Every generation throughout human history has struggled with its own version of the generation gap between the young and the old. I can picture Adam and Eve complaining about the next generation, predicting the demise of the human race because of the values of their children and grandchildren. I can almost hear Adam complaining to Eve, "The problem with kids today is that they have no respect, no sense of sacrifice or responsibility." I can picture Adam and Eve’s kids rolling their eyes, and whispering to each other, "Mom and dad need to get with the times."
It seems like every generation thinks that the next generation is worse than its own. Older people can tend to look at younger people with suspicion and concern. Younger people look differently, they dress differently, they embrace new technologies, they’re filled with dreams and new ideas. Let’s be honest: it’s hard to take someone seriously who only has to shave once a week.
And younger people pick up on this; they feel as if older people don’t take them seriously. It’s like the old Who song "My Generation":
"People try to put us down.
Just because we get around.
The things they do look awfully cold.
I hope I die before I get old. "
Younger people fear older people will always look at them as kids, even after they reach adulthood.
And younger people tend to disregard the wisdom of older people. They figure older people just don’t understand. As a result, older people tend to feel unappreciated by younger people.
I think Mark Twain’s comments about his father best sum up the generation gap:
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."
The generation gap exists in churches as well. Many of the power struggles churches go through result from tensions between different age groups. It’s no wonder that older Christians start to get nervous when younger Christians start rising to positions of authority and responsibility in the church.
And it’s also no wonder that many younger people simply give up on the established church and start their own thing. Before you’re too quick to condemn that kind of thing, remember that’s how Life Bible Fellowship Church started back in 1971. Our church founders were a group of idealistic young Christians in their late teens and early twenties who were distrustful of the older, more established way of doing church. So we did it our own way, making sure we did it differently than our elders did it. But here we are thirty years later, and guess what? We are the established, traditional church!
When you’re young as a Christian, you tend to not be taken seriously by others. I think back ten years ago, when I first became the pastor of teaching here at Life Bible Fellowship Church. I was 28 years old at the time, fairly young for a pastor of teaching. Our youth pastor at the time was a guy named Dave, and he was in his mid-30s, seven years my senior. Dave and I once we met with a seminary placement director to talk about hiring some of the seminary students as ministry interns to work with our jr. high and high school students. The placement director was in his mid-40s, and he assumed because of my age that I was the youth pastor and Dave was the teaching pastor. So this placement director totally ignored me throughout the meeting, focusing all of his eye contact and attention on Dave. I’d ask a question, and he’d either ignore the question or he’d direct his answer to Dave. Half way through the meeting he realized his mistake, but by then he’d already communicated what he really thought with his body language.
When you’re young as a Christian, older people can tend to not take you seriously.
Yet when you get older as a Christian, younger people tend to not take you seriously. I’m used to being the youngest person in church settings, but the last few years that’s been changing. No longer am I the youngest person on staff at the church, and no longer am I the person with the youngest kids. But I’ve realized that I’m getting older. I’m realizing that one of the challenges for older people is to help younger people see the bigger picture. You don’t want to destroy their idealism or throw cold water on their passion, yet you want to help them make wise decisions that they won’t regret later. Yet often, if you’re older, you’re written off.
How can we close the generation gap? That’s our question today. We’ve been in a series through the New Testament book of 1 and 2 Timothy called Deepening Your Life With God. Today we’re going to talk about how to close the generation gap between the young and the older. We’re going to first look at a principle for closing this gap, and then we’re going to find a specific application of this principle to one group of people in the church.
1. The Principle (1 Timothy 5:1-2)
Look at 1 Tim 5:1-2 for the principle. If you were here last weekend, you’ll remember that back in chapter 4 Paul encouraged his young protégé Timothy to not be intimidated by older church members. Even though some older people would be tempted to look down on Timothy because of his age, Timothy still had a job to do, a ministry assignment to complete. It was a difficult ministry assignment of bringing correction to the false teaching at the church in Ephesus, of telling current church leaders that they were no longer qualified to be leaders, and of installing new church leaders. So in the previous chapter Paul gave his young protégé Timothy a pep talk, to do his job even if people didn’t take him seriously because of his age.
But here we learn that Timothy’s role as a leader doesn’t give him the freedom to be harsh or bossy. The verb "rebuke" is a strong verb in Greek. It means to "express strong disapproval" by rebuking, reproaching, or denouncing (Louw and Nida 33.420). This is exactly how Timothy was probably tempted to act to those older people who didn’t take him seriously because of his age.
But Paul tells Timothy not to tell but to ask when it comes to bringing correction to older men. Instead of demanding his way, he’s to exhort or encourage, to ask instead of tell. This way he can treat older men with appropriate respect and do his job at the same time. Timothy’s job requires that he bring correction at times, but how he brings correction is just as important as bringing the correction itself.
When you have to confront older men, says Paul, confront him as you were confronting your dad. Now back then respect for your parents was in extremely important cultural value, not just for the Christians but also for all Jews, Greeks and Romans in the ancient world. Everyone in the ancient world believed you were supposed to respect people older than you, especially your mom and dad. So Paul encourages Timothy to imagine how he’d act if he had to confront his dad about something, and to use that approach with older men in the church.
The same idea holds true for older women, to bring correction as if they were your mom. For younger men encourage them if they were your brothers. Now as the father of four boys, this idea didn’t bring me much comfort. The way my boys treat each other at times isn’t very brotherly, but I suppose that’s just a normal part of sibling rivalry when they’re kids. But the idea here is for brothers to treat each other with respect and honor. For younger women, Timothy is to treat them as if they were sisters.
Men and women older than Timothy and men and women younger than Timothy pretty much covers all the generations in the church. The principle we find here is this. We close the generation gap in the church by PROMOTING MUTUAL RESPECT among the ages.
Really, respect is all most older people want from younger people. They don’t want to hold younger people back from chasing their dreams. But they do want to be respected, for their opinion to count for something, for their experiences to be helpful for someone. They want their son to call them and ask them advice on buying a car or refinancing their home. They want their daughter to ask for advice on potty training and planning for college for the kids. Most older people want to contribute, not to control They want to be respected.
And really, respect is also what younger people want from older people. They want older people to take them seriously, to not write off their dreams as unrealistic and their idealism as impractical. They want to be taken seriously, to be respected.
2. Application of the Principle (1 Timothy 5:3-16)
Now vv. 3-16 all deal with one specific example of how to apply this principle. The group Paul focuses on in these verses is widows.
Now why does Paul deal with widows here? Well there are probably several reasons, but one of them is surely that among the older people in the church, widows were the most vulnerable and needy. In the ancient world, a widow was any woman who lived without her husband, so it also included women who had been divorced or abandoned. The most common cause of widowhood was a husband’s death, but some guys simply ran off, leaving their wives and children behind. When a woman’s husband died in the ancient world, all of her husband’s property and assets passed to his children, not to his wife (Thurston 15). So widows had no rights or assets. There was no government assistance for widows in the Roman empire, and surely no family court to enforce alimony or child support. If a widow had no children to care for her, she’d return to her father’s home, and if that didn’t work, she was totally dependant on other people’s charity.
Now there were three specific groups of widows in Ephesus Paul is going to talk about here. The first group are destitute widows. These are widows with no family to care for them. Destitute widows were totally alone in life, dependant on God alone because there was no one else to turn to. The Christian community helped financially support these destitute widows because no one else would. In fact, by the mid third century--about 250 years after this letter was written--the Christian church in Rome supported about 1,500 destitute widows (Thurston 57).
A second group were ministering widows. These were widows who were also supported by the church, but they served in ministry on the church staff. By the second century this group was called "the order of widows" and they were probably the first example of an organized women’s ministry in the early church (Thurston). These women took a vow to remain single, and then they spent the rest of their lives serving in the church.
The third group were worldly widows. These were younger widows who are living their lives for pleasure, addicted to a life of luxury. Although they were younger, they refused to work or remarry, expecting the church to take care of all their needs so they could live a lifestyle of selfishness and indulgence. Bible scholars believe that the false teachers in Ephesus were making inroads into the church through these worldly widows.
So the question is how does Timothy encourage mutual respect with these three subgroups of older women in the church? We find three specific applications of this principle of mutual respect to these three groups of widows.
Look at vv. 3-8 and v. 16. The word "give proper recognition" in v. 3 is the Greek word "honor." To "honor" is to attach status to a person, and sometimes honor carries the implication of financial support, like it does here. So the church respects destitute widows by caring for their physical needs.
But a widow only qualifies for this kind of respect if she has no other source of support. If the widow has Christian children or grandchildren, they should put their Christian faith into practice by caring for the needs of the widow. Throughout this section, Paul has the fifth commandment in the back of his mind. The fifth commandment says, "Honor your father and your mother." One application of that commandment is for adult children to care for their elderly parents. To qualify as a destitute widow deserving support from the church, the woman must be truly alone, with no support from family. This is in contrast to the worldly widow, who lives for pleasure and self-indulgence.
Verse 8 warns us that Christians who refuse to care for their aging family members are in danger of falling away from their faith in Jesus. Although they might not deny Jesus with their words, their actions--or in this case inaction--betrays an abandonment of their faith. To refuse to care for an aging relative is a direct violation of one of the ten commandments. When Paul claims that this person is worse than an unbeliever he means that the non-Christians in Greco-Roman society had higher morals than this Christian since most non-Christians kept their family obligations to their elderly parents.
So here’s the first application of the principle, and this application relates to destitute widows. God wants us to care for aging family members who cannot care for themselves.
This is how younger people express mutual respect for their parents in their old age. I know of several of you who’ve done exactly this as an expression of your faith in Jesus. Some of you have taken an aging parent into your home when they can’t care for themselves anymore. You’ve sacrificed financially, personally, and spiritually. Some of you have had to pull back from your involvement in other ministry to care for the needs of a family member who needs you.
This text doesn’t tell us exactly how to do this, and I suspect that how we do this will be unique in every circumstance.
I know people who had abusive parents struggle with this idea. For these people, family was a place of pain and heartache, so caring for an aging family member hardly seems to be the repayment of parents we read about here. Yet God still calls us to care for these parents as they age, as rotten as they might have been to us. If nothing else, you can honor the parent for being your source of life.
Paul says this is a significant part of our devotion to Jesus, that we care for our aging family members as best we can, without burdening the church with their needs. That’s how we apply this principle of mutual respect to our aging family members.
Now look at vv. 9-10. I believe "the list of widows" here is different than simply financial support, but this is most likely an "order of widows." These are widows who didn’t want to remarry, but who instead made a commitment to remain single and serve in ministry at the church as ministers. These widows assumed a variety of different responsibilities, and the church paid them for their involvement in ministry.
To qualify as a ministering widow Paul says the woman must be over sixty, which was considered very old in the ancient world. Most men never made it to sixty and very few women made it to sixty. So this was the high end of the average lifespan in the ancient world, even though it sounds pretty young to use these days. The good deeds described here are probably the kinds of things ministering widows did in their church ministry. Bringing up children doesn’t refer to the widow’s own children, but to working with other people’s kids. Perhaps these ministering widows led the church’s ministry to kids, or perhaps they cared for orphans. Part of their ministry would be with kids.
They were also to show hospitality. When a guest speaker came to visit the church in Ephesus, it was these ministering widows who would open their homes for the guest speaker to stay.
The phrase "washing the feet of the saints" refers to a willingness perform humble acts of service (Marshall 597). Just as Jesus washed the feet of his closest friends as an act of servanthood, this phrase "wash feet" came to refer to any kind of humble servanthood. In other words, these ministering widows were willing to do whatever needed to be done in the church’s ministry.
They also helped those in trouble, which probably refers to what we think of as "pastoral care." They probably did home visitation with people who were sick and struggling. They prayed with these troubled people, seeking to be an instrument of God’s care and comfort in their lives.
So here we find the second application of the principle. God wants us to help our church support church members who have no one to care for them.
Both the destitute widows and the ministering widows were supported by the local church, out of the church members’ tithes and offerings. The destitute widows were supported out of need, because there was no one else to care for them. The ministering widows were supported out of merit, because they had proven themselves to be valuable in the church’s ministry.
At our church 7% of our annual operating budget goes into a fund called "The Christian Concern Fund." This fund is specifically for people in our church who are needy and struggling. It’s not just limited to widows, because in our culture there’s more support for widows than there was in the ancient world. You see the application of the principle goes beyond widows, but it applies to anyone in the church who has financial needs they can’t meet. Our commitment is to use the fund first to meet needs within our church, and then to use any surplus to meet needs outside our church. Seven cents of every dollar you give to the church goes into this fund automatically, and that might not sound like much, but it really does add up.
God wants us to help our church support people who have no one to care for them. This is another application of the principle of mutual honor.
Finally look at vv. 11-15. Here we find Paul zero in on the worldly widows who are living self-indulgent lives. Younger widows aren’t to be put on the list of ministering because they probably won’t stick with it. Since the order of widows required a vow to remain single, these younger widows might mean well at first, but eventually they’d probably remarry. The population of women to men in the ancient world outnumbered the men significantly, so a younger widow could remarry if she wanted to. So Paul doesn’t want to put these women in a position of making a vow and then later breaking the vow.
Apparently the false teachers in Ephesus were also making inroads through these younger widows as well. These are probably widows who are already on the list of ministering widows, and as they go from house to house to visit people, instead of ministering, they’re spreading the false doctrine of the false teachers. We learned a few weeks ago that this false doctrine included the Jewish dietary laws, as well as forbidding marriage and so forth. Because of this, some of these younger widows had already abandoned their faith in Jesus.
That’s what he means in v. 15 that some have turned away to follow Satan. Some had become captivated by ideas and doctrines that were not biblical, thus falling into a false religious system.
This was scandalizing the church in the eyes of the community. That’s what Paul means by not giving the enemy an opportunity for slander. The idleness and self-indulgent lives of these younger widows was getting the attention of the non-Christians in the community. They were sneering, saying, "Look at how lazy those Christian widows are. Look how gullible the church is to keep supporting those women, as they go from house to house." The idle, self-indulgent lives of these younger widows was hurting the testimony of the church.
So Paul wants these younger widows to remarry and reestablish a family. He’s not trying to be insensitive to the grief of losing their husbands, but he’s looking long term. Paul knows that here’s no shortage of eligible men looking for wives because of the disproportionate ration of women to men.
So here we find the final application of the principle. God wants us to encourage younger widows to live responsibly.
In ancient Ephesus this meant remarriage, but in our culture today it simply means to live a self-sufficient life. With things like social security, retirement funds, and job opportunities for older people, this doesn’t necessarily entail remarriage in our culture today, although certain it can mean remarriage. The point is for younger widows to live responsible lives.
Now put yourself in Timothy’s shoes. He has to go to these younger widows and tell them that the church isn’t going to support them anymore. Yet he has to do it with respect, treating these younger widows as if they were his mom. What a difficult job he had to do!
Conclusion
So the way to close the generation gap is mutual respect between the generations. With widows we apply this principle by caring for our own aging family members, by helping our church support people who have need, and by encouraging younger widows to live responsible lives. But the principle is mutual respect.
The older I get, the more I realize that there’s a lot of waste when you’re young. The young have so much idealism, but so little wisdom. They have boundless energy and enthusiasm, yet they lack many of the life skills necessary to harness that energy and enthusiasm for lasting good. They’re ready to take risks, yet often they take foolish risks, rather than calculated ones. So much is wasted during our youth.
And the older I get, the more I realize that being older has a lot of waste as well. When we finally have the wisdom of hindsight, we no longer have the guts to take the risks we did in our youth. All that wisdom, learned from the school of hard knocks, yet its wisdom we’ll probably take to our graves with us. We have the perspective of experience, yet we distrust new ideas, so we waste that perspective. Aging has a lot of waste.
But what would happen if the young and old respected each other? What would happen if the generation gap closed some, so the vigor and idealism of the young was joined with the hindsight and wisdom of the older? What would happen if the young and old had a common vision of God’s kingdom work on this earth, and instead of discounting each other, they respected each other for what each group had to offer? It would almost be like the day of Pentecost, when the church began, and God’s Spirit was poured out on both men and women, young and old, slave and free, where all without distinction received the Spirit of God because of their faith in Jesus.
Sources
Marshall, I. H. The Pastoral Epistles. International Critical Commentary. T. & T. Clark, 1999.
Thurston, Bonnie Bowman. The Widows: A Women’s Ministry in the Early Church. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989.
