I Timothy 5:17-25
September 27th, 2009
Exordium: The minister faces challenges and situations on every hand. He may feel like a juggler trying to balance things and keep the ship of the church on its right course toward the Kingdom of God.
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.
I Timothy 2: 8-15
August 16, 2009
Exordium: This passage is about how we worship-an important subject since we do that every Lord’s Day- as well as in our homes. We want to get it right.
This part of the Word of God takes us back all the way to the beginning of things, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and judgments came upon them. These are judgments we live with every day.
But in worship we reverse these curses and actually turn them into blessings. Let me show you what I mean. Since the curses were separate and different for the man and the woman, we must turn them into blessings separately. In this section of First Timothy, the men come first.
I Timothy 2:1-8
August 9, 2009
Exordium: Last week we closed on the matter of the conscience, how valuable a gift it is! Along with faith it is a weapon of the Christian in the warfare of the Christian life.
We made commitments:
1. Daily to be exposed to at least one chapter of the Word of God as a means of increasing our faith.
2. Daily to examine our conscience to see if there are adjustments in attitude or action that need to be made.
The conscience needs to be cherished as one or our most precious possessions. We do that in worship and prayer. That is why it is so important to learn to pray. Have you learned to pray in the Biblical way of prayer?
I TIMOTHY 1: 12-20
August, 2, 2009
Exordium: You are like a flower bed to me. At first, you all looked alike, but as I get to know you, each of you has his or her own beauty. I see God’s grace at work in each of you in a different way. In some, He is nurturing, others guiding, some He is comforting, some He is employing in His purposes and program and in some all of the above are visible. In every case, He is growing you up in Christ.
I Timothy 1: 1-11
July 26, 2009
Exordium: This letter of First Timothy is loaded with truths that are not found in just this way in any other part of the Bible.
It is a letter from an older man to his young student protégé, but it is written for others to hear and perhaps primarily to them. That is where we come in. We are eavesdropping on a conversation which we are intended to over hear, written to a minister but designed for his congregation.
II CORINTHIANS 4:10-12
JUNE 28, 2009
EXORDIUM: There is something we all have in common, but we seldom talk about it – the Christian life and how to live it. That may be part of the reason that we stumble sometimes, or make little progress or alienate others along the way.
Perhaps we haven’t really learned how to walk, in the way Paul meant in Ephesians when he said, “walk worthy of the calling with which you have been called.”
