We are in 1st Timothy chapter 1 this morning. 1st Timothy 1 verses 1 and 2. I've been reading 1 Timothy because I have taken on the task of trying to memorize the book, which seems almost insane to me. The older I get, the harder it is for me to memorize. But I'm doing that. And because I'm not the senior pastor here, much of my preaching ministry here is not based on verse-by-verse exposition, unless Pastor Randall goes on a sabbatical every 20 years or so. But on what I've been working on lately in my own study or for conference preaching. So that's why we're dealing with 1st Timothy chapter 1, verses 1 and 2. So that's what you're getting today. The book has had a big impact on my ministry over the last 29 years. I find myself coming to it often. John Calvin's set of this book and 2nd Timothy. What I owe to these two epistles to Timothy can never be told. In the books, especially in 1 Timothy, what you have here is a manual for pastors and for elders on life in the local church. And it should be read often, and it should probably be memorized by pastors and elders, because it's so instrumental, it's so important, and it's a high standard. It's an extremely high standard. I don't know any pastor that can come to 1 Timothy and read it and not, in some way or the other, repent every single time they read it. I mean, it's just, it's a stunningly high standard. Alexander White, Scottish preacher, he was right about the epistles to Timothy when he wrote this. Paul, you may be sure, threw down his pen again and again in the composition of these two pastoral epistles, and betook himself to his knees and to the blood of Christ before he could finish what he had begun to write. I'm sure of it. I'm sure as he was writing this, he was pressed with it himself. What a standard is this? What, how high of a standard is this? I'm afraid that we have lost the standard in so many churches these days, and generally in Christianity in general. So in the first two verses, what we have is an explanation of the Apostle Paul's call to ministry. I don't know if we have any young men here who are called to pastoral ministry or not. I hope and pray that we do. But if there are, then there are two lessons in these two verses that you must understand about pastoral ministry. And these two lessons come in the context of the gospel. What we just sang about. About grace and peace. The reason why anybody goes into ministry is not because it's a job. They don't even go into it because it's an adventure. Like the Army used to say in the recruiting posters. they go into the job because, first and foremost, they're Christians who've been impacted by the grace and mercy and peace of Jesus Christ. And because of that, they're compelled, if they're called of God to do it, they're compelled to go into ministry because they cannot but do it. There's no other options for them. And that's what we're going to look at here in the text. I'm gonna try to quote 1st Timothy 1, 1, and 2. This is what I've been working on. I've been memorizing it in the King James, and so that's why it's gonna sound that way. But this is what it says. Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God our Savior, and Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope. Unto Timothy, my own son, the ESV, I think it's the ESV, my true son in the faith. My own son in the faith. grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. So in verse 1, for Paul, speaking to Timothy, Paul's talking about his own call. As he talks about his own call, he says the call to ministry was not optional for him. And there are several characteristics of this call to ministry that I want to point out from verse 1. The first characteristic of a call to ministry is that a minister is sent. Paul was an apostle, the scripture says. And I don't know what you think about the word apostle. These days when you look around on church signs and on websites, you get a little bit different idea of what it means to be an apostle compared to what the Bible says, right? But an apostle of Jesus Christ is someone who is sent directly by Jesus Christ, who saw him and sent him, during his life, sent him out into ministry. We don't have those anymore. We don't have those. So if you see somebody going around saying, I'm an apostle. Don't believe it. Don't you buy it. They're not. They're rest assured they're not. They did not see Jesus Christ. He did not send them directly in the way that he sent those disciples. And that he sent the Apostle Paul. That did not happen for them. They could be a pastor. They could be an elder. But they're not apostles. The Apostle Paul was an apostle, and the word in the Greek just simply means someone who has sent. Now you can say, well, yeah, but missionaries are sent, and pastors in a way could be sent. Yes, I guess you could say that as an application, but you can't take the title and put it on someone in the same way that was put on the Apostle Paul or the rest of the apostles. It doesn't work that way. So a minister is sent. However, there's still a calling. There is still a calling, and the minister is still sent. And at some point in the minister's life, he's going to have a realization, a compelling— it's going to feel like a command, like the Apostle Paul says here in verse 1, that they must do it. A minister is sent. What happens is there's an inward compulsion to ministry, and then there's an external call that's verified by the church. So there's an internal call that the person feels himself, that the man of God feels himself. Man, I think I need to preach. I was talking to Cody about this. He was explaining to me, I think a year or two ago, that, you know, he really felt like he needed to go out and preach the gospel on the streets. He didn't know how to do it. He had nobody to go with him. And so here he is, struggling with this, thinking, how in the world do I— Do I go out and do that? And then God, by His grace, brings along Jeff from another church, brings him here about the same time, who has experience preaching on the streets, and suddenly this inner urge that he had for about a year, he's able to do something with, because he's got a friend who can show him how to do it, and all this kind of thing. See, that's how a call to ministry will work, is that you know, man, I got to do something. I don't even know how to do it. I don't even know how to preach. I just wish that in our Bible colleges and in our seminaries, that the people who are teaching preachers to preach would start not by putting him up here in a pulpit, but sending him out on a street corner somewhere. That's the best place to learn how to preach. When you got people drunk, you know, spitting and just fuming and all that they do, and getting up in your grill, and everything that they do out there on the streets, you learn how to preach. Learn how to stay on point when they're, when they're doing all the things that they do. And what a great place to learn what the gospel is and how to preach the gospel. Put them out on the streets. That's where we need to start. If they can prove themselves on the streets, then put them in a pulpit. Because that's what you see in the Scriptures. Now look at Acts chapter 13 for a minute. Flip over to Acts 13. You're gonna see this internal call to ministry in the Apostle Paul's life. And then the external call that comes from the local church. Acts 13. Now, the Apostle Paul, you know the story. He's on his way to Damascus to persecute the church. And Jesus appears to him. And gives him the truth. He gives him a calling to go and preach the gospel to the Gentiles. But he doesn't do that right away. He doesn't run to that right away. There's a period of years it takes place, and a time where he spends time in a local church, ministering and serving in that church, and the church that he went to was a church in Antioch. So it says, now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers. Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manan, a lifelong friend of Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, He had a call from Jesus, right? When he was saved. That call came to him when he was saved. but he doesn't receive the external call and he doesn't begin his missionary journeys planting churches and all the rest until the local church verifies the call. That's what you see here in Acts 13. What we have today are so many self-appointed preachers. People who get the idea, yes, I should preach. And maybe they are called of God, like the Apostle Paul was. But they're not willing to live life in the local church. They're not willing to lay it all down in the church, and learn in the church, and serve in the church. And they never even give the church an opportunity to recognize them, the Spirit of God, to bring direction in that way, and send them off formally. And they rob themselves. And they rob the church by doing that. And so with the Apostle Paul, you see this example in his life. This is what he did. So the question comes up by Bible scholars when they look at 1 Timothy. There's always questions with Bible scholars, just the way it is. They ask the question, this is a personal letter to Timothy. So why in the world is Paul trying to prove his apostleship to a guy he's known for years? Why would he do that? Why would he really point out, well, hey, I'm an apostle. Why is that happening? And it's believed that maybe one reason why that's happening is because the role that Timothy had. Timothy was not an apostle. What Timothy was, it seems like, if you read the book of Acts and what he was doing, it seems like what he was doing is that he was kind of like in the role of a church planter. And he was overseeing churches, probably in the area of Ephesus, in Asia Minor. His job was to see how the church plants were going. Overseeing them, and perhaps planting churches himself, based on what's said in 1st and 2nd Timothy. So R.C.H. Lenski says, it was a great advantage for Timothy to have full instructions in writing, not only for his own sake, but also when he was challenged by others. Here are the Apostle's own words, set down by the Apostle himself. They are both a written authorization that grant Timothy the right to act for Paul in this apostolic work, and written directions about which no person could quibble. Once you had it in the Apostle Paul's handwriting, and you have it laid out there, right there in verse 1, that it's Paul the Apostle who's telling Timothy to do these things, you can imagine, if you've been in church life for any length of time, you can imagine maybe how it would go. Hey Timothy, you're a young guy, you know, you're all excited and all that kind of thing, but, you know, do you think Paul would really do this? Don't you think you're overstepping your bounds a little bit, Timothy? Wouldn't it be nice if he could just take that book and show it to him and say, yeah, I'm doing exactly what the Apostle Paul said I should be doing. And so he has it in writing. I think that's probably why in verse 1 he's dealing with this whole issue of apostleship. Usually, if you read the New Testament epistles, he's dealing with it with people who don't believe he's an apostle. Well, that wouldn't be the case with Timothy. So what's going on? I think that's probably what's happening there. But if you're called to ministry, know this. First of all, you will know that Jesus is sending you to do it. You'll struggle with it. Mightily. You'll struggle with it. And there'll be times when you'll try to get away from it. And you can't. And God brings you back to it. No matter what you do, you can't escape from it. And it's something that you approach with a great deal of fear and trembling because you realize that when you stand to preach, or teach, or lead the people of God in any way, you're gonna give an account for those that are underneath your charge. Hebrews 13 makes that really clear. Pastor Randall and myself, as elders in this church, when we stand before the Lord Jesus Christ on the Day of Judgment, We're going to give an account for each one of you that's a member here. Everyone. That's a fearful thing. So a minister is sent, but a minister is also commanded, because the next part of verse, Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God. It's not optional because there's a commandment that's involved here. And the Apostle Paul talks about the commandment that he received on the road to Damascus in Acts chapter 26. So go back to Acts chapter 26 to verse 14. Acts chapter 26, verse 14. Now, let's go back to 13. 13 says that midday, O king, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, that shone around me, those who journeyed with me. And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads. And I said, who are you, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting, here's the command, but rise and stand upon your feet for I have appeared to you for this purpose to appoint you as a servant and witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles to whom I am sending you, to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me." This is not given as an option. Jesus is not saying to Paul, if it fits into your schedule, I would like you to maybe consider possibly becoming an apostle to the Gentiles. Not what he says. He says, nope, I command you to do it. He commanded with authority. We're going to talk more about that authority as we go here. But I do want to say this. Because he's got a command, he's been sent, right? We've established that. So here's a warning to those who would seek to try to push their own way into the office. Intruding into the office pastor, elder, without a call, is dangerous to you. If you don't have a call, but you push to get into that, or really into any ministry capacity, without a call, it's one of the most singly dangerous things that can happen to you. Let's look at some examples. Go back in the book of Numbers. Numbers chapter 18, verse 7. This is a word of God to the priests, the Levites. There's a warning here. Numbers 18, verse 7. Go back to verse 6. They're a gift given to God. They're set apart unto God. This is why it's dangerous. Verse 7. It's pretty clear. If you're trying to press into this, you're not a Levite, you're not called to this ministry, any outsider tries to come near to this, he should die. God takes his ministry seriously. People will say, well, that's the Old Testament, you know. Ever read about Ananias and Sapphira lying to the Holy Spirit? Acts chapter 5 in the New Testament. What happened to them? They were killed. Not making any threats to anybody here, by the way. I'm just reading what Scripture says. 2 Chronicles chapter 26. You have the example of King Uzziah. King Uzziah tried to press himself into the role of priest. He was a king. But he was not called to the ministry of being a priest. There's only one prophet, priest, and king. We just learned about that in our catechism. Jesus Christ is the only one who can adequately fulfill all those roles. Uzziah tried to usurp on all of that. And so in verse 16, Talk about Uzziah, when he was strong, he grew proud to his destruction. For he was unfaithful to the Lord his God, and entered the temple of the Lord to burn incense on the altar of incense. But Azariah the priest went in after him with 80 priests of the Lord who were men of valor, and they withstood King Uzziah. and said to him, It is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the Lord, but for the priests, the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated to burn incense. Go out of the sanctuary, for you have done wrong, and it will bring you no honor from the Lord God." Think about this for a second. This was a gracious thing that God was doing. Is it not? He sent warning. He sent warning. He could have just stricken Uzziah with leprosy on the spot, and he would have been right and just to do so. But God is so gracious that he sends warning. When you hear preaching from the pulpit, the issues of warning to you, that is not negative. That's not bad. The preacher is not being mean. That is an act of grace. That God would send a warning. If a bridge is out and there's a cliff, and somebody's out there trying to stop people from driving off the cliff, they're not mean. How dare you wreck my day? I got plans, man. I'm going over that chasm. That's what I'm gonna do. Who are you to tell me that I can't drive over that thing? The bridge is out! Don't do it, you will die. You will die. That's not—and being urgent about it, by the way, and saying it like that when you got a knucklehead who wants to try to fly over a cliff, that's not mean either. Because you're pleading. You're trying to get their attention. You might even sound like you're yelling in order to get their attention. Why? Because you care about them. My son Charlie, is Charlie here? There he is. Sorry Charlie, I gotta tell a story about you. So when he was four, we lived over in Justin, we lived in this housing development in Justin. I'm sitting in the house, in the back of the house, I hear the door open. I believe Charlie was the only other person in the house with me at the time. So if the door's opening, it means the four-year-old's about to do something. He's not supposed to do. And so I hear the door open. I look up and there he goes. He's—I don't even think he was four. I think he was about two. He went sailing out the door. And in that development, there's like 10 feet from the front door to the street. And I'm like 30, 40 feet back, however far back it is in the house. So I'm out of there like a shock. And I'm yelling the whole way, Charlie, stop! Right? I'm yelling like that. Stop! Because he doesn't have time. You know, and there could be a car coming by. Why did I do that? Because I was mean? You think I'm mean, Kevin? Kevin's over there nodding his head. He says, I'm mean. I probably am mean. But anyway, I wasn't mean at that moment. I was trying to get him to stop. And get him to stop and not run into that street. Because I love him. I don't want to pick up his lifeless corpse off the street. Right? Think about that. That's why as parents we have to do these things. I stopped. Verse 19. Think about Uzziah. Here's how he responds to the gracious warning from God. Uzziah was angry. Now he had a censer in his hand to burn incense, and when he became angry with a priest, leprosy broke out of his forehead in the presence of the priest in the house of the Lord by the altar of incense. And Azariah, the chief priest, and all the priests looked to him, and behold, he was leprous in his forehead. They rushed him out quickly, and he himself hurried to go out, because the Lord had struck him. And King Uzziah was a leper to the day of his death. Being a leper, he lived in a separate house, for he was excluded from the house of the Lord. And Jotham his son was over the king's household, governing the people of the land. Last verse of verse 23, Uzziah slept with his fathers. They buried him with his fathers in the burial field that belonged to the kings. They said he is a leper. Jotham, his son, reigned in this place. This is a serious thing. The God that we serve today is the same God of the Old Testament. And it can be a dangerous, dangerous thing. Why is it we see so many men fall away from ministry? Why is it that we see so many men shipwreck their lives? They end up leaving their wife or whatever. They end up getting a divorce. Or maybe they stay together, but they're unfaithful, whatever. All this stuff, this train wreck that happens. Why does that stuff happen? Well, certainly there's sin. We're all sinful men. We can fall into sin. But perhaps God's purifying his pulpit. by exposing it. A minister is commanded. And if you're not commanded, don't press yourself in. A minister is also a slave. He's a slave. We're going to talk more about this. But it says there, Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God, and by Jesus Christ, who? Our Lord. He's master. He's master. When we say Jesus is Lord, it's not like Jesus is his first name, Christ is his middle name, and Lord is his last name. It's a title. And what it means is, he's our master. I don't think we have fully come to understand all that that means, really. Because if we really understood all that that means, we would live our lives much differently. He's our master. over everything. I don't want to spend a lot of time here, because I've got to go deeper with it in the next verse. So I'm just going to say that here, and we'll move on. But a minister is gospel-driven. Because think about how God is referred to, and how Jesus is referred to. First of all, in chapter 1, verse 1, he's God our Savior. He's our Savior. And it's kind of interesting that the Apostle Paul is referring to God as Savior, because in the New Testament, who do you usually refer to as Savior? Usually it's Jesus, but here in this case, he's saying God is our Savior. Well, there are other places where it does say that God is Savior, but not many in the New Testament. And most of them show up in the pastoral epistles. Most of them show up 1st Timothy, 2nd Timothy, and Titus. So you have one example here in 1-1. Go to chapter 2, verse 3. And it says, this is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior. In 1 Timothy 4.10, it says, For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hopes set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. Titus chapter 1, verse 3. Get there. It says it again in Titus chapter 1 verse 3, "...at the proper time manifested in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior." Titus chapter 2 verse 10, not pilfering, but showing all good faith, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior." Titus chapter 3, verse 4. But when the goodness and loving-kindness of God our Savior appeared, He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal, of the Holy Spirit. So I'm pointing out every time the Apostle Paul refers to God as our Savior in 1st 2nd Timothy and in Titus. Actually, it's just 1st Timothy and Titus. Why? The question then becomes, from Bible scholars who look at things like how these different writers use different titles and different words in the Greek, the answer seems to be that at the end of the Apostle Paul's life, There's a cult that's rising up and they're Gnostics. They're called Gnostics. They have special secret knowledge is what they claim. And they claim that because of their special secret knowledge, that they were the only ones who would be able to, they were the only ones who were privileged enough to get salvation. And, further than that, they really believe that they were the only, that God only saved people from certain nations. In this case, the Jewish people. Like they're the only ones who could be saved, is what they taught. And so it's believed by Bible scholars like Kittel and by Colin Brown, and all these people that are really smart, and a lot smarter than I am, that what was happening there is, in the context of most of these references, Paul says something when he's talking about saving the nations. God our Savior in the context of each one of those verses I read, and most of them, it's talking about saving multiple nations. And so it seems to be that the Holy Spirit is inspiring Paul to say these things so that he can directly or indirectly combat that and say, look, the gospel isn't just for one group of people. It's for the nations. And we all have to struggle with this somehow. Every one of us tends to do this in some way or the other, where we think that the gospel is really for only a certain group of people that we tend to like. Or they're like us, or something like that. That's not the truth. The gospel's not just for people from the United States. It's not for white people alone, or black people alone, or brown people alone, or, you know, Asian people alone. It's for the nations. And so what he's doing here, I believe, is he's addressing that in sort of an indirect way. Now in the Old Testament, Jonah chapter 2 verse 9, here's something else that we're saying when we're saying God is our Savior. We're making a statement about where salvation comes from. Jonah chapter 2 verse 9, Jonah says what? Salvation is of the Lord. It's of the Lord. It belongs to the Lord. Salvation belongs to him. He owns it. And he distributes it as he pleases. So that's part of what may be going on here with this reference to God being Savior. The Old Testament is loaded with those statements, as you would expect. God is our Savior. And that comes through the Gospel. But how is Jesus referred to at the end of 1.1? He's our hope. The Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope. He is the only hope you've got. The emphasis here is that you got no hope in yourself. You have no hope in yourself. Listen, you cannot be good enough. You have to say this over and over again. You can't be good enough to go to heaven. You can't follow enough laws of God. He is your only hope. based on what we're about to talk about here, grace and peace and mercy. So the Lord Jesus Christ is our hope. He himself is our hope. Do you know him? Do you really know him? I'm not talking about— I am talking about religion. I'm not talking about this fake Christianity that's out there, right? I'm talking about real Christianity, where you pray, you read the Word, you meditate on the Word, you ask God for things, and he answers your prayers. The relationship is real. It's religion for sure, but there's a relationship there as well. And that brings us to the second point in verse 2. The call to ministry is a call to relationship. If God's calling you to ministry, you've got a relationship. I think it's John MacArthur that says, we always make a big deal, you know, whether or not you have a relationship to Christ. It's like, look, everyone has a relationship to Christ. He's either your Lord and your master and your king, or he's your judge. There's a relationship. He will judge you at the end. That's the relationship that you have. You already have one. Either as your Savior or as your judge. The Lord Jesus Christ is our hope. He's the only hope that you've got. Repent of your sin. Run to Christ. Run to Christ and find everything in him. So the second point I want to make here, the second lesson to those that may be called to ministry, is that there are relationships in ministry. Because God saves us and Jesus is our hope, we have basis for relationships. You don't have any outside of Christ. So it's a call to relationship with God our Father. He is our Father. We see that in verse 2. Get back there in the ESV, and I'll read it in the version that you've got. To Timothy, my true child in faith, grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. In the King James it translates it, God our Father. I'm not sure which one would be exactly right here. I'd have to talk to Pastor Randall about that. And Christ Jesus our Lord. But this point is the same. He is our Father. He is our Father. Can I— Yeah. I think everybody's got like some kind of issue with their dad. Right? Let's just be honest. And if you're a dad, your kids probably have an issue with you. And you probably don't even realize it. It's true. The thing is, is that I think the reason why we all have issues with our dad is because somehow we know that God is our Father. And our dads are a mess. And guess what, Dad? If you're a dad, you're a mess too. All right? You're a sinful mess. None of you can measure up to God, our Father. And so somehow there's this tension that exists in our kids. Now some dads are just outright idiots. Right? I mean like they leave their kids. They leave their spouse. They leave their kids. And all that. But that's because that sin thing that's going on there, it's all there. There is a call, when you come to faith in Christ, to have God as your Father. This is an important thing. Because this has always described the relationship of the covenant people with God. In the Old Testament, Israel referred to God as their Father, and God referred to Him, Himself, to them as Father. Look at Deuteronomy, chapter 1, verse 31. We get so used to hearing some of these terms, we don't think about what they mean anymore. We learn the, you know, the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. And we just think, yeah, God's our Father. That's it. Big deal. It's a big deal! Deuteronomy 1, verse 31. No, verse 30. The Lord your God who goes before you will himself fight for you just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes and in the wilderness where you have seen how the Lord your God carried you as a man carries his son all the way that you went until you came out, until you came to this place. God brought the people of Israel through like a man carries his son. That's a relationship that you have in covenant. In Deuteronomy 14, verse 1, you have another example of this. In Deuteronomy 14, verse 1, listen to this statement. There's this whole thing about clean and unclean food. You know, you read that, you fall asleep, right? But don't miss verse 1. You are the sons of the Lord your God. And then he begins to proceed with these commands based out of the idea of relationship. You have a covenant with God, and in covenant with God, he's your father. No matter how messed up your father is, God is not messed up like that. He's sinless. He's sinless. So as messed up as your dad may be, understand that ultimately you have a heavenly father who's not messed up in any way. And guys, if you're like so many other people in the United States who didn't grow up with a dad, let me just tell you something. You have one in him. You can learn how to be a dad by watching how your Heavenly Father works with His covenant people. And imitate that. Imitate that. You say, well, I don't know how to be a dad. You have a Bible? Read it. Read and see how God deals with his covenant people. How he's patient and loving with them, yet at the same time firm with them. And you can learn something there about how to be a dad. And this is all through the New Testament, of course, when Paul starts his epistles in Galatians and 1 Thessalonians, he starts with the same idea. But understand this. God is your heavenly father if you are in covenant with him. And you get in covenant with him when you repent and place your faith in Christ. Now in the next part of the verse it says grace, mercy, and peace. Grace, mercy, and peace. We sang about it not too long ago. These are all gifts of salvation. He says, Paul, he says, unto my son, my own son, unto Timothy, my own son in the faith, my own true child in the faith, grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father. These are gifts of salvation. Jeff mentioned it. The thing to notice is that mercy is not usually mentioned in these introductions. Usually it's grace and peace. Mercy is very rarely ever mentioned. Here it is. Mercy, God does not give you what you deserve. If God gave us all what we would deserve, it would look like a bloodbath in here. It would be a slaughter if we got what we deserve. We're sinful people. We lie, we steal, we take God's name in vain. We deserve death and we deserve worse. We deserve hell. But in the gospel, You get mercy. You don't get what you deserve, and you get something else. You get grace. You get what you don't deserve. You receive from God forgiveness of sins, the righteousness of Christ credited to your account. You get to be adopted into the family of God, and you can call God Father. That's what you receive when you come to faith in Christ. This is all gospel. This is all gospel saturated, this introduction. And he's dealing with a man that's going out into ministry, but he's reminding him, in just two verses, all about the gospel. It's all driven by that. Grace, mercy, and peace. You see, before you came to Christ, you were at war with God. And you know what? God was at war with you. You hated God, and God His wrath abided on you. It was abiding on you according to John chapter 3 verse 36. There's a war between you and God. In the world, when they have a ceasefire, they just agree to stop killing each other. They still hate each other. If they get the chance, they'd shoot each other. But that's how it is in the world. But when you're reconciled to God, two people, people, two parties or enemies with each other, They're no longer just putting their weapons down and agreeing to put up with each other. But now, there's real, genuine love for each other. That's biblical reconciliation. It's amazing what we have in the gospel. So it's a call to relationship with God our Father. It's a call to relationship with Jesus Christ our Lord. He is our master, as I mentioned earlier. Polycarp, in his letter to the Philippians, wrote this. Bind up your loose robes. This guy was discipled by the Apostle John. Bind up your loose robes and serve as God's slaves in reverential fear and truth. Everything in heaven and on earth is subject to him. Everything that breathes will serve him. He's coming as a judge of the living and the dead, and God will hold those who disobey him accountable for his blood. Jesus Christ is the head of the Church, we all agree to that, Ephesians 1.22, but he's also in charge of you. 1 Corinthians 6.19 says, "'What? Know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For you are bought with a price.'" You're bought. "'Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's. He bought you. He owns title to your life. He can do with you exactly what he jolly well pleases. And he will. He will. And with Timothy, he would call him to ministry. With Paul, he called him to ministry because he had title on him. According to verse 2, he's Lord. It's a call to relationship with God our Father. It's a call to relationship with Jesus as Lord. And this is a This is like the cherry on top. There's relationships in the local church. Look at how Paul refers to Timothy. Unto Timothy, my own son or my own true child in the faith is the better translation. My own true child in the faith. In the context of God being Father and Jesus being Lord and Master, we have—we're all in that boat together in the gospel, right? So then what you have happen is, as you get involved in the church, what you have is relationships that are real. He says, you don't really hear much about Timothy's dad, but Paul says, you're my son in the faith. God used Paul to bring Timothy to faith, and he had this long discipleship relationship with him that extended to the point where he was turning Timothy over to oversee the churches. And that's what you have in the church. I'm afraid of megachurches, where you can just sort of waltz in and waltz out, and nobody ever know that you're there. I'm afraid of them. Where you can just come and go as you jolly well please, and there's nothing expected of you. Go, be entertained, hear something about God, and go home and live however you want. That's not how the Lord designed the local church. He designed it for relationship. He designed it so we would be accountable to one another and before the Lord. And so we have to treat it like that. Don't do that to the church. Don't do that to the church. We're not a megachurch, obviously. Take a look around. Don't smoke up here mirrors or, you know, lights or anything, you know. None of that. But, what we do—you can still act like that, though. Even though we're not a megachurch, you can still have that megachurch attitude. Don't approach church like a consumer. Don't approach church like, what can I get out of it for me? But instead approach it like, this is my family. This is my family. I want to be with my family. And that's what you see with Paul and Timothy here. You see that family-like relationship. And if you look through 1 Timothy, I'm not going to take the time to do it now because I'm late, but there's all kinds of allusions to this. So if the Lord calls you beyond your salvation to pastoral ministry, it's based on his lordship. Jesus is Lord of your salvation. He is Lord of the call to ministry since he's the head of the church. He has purchased you and he owns you. If he calls you, you have no option. You will be compelled. You will have to preach. You won't need a pulpit. You'll have to preach. And at some point in a pastoral call, that won't be enough just to even go out and preach. At some point, you'll want to pour into people. You will meet your own sons in the faith and long to disciple them as Paul did Timothy. You will weep with them. You will bleed with them. You will have your emotions trampled by them. You will laugh with them. You will answer for each one of them. And you will rejoice when they finish their race well. And at times you will grieve deeply when they don't finish it all. It's a high calling. It's a holy calling. And Timothy is gonna get all of that from the Apostle Paul in the book of 1st Timothy. How high and holy a calling it is. I hope that there are men of God who are called through the work of this church to preach the gospel. I hope he raises up pastors for this church in the future and for other churches, church plants and things like that. But don't dare do it. unless you've been called to ministry, underneath the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for this truth, and we pray, Lord, that you'll help us to camp out here as the people of God. You've given us relationship, and you've given us precious relationships in the church. Help us, Lord, to cling to those things and to see how precious they are. In Jesus' name, amen.