MCC Podcasts
Working It Out - Series Intro
If your life is like mine, sometimes it feels kind of like you feel in that Christmasy that every parent or every household has. Where Christmas morning is coming and the kids are asleep, but you sit down and you've got like six boxes of complex toys to put together or bicycles and no instructions. They remember to leave the boxes, but nobody remember to leave the instructions. So you know that moment, can you get in touch with that moment, all the stuff has to get done by midnight or by eight o'clock or whatever time the kids are going to wake up. You want them to run out and find the bicycle put together or to find the toy all intact and ready to push the button. Thanks brother. But it's that life sometimes is like that Christmas Eve where you have more boxes than you do guidelines, more boxes and parts than you do instructions, but it still has to get done. And you find that sometimes life is like that, but when you have only the picture and the parts, if you reach into one of those boxes and you get some, grab some bag full of nuts and bolts. And you're wondering where in the world does this go. But if you're like me, you find that if you have the picture and then you can take all of the parts out of the box and lay them all out, the more you see the parts, the more likely it is that you'll be able to figure out how it all comes together. You have to find out what's in the box, look at all of the parts and how they might work. And then the more you see all the parts, the more you get to that moment where you can say, okay, all right, I see how this works. You know what I'm talking about? If you see all all the parts, for instance, here's a part. Can somebody tell me how this works? It's heavy, it's pretty heavy, metal, can somebody tell me how this works, or if it works, or what it works for in the first place? You can't, right? Who knows what it is. But if I show more parts, pardon me, I didn't mean to show that part so much. That was pretty good on the run. How about if I show you another part? Does that give you any clue this little donut part? How does that work? Where's that going? How does it fit together on this? I don't know. But if you see more parts, it starts to come more clear. Like, for instance, that pretty much clears it all up, doesn't it? It's got some kind of a motor, and it looks like something into which you screw a light bulb and some wires. Uh-oh, so you know a little bit more about it. And then I got it. It's a strange, scientifically challenged aquarium that somebody broke and took the ends off of, because there's this tube of glass. It's starting to look like it could be something. Oh, here we go. And then there's that one part that you bring out, and the whole thing starts to make sense. Oh, I see what it is. It's a barber pole. You see that? So this is an old barber pole that I have left half of on the stage here now, that I've uncovered in my dad's barn about ten or eleven years ago right after he died. And so I've had it wrapped in a blanket in my garage all these years. It's moved two or three different times. And finally the other day, a couple of weeks ago, I got it out that I'm going to restore that barber pole. But I started taking it apart. I have no instructions. I have just the picture, and was able to take that apart. And hopefully someday we'll put it all back together. But see, there's an example of how you don't have all the instructions. You just have sort of the parts, but the more you take them out and look at the parts, the more likely it is that you can come up with something that works at the end. You see the point there? That's a good illustration of it. Now we're going into the book of 1 Timothy. And the reason I used that illustration and actually make the point I've just made is this. We're going to approach the book of 1 Timothy as something that offers some of the parts that help life make sense. It's a book that says, look, here's this piece, here's this piece, here's this piece. And the more we unfold the pieces, the more we present the pieces about how Christian life, how life and Christian community works, the more we see from that book of 1 Timothy, the more likely we are to get to the point where we can have that same moment you sometimes have on that crazy Christmas Eve night. Oh, okay. I see how all of this fits together. I see how things work, thus the title of our series, Working Stuff Out. That's where we're going as we look through this book of 1 Timothy. Like I said earlier, we've planned to be able to take some time with the book. We're going to be stopping at points and actually even lingering on little subtitles or subheadings in the book. It should be a really, really fun study. We're looking forward to preaching it. And I'm looking forward to introducing it this morning. First Timothy, written probably around AD 65 by Paul, obviously to Timothy, his apprentice pastor, one of his young trainees. Timothy is the pastor of the church in Ephesus. So if you read the book of Ephesians, that was written a couple of years before, two or three years before the book of 1 Timothy, most likely. And Paul had visited there, seen what was going on, diagnosed some of the things that that local church needed in that area, that region of local churches needed. Puts Timothy in charge of the ministry there in Ephesus and perhaps even a broader ministry to surrounding churches, but certainly in that one town. And then probably has questions back and forth from Timothy, either through letters or through representatives. Paul may have written 1 Timothy with Timothy's letter to him in one hand, reading it, and then writing answers to it in another hand. But certainly at least Paul wrote the letter of 1 Timothy to this young pastor, Timothy, with an understanding of what was going on and what he was facing in that church. So in Paul's mind, here's what a Christian community looks like, and here's how a Christian community makes things work. And he writes those instructions to Timothy, and he says, "Here's what you need to do in order for your Christian community to work things out." And there are lots of different topics and subjects that show up in this book, and we're going to stop and look at most, if not all of them. The purpose of this book is made clear when we read the first three or four verses, and I want to actually do that. In 1 Timothy, beginning in chapter 1 with verse 1, the first three or four verses, and listen for what Paul says the purpose is, and have in the back of your mind this idea of working things out. What's actually true, and how do we take what's true and cause it to work in our context? Which, by the way, was a crazy context. Timothy was ministering a pluralistic context, a doctrinally and theologically confused and under assault context, a context where there was pressure to adjust what was true in order to not be too offensive and to fit really well. And you became confused about what was actually true, if not about how to apply what was actually true. Sound familiar? Because I was just meeting with, pardon me, about the cough, guys. I always keep my word. I was just meeting with the new pastor of Hillside Church for lunch recently, and I think that we have common hearts. It's going to be a good friend of mine, I think. And we were sitting and talking, and one of the things that came up, he asked me this question. Okay, so is it possible that it's a cop-out that he said, "I kept hearing this phrase over and over again since I've gotten here." Oh, that's just Marin. That's Marin County. He said, "Is it possible that we quickly go to that phrase and it's a cop-out and maybe it's us, and from there, it was a pretty interesting conversation. From there, we went to the conclusion that Marin is actually virtually, it's not much different at all from the actual flavor of things in New Testament times. So a lot of the churches that Paul planted, he planted them in places that looked and felt just like what we live in right now. And he and I came to the conclusion that's a really cool, exciting honor to be called the pastors here in churches here, where people actually dare to try to live out the Christian gospel in places that are just, in a time that's just as challenging, at least in our own way, as some of the things we read about in Scripture. And to be required to depend upon the power and the insights and the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, just like these leaders were. And we were getting pretty excited about being here and actually stopping the middle of lunch and praying, "Thank God for placing us here right now." And our churches and fellowship and bringing us together as friends and different things like that. Timothy is receiving a letter from Paul that says in effect this. Paul, Timothy, here's how you work things out in a community of Christian faith, where everything's all goofy, where everything's fluid, where truth is up for grabs, where the pressure is on to change that, adjust that, pass on that, minimize that, emphasize that. Here's how you make things work in that crazy context. Listen to what he says in these first few verses. "Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior, and of Christ Jesus our hope." For instance, one of the places will stop this will be next week's message. "Appostal, what's that? Are there still apostles? If there are, what does it look like? If there aren't, what's the point of apostle? There's a whole apostolic Christian church movement nowadays. What's authority look like? Who is my authority? If there is an apostle, do I have to listen to him? Or is it a her? Those are the kinds of things we'll stop and look at when we come across them in this book. But to move on, he says, "Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope." To Timothy, my true son in the faith, or my true child in the faith, he could have a daughter in the faith. In fact, we know Paul did. He worked through several excellent female leaders and invested in them and used them to plant churches. My true son in the faith here, this book to Timothy, we're going to talk about what it means to be someone's child in the faith and to have a child in the faith. I'm 58 years old, have been around Christianity all my life, became a Christian in January of 1975, and have studied pretty seriously what that means and worked fairly hard on trying to do away with the difference between who I am and who I need to be in the dream of being in Christ. And I still depend upon my mothers and fathers in the faith. I still call upon them. I need their wisdom. I ask them for input and advice, and I ask them to challenge me. And if I move to a new place, like when I moved here and I don't have mothers and fathers in the faith that are readily there for me, I build a community of mothers and fathers in the faith because I need the wisdom of those who have already lived a lot more life than I have, and I want to have children in the faith. I want to be giving what I have to somebody else, and if anything I have is worth keeping, I want them to keep it and maybe build something on it. We're going to talk a little bit about that. But Timothy was Paul's child in the faith. He says, "Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and from Christ Jesus our Lord." Those are three pretty important things to receive, but then listen to this. "As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain persons not to teach false doctrines any longer, just not to teach things that aren't true any longer." Which was going on in the church. Or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God's work, which is by faith. There's an interesting translation right at the end of verse 4 there. Paul is saying this, "Teach them not to focus on stuff that ends up being philosophical, conceptual only all these fancy doctrines and teachings." But instead, Paul says in another translation, "Teach them to focus on what ends up being the stewardship of the gospel, the things that are the opposite of just concepts and philosophies and crazy myths." Something measurable, a stewardship of the gospel. That's a word that Paul uses a lot in his writings, and I don't remember if it's exclusively Pauline, that particular word, but it's certainly excessively Pauline in Scripture. The idea of the gospel being a measurable lifestyle, something that can be given and experienced and measured, as opposed to concepts, as opposed to things that result in nothing but arguments or things that could be true or might be true. Paul is saying to Timothy, "Here's one of the things I want you to focus on. Focus on what can be lived. Focus on what can be bolted down." That couldn't be any more perfect. Focus on something people can see. Focus on something people can taste, the stewardship of the gospel, not just fancy concepts, livable truth. That's what we're going to do in our study, asking the question, "How do things work? How do we work things out as followers of Jesus, as a community of Christians?" That's part of many communities of Christians that are moving in the same direction and have the same longing and same responsibility from God for our time. How do we live in such a way that when it's our turn to hand off the baton to those children who sat right up here and their children will actually have a baton to hand them, working things out in Christian life? That's what we're going to be doing here in this text. We want to learn what Paul calls the administration of the faith, the measurable living of the faith, and that's what we'll be doing. We'll be working out things as we come through this book like grace. Not just grace, the philosophy, not just grace, the concept. How do you live with grace? How in the world does Barbara Jones, many of you know her, get to the point in her life where she is so naturally gracious? How do you do that? How have you learned that? How does that work? I was telling Pastor Brian from Hillside the other day, because he asked something like, "What I've been doing in your life?" One of the things I could tell him was, I was telling him a story about what he was asking about being a pastor that transitions a church, which he's doing right now with Hillside. This guy I've been doing there, and I was telling him about, "Man, you cling to God." One of the things you do is cling to God because there were some people in our church that wounded me so deeply that I have to confess to you, I just hated them. I hated them, I had resentment toward them, I never wanted to see them again. Yes, and I was actually standing on this stage preaching to you while I was carrying and harboring those kinds of feelings. I got to the point where the best I could do was to insulate those feelings and make sure I didn't act on them, but I had to admit that they were there. Come on, you know what I'm talking about, right? And I began to pray for grace, and I would grip my teeth and pray. Lord, find the best part of this prayer if there were any of them, and listen to them because I kind of am praying out both sides of my mouth, but get me there, God. And I shared with my friend how I got to the point where now I love seeing those folks. I cannot find one drop of resentment or anger. I love praying for them, I love hanging with them, I miss them when I don't get to see them. It's been wonderful what God has done, and I'm a tie, and so, man, I know how to present really, really well. And he said to me, "How did that happen? What do you account for that?" You know, I was going to give him my answer of, "Well, you read this book, and then you do this discipline, and you move it over." But the simple answer came to me this way. Well, I did ask God for it. I asked God for grace, and he gave it to me. We're going to deal with issues like grace. Like all of us becoming more like Barbara Jones, or even beyond Barbara Jones, more like Jesus Christ. Those are some of the, that's one of the topics. Topics like grace, making things work, sexuality, human sexuality, we live, where that has to be discussed. And how in the world do we believe what's true and still practice it with grace? Very delicate, very demanding, it's only for the mature to deal with that and not compromise either one. Personal growth, how do I keep moving toward a life in Christ that's inspired, intelligent, and involved? We'll deal with that in this book because all of that's there. A section on leadership, there'll be messages on faith. An entire subsection in this series on family and relationships with family and employer-employee relationships. This book deals with those kinds of things and more. It's a, pardon me, this is a series that's designed to look into Paul's instructions to Timothy and learn from them about how we're to be working things out. So we'll pull out all the parts and look at them and hopefully each week be able to say some version of "Okay, all right, now I see how that all works." What I want to do is take some time to pray as we launch into this series. And you have heard all you're going to hear from me today in terms of a message. I just wanted to introduce the series. I want to encourage you, please be reading First Timothy and get as much as you can from First Timothy. It will be a rich time together. We'll start delving into the details of it next Sunday and our preaching team is preparing even now for several weeks of study from this book. But it's a rich and beautiful book about working things out in a Christian community and in Christian life, piece by piece by piece. I want to caution us though against what often can happen. We can often spend so much time learning how things work. I spend no time actually working them. So I'm going to allow for a time of prayer and I'm going to ask the band if you'll come back up now while we get ready to pray. Time for us to pray and here's the focus of the prayer. It's going to be a silent prayer and here's the focus, here's the prayer. Your version of this prayer, God, as you open my eyes to how things should be, to how things work. Will you also open my heart to a willingness to work out the things I see? Does that make sense? Lord, in other words, I don't want to just learn stuff. I want the strength to do stuff in response to what I learn over these next several weeks. So as you give me insight, give me also strength and willingness to respond to the insight. Let's take some time in silence and let your version of that prayer trickle down deep in you during this time of silence. Teach me God and then take me there. That's the prayer. Let's pray that now, silently.