Series: Gospel Shaped Church 10/18/20
Week 7: 1 Timothy 3:14-16
“How one ought to conduct himself in the household of God, the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth”
This sums up well the theme of this and the second of Paul’s letters to Timothy. God’s heart is to have a group of people, His adopted family, that lives in strong support of the truth as God has revealed it to us. God’s ways are not our ways.
God’s intentions for us fly in the face of our natural sinful inclinations, our self-bloated world view and our common spiritual enemy that all conspire together to distract, derail, deceive, distort, diminish, denounce and destroy any of our attempts to uphold this truth, by causing basic dysfunction, confusion or ultimately, our demise.
Revealing the truth and living by it is our way of being salt and light in this darkened world. Jesus said we are to teach what He commanded and to obey it. This makes disciples. This sheds light in the world. What says trust, more than obedience to what the One to be trusted says to do? Is this not then the ultimate metric for whether we believe or not? Or put another way, one might ask, how can we know if someone trusts God?
We can know if that one does what God says. Obedience.
You might say, “well, to love is an ultimate way of measuring faith”. I think not and here’s why. Unfortunately that answer must depend first on what definition of love is used. This goes for the variety of definitions of any number of words in our world have come to have and in this variety, it seeks to dilute what the truth is. Only when we start with God’s standard for truth, His view of reality, His definition of words, can we safely place our trust. In other words, we are saying we trust what He says about this, not what you and you and you say about this.
Gaining power to control people’s lives and pull their strings is arrogant selfish ambition enslaving people.
Creating wealth for temporal satisfaction is a delusion that self medicates…
Saving the earth without saving the people it was created for is a pointless exercise, glorifying the creation instead of the Creator. But they’re just three great diversions from the pursuit of truth, given us by the enemy.
We become a pillar and support of truth by submitting to God by obeying His word. The truth.
In doing so, a healing or reconciliation begins to take place to help bring this life on earth in line with the Creator’s intention. One day, it will ultimately come together, but until then we dare not abandon the cause of the truth, God’s view of reality.
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