Well, as one who is able to stand before you, I've told you before that I'm just always so grateful for those ancient words. I would make a horrible used car salesman. If I had to come up with my own spiel, I would be in a world of hurt. I'm so thankful that we have an unchanging, authoritative, powerful, timeless Word from God. After all, you don't want to hear from me this morning, you want to hear from God. That's what we need. Our text this morning will be in 1 Timothy 5. 1 Timothy 5. I don't have to tell you that church life is not for the faint of heart. And what I mean by that is the relationships that are part of working together, living together within the family of God. It's challenging at times, to say the least, right? Some of you can speak to this from personal experience, either from here or from other local churches, maybe the church you grew up in. You know what it is to be wounded maybe to be betrayed, maybe to have information that you shared in confidence used against you in some way, or to be somehow the recipient of someone's very hurtful words, to be misunderstood or misrepresented, to have lifelong friendships broken. Church life, life within the family of God, is not for the faint of heart. It is difficult, fraught with danger, takes a lot of hard work to get along. Lucas Hanot is a playwright. He one of his works was on in New York City this last year off Broadway, but gained quite a bit of attention. It was simply called the Christians. And I think we have an image here of of the scene. Kind of the set for this particular play. I think we have that Q. Do we have that there? Maybe. We'll see if we get to it. There we go. As the story unfolds in this play, it's a church, a rather large church. And here's some of the various leadership of the church, some of the main people. And of course, the whole play is about a church split. that takes place and and i i i i haven't gone to new york city want to send me there i'll take in the play uh... but i just just reading reviews and you can use to uh... the church being sort of stereotyped right uh... painted in a very poor light bunch hypocrites uh... kind of you know very naive you know that the general depiction apparently uh... that was not the case with with Lucas's portrayal, but he does convey sort of the depths of human sin and the brokenness that often comes in relationships and in families and how deep the wounds run. when people hurt one another, right? And apparently he just brought that across in some very pointed ways in this particular play. And it's unfortunate that this is sort of one of the things that the church is sort of known for, the inability to get along. And so it's a reality. It's one that we have to face. There's a realism. I told a 101 class today, we had a group in there, and I said, well, our goal is to help you understand a little bit more about this local church. And at the end of these four weeks in the 101 class, you might decide that you don't want to come back. And that's okay. Sometimes when people see the real... They want to think of the church in a certain way, and when you begin to peel back the layers of the onion, you realize that it's comprised of real people with real problems, who have sinful propensities, and all of those array of challenges. That's the reality of life in the church. So 1 Timothy 5, let's look here to God's word. As Paul gives Timothy very specific instructions on how the church is to function, some guidelines to help them function well as the family of God. 1 Timothy 5, we're just going to look at these first two verses. Here are the word of the Lord. Do not rebuke an older man, but encourage him as you would a father. Younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity. May God add His blessing to the reading of His Word. I would suggest to you that there is an unfortunate chapter division here. We need to know that chapters and verses are not part of the inspired text of scripture. They've been superimposed over the text to help us. They help us navigate a little bit. We can direct one another to a certain passage of scripture. We can all find where we're studying this morning. So it's good. But here in this case, I think it's unfortunate how that division falls because these words are probably better understood within the context of chapter 4. There in that context, Paul had talked to Timothy about Timothy's problem. And that was his youth. He was a young man. Now, not according to our reckoning. He was probably in his mid-thirties. but for a rabbi, for a leader in the synagogue, in the church, a spiritual leader, that was young, too young to really garner much respect. And so Paul was talking to Timothy about how he could earn the respect of the people, how he could command respect. And he gets into the areas of Timothy's behavior and his conduct and all these things. And this is part of that. So he talks to Timothy as a young man about his interactions with older men, and his interactions with older women, and his interactions with younger men, and his interactions with younger women. And all of these things were part of how Timothy was to live a credible life. To conduct himself in such a way that the people would respond to his ministry. that he would be believable and trustworthy, and they would be able to follow his lead. So that's what's happening here, and I think again why we must view these verses in chapter 5 in light of what Paul has just said. And I don't want you to lose track either of the context of why all of this was important. Timothy needed to be heard, not just to assuage his pride, Not to make him feel better about himself, but because the gospel was at stake. Opening part of chapter 4, false teachers. Specifically false teachers who were teaching salvation through human effort. Human merit. We say works righteousness. Achieving your own salvation by your good works. And they were distracting people from salvation by grace alone. What Paul had just unpacked at the end of chapter 3, this great mystery of the gospel. And he unpacks the work of Christ. who is manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory." This is the heart of our faith. This is the mystery of the gospel, the work of Christ on our behalf. He accomplished this. It's not about what you have accomplished. It's about what Christ has accomplished. And some teachers had begun to come in and had begun to distract the church from that central focus. Distract the church from the gospel. Timothy was called upon to confront this. Timothy needed to be heard. He needed his message to get across. He needed to be credible as he helped to lead this particular local church in the city of Ephesus. And so Paul's again working with him as a young man as to how he can earn the respect of the congregation. And this is part of it. In his interactions, in how he treated people, how he conversed with people, how he confronted people was going to be one of the ways that would that he would gain a hearing. Now, I also want you to think about the fact that Timothy is being put forward here as an example according to chapter 4, verse 12. A pattern, a prototype. So it's not just what Timothy is doing and needs to do, but Timothy is setting pace for the church. He is the forerunner. He's helping to establish some patterns here for the church. So Timothy's supposed to relate to people in a certain way, and that's going to help the church understand how they are to relate to one another. So that's an important element here as well that helps us to think through our own relationships within the context of the church. So family etiquette. I've used some of that terminology as we've tried to encapsulate this teaching. Family etiquette. I'm not a real big Emily Post person. She wrote all these books about where you put your forks and your napkins and all these sorts of things. But I'm talking about etiquette in a more substantive way. One dictionary definition says, the customs or rules governing behavior regarded as correct or acceptable in social or official life. Customs or rules that govern behavior. This is what Paul is giving for Timothy. Here's the ground rules for how you are to relate to one another. Here's the family code. that you are to function within these guidelines. You ever have family meetings in your family? We have family meetings. Oftentimes surrounding the dinner hour, maybe as part of our time in the scriptures, we read a passage, but sometimes there's just times when we say, okay, it's at that time of the year, or we've finished a semester, and now we're going into a new semester, and here's some things we need to be talking about and thinking about. Here's what's working, here's what's not working, here's where we need to come up to speed a little bit, right? I think we could kind of view that in this sense as well. Here's the way that we ought to be relating to one another within the family of God. And we have some great principles here that Paul is conveying to Timothy in that regard. So I'm going to summarize three of them for you, observations from this text. The first, we should speak directly to one another. It's a great guideline here to help us maintain healthy relationships with one another in the family of God. We should speak directly to one another. A number of passages where this is addressed quite overtly. It's rather assumed here in this text. Timothy's going to be engaged in talking with all sorts of different people. Matthew 18 is one of those texts. I think we have that here. Know your passage. If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault. Here it is between you and him alone. And if he listens to you, you have gained your brother. So there's to be this interpersonal communication, right? What we would call direct communication. When my brother or my sister is involved in something that is some sort of self-destructive behavior, sinful behavior, then we go and I talk to them. I challenge them. I plead with them. I petition them. 2 Corinthians 12. give sort of the alternative. Here, Paul is concerned that there isn't good interaction within the church in Corinth. And Paul's going to come visit them, and he's afraid when he shows up, he's going to be disappointed, and there's going to have to be some confrontation. He says, I fear that perhaps when I come, I may not find you as I wish, and that you may find me not as you wish. that perhaps there may be quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder. So these would be inappropriate responses. Gossip when I don't talk to the person about it, but I talk to somebody else about it. Anger, I just kind of stuff it down inside And I'm seething about it, right? But I don't actually pursue reconciliation. I don't talk to that person. Jealousy. You need to harbor certain feelings towards that person. So all of these would be inappropriate responses. Here, Paul's outlining for Timothy a direct approach to talk to, to teach, to exhort, to encourage, to correct people directly. so the scriptures don't encourage us to vent. Right? You know what I'm talking about, right? Just frustrated, so I go home and talk to my wife and spew my toxins all over her. Or I complain to a co-worker or something, and then I feel much better. Well, that's not exactly what Paul has in mind here. He has in mind direct conversation with the person who I have a problem with or who needs to be confronted. Direct communication. We can't simply avoid the issue. Do we have any avoiders here this morning? My hand's up. I could tend to be an avoider. There's a lot of conversations I just don't really look forward to, right? I'd rather just hope it goes away. And here Paul is not giving Timothy that option. I think Timothy, from a temperament standpoint, I think that's where Timothy would have been. I think Timothy could have been an avoider, reading between the lines. He was somewhat timid in personality. and a little bit weak in physical constitution. Maybe his stomach really was churning, you know, and he'd have to have difficult conversations. He probably could have been an avoider. And so Paul's encouraging, again, direct conversations as part of Timothy's responsibility. Part of a responsibility we all have to spur one another on towards love and good works. No screens. Right? We don't handle confrontation by email. Right? We're often inclined to say things in an email we would never say if we were sitting there looking someone in the eye. Someone that we know. Someone that we love. But we have this freedom sometimes to sort of... We feel a certain amount of safety. I can just lob a grenade from behind this barrier. you know, over there. Well, that's not what Paul has in mind. That's not what he's exhorting. He's exhorting direct communication, talking to someone face-to-face. I think there's even some generational. We talk about temperament, you know, how many of us maybe would be inclined towards being avoiders and such. I think that generationally there's some components too. Newer generations are sometimes talking to people that aren't really... they don't like talking. They'd rather text. It's safer. They can again remain on this side of the screen and plot out their response. There's not the pressure of someone actually talking to them or them having to talk back. So again, sometimes generationally there could be challenges in this regard as well. But one of the things that's going to mark healthy interactions within the church is direct, communication with one another. Oh, there's culture in this, too. And I was thinking about this, talking about this with some of our Chinese attenders. Chinese culture tends to be a lot less direct. So they might come about something from a very, you know, they might have to kind of work around to get to the topic a little bit more, right? And that's okay, when I say direct, I guess I'm not meaning aggressive. We as Americans can sometimes be aggressive, right? I'm not sure that's always best either. But intentional, where I'm continuing to make intentional strides to reach out to a person, to challenge a person, to encourage a person with direct communication, okay? So we should speak directly to one another. Number two, we should speak impartially to one another. We should speak impartially to one another. I'm not sure I landed on the right word here to describe what I'm seeing in this text. But I'm struck with the fact that Timothy is not just charged to confront sort of new believers, to work with new believers, those that are new in the faith, those that are young and immature. Timothy has given this ministry to challenge older men and older women. in addition to people who were his own age. That's part of the problem here, right? Or the potential obstacle in all of this is that Timothy's sensing, you know, are people going to listen to me? How can I talk to people who are older than me, who have been in the faith much longer than me? But there's something here that Timothy was to be engaged in this ministry impartially, not just to new believers, not just to people who had these maybe overt problems or hang-ups. Timothy was to be involved in working with the old and the young, men and women, and charging them towards greater discipleship, right? We have examples of this. Philippians 4, there's a couple of established women in the church, Iodia and Syntyche, who were fighting. And it was so bad that Paul had to come to a point where he actually challenges them in his letter to the church there in Philippi. He references them by name. It's interesting how he does it. We'll talk about that more in a minute. But these were godly women. The text is quite clear. They had been involved in ministry for many years. But they had not arrived yet, right? They still had issues. Now, we can maybe just say it together. I have not arrived. Can we say that? I have not arrived. And you haven't. And neither have I. Sanctification is a process that we will be engaged in until the day that we die. And I know sometimes I think I should be further along in certain areas than I am. I say that to my shame. The reality is, in process. No one is beyond accountability. No one reaches a point where they no longer need to be challenged in their walk with Christ, in their personal disciplines, in their communication patterns. We all are in a position to be challenged and encouraged and confronted. You remember Paul and Peter? Another great example of this. It's recorded for us in Galatians. Paul and Barnabas are conducting really effective ministry in Antioch. They're seeing many Gentiles, non-Jewish people come to faith in Christ. And things are really happening. And so Peter comes on a survey from Jerusalem, the mother church. And he comes and he's excited about what's happening. And he's interacting with these new disciples. And they're sitting down and having meals together. And then some other bigwigs come from Jerusalem. And Peter pulls back. Peter's like, oh, maybe I'm getting a little too close to these Gentiles here. And Paul confronts him on it. He says, what are you doing? You're sending a mixed message here. Are people saved by grace alone? Or are they saved by observing the ceremonial law of Moses and all these eating and dietary laws? Paul says, which one is it, Peter? You're sending mixed messages here. So you think about what that would have involved for Paul to confront Peter. But that ought to be the nature of the relationships that we have. with one another. And by the way, if you're going to have that kind of interaction, there needs to be a level of mutual commitment to one another, right? In part, that's what family is. You can't just ignore family. You might ignore your husband, your wife for a day or two, but that gets really... That's really hard. It doesn't work very well. You know, you have to sit down and talk about things and work through them. And that's the nature of family. It's the beauty of family. You have to work through it. We're committed to one another. And we're going to work through this as hard as it is. You can ignore a co-worker, right? You can choose to avoid somebody in the grocery store. You can't do that with family. And that's why this is such a powerful metaphor. We ought to be able to, sometimes we're just too easily offended, right? That person told me what I didn't want to hear and I'm out of here. This assumes that there's a level of mutual commitment where we work through hard things together. So we should speak impartially to one another. And finally, we should speak appropriately to one another. We should speak appropriately to one another. Here, Paul provides some caveats and some specific challenges for how Timothy is to interact. And again, it has to do with family. Timothy's a young man. So, Paul says, I want you to relate to older men as fathers. I want you to relate to older women as mothers. I want you to relate to younger men as brothers and younger women as sisters. This is the paradigm that I want you to adopt. So you're not going to respond to everybody or interact with everyone in the same way. You have to not only think about your message, but you have to think about your approach. how you interact in those conversations. And Paul hits two areas particularly here of concern. The first has to do with the whole area of honoring older people. This was one potential pitfall here for Timothy. In his interactions, that he would fail to honor those who were older. So he says here, you shouldn't rebuke an older man. This is a fighting word, right? Although it's not meaning physical fighting, throwing punches, but it's throwing verbal punches. One of the texts says you shouldn't speak harshly, violently toward an older man. Rather, He was to encourage him, come alongside, speak to him appropriately as one would speak to a father. The Scriptures talk a lot about this whole arena of honor. Leviticus 19, I think we have a couple of these verses here. You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God. I am the Lord. Proverbs chapter 30, the eye that mocks a father and scorns to obey a mother will be picked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by the vultures. There's a graphic image, right? If you do not respond appropriately with honor to your parents, it will not end well with you. Okay, we get sort of in no uncertain terms how God feels about that. Proverbs 23, 22, listen to your father who gave you life and do not despise your mother when she is old. And then into the New Testament, Ephesians chapter six, familiar passage here, honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land. So these are all important statements about the type of relationship that a son or a daughter is to have with a parent, with a father or a mother ought to be marked by respect. It's never appropriate for a child, for a student to yell at their parents. Never. That's a sinful response, okay? A little uncomfortable in here, right? I mean, we live in a very kind of brash, authentic culture, okay? But we kind of have to have our minds trained again to what appropriate parent-child relationships are, and we need to think in those terms when it comes to the church. We ought to respond with honor, gentleness, So that was one concern, that Timothy could fail to honor and understand the differences in age in his ministry. The other potential pitfall area for Timothy was purity. So Paul highlights specifically again his relationship with younger women. And we have a number of texts that speak to this as well, particularly out of the Proverbs, Proverbs 5. The lips of a forbidden woman drip honey and her speech is smoother than oil. Proverbs 6. Do not desire her beauty in your heart and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes. So you have here kind of caution against flattery and caution against fixating, allowing desire to sort of control a person. And then Proverbs 7. I'll laze out another scenario here as well. I think we have that text here. Cue, don't we? There we go. For the window of my house I have looked out through my lattice, and I have seen among the simple, I have perceived among the youths a young man lacking sense, passing along the streets near her corner, taking the road to her house in the twilight, in the evening, at the time of night and darkness. You shouldn't set yourself up for trouble, right? Don't make provision to be in certain places at certain times that are going to just lead you into trouble. Here's a father talking to his son about this and just outlining proper responses and relationships and attitudes towards young women. And Paul's telling Timothy something similar, that you're to relate, you're to view the young women within the congregation as sisters. We don't really have to unpack what that means, right? We know what is appropriate behavior between a brother and a sister and what is not, right? Platonic, non-sexual behavior. interactions. So Paul's working through this with Timothy knowing that this could be one of the chief ways that Timothy would be disqualified, would undermine his ministry. But I think these are probably just samples. There would also be potential problems for how Timothy would relate to other young men. He could wield his authority in such a way, instead of treating them as brothers, as equals in the Lord, and other ways in which He could potentially not treat older women well. But we're just given a sampling of some of the pitfalls and some of the things that ought to shape our interactions with one another. And I think you could put yourself in those quadrants. Older man, older woman. I'm going to say 40 and over. That's the way kind of the Bible defines this term. Timothy's a young man because he's of military age. He's under 40. So anybody over that would constitute an older man. Older man, older woman. Younger man, younger woman. You put yourself in any of those quadrants and you kind of just work things backwards to think through, okay, if this is how Timothy is supposed to interact with these people, then okay, if I'm in this quadrant, then this is how I need to interact with these people. You know, we ought to begin to think in those terms. Again, Timothy's giving us some paradigms here. He's a model, he's a prototype of how we are to interact with one another. I've shared with you before, I spent a year in China after my senior year of college and went from being you know, really involved in all the activities and college life and having a really strong group of friends, to being in China, to being in a very foreign culture, teaching English, which was not what I had studied for, not being able to speak any of the language, feeling very insecure in a lot of ways. Not again real talkative by nature and so to sort of put myself out there And I was about a week into my time when our team leader. There was there was five of five or seven of us there From Cedarville and we were living in the foreign teacher building on the campus of the People's University in Beijing And a team leader came her name was Diane. She's about 20 years older than me kind of a mother figure and she says Why don't you go out for a walk?" I was like, this is a weird conversation. I don't need to go out. And she said, well, you haven't been out in a week. You need to go out. And I was kind of in my, you know, this little turtle shell, you know, I was in a fetal position in my room, you know, leaving for meals, but the classes hadn't even started yet. And I think she could just sense that I was, you know, not doing well, I needed a push. And in a very sort of motherly way. She didn't come right out and say it. And she was gentle and I think kind of reading between the lines. And I think about how that one little conversation really shaped my year. I ended up having a great year. Made some significant friendships. Saw some people come to Christ and was pushed out of my comfort zone in a lot of different ways. But I often think back to that conversation of somebody who took the opportunity not only to speak the truth to me, but to speak the truth with great grace in a very appropriate way to challenge me and to push me in my walk with Christ and to help me to walk in faith. As I see here what Paul is outlining for Timothy, he sees a healthy family. He wants to see a healthy family operating here in the church in Ephesus. And so he's calling on Timothy to sort of embrace this mindset and interact appropriately with the believers there. It would be my prayer that we wouldn't be like that that play that's happening in Off-Broadway, the Christians, stereotypical, divided, schism, struggling to get along, but that we would embrace some of the family code here, the family etiquette of how we can relate together in healthy ways. And that God will allow us to not be a statistic, to not fall by His grace, to not fall prey to some of those patterns, but that God will allow us to increasingly be a place that is marked by healthy interaction where we are spurring one another on towards love and good works.