The Aim of Our Charge Is Love

This sermon opened a series through First Timothy by introducing Paul and Timothy before settling on a single verse: the aim of the charge Paul gives Timothy is love issuing from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. Pastor Nathan used that verse as a lens for everything else in the passage and as a frame he said he expects to return to throughout the whole book.

What was said

Paul's opening words in First Timothy establish who he is and why he is writing. He describes himself as an apostle not by his own choosing but by the commandment of God, which links directly back to his conversion on the road to Damascus. From the first verse Paul places God and Jesus side by side, and Pastor Nathan pointed out that this is a deliberately high view of Christ, consistent with what Paul argued in Philippians. The word "hope" in that first verse is not wishful thinking, he said, but a certainty that will come to pass.

Before getting into the letter's argument, Pastor Nathan walked through what scripture and early tradition tell us about Timothy himself. His name in Greek carries the sense of honoring God. He grew up in Lystra in a mixed household, with a Jewish Christian mother and grandmother, Eunice and Lois, and a Greek father who was apparently not a believer. Most people treat Timothy as very young, but working backward from his martyrdom in 97 AD at age 80, he would have been around his mid-thirties when this letter was written, roughly fifteen years younger than Paul, not a youth.

Paul left Timothy at Ephesus for a specific reason: to confront certain unnamed people who were teaching something other than the gospel. Pastor Nathan noted the word "certain persons" is deliberate, since Paul is asking the amiable but timid Timothy to hold the line against people who may well have been older or held positions of authority. The two ditches Paul names, myths on one side and endless genealogies on the other, both pull away from the same thing, the faithful stewardship of the gospel that is received and transmitted by faith.

The center of the sermon was verse five. The aim of the whole charge is love, the kind of love that seeks the best for the other, the same love that moved God to give his Son. Pastor Nathan said that love of that kind does not float free in the air but issues from three specific sources: a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. He treated each one in turn, noting that a pure heart is shaped by submission to God over time, that a good conscience requires keeping short accounts both with God and with other people, and that a sincere faith is not faith for personal gain or social advantage but genuine trust in Christ.

The false teachers Paul has in mind swerved away from exactly those three things. An impure heart may be driven by ego or self-promotion. A bad conscience is one where someone knows they have harmed another person and refuses to go and make it right. And an insincere faith, Pastor Nathan suggested, looks a lot like the Ephesian silversmiths who may have simply switched from making idols to selling Christian trinkets when the market moved. He tied this to a line from his preaching professor: "Weak point, pound pulpit," meaning that confident public assertion without scriptural grounding is itself a signal that something other than a pure heart is at work.

Pastor Nathan closed by saying this verse will serve as a touchstone as the series continues into the more contested parts of the letter. He acknowledged that First Timothy raises questions about men's roles, women's roles, and church order that people in the room will want to argue about. His point was that each person should examine their own heart, conscience, and faith before entering those conversations, asking whether what they bring to the table comes from humility and love or from pride.