Titus 1:15-16

Everything is pure to people who are pure. But if people are defiled or faithless, nothing is pure for them; even their mind and conscience are defiled.

They declare that they know God, but they deny him by what they do. They are detestable and disobedient, and useless for any good work.

First off, this verse (15) has been misused, abused, taken out of context to justify…whatever. Let’s be clear that Paul is referring specifically to Jewish food laws and ritual purity. Some people were saying that you had to keep Jewish food laws in order to become a Christian.

Well, all foods had been declared clean to eat, sooooo sorry ’bout your old eating requirements.

At the heart of this passage is what Jesus taught—that purity is a matter of inner disposition, not external performance, adherence to ritual, or avoidance of the “unclean”.

The reason everything was impure for those who Paul calls “defiled or faithless”, is because their minds and consciences were corrupted—the place out of which flows who you really are and how you see the world.

The word translated “mind” is the Greek word nous, for which we have no great English equivalent. You might say it is our spiritual receptive capacity, our deep understanding, receptive capacity of the intellect, or the comprehension. It’s like a little radio inside of you which can actually be tuned in to the voice of God (not necessarily audible). The nous can be trained to register or perceive God speaking and moving.

If that is off, everything is off, so that you see the good that God has made as impure or corrupt. Impurity is in their souls, not in God’s created world. Since their nous is defiled, everything appears impure to them, and, therefore needs legalistic regulation.

How ironic that “by avoiding what they consider ritually detestable, the false teachers become detestable themselves….with all their attention to minutiae of the Mosaic law, they are still found to be ‘disobedient’ because they mistakenly reject true Christianity (which centers on salvation by grace through faith) in favor of their own brand of religion.” (Andreas Kostenberger)

Professing to know God, they were not even fit for Kingdom work, since they did not first surrender their internal lives to Christ who announced and inaugurated said Kingdom.

2 Timothy 4:3

The time is coming, you see, when people won’t tolerate healthy teaching. Their ears will start to itch, and they will collect for themselves teachers who will tell them what they want to hear.

It’s interesting to me, as I’ve studied this verse, that it’s not just the obvious “I don’t want to feel conviction, tell me what is pleasant” going on here. Though that is definitely a factor.

The other element is boredom.

There is this underlying boredom, apathy, annoyance.

People were becoming bored with hearing the truth, with hearing healthy teaching, or sound doctrine, as some translations put it.

How do people tire of hearing the deep truth of the gospel? How does one become bored with the incompressible depth and beauty of the incarnation, cross, and resurrection??

By desiring to have your ears tickled—craving something “new”. By developing an insatiable appetite for the novel. To have your ears tickled, as some Bibles have it, is to desire to hear only what one enjoys, instead of desiring to hear the truth, whether enjoyable or not.

We must be so careful of this, and keep ourselves in check.

Do you want to hear from God at the Sunday service? Or do you want to hear a great, interesting sermon with fun stories? We’re not saying they’re mutually exclusive, but what do you crave?

I remember years ago when I first started hearing people say things like, “You should come to our church, the pastor is really funny and tells such good stories.”

Uhhhh, that’s ok, I can buy tickets for when I want that sort of thing. Last time I checked, preaching and teaching was to hear from God.

2 Timothy 1:6

For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you…

We all have the gift of God within us, which is the Holy Spirit. We also have other gifts to enact God’s mission in the world. All of us do.

We do not need any new ingredients, we just need to stir up what is already in us.

Some translations have “stir up” or “fan into flame” for “rekindle”.

God has done His part in giving us His Spirit when we believed on Jesus. It is our part to fan it into flame, to stir it up so that God’s Spirit is an active ingredient in our lives and bodies and not a dormant one.

Remember what we said a few days ago, that grace is not opposed to effort, it’s opposed to earning.

Hear what John Chrysostom said of this verse over sixteen hundred years ago:

For it requires much zeal to stir up the gift of God. As fire requires fuel, so grace requires our alacrity, that it may be ever fervent….For it is in our power to kindle or extinguish this grace….For by sloth and carelessness it is quenched, and by watchfulness and diligence it is kept alive. For it is in you indeed, but you must render it more vehement, that is, fill it with confidence, with joy and delight.

2 Timothy 1:7

for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

If you’re living in fear or despair because of the current political climate, then you need to stir it up.

Stir up the Spirit within you.

Because the Holy Spirit is not cowering in fear at what is going on in the world.

God’s Spirit always operates in power, in love, and in self-discipline (or sound judgment).

But as Chrysostom said, we do have the power to kindle or quench the Spirit of God within us.

1 Timothy 6:8

If we have food and clothing, we should be satisfied with it.

Do you have anything to eat today?

Do you have anything to wear?

Do you have Christ?

Is that enough?

Are you satisfied?

Or do you [think you] need more?

People who want to get rich, by contrast, fall into temptation and a trap, and into many foolish and dangerous lusts which drown people in devastation and destruction.

And I think we need to cautious not to say, “Oh I don’t want to be rich” thinking always of those who have a ton more than we do. The idea I think is that if we’re wanting much more than basic food and clothing when it comes to material possessions, then we need to take a moment to examine why, and stop ourselves before we fall down the very slippery slope of “keeping up” and thinking we need more than we do to be satisfied in this extremely short life as we know it.

We brought nothing into the world, after all, and we certainly can’t take anything out.

You never see a U-Haul being pulled behind a hearse, as they say.

1 Timothy 5:3,4, & 8

Take care of any widow who has no one else to care for her.

But if she has children or grandchildren, their first responsibility is to show godliness at home and repay their parents by taking care of them. This is something that pleases God.

If anyone doesn’t take care of their own relatives, especially their own household, thy have denied the faith; they are worse than unbelievers.

This is simply what we do.

We take care of widows. We care for those who cannot care for themselves or have no family to do so.

In following Jesus, this is nothing special, in a sense.

I remember when I was working at Outreach, Inc. with homeless youth, and a pastor of mine made the observation, “It’s kind of sad that we call this ‘cutting edge’ ministry. Shouldn’t this just be normal, run-of-the-mill Christian ministry?”

YES!

He got it.

Taking care of those in various states of difficulty, our immediate family first, is plain-jane, vanilla Christian ministry. It’s not going above and beyond our call to duty. It’s more like doing the bare minimum.

And it pleases God.

So let’s not break our arms patting ourselves on the back.

Let’s just make sure we’re doing what we’re called to do, and not for thanks, not to feel good inside, but because it is right.

1 Timothy 4:7

Go into training in godliness!

Last night, Ana and I, along with a friend, were able to see one of my favorite authors, Richard Foster, speak at a church up in Marion, Indiana. Foster has been deeply formative for me, a spiritual mentor from far away. He is retiring from public work, and visiting ten cities this year on his way out. The title for the small event was “Discovering a With-God Kind of Life”  and also marked the 40th anniversary of his awesome book Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth.

I held off writing today’s Ripple earlier, thinking I may want to write a reflection on the evening, and serendipitously, Foster referred to 1 Timothy 4:7 for a significant portion of the evening.

So on with my reflection on his reflections!

Richard said he wrote Celebration of Discipline out of his observation in the 70s that so many Christians had no idea of how to “grow in grace” (2 Peter 3:18). If grace is defined as “unmerited favor”, how do we grow in unmerited favor?

We first must notice that the opposite of grace is earning, not effort.

We grow in grace, in godliness, through training.

Train yourselves in godliness.

Grace is God’s part, training is our part.

The means of grace are the spiritual exercises, the disciplines. The disciplines simply place us before God as a living sacrifice. Once we are before God, we let them go, for the exercises have no merit in and of themselves. Again, they are only a means.

This takes a lifetime–to be formed into the image of Christ–because the trouble with living sacrifices is that they are always trying to crawl off the altar!

Training vs. Trying.

We must train the deep habit structures within us so that, over time, we start responding naturally with patience, gentleness, joy, peace.

We don’t just try real hard to be patient or peaceful or humble.

We train through exercise—the spiritual disciplines such as solitude, silence, meditation, study, worship, service, fasting…

If you want to run a marathon, you don’t go outside and try to run 26 miles. Yikes.

If you want to bench press 300 lbs., you don’t load it on the bar and try to press it. Ouch!

You train.

Over time.

And if you’re diligent in your training, over time, you will grow in grace. You will actually grow in godliness, and the deep habits and natural responses within you will be transformed into the habits, responses, and mind of Christ.

Some pastors who shared last nite said that the disciplines are a pathway to freedom, opening us up for new life, renewal, and renovation of our heart.

1 Timothy 3:16

Indeed, the mystery of godliness is great:

He was revealed in the flesh, 

And vindicated by the Spirit;

He appeared to angels,

And was announced to Gentiles;

He was believed in the world,

And taken up in glory.

What a wonderful little six-line credal confession we have here. With its poetic nature, this is likely a very early Christian hymn Paul is quoting—which is kinda cool ponder.

The “mystery of godliness” he is talking about is God’s salvation plan which was in mind all along and revealed at just the right time. In a word, Jesus. Jesus is God’s plan to unite humanity and divinity.

We have the Gospel in this compact confession. So it would be good, and not terribly difficult, to memorize this song for frequent rumination.

Let’s go through the hymn line by line, hopefully giving you a little different wording or angle on the Gospel, and, therefore, perhaps a deeper appreciation of it.

Line 1

Jesus’s human life was a divine manifestation. We call this the “incarnation”. The crucifixion is to be understood as the ultimate purpose and climax of Jesus’s pre-resurrection stage of existence. “Authentic Christian existence (“godliness”) is linked to the divine unveiling of Christ ‘in flesh.’ ”

Line 2

God’s response to the crucifixion is Jesus’s vindication—God’s demonstration of his innocence. Jesus entered his second stage of human existence by means of the resurrection. This is the final stage of existence for which all believers are destined. “The humanity of Christ in its two stages is the means by which God’s salvation mystery is revealed.”

Line 3

Likely refers to Christ’s resurrection appearances before angelic powers, both holy and fallen, displaying his victory and the meaning of the resurrection to the heavenly powers.

Line 4

“Christology develops naturally into missiology.” The divine promise from the OT that all the nations would be blessed is fulfilled in the Christ-event, and also through human declaration of it. We have quite a part to play—to reach the whole world with this message of God’s salvation plan.

Line 5

The Christian mission is effective because Christ is the content of the proclamation and the one in whom belief is placed.

Line 6

The exaltation of Christ—his glorification. Jesus was and is confirmed by God and they are one. Jesus is at God’s right hand in the heavenly realm.

These thoughts come from scholar Philip Towner in his beast of a commentary on the letters to Timothy and Titus. I got so much out of it and was blown away, sharing here about one-tenth of what I read about. Wow. Deep waters. Love the boundlessness of the Holy Spirit.

I know this is a bit long, but would like to leave you with Towner’s summary of this hymn:

The hymn establishes a balance that rightly begins with the fundamental Christ-event. But the central place of human response and responsibility in mission is essential to the salvation plan of God. It is actually almost a misnomer to call this piece a “Christ Hymn,” for its solemn purpose is to reiterate in the present context the intimate connection that exists between Creator and creation—a connection that God has reestablished through the incarnation and death of his Son. It is thus a hymn about restoration and wholeness—the reconciliation of the divine and the human into a unified relationship through the human experience of Christ. At present, the church is to identify with the experience of Christ in suffering and witness, its hope made sure and purpose for doing so grounded in the fact of his resurrection, vindication, and glorious exaltation.

1 Timothy 2:1-4

So, then, this is my very first command: God’s people should make petitions, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings on behalf of all people—on behalf of kings, and all who hold high office so that we may lead a tranquil and peaceful life, in all godliness and holiness.

This is good; it is acceptable with God our savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to know the truth.

Do you pray for Donald Trump?

Or just complain about him?

Some things in Scripture are more super clear than others. One of the more clear directives we find is that we are to pray all the time for all kinds of people—including government leaders– in all kinds of ways. And I don’t think that we would be so directly directed to pray if it didn’t do any good, if there was no point to it. (Another clear directive is to not be a complainer.)

I still wonder what all God wants to do, yet waits on us to pray as a people for.

There’s that old quote, I believe from Chesterton, that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. This is how I feel about prayer. I’m not sure I’ve ever run into anybody who really prayed and found it to be pointless or completely ineffective.

But I’ve met countless people who don’t make the time to pray.

We start with what we know, praying in accordance with God’s will—what we know God wants. God wants all people to be saved and to come to know the truth.

What if we committed to praying for this for all kinds of people including government leaders? If it was appropriate for the first century church to pray for governing leaders with Nero on the throne, I’m gonna take a wild guess that it is appropriate for 21st century Americans to pray for governing leaders, for the whole world.

Oh what would happen if we really prayed….

What would change?

In us?

In the world?

Let’s find out.