's going back, recalling the call that God has on us, recalling our salvation, recalling what we dreamt that we could be for the kingdom of God, and then going, I got to live consistent with that so that my conscience is clear. Because when we disobey the Lord, our conscience isn't clear, right? When we're inconsistent, when we say to ourselves, man, every dollar is the Lord's. But when we don't talk to the Lord about how much we should give, or whether we should be part of this building program, or how we spend our money, or what toys we buy, or how much we give away and wear, when we don't check that in with the Lord, that's inconsistent with God's call and vision on our lives. Are you with me on that? And our conscience gets violated, and what happens is, we live with some disobedience in our life, some violated conscience and lack of consistency in our life. We don't receive the Lord's forgiveness, we don't fail well, we don't receive the Lord's forgiveness and say, "I'm going to receive your forgiveness, and now I'm going to send no more." We go, "Well, God's grace covers me, and I'm kind of a loser, Christian. If I had to give myself a grade, it would be a C minus, and most people around me would kind of see pluses, so I'm not that bad anyway." We start violating our conscience, we're not holding on anymore to God's vision and calling on our lives, where we said, "I'm in. Every day, every dollar, every thought, every word, I'm yours." You hear me? God goes, or Paul goes to Timothy, you got to hold on to faith, and you got to hold on to a good conscience, because some people have rejected these. And that's the next part that I want you to see. He goes, "You hold on to faith and a good conscience. You hold on to God's vision and calling on your life, but he goes on to make the obvious point." He goes, "And don't bail out." You don't bail out. You go, "Some people," if you go back and look at the Scriptures, you go, "Some people have rejected these things, this faith and this good conscience. They haven't lived consistently, they haven't held on to the truth, they haven't remembered what God, the call that God has put on their lives." And so, they've rejected these things, and they have suffered shipwreck with regard to their faith. What an awful thought this phrase that he puts. He says, "You can't bail out. Bailing out as a shipwreck." We would call it, it's like, "Oh my gosh, my life's a train wreck right now," you know, right? That's what we would say. And they have trains. It was a shipwreck for them. "Well, I have to shipwreck." We, Paul says to Timothy, "You hold on to God's calling on your life, and you can't bail out. You cannot bail out." My friends, there are so many ways that we bail out on God's call on our lives. There are so many ways we bail out. And just to be oversimplified about it, for sure, one of them is just they're super active bailing out, right? Where we just look at a situation, we go, "I want to be here," or, "I want that," and "I know God and I'm out, so yeah, do that." And my young Christian life was full of that stuff because I became a Christian when I was 13. I didn't even have any opportunity to do anything wrong before I was a Christian, then after I was a Christian, then all those things came up, and I would look at stuff periodically and just go, "I so want to live for Jesus," like I got that beating in my heart, but no, Jesus, and I would go do junk. But I was a kid. It was at the beginning. And there's somewhere along the line, maturity sets in, and our mentors, our Pauls, the scriptures in our lives say, "You hold on to the faith. You hold on with a clear conscience, and you cannot bail out because it's a shipwreck." If I continued actively to make the choices I made when I was 15 and 16 and 17 years old back then, my life would be a shipwreck. And friends, you know, and students, some of the guys that I was with who made those same choices as we were youth group buddies, didn't get away with it, and their lives are car wrecks to this day, right? You guys know what I'm talking about. It's a shipwreck when we don't hold on to the vision that God gave us, for who it is that we could be fully devoted, sold out to Jesus' servants of His. So there's these active ways that we just completely can bail on God. But there's also these passive ways. There's these unengaged ways. There's these ways where we sort of just coast in our spiritual journey, and we don't hold on to our faith. We don't hold on to our good conscience, and we sort of disengage. And Christ becomes, and Christianity becomes, as opposed to us saying, "I'm in, Jesus is my Lord," it becomes this bunch of concepts and precepts for us. And we go to church, and it doesn't impact us in any other way, and what happens is this passive cycle, when we're unengaged, then it's very uninspiring, and when we're uninspired, we don't engage, and when we don't engage, we don't see the Lord show up, and there's no fruit in our lives, and there's no inspiration to live for God, and there's no glory shown round about us, because God's not showing up, and so we stay more engaged and more passive, and pretty soon we've wandered away so far that we've made a shipwreck of our lives. It's the cattle who nibble on a tuft of grass, and then go, "That one looks good," and then he will go over here and nibble on another tuft of grass, and then that one looks good, and nibble on another one. And hours later, they've gotten so far away, they look up and go, "I don't even know what field I'm in anymore," and we're lost. That's shipwreck. Think of the image of what a shipwreck is, friends. The journey is tragically interrupted, there's debris everywhere, we're lost far away from where it is, we don't even know where we are, we're lost far away from where it is that we should be going, we have no way to get there, we have no way how we're going to know how to get there, where we should have been sailing, this adventure on the high seas, on the ship going to some sort of noble place. Instead of that, we're paddling on a piece of scrap wood with a 2x4 hoping there aren't sharks in the water, and there's just debris everywhere, there's just mayhem in our wake. Paul says, "Timothy, you go back to what you knew God had for you as a follower and a servant of Jesus, and you hold on, and you do not bail out because it's a shipwreck if you do." And then he goes on to mention two guys in the text, you go back to the text, he mentions two guys who bailed out, and he talks about them four or five years later in the book of 2 Timothy, they're both mentioned again, they're people who are teaching untruth, they're not submitting to God's truth and God's word, they're not living right, they've bailed out, and they have all kinds of devastation in their wake, and he says, "You know what, these guys, I can't do anything with them anymore, they've not submitted to the call of Jesus on their lives, so I'm just gonna let them be under the Satan's teaching then." Because if they don't, it's the opposite of the lordship and the grace and the leading and the care and the ministry of Jesus, if we don't want to be there, then we get to be taught by the enemy and see if that'll teach us any sense. Are you kidding me? This is awful. And that, by the way, is not a punitive thing, it's in 1 Corinthians 5 as well, it's a work of God where he says, "Listen, if you're not gonna submit to Jesus, then you can go outside the church and submit to the devil, see how that goes, with the hope that it'll ring your bell and you'll come back to what's right." He goes, "I'll hand them over 'cause we can't teach 'em." Is this not startling? This thought? Don't let go of God's vision and calling on your lives to be a servant of Jesus, don't bail out. And I'm done, I'm just gonna make this last point, when you look at this, hold on to God's vision, calling your life, don't just bail out, never don't bail out. And then, you know, don't just hold on to it. He kind of has this thing in the text where he goes, "So fight for it." There's fight language. Now he goes, "Listen, I told you to hang on to faith and do a good conscience." But he's like, "But I want to tell you to fight for it. Some things in life are worth fighting for." And remembering what God said, what God called, the work that God did in our hearts, and the one we said, "I'm yours forever and I'm all in and I will serve you." You fight for that, some things are worth fighting for. And that's the way that we're called to live, that's where abundant life is found, that's what we're supposed to do, he goes, "You don't just hang on, you fight for it." And now, all of a sudden, this language comes in, this warfare language, if it was literal in the Greek, you would hear this kind of, it would say something like, "As a soldier who wages war, wage war in that good war to wage." And you know, Paul uses these words other places. He says to them that he goes, "Listen, no one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs because all he can do is please his commanding officer." It's the same word, he goes, "No one serving as a soldier," that's the same word as fight. So this says, "Serve as a soldier for it." It's war, and war means it's going to be hard, and war means it's selfless, and war means there's risk, and war means we cannot afford to bail out on the task. This is an intense passage that I threw at you in 20 minutes, but we fight for it because some things in life are worth fighting for. What do you have to fight for? What do you have to fight for? What vision and calling on your life has God placed deeply in you from the day that you were ate and you knelt with a Sunday school teacher, or the day you sat across the table from your spouse and said, "I think I get it, I want in with Jesus," or the day you sat here and said, "Now I'm surrendering my plan for my life with Jesus' plan for my life. What now friends today do you need to fight for?" I sat with a brother this week in a coffee shop, and he talked about some struggles his son was going through, and he said, "I haven't been a dad that's honored the Lord at every turn, but he said, 'I turn to my son and I said, 'I will fight for you.'" And it was the most significant words that have ever come out of my mouth, he said, "What do you need to fight for? What calling does God have on you to be his man, his woman in your world, with your relationships and your kids and your money and your time, my friends, some things in life are worth fighting for, and we cannot afford the shipwreck of letting go of our faith and our conscience and our obedience, because this is what life is about. May God challenge you, inspire you to live that way. Do you know the other place that this word "fight" is used? It's where Paul says in 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, "We do not wage war like everybody else." The battle we fight with, we fight with divine power. And God can meet you again today and take the shipwreck of your life and your inconsistency and your passive letting go, and he can knit you back together into the vision and the calling that he had from the beginning. And maybe today is a day where you go, "I'm in, I'm fighting for what God has for me." And what I remember my plan, my purpose was in giving my life to him in the first place.