Let's take God's word and let's turn back to the book of 1 Timothy chapter four. 1 Timothy chapter four, as we continue with this idea of God's ordinary means of grace. God's ordinary means of grace. Let's see where we find it. So we're gonna read beginning in verse 11, and we'll read down to the end of the chapter. So 1 Timothy 4, beginning in verse 11. Command and teach these things. Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. Until I come, Devote yourself to the public reading of scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. Practice these things. Immerse yourself in them so that all may see your progress. Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing, you will save both yourself and your hearers. Let's pray. Our merciful, gracious, loving Heavenly Father, we bow before your throne of grace today to find help in time of need, to call upon you, the one who was and is and is to come. The one who never changes. You, the one who is the same yesterday, today, and forevermore. The great I am. And we come to you, Lord, because we are all in need. We need your presence. We need your spirit to open our minds, our hearts, our ears to your word. Lord, that your word may be effectual in our lives. God, we want to live a Christian life that is faithful to you, that you are pleased with. And we know that we cannot do that without you. We need you. We need you in this moment. I need you in this moment to exposit your word rightly and appropriately. I pray that you would grant me appropriate affections as we preach, that you would give me words that are fitting, and Lord, you would bless every one of us as we look deeply into your word and pray for you to teach us and ask you to change us. For we pray for this in faith, in Jesus' name, amen. So last week we began to ask this question, how do you live the Christian life? What is the means through which you and I as Christians live the Christian life? Are we expected to follow a list of rules of things not to do and things to do in our own power? Do we expect God, the Holy Spirit to do for us everything that would make us faithful and fruitful to God? Or has God revealed in His Word the means by which we grow in grace and Christlikeness and thereby live a life to the glory and honor of God? And we answer that question by saying that God has ordained the ordinary means of grace to be the regular way through which we expect to receive grace and power from God to live the Christian life. The ordinary means of grace, we said, are the institutions ordained by God. And that's significant, isn't it? Not ordained by the church, but God. These are the means through which God has ordained to accomplish His goals, His ends. And these ordinary means of grace are the institutions ordained by God to be the regular channels of spiritual growth and grace for true Christians. Now, you notice that I said the regular channels. Because God does sometimes work in extraordinary ways, not ordinary, but extraordinary ways. He often does that. He's sovereign over that. And He can do what He wants, when He wants, with whom He wants, whenever He wants. But that does not negate the reality that when you open God's Word, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth to the church, we find instructions and teaching that is very specific. Teaching that actually guides us in the pathway of faithfulness to Jesus. That if we will take up the means of grace, be they ordinary as we may call them, they are nonetheless the ordained means that God has purposed to do spiritual, eternal work. So in the pursuit of spiritual maturity, in the process you might say of discipleship, many people are seeking extraordinary or breakthrough experience. Have you ever prayed like that? Have you ever thought like that? God, I need a miracle today. God, I need one of those times where you part the Red Sea a wall on the one side and the other, extraordinary, miraculous, against the laws of nature, the ordinary way of life. If you wanna get around the Red Sea, ordinarily, you would walk around. Might take you a while, but that's the way you would get to the other side, unless you have a boat or a bridge, right? But there's those times of extraordinary actions that God is sovereign over. But if you read from Genesis to Revelation in the Holy Word of God, you'll notice that those extraordinary actions of God are actually limited to three main time periods in redemptive history. The time of Elijah, the time of Moses, and the time of Christ. Now, that's not to say that we don't find miraculous things happening here and there along the way. But think about it, when you read the Old Testament, when you read the New Testament, how many people are you actually learning about when you consider the totality of all the people that were on planet earth at the time of that writing? Even the nation of Israel is really a minuscule tribe among all the peoples that were on earth in the Old Testament time period. They were a small group and the true spiritual people of God were a remnant within national Israel. And so we've always, the people of God have always been the master's minority. We've always been the remnant and we always will be the remnant until Christ returns. But the point that I'm making is that when you consider all the things that we read about that are focused upon the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, and even in the New Testament in the Gospels with Jesus and his appointing of his apostles and in the first century, that by the time you get to the end of the first century and you get to the apostolic fathers and the rest of church history, you don't find a lot of these kinds of extraordinary experiences from the totality of humanity. It's really a minuscule record when we consider the whole of humanity for the whole of human history. So what has God, what do we do? What do the ordinary Israelites do? What did the ordinary Christians today do when we're not one of those Moses or Elijah or Elisha or Jesus or one of the apostles? How do we live in the power of the Spirit? How do we walk in faith and faithfulness to Jesus? Answer, the ordinary means of grace. That's how you do it. And we pointed out last week, and I'll remind you again, that these ordinary means of grace are the most reliable in the pursuit of spiritual development and maturity in Christ. Why do I say that? Well, let me give you some, let me give you at least one text here. Turn back, if you would, to the book of Galatians chapter one. Galatians chapter one, let me give you a four example. as to why the ordinary means of grace are more reliable than extraordinary experiences. I know you want them. I want them. And I'm not saying we shouldn't pray that God would do these things when and where he decides to do. But I am saying that in the meantime, God has given us much more detail. to follow on a daily basis from His Word so that we know that we're walking in a path of obedience and submission and faithfulness to thus saith the Word of the Lord. So here's an example that the Apostle Paul gives in the book of Galatians chapter 1. He's going to give an example of an extraordinary experience that could lead to you believing a false gospel. Verse six, chapter one, verse six. I am astonished that you were so quickly deserting Him, Christ, who called you in the grace, or God the Father, I'm sorry, Him who called you in the grace of Christ, and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. Beloved, that was true then, that's true today, and it will be true until Jesus comes back. There will always be enemies of the cross of Christ. And they do not necessarily always seek to just say there is no God, there is no Messiah, there is no way of salvation. Sometimes what they try to do is take partial, take the Word of God, twist it and turn it, and give half-truths at best, and try to misinterpret and misapply the Word of God and the promises of God and the gospel of God, so that it's actually a false gospel that's propagated using the same kinds of terminology that other Christians use. But what is this extraordinary experience? Verse 8, but even if we, an apostle, who is especially ordained by the Lord Jesus Christ to have authority in the churches to establish both what they believe and how they practice Christianity, right? We've been over that, and so I won't revisit all of that. So even if an apostle comes, him, Paul, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be a curse, let him be anathema, let him be damned by God. Because beloved, not all angels are good. Some of them are fallen angels. Some of them, we call them demon spirits. And even in the first century, the apostles warned us about the Antichrist and the spirit of Antichrist that would go out, not the true Christ, but say, here is the Messiah. Jesus told his apostles, some will say to you, there's the Messiah, he's over here, go out to see him. He said, don't go, don't go. But there will be these teachings. Go back to our text, 1 Timothy 4, verse one. Now the Spirit, the Holy Spirit expressly says that in the latter times, some will depart from the faith, the true faith, once for all delivered to the saints, the objective deposit of truth from God concerning the Lord Jesus Christ for the salvation of everyone who will believe, that truth is gonna be departed from by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of what? Of demons. So beloved, you could have an extraordinary experience like that. Can you imagine what it would be like? Well, just think about Mary, the mother of Jesus, when Gabriel came to her. What was that like for her? When you think about in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, after Jesus was raised from the dead and the people saw the resurrected Christ, even his apostles, There was such fear and trembling that came upon them that they fell to their faces as if dead people. At these extraordinary beings, these angelic beings, coming just, Gabriel just comes to bring an announcement. Zechariah, the dad of John the Baptist, and the experience he had at the temple. And what an extraordinary experience he had. And Paul says, if one of those kinds of beings comes to you and preaches to you a gospel contrary, different than the one that you received by the power of the Holy Spirit that changed your life, changed your heart forever, let him be anathema, let him be accursed. So beloved, you and I cannot always just say, wow, I'm telling you what, it was such an experience. I mean, you just won't believe what I saw. You wouldn't imagine what I experienced that day. I know this comes from God, do you? How do you? How do you know that? How can you tell the difference between one spirit and another? Answer, the Word of God. The ordinary means by which we know God is that God has chosen to reveal himself in words that are contained in the Holy Bible, that serve us every day as guideposts, that teach us what to believe and how to live the Christian life. And that's exactly what Paul, is talking about in this text. So just because the ordinary means of grace are not as flashy as some of the extraordinary experiences that people talk about, to our sensibilities, they seem more ordinary, does not mean that they are not the spiritual activity of God. And that's what I really want you to hear. Just because it seems ordinary to your sensibilities right now does not mean that that is not the way in which God has chosen to act, to inform your heart and your mind and your soul, and to guide you along the pathway of righteousness. We gave you a couple of them, I'll just quickly go over them, but the study of the Word of God, for example, the study of the Scriptures, participation in the sacrament, baptism, the Lord's Supper, prayer, the fellowship with other believers, the experience of trials, congregational worship like we're having right now. All of these seem ordinary to our sensibilities, but in fact, they are God-ordained. They are the God-ordained means. through which God communicates his grace and power for you to live the Christian life. And if you neglect these ordinary means of grace, then you neglect God and you neglect the relationship and the sweetness of it, as we're going to see, and the power of that relationship that you could have if you would take them up, take them up. So, These means are designed to glorify and reveal Christ, the Word of God coming and providing clear instructions, clear teaching, objective truth, and the sacraments representing the gospel itself and the transformation that it provides for those who believe. So, we are beloved to rely on these ordinary means of grace because they communicate God�s grace, they train us in godly living, and they are so significant to our lives. So, let�s go back. And we looked at the first one in verse 13 last week, namely the public reading of Scripture. The public reading of Holy Scripture is one of the ordinary means of grace. So first of all, come to church, come to the gathering of the church, and the word of God is going to be read publicly. And he tells him that in verse 13. He says, until I come, devote yourself, devote yourself to the public reading of scripture. And we talked about the implications of this, and we talked about this so I won't linger too long, other than I want to give you a story from the Old Testament as an example. So, if you look this up, you could go to Deuteronomy, just write this down, Deuteronomy 31, where you see all the way back at Deuteronomy, Moses gathers the people of God together and he begins to read the word of the Lord, the law of God to the people. And in verse 12 of Deuteronomy 31, it says, God tells Moses, assemble the people, and listen to what he says. This is gonna be my little plug in for a family integrated church model, okay? Here we go. Assemble the people, men, women, and little ones. No little ones church here. and the sojourner within your towns, that they may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God, and be careful to do all the words of this law, and that their children who have not known it may hear and learn and to fear the Lord your God, as long as you live in the land that you're going over the Jordan to possess." That's what God tells Moses to tell the people of God to do. Joshua. leaves the scene and Joshua begins to lead the people. It says in Joshua chapter 8 and verse 34, and after he read all the words of the law, the blessing and the curse that's contained in the law, the word of God, according to all that is written in the book of the law, there was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel. And here it is again, and the women, and the little ones, and the sojourners who lived among them. But in 2 Kings, if you want to turn to that when you are welcome to, in 2 Kings you have the story of Josiah's reform, you may be familiar with it. But Josiah was one of the kings of Israel, one of the kings of Judah, and this is such a good illustration of what we're trying to say. Now, the people of God who have been led to the Red Sea, the people of God who have had people like Elijah that called down fire out of heaven, like Elijah who could make the axe head to float, right, who could open the Jordan River at flood stage, those kinds of miraculous things, right? The people of Israel trying to live a life of devotion and dedication to God, you know what happened? They started somehow along the way, they actually lost the Word of God. They lost it. Can you imagine? They lost the Word of God. They no longer had the book to guide them and direct them according to the ways of God. God had given them a book. God had communicated and revealed himself in words, and he instructed Moses and the prophets, some of them, to write those words down, and they were in scripturated revelation of God, and they were to guide them. They were to guide the kings. They were to guide the people. But you know what? They lost it. How do you lose God's word? Well, can I submit to you one way that that happens almost always? Neglect. If you begin to neglect the word, it doesn't take long till you don't even know where it's at. And I submit to you this morning that there's a lot of folks today that need to come back to the book. They need to come back. And one of the ways that we keep that going is through the ordinary means of grace called reading the scriptures publicly. But listen to what happens. 2 Kings 22 verse eight. And Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the secretary, I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan and he read it. So what happened was the temple of God had been neglected. I mean neglected. They weren't maintaining the physical facilities. They were not maintaining it rightly. They were worshiping idol gods. And the book of the law, the word of God was actually so neglected, it was lost. And they began to do repairs to the temple and started cleaning up the temple. And they found the book, the book. And so Shaphan comes to the king and reports about the repairs of the temple. He tells the king in the process that Hilkiah the priest found the book of the law, and so he reads it before the king, and the king tears his clothes. That's an expression of mourning. That's an expression of contrition and brokenheartedness. He tears his clothing. The king is now humbled before God in his inscripturated revelation and calls the religious leaders together and instructs them to pray to God and intercede for him and for the people of Judah. He humbles himself under the hearing of God's Word, which had been neglected, which had been abandoned by the people of God. And then in verse 13, he says, go inquire the Lord for me and for the people and for all Judah concerning the words of this book that has been found. For great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book. to do according to all that is written concerning us. So the king and the priests and the leaders humbled themselves, they prayed, they repented and called upon God. God sends back word to the king that all the curses and all the promises that they've read in the book of the law are going to come true. It's going to happen. It's gonna happen. The people of God have so rejected God's word, neglected God's word, lost God's word, abandoned God's word, and God's curses are coming. God's curses are coming. But because he says, God says, that they humbled themselves and began to conform to the word that they have in the book now, the inscripturated revelation of God, The tragedy that is gonna come upon the nation will not happen in the time of Josiah. He would be unable to die and go to his grave in peace. So the king begins this great time of reformation, reforms the nation, reforms the temple, brings the people back under the direction of the word of God. Sound familiar? When we think about the word reform, we think about the 16th century, right? in the 1600s when the Protestant Reformation took place. But here's an example, even in the Old Testament, of what happens when people go back to the book, when people return back to the source of God's inerrant, infallible Word, and it becomes the source that guides them into everything they believe and everything that they practice. And so that's just an example from the Old Testament. We came into the New Testament, looked at the life of Jesus, the apostles, and then we ended thinking about how important it is to do that. Let's go to number two. So what is the second ordinary means of grace that is given here? until I come to devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture to exhortation. To exhortation. So the second thing is exhortation. What is exhortation? Well, you think about it when I say, we need, as a people, to come back to the book. I wanna urge you to take up the means of grace, to open the word of God every day, and understand that if you wanna hear from God and know that you're knowing the truths of God from God, you must get that knowledge from His word. That's an exhortation to you to act, and an encouragement and a call to action, and that's exactly what exhortation means. But I want you to notice how these three ordinary means of grace are connected, all of them are connected. To read the Word of God publicly, there you have it, unadulterated, pure, the truths of God in Scripture rated are then translated from the original languages so that we understand, the general public can understand the words of the Lord, and it's read so that we can all hear what does thus say the Word of God. And then the exhortation is this call to action. It's like Hezekiah coming to the people and saying, We need to repent. We need to humble ourselves. We need to respond to this. Now that we know the way to live, you could think of it like this. Hezekiah, I said Hezekiah, I meant Josiah. Josiah could have been trying before the book was found to do his level best, right? I mean, he's trying to serve Yahweh, but then he finds the book. He says, oh, we were wrong. We were wrong. He was humbled at the Word of God. He trembled at the Word of God and was willing to submit himself to what it says. Are you? When you hear something, you say, well, I've never heard that before. I don't know. But if you read it in scripture, and there it is, and the plain meaning of the text comes to your heart and to your mind, are you humble enough to submit to it? Well, he tells us, he tells Timothy, he tells pastors that they should not only read the scriptures, but exhort the people from the Word of God to warn the people against error, to warn the people about false practice within their churches and within their Christian lives. We have people today, beloved, that are calling what God calls sin, good. They call good, evil, and they call evil, good. That's the day you live in. That's the day you live in. And so this is an exhortation, this is a warning to people to know the truths of God and then to act upon those truths, calling us to action. And also the third nuance here is to give encouragement. So this word is often used in scripture to give meaning, to exhort, to give encouragement, to call someone to action. And it always has this idea of a solemn calling to action, a solemn calling and warning doctrinal and practical error, which we have looked at over and over again in 1 Timothy, right? Godly living is attached to sound doctrine. So let me give you some examples here. Acts chapter 13. Acts chapter 13. It'll give you a little bit of a flavor of what this word looks like in some other context. Acts 13 and verses 15 to 16. So here's the apostle Paul, and he's going to go into the synagogue, Jewish synagogue, and they're gonna go through the routine. They're gonna go through the liturgy. They're gonna read the scriptures publicly, and after they read the scriptures publicly, they're gonna say this. Any of you brothers that has a word of exhortation, now's the time. So the reading of the scriptures and the exhortation of the scriptures or by the scriptures and with the scriptures always go together. After the reading of the law and the prophets, verse 15, Acts 13, 15, after the reading of the law and the prophets, the rulers of the synagogue sent a message to them saying, brothers, if you have any word of, and here's the same Greek word, encouragement, here it's translated encouragement, in our text it's translated exhortation. If you have any word of exhortation, any word of encouragement for the people, say it. So Paul stood up motioning with his hand, men of Israel, he says, listen to this, and here in this text he goes on to exhort and encourage the people to believe on Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah that God had promised to the nation throughout their history. So it's an encouragement, it's an exhortation that comes out of the reading of the Scriptures. So you have the reading of the Scriptures and you have exhortation to exhort, and God calls people today. God calls pastors, preachers, evangelists to do this work within the context of a local church. He calls them, He equips them, He ordains them to this. And it's for your good as a church member. It's for your good as a Christian to hear the word read in its purity and then to hear an exhortation calling us to action, encouraging us in our faith from those words. Sure, Romans chapter 15, verse four. Listen to how this word is used here. Romans chapter 15 verse 4, for whatever was written, notice that, for whatever was, are you with me? In former days was written for our instruction that through endurance and through, and here comes the word, encouragement, the encouragement of the what? of the Scriptures. This is not just a man saying, hey, I encourage you to go on, you're doing good, good job, pep rally. That's not what it is. This is tied to the inerrant infallible Word of the living God. This is tied to the Holy Scripture. The Scriptures are read, and whatever is written in those Scriptures is given so that it will be an encouragement to you in the present. It's always attached to the Word of God. Encouragement of the Scriptures, and notice what it produces. What does it produce? Hope. Now think about living the Christian life. Think about the importance that hope has in your soul every day to persevere in faith and faithfulness to God. Hope is such a powerful force in the Christian life. But how do you maintain that hope in God? Answer, whatever is written was written. for our instruction that through endurance and through the encouragement, the exhortation of the Scriptures, we might have hope. So our hope is tied to the Word of God and to the exhortation toward what the Word has to say for your life. See how that works? You want hope in God, you go to the scriptures, you want hope in God, you come to the assembly where the scriptures are read, where the scriptures are used as the means through which the church is exhorted and called to action and encouraged in faith and faithfulness and perseverance and hope, right? 1 Thessalonians 2, 1 Thessalonians 2. Verses 11 and 12, we find a word here of the same category, 1 Thessalonians 2, 11 and 12, for you know, talking about his relationship to them, like a father with his children, we, here's the word, exhorted each one of you, we exhorted you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God who called you into His own kingdom and glory. So Paul's own example of his ministry, how like a father with his children, he exhorted them through the Scriptures. 1 Thessalonians, you're in chapter 2, look at chapter 3, verses 1 and 2. We talked about hope, now we're gonna talk about faith. 1 Thessalonians 3, 1. Therefore, when we can bear it no longer, we were willing to be left behind in Athens alone, and we sent Timothy, our brother and God's coworker, in the gospel of Christ, to establish, and here it is, and exhort you in your faith. So in Romans we see how Christian hope is connected to the Scriptures and the exhortation from the Scriptures is the ordinary means of grace by which you persevere in hope in God. Here we see the ordinary means of grace connected to the Scriptures and the exhortation thereof connected to your perseverance in faith in God. exhort you in your faith, encourage you in your faith, charge you to persevere in your faith in God. Or the whole book of Hebrews, the whole book of Hebrews, he says at the end, in Hebrews chapter 13 and verse 22, the whole book has this same kind of idea behind it, Hebrews 13, 22. He says, I appeal to you brothers, bear with my word of exhortation. for I have written to you briefly." So the whole book, the whole inspired book of Hebrews comes to the church as a means through which, he says, this word of exhortation comes. And all of the beautiful, wonderful, marvelous instructions that you find in the book of Hebrews. So in our text, Timothy is to call for the church to respond to the reading of the Word of God, and what he calls that is the word exhortation. We might think of it as the appropriate application of the Word of God to our lives, to our relationships, and to our churches. have the public reading of Scripture, to have the exhortation that grows and comes from a right understanding of that text, which we're going to get to next week in the next Ordinary Means of Grace, is to call us to action, to stir us up, not according to the fancy of the individual, but according to the holy Scriptures that are inerrant and fallible. and profitable for every one of us if we seek to truly know and walk with God, seek to truly glorify Him with and through our lives. Application comes, beloved, when we understand and we're called to that action from the scriptures. Let's pray.