You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2009.
1 Timothy 5:1-16
September 20, 2009
Exordium: This passage starts out teaching us about life in the church, and goes almost immediately to family matters and illustrations for life in the home.
How close these two great gifts of God are: the church and the family circle. The one seems to merge into the other. For after all, the church is a collection of households, and that includes the households where there is only one. That too is a little church.
1 Timothy 4:6-16
September 13, 2009
Exordium: One can learn a lot from attending funerals. I remember well the farewell service for the wife of a dear pastor friend of mine. He was a poet as well as a preacher. His beloved wife, Maryanne, went to be with the Lord and I was there and Jim, the husband, brought the message himself. We were all amazed and I wondered what he would he say and how could he do it?
He described Maryanne in glowing terms, “before she began to breathe the finer air,” as he put it. Then he summarized her life with one phrase which will never leave my memory. He said, “She was “an athlete of the spirit.”
I PETER 4: 1-5
September 6, 2009
Exordium: Paul was a lover of life. He rejoiced at being citizen of God’s world as well as of God’s kingdom. He wrote to Timothy: “God has given us richly all things to enjoy.” (I Timothy 6:17B) Think of that sentence in terms of his embracing of life, the good life, God had given him.
We have often recounted his sufferings for the gospel, but how much have we celebrated his joy. You will remember that he wrote his great epistle of joy from a prison cell.
His grasp of God’s world was large, and he tried to expand his view of the world as well to help us to see how gracious and generous and good our God is and to enable us to enjoy Him more and more. One of His great expansive sentences was: “All things are yours and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.” (I Corinthians 3:21)
1 Timothy 3: 14-16
August 30, 2009
Exordium: Paul’s goal here is to help Timothy see what a great thing he is working with – the very “house of God”, that is the place where He has chosen to dwell and where His children have the hub and center of their lives. He calls it the “church of the living God,” meaning that the Spirit of God is what causes the church to be alive and growing as it is.
