Forbidden Bible Verses — 1 Timothy 4:6-10

The three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.

Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.

Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary by Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

1 Timothy 4:6-10

A Good Servant of Christ Jesus

⁶ If you put these things before the brothers,^[a] you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. ⁷ Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; ⁸ for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. ⁹ The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. ¹⁰ For to this end we toil and strive,^[b] because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Saviour of all people, especially of those who believe.

——————————————————————————————————————-

Last week’s post discussed the Holy Spirit’s saying that some will fall away from the faith and included a warning about deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons coming from liars with no consciences.

Following on from that, Paul tells Timothy to put those things — biblical truths — before the congregation in Ephesus and neighbouring churches, and then he will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, having been trained in the words of the faith — Scripture — and of the good doctrine he has followed (verse 6).

Matthew Henry’s commentary cites other Apostles who gave that same message (emphases mine below):

The apostle would have Timothy to instil into the minds of Christians such sentiments as might prevent their being seduced by the judaizing teachers. Observe, Those are good ministers of Jesus Christ who are diligent in their work; not that study to advance new notions, but that put the brethren in remembrance of those things which they have received and heard. Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though you knew them, 2 Pet 1 12. And elsewhere, I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance, 2 Pet 3 1. And, says the apostle Jude, I will therefore put you in remembrance, Jude 5. You see that the apostles and apostolical men reckoned it a main part of their work to put their hearers in remembrance; for we are apt to forget, and slow to learn and remember, the things of God.—Nourished up in the words of faith and good doctrine, whereunto thou hast attained. Observe, 1. Even ministers themselves have need to be growing and increasing in the knowledge of Christ and his doctrine: they must be nourished up in the words of faith. 2. The best way for ministers to grow in knowledge and faith is to put the brethren in remembrance; while we teach others, we teach ourselves. 3. Those whom ministers teach are brethren, and are to be treated like brethren; for ministers are not lords of God’s heritage.

John MacArthur says:

… what is curious to me is that instructing Timothy in regard to dealing with false doctrine, he majors on the positive rather than on the negative. That’s a very important thought. The thrust of instruction here shows that the critical way to face false doctrine is not by refuting and denouncing false doctrine all the time, but by positively affirming the truth and living that truth.

And you establish such a high respect for virtue and truth that it becomes far more attractive, desirable, and believable than heresy and lies.

MacArthur points out that it can be problematic for a priest or minister to point out error without pointing out the truth:

… you can have a very negative ministry where people know everything they don’t believe, they just don’t know what they do believe. They can do well at refuting error, but it’s hard for them to keep from falling into sin because no one’s ever taught them the principles and dynamics of living the Christian life. They know what’s wrong, but they don’t know what’s right.

On this line of thinking, MacArthur tells us how the FBI train their agents involved in detecting counterfeit:

… about the FBI training people in the counterfeit currency area, they don’t show them anything counterfeit, they just show them everything real, and when they see a counterfeit, it’s very obvious.

Paul is complimenting Timothy in this verse, because he praises him for being a good student of Scripture and the doctrine it teaches. Timothy had a blessed upbringing with his mother and grandmother, Lois and Eunice, respectively. From the time he was a teenager, Timothy had a teacher in Paul.

Truth must be at the top of the agenda, but, MacArthur says that there is also room for warning about theological error:

You are strong in the Word and you have overcome the evil one, which means you’ve overcome Satan, who is disguised as an angel of light, purporting to be representative of truth when in fact he is the purveyor of lies. You overcome that by being strong in the Word. So you warn people, that’s a part of it, a reminder, a continual suggestion of error, but you keep building them up in the Word.

MacArthur gave the sermons in this series in 1986. A lot of error was apparent in churches then, and there was a constant call for Christian unity in spite of error, which many good pastors rejected:

I really believe that the failure to have a critical mind and the failure – and I don’t mean by “critical” unkind or ungracious, I mean analytical. The failure to have a critical mind in our generation has allowed the church, first of all, to be infiltrated by all kinds of error.

It has then led to the church becoming confused. It has then led to the church being weak and, of course, the church is even liberal and in some cases it’s totally apostate. Watered-down teaching, platitudes, and sermonettes for Christianettes and limp theology and convictionless preaching have replaced strong doctrine, clear exposition of Scripture, profound preaching, and the legacy has been tragic. Charismatic confusion, psychology encroaching on biblical doctrine, science of mind, psychic and occult ideas pervading Christianity, cultic perceptions, success-oriented motives, prosperity doctrines, positive confessions, all of that stuff has come into the church like a flood.

And honestly, I believe that all of this chaos can be laid at the feet of spineless, convictionless, uncritical pastors who have failed to draw the lines and say there is error and speak to that and build their people up strongly in the Word of God …

A pastor’s heart is manifest in how capable a man is at protecting them from wolves. That is a pastor’s heart.

MacArthur says that a good church leader must study the Bible regularly:

Secondly, an excellent minister is also an expert student of Scripture. He is to be an expert student of Scripture. How the church ever lost touch with this is hard for me to believe, but very frankly – and I say this with sadness in my heart – I hear a lot of people who speak and teach and preach who, from my standpoint and the standpoint of those who would look at them from the Bible knowledge aspect, reflect a very minimal understanding and a minimal commitment to the study of Scripture.

There was a day in the history of the church when the great students of Scripture and theology were pastors. The Reformation, all the great reformers who gave us the heart and soul of much of our theological understanding, were pastors of churches. You get into the Puritan era when they were pumping out tremendous books and volumes on doctrine and theology, and they were pastors. That was what a pastor did. He was, above and beyond all things, a student of the Word of God. He was not just a quote/unquote “communicator,” he was a student first and foremost.

He had capability to deal with precision in the understanding and interpretation and application of the Word of God, and that’s what Paul wants to say to Timothy at the end of verse 6. If you want to be a good minister of Jesus Christ, being nourished by the words of the faith and the good doctrine which you have closely followed. This is so basic. Present passive participle, being nourished, you need to be being continually nourished. It is a continual process of self-feeding, by reading and reading and reading and reading and inwardly digesting and meditating and dialoging and mastering the content of the Word of God, rightly dividing it so that you are a workman who needs not to be ashamed.

… That phrase “the words of the faith,” the word “the” is in there, refers it to biblical or scriptural writing. The words of the Christian faith is Scripture, the body of Christian truth contained in the Scripture. We are to master the Scripture. We’ll never do it, but that’s our pursuit …

… for every one hour that I teach, there are at least fifteen hours of direct study in preparation for that, to say nothing about a whole lifetime that’s behind that. It’s mastering the Word of God, to be able to teach people all things whatsoever I have commanded you, as Jesus said in Matthew 28.

Paul tells Timothy not to have anything to do with irreverent — ‘profane’ in older translations — and silly myths, or ‘old wives’ tales’; rather, he is to train himself for godliness (verse 7).

MacArthur continues on the characteristics of a good pastor with this verse:

Thirdly, an excellent minister avoids the influence of unholy teaching. He avoids the influence of unholy teaching. As strong as he is in the Word, the flipside of that is he is correspondingly disinterested in unholy teaching. Verse 7, “But refuse” – that is a very strong word, paraiteomai, a strong word, reject, put it away – “profane and old women’s myths.” He says refuse unholy teaching.

Profane is bebēlos, it means unhallowed, unholy, radically separate from what is holy. It is the opposite of the Word of God, anything that contradicts the Word of God. And then he refers to “old women’s myths,” which is kind of an interesting phrase. That, by the way, is the opposite of biblical truth. In 2 Timothy 4:4, the same word, muthos, from which we get myth is used there. “They shall turn away their ears from the truth unto muthos.” So truth and muthos are seen as opposite. And what he is saying here is you are to be nourished up in the words of the faith and the good doctrine, but you are to refuse the opposite, the bad stuff.

Now, what are the old women’s muthos? Why does he throw the old women in there? Well, that was a cultural thing. In philosophical circles in that time, they used a little epithet, a sarcastic epithet, and when they wanted to heap disdain on some viewpoint, they would call it an old woman’s myth. “That’s something a senile old lady would tell a kid, that’s a fairy tale. Don’t give me any of your old women’s myths.” That indicated a total lack of credulity.

So Paul sort of picks up that existing sarcastic epithet in philosophical circles and uses it here and the readers would have understood it. “Don’t you fool around with what is radically opposed to that which is holy, and don’t you fool around to something that is opposite the truth.” The mind is a precious thing. And for the one who serves in leadership in the spiritual realm, God wants a pure mind, a pure mind that is saturated with the truth of the Word of God. There’s no place for foolish, silly myths, shallow, radical, ignorant fantasies.

And yet somehow in our contemporary day, we have decided that old ladies’ fables and all these profane teachings are scholarship. And supposedly to be truly educated, you’ve got to spend years learning all of that stuff. We have bowed down to the elite academic establishment in theology that have been doing nothing but pumping out old ladies’ fairy tales and doctrines of demons spawned by seducing spirits.

MacArthur gives us a cautionary true story about seminary:

What really hit me hard in this area was I had ministry as a young man with a fellow who decided to go away to a seminary. And, of course, very liberal, denying the faith and so forth. He came out of there a bartender. That stuck in my mind. It was never my judgment that a seminary was to train bartenders, but in his case, that is precisely what happened. He went in to prepare for ministry, came out a bartender.

Frankly, he would not have been an effective minister because of that kind of background. But the point to me was what a terrible devastation of a person with some kind of positive motivation to start with.

I know of Theology majors, men and women who wanted to pursue the ministry, and who emerged as atheists. That’s not entirely their fault, although they do have to assume some responsibility. That’s largely because of the curriculum.

MacArthur has also had experience with that:

I wanted to complete a doctorate some years back after I completed seminary, and I went in the first time to meet the academic representative who would tell me about the program. And he looked over my transcript and said, “Well, you have one problem. This is going to be a problem, you have too much Bible in your curriculum, too much theology.” I said, “I thought this was a degree in theology.” He said, “Well, it is, but you’ve got too much Bible and theology, so we’re going to have to have some course work given to you which you’ll have to make up before you can enter into the program, and then you can finish in a year and a half.”

And he said, “I’ll give you a list of books that you’ll be required to read and immediately you’ll have to begin a course that will start right this summer.” He gave me a list of about two hundred books …

And I looked at this and I checked out the list with somebody who knew these various titles. I went through the whole thing. And I can say that of all two hundred of them, none of them told the truth, basically. Some of them may have intersected with the truth here and there but they were all a lot of error, they were a whole lot of profane and old ladies’ fairy tales passed off as scholarship. And then I received a letter telling me that I would have to take a course in the summer in Jesus and the cinema, which sounded kind of curious to me.

So I called up and I said, “What is Jesus and the cinema?” that was the course title. “Well, what you’ll be doing is watching contemporary movies and evaluating them on whether they are antagonistic to or supportive of the Jesus ethic.” And so what, of course, we were dealing with was strictly the ethical Jesus. I mean, there’s no divine Jesus, just an ethical Jesus, and so you go watch movies and see whether they interact on one side or the other with the ethical Jesus …

And then they gave me some other assignment and I went through all of this, and then I went back out there and I walked to the fellow’s desk and I just put the material down, and I said, “I just want to let you know that I have spent all my life up to this point learning the truth, I can’t see any value in spending the next couple of years learning error, so just forget it.” And I walked away, and I really think that was of the Lord because I’m grateful to God that from the time of the beginning of my training right on through to today, my mind is filled with the truth of God.

MacArthur addresses the latter part of verse 7:

Fourthly … an excellent minister is disciplined in personal godliness. He is disciplined in personal godliness. Verse 7 picks it up, “And exercise yourself unto godliness.” Exercise yourself unto godliness. Oswald Sanders says his book Spiritual Leadership, “Spiritual ends can only be achieved by spiritual men using spiritual methods.” That makes sense. So the issue in ministry is godliness. It isn’t how clever you are, it isn’t how glib you are, it isn’t how good a communicator you are, it is: Do you know the Word of God? Do you have a pure mind? And are you godly? Because ministry is an overflow out of that. It’s an overflow of your life, your virtue.

Paul says that, while physical training has some value, godliness has value in every way, as it holds promise for this life and the life to come (verse 8).

MacArthur explains:

Now let me tell you a little bit about the background of this. Why does he use the word “exercise”? Interesting word, gumnazō. We get the word gymnasium from it. Gymnasium. There’s a word even in that same word group that means naked because they participated in athletics in those days naked or stripped down to just the bare minimum. And so the word meant to exercise or to train yourself in an athletic endeavor, which means rigorous, strenuous, self-sacrificing kind of training. He uses that word. But he picks up on the whole culture that goes with that word when he does it.

For example, in Greek culture – and, of course, Ephesus was right in the heart of Greek culture – every city had a gymnasium. It was a focal point of the city, and youths between the ages of 16 and 18 gave the major proportion of their education to physical training. So much of life in those days was involved with physical activity. Today we have what we call service industries, where you sit behind a desk and push paper. In those days, people moved and walked and worked and bent their back and whatever. And even in domestic chores, that was necessary. Physical training was very vital, and there was a great, great and prized and esteemed viewpoint of athletics, so in every town there would be a gymnasium …

In spite of the Stoics who were forever and always protesting against the cult of the body, the cult of the body flourished in the time of the apostle Paul. There were people into the body beautiful, into exercise, into training. Does that sound familiar? That sounds familiar. And we’re in the same kind of a situation today. They were into training the body. So Paul, just by using that one verb, just plays off of that whole cultural illustration and says, “Look, exercise yourself unto” – what? – “godliness.”

I mean if you’re going to go into training, go into training for godliness, go into training for virtue, go into training for the inner man, the soul, the spirit, unto godliness, eusebeia means reverence, piety, true spiritual virtue. Keep yourselves in training for godliness would be a good way to translate the tense of the verb, keep yourselves in training for godliness, discipline yourself unto holiness. Beat your body to bring it into submission, 1 Corinthians 9:27, as Paul did, lest in preaching to others you yourself would be disqualified. You must maintain godliness …

Listen, you cultivate godliness, is it a blessing now? Of course. You cultivate godliness and you have a rich, fulfilled, God-blessed, fruitful, effective, useful life now and, he says, of that which is to come. You get involved in spiritual gymnastics and you go to your spiritual gymnasium every day and do your spiritual workout and the results will not only be blessedness in the life that now is, but blessedness in the life that is to come. Spiritual exercise benefits my true self, my soul, my inner man in this life and on into eternity.

Paul emphasises his point: the saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance (verse 9).

MacArthur says:

So he just lays out a very simple principle, the excellent of servant of Jesus Christ is one who is disciplined unto godliness. This is so obvious, this statement in verse 8, that in verse 9, he calls it a faithful saying. “This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance.”

Now, that’s a little formula that Paul uses five times in the pastoral epistles, “This a faithful saying,” “This is a faithful saying,” “This is a faithful saying.” Two times he says, “This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance,” which is just an emphatic kind of affirmation of the first half of the statement. It means it’s a trustworthy statement. It’s a truism. It’s an axiom. It’s a maxim. It’s something patently obvious. Everybody knows it. In fact, that is a formula referring to a common saying in the church. It’s probably a proverbial statement.

Paul ends this section by saying that it is to this end — serving Christ faithfully — that we toil and strive, or ‘suffer reproach’ in older translations; we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Saviour of all people, especially of those who believe (verse 10).

Henry explains the four principles in this verse:

Here we see, [1.] The life of a Christian is a life of labour and suffering: We labour and suffer. [2.] The best we can expect to suffer in the present life is reproach for our well-doing, for our work of faith and labour of love. [3.] True Christians trust in the living God; for cursed is the man that trusts in man, or in any but the living God; and those that trust in him shall never be ashamed. Trust in him at all times. [4.] God is the general Saviour of all men, as he has put them into a salvable state; but he is in a particular manner the Saviour of true believers; there is then a general and a special redemption.

MacArthur has more about toil and strife:

We’re engaged in an eternal work. The destiny of souls is at stake. There is no higher and no more blessed work in and of itself, but the compelling thing is the eternal aspect. Paul says in verse 10, “We,” probably referring to any companions along with him and very likely embracing Timothy as well and everybody else who is so called to ministry.

The words “labor” and “strive” come from two Greek verbs, kopiaō, which means to work to the point of weariness, exhaustion, sweat. It’s a strong word used many times in the New Testament. The second one is agōnizomai, from which we get agonize and agony. It means to agonize in a struggle. He says we work to the point of weariness and exhaustion. We agonize; that is, we literally work through personal pain because we understand the objectives and they are eternal.

Oswald Sanders wrote, “If he is unwilling to pay the price of fatigue for his leadership, it will always be mediocre. True leadership always exacts a heavy toll on the whole man. And the more effective the leadership is, the higher the price to be paid,” end quote. But we cannot mitigate against that price because we understand the urgency of what we’re all about. Weariness, loneliness, struggle, rising early, staying up late, foregoing desired pleasures, all of that comes with excellence. All of that comes with the hard work of the ministry …

MacArthur contrasts the living God with dead idols:

We trust in the living God. You see, it wasn’t for immediate fulfillment but for eternal reward, is what he’s saying. Literally, the Greek text says this: “We have set our hope on the living God.” And “have set our hope” is a perfect, it means we did it in the past and we continue to do it in the present. We did it and it’s still going on. We continually have set our hope in the living God. What do you mean? We’re not doing what we do for time, we’re doing what we do for eternity.

The contrast here is between the living God and dead idols. If you were to open your Old Testament, you could look at 1 Samuel 17, verses 26 and 31; you could look at 2 Kings 19, verses 4 and 16; Psalm 42:2; Psalm 84:2; et cetera, et cetera, and you would find God called the living God, the God who is a living God – and that in contrast to dead idols. All the gods of the nations are dead idols, they’re just dead idols. And so whatever anyone does for those gods is only going to have implications in time, not eternity, because it’s a dead idol.

But Paul is saying we serve, not for just a temporal earthly reward some dead idol that can carry us not beyond the grave at all but only here in time can anything have any meaning, but we serve the living God who is eternally alive and therefore will reward us eternally. That’s the idea. We live in hope. We live in hope, hope of the future.

MacArthur looks at the last part of verse 10, which sounds somewhat Universalist. He points out that ‘saviour’ can mean ‘provider’ as well as ‘deliverer’. In other words, every man has his daily bread, so to speak, on this earth, but only true believers are delivered into the kingdom of God through Jesus Christ:

And I want you to understand this, so stick with me because I think it’s such a rich and wonderful understanding of this passage. In Acts 17:25, we find Paul on Mars Hill. He says about God that God is not worshiped with men’s hands as though He needs anything but seeing He gives to all life and breath and all things. God then, in a sense, is the sustainer – are you ready for this? – and the provider of life and breath and all things for whom? For all men – for all men. For everyone.

Verse 28: For in Him we live and move and have our being and even your own prophets have said we are also His offspring. So in a general sense, God is the sustainer and provider of life for all men. Now, the word “savior” can mean sustainer, provider, deliverer. It is so used later on in the book of Acts, I think it’s in chapter 27, if I remember right, in verse 34. Yes, Paul in the shipwreck situation says, “I beseech you to take some food, for this is for your salvation.” Well, what kind of salvation is he talking about? He’s not talking about spiritual salvation, he’s talking about your health, your physical health, your physical sustenance …

James 5:15 to 20, that little passage there says, “The prayer of faith shall” – what? What’s the word? – “save the sick.” So the word “save” does not necessarily isolate itself only to soul salvation. It can have implications for some deliverance from disease, from trouble, some sustenance of food, providing health and so forth.

To give you another illustration of this, go with me to Isaiah chapter 63, just near the end of Isaiah’s great prophecy, and let me show you, I think, a graphic illustration. Now, what we’re trying to point out is – and follow the thought – that God in a temporal sense is the Savior of all men. God sustains life by His providence. God has built healing into the body. God saves men not only in the temporal sense, but – listen to this – He saves them in the gracious sense. “What?” you say. “You mean God gives grace to unbelievers?” Yes, and the grace that is given to an unbeliever is the grace that has God withhold His immediate instant wrath. You understand that? The soul that sinneth, it shall what? Die. The wages of sin are?

How long should a sinner live? A split second. But God is gracious to even sustain the life of an unbeliever. It is His mercy that lets an unbeliever live. So in the real, large, broad sense, God is the deliverer, sustainer, provider of all men. He provides food. He provides life. He provides relationships. He provides healing. He even provides grace and mercy because He does not give them instantly what they deserve …

Listen to this. You remember 1 Corinthians 10? Listen. “Moreover, brethren, I would not that you should be ignorant that” – follow this – all our fathers” – all the Jews – “were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea, all ate the same spiritual food, all drank the same spiritual drink.” In other words, God sustained, provided for all of them. Listen to verse 5, “But with many of them, God was not well pleased.” In other words, God provides sustenance on a temporal level for all; salvation on an eternal level for those who believe.

So He is the Savior of all, but especially does He sustain and provide for those who believe and will forever and ever. All left Egypt – all left Egypt. That whole nation, though different people, still duly constituted as a nation, all came into Canaan. God had sustained that nation and its existence. God provided the food, the water, the life, delivered them from illness and danger and enemies, and preserved and sustained them all those years, but redeemed only a few who believed.

God, then, is a deliverer, and what Paul is saying is, “Look, we are doing what we’re doing, we are laboring and striving and working hard and giving our life in the struggle because we believe the consequences are eternal, because we have not a dead God but a living God who will live forever, and we have set our hope on that living God, and we know that living God will sustain the souls of those who believe because we have seen already in time His sustaining power.” That’s his argument.

We preach because we’re convinced that God is a living God who will sustain eternally and provide for and save those who believe. So Paul is saying that’s why we work hard. We have a view of eternity. We see beyond the temporal to the eternal consequence. And, beloved, that is it. And if you ever lose sight of that, you’ve lost it. I mean you’ve really lost it. Your ministry has to be in view of eternity. Doesn’t matter what happens here, only matters what happens here that matters what happens there. This is not the end.

And so he says we serve with all our heart, and that’s why Paul went through what he went through, and that’s why any faithful excellent servant goes through what he goes through because he understands that he’s set his hope on an eternal God who has proven that He can sustain life and He’ll do it for those who believe on into eternity so that what we do has an eternal effect.

Paul has more instructions and guidance on this topic, which we’ll look at next week.

Next time — 1 Timothy 4:11-16