Text: 1 Tim 4:6-10, Title: The Next Super Bowl, Date/Place: WHBC, 5/27/18, AM
A. Opening illustration: Peyton Manning’s training for football: “I called him the piranha,” Arians said in a statement released by the Cardinals. “I could never get him enough information, whether it was about the opponent or our gameplan or anything else. We had him in for a pre-draft interview in’98 and he had a notebook full of questions for us, including one about the Indiana tax code. I remember thinking, ‘Who interviewed who here?’ Another time in 2012, before a divisional-round playoff game against the Ravens in Denver, Manning held his hands in a bucket of ice before he went outside to throw with his receivers. He wanted to replicate the cold weather he would face in the upcoming game
B. Background to passage: After his warning to Timothy about those that would fall away from the faith, he gives him a little pep talk about the foundation and goal to keep in the forefront of his mind. In the following paragraph he gives Timothy a battery of commands to do and be certain things before the congregation, so this week he is preparing him for those commands.
C. Main thought: This week we will look at two pieces of Paul’s instruction for Timothy’s focus.
A. The Goal (v. 7-8)
1. Believers pursue Christ with the vigor of a soldier exhausted from battle or a criminal arising from an intense beating; that’s what this word means. We are also to suffer harsh treatment for our testimony with perseverance. All for the goal of godliness. This word means to know how to act in the presence of or in relation to God. It carries the idea of fear, reverence, holiness, worship, and engagement of divinity. Paul tells Timothy to train for it. We get our word gymnasium from it. Believers are to learn, to practice, to advance in their knowledge and consistency of godliness. It has value now and to come.
2. 19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, 23 but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! 24 “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. -Matt 6:19-24
3. Illustration: kids tubing and knee-boarding, Kaitlann’s foot, Mackenzie’s softball coach this year, one focus, all year – win the league. And the girls believed it!
4. This is not a self-help moralism which is taught. It is not pull yourself up by your own bootstraps religion. It is about developing a holy awe for the Mighty One of Israel. It’s hitting the books, listening to the sermons, laboring in prayer. It’s pursuing God day after day after day. It’s about that pursuit ending in success of learning and practicing your walk with God with the reverence He deserves. It’s about you attaining a godliness that is pleasing to God and carries an aroma of attraction to the world. My burden for you seeking his face this week. Of course, I am practical, how and how do I tell with each individual. But the motive is just as important. We like lists, we are told to be good, our minds operated that way. You can’t tell if you are a “good Christian” exclusively by what you do. Just the phrase “good” Christian implies judgment by works.
B. The Motive and Means (v. 10)
1. Paul says that we are among those who have set their earnest expectation of the One True and Living God. I like a checklist for salvation. Paul likes hope. He says that the motivation for training, for godliness is hope that is rock-solid, concrete-set (perfect tense) in the one true and living God. This motivational hope is the fact that God is our treasure beyond measure. He is that which has immeasurable worth. His value compels us to train ourselves for right living, fear and reverence and love toward God. His blinding brightness and beauty cause us to lovingly surrender with joy all of who we are for His glory. It is duty, it is delight.
2. Hope set in Christ is also our means. Much Christian literature adopts a checklist, morality-based, debtor’s ethic, guilt-laden, self-centered, or community-oriented motivation without giving a means, Paul doesn’t do that. He doesn’t even give twelve pieces of advice. The motive and the means are the same: fixed joy in the One who was dead, but is risen, never to die again. The motive looks at the here and now – hope in Christ. The means looks to the days and life ahead. It is a trust in a future grace. It says, God has given his Son, will He not now give us all things? The means is a God who is able, and who will always do what he says he will do, till the ends of the earth, and to the ends of time. SWEET! This is the way we are able to train, trust gives the strength, trust gives the endurance, trust in the treasure gives the discipline.
3. 7 But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. 8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ -Phil 3:7-8
4. Illustration: Steve, Matthew, and I read the Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, and it said, “bad motivation ruins good acts.” It is the difference in motivation for a lover’s display of affection to his beloved. It’s the difference between “my pleasure” ?? and “my pleasure” ?. It’s why we have called and checked out so many different schools for the kids – we value them and value education; not just because we want the cheapest and most convenient, and we are glad to do it.
5. If you can’t find time to study and pray, it’s because you don’t trust, love, believe enough. When we value Him, it motivates us to trust him to provide the change in our want-to’s, change in our discipline to get up, change our passion to find new ways to redeem the time, not so we can have a better life now, not so we can have a better marriage, not so we can manage our money better, not so we can kick the habits of sin that control us, but so we can love him. Because he is our treasure, we have faith in future grace that he will provide for us, and we pursue. He inclines our hearts. He allows us to proceed in maturity; and He will, with our faith and hope, deeply planted in the firm foundation of the Living God! So, yes, discipline yourself, train yourself, work yourself to exhaustion for the glory of Christ to read His word for all it is worth, to listen to it, to memorize it and learn it. Push yourself to pray through with perseverance. But do it through faith in future grace, hope set in the greatest Treasure. Throw off the guilt and learn to fast because you are hungry for the Treasure more than food. Beat your body into submission to spend time in silence and quietly listen for the voice of the Spirit but do it by faith. Work out your salvation, for it is God who works in you to do his good pleasure. Teach yourself to control your tongue and take thoughts that rise up against Christ captive. Practice worshipping him in truth and in spirit. Train yourself to think of Christ and all that He is, has done, will do, and will always be as you sing. Do it because your hope is firm in Him. Fix your hope in the God of heaven who helps those upon which He has compassion and believe that He will have compassion upon you. Train yourself to know how to live with Him by His transforming power.
A. Closing illustration: Dust of your rabbi, Jedi always has a teacher
B. In both of these instances, the key factor is one who pledges himself to another’s teaching. As a Christian we place our hope and allegiance in God Almighty who gives the motivation and the means to reach the goal of godliness for His glory now and in the life to come.
C. Invitation to commitment
Douglas Hyde was a major leader in the Communist Party in England during the 1930’s and 1940’s. However, in 1948 he converted to Christianity. Later he wrote a fascinating little book, Dedication and Leadership, in which he pointed out that the means of developing leaders among the communists were not all that different from the means of developing leaders among Christians. The only real difference, Hyde observed, was that the communists had actually employed those means.
Hyde developed an entire chapter to a young man named Jim. Jim had approached Hyde after a lecture in which Hyde boldly asserted that the Communist Party could take anyone who was willing to be trained in leadership and turn him into a leader.
Sizing him up, Hyde took Jim to be a man who “was almost pathetically anxious to be turned into a leader.” In fact, “As I looked at him I thought that I had never seen anyone who looked less like a leader in my life.”
According to Hyde, Jim was extremely short and fat, with a pale complexion, a slightly crossed eye, and worst of all, a most debilitating handicap: “Quite literally he came to me and said: ‘C-c-comrade, I w-w-want you to t-t-t-take me and t-t-turn me into a l-l-leader of m-m-m-men.’ I looked at Jim and I wondered how I was going to do it. Then I thought to myself: ‘Well, I told the class that we could take anyone who was willing to be trained in leadership and turn him into a leader, and here is Jim pathetically anxious for me to do it. This is a challenge.’ So I set about the job.”
Then Hyde writes: “It will be observed that I had made only one qualification. This was that the would-be leader must be willing to be trained. This presupposed a certain attitude of mind, which Jim already had. I was, so far as I could see at that moment, almost the only thing I had to build on.”
What was that one qualification, that one attitude? An eagerness to learn, a willingness to be trained. It was indeed all that Jim had - but it was enough to get started.
Jim spent many months showing up to lectures and classes, listening to the leaders discuss communist philosophy, history, and strategy. Then they put a man under Jim for him to tutor. From there they sent him into his workplace to build relationships with other men and gradually infect them with seeds of communist thought. Eventually they even enrolled him in a public speaking course.
“[Jim] was appalled at the thought,” Hyde wrote. “But he knew, nonetheless, on the basis of his experience in tutorial work that he had unsuspected potentialities. So he went. We did not turn him into a great orator, we did not even entirely cure him of his stutter, although, as he gained confidence in himself this became modified and finished up as a noticeable but not entirely unhelpful impediment in his speech.”
Jim eventually assumed leadership in his industry’s local trade union and from there went on to become a national leader and a key agent of the Communist Party. As Hyde put it, “Jim, the most unpromising-looking piece of human material that ever came my way had become a leader of men.”
