Today is the Sanctity of Life Sunday being observed in churches across the United States
and I want to encourage all of us to remember in prayer those involved in the movement,
not all elements of it.
We would approve of some of the tactics that we have seen in recent months over the last
year or so are tactics that do not belong to a pro-life movement.
That does not cause us to diminish our efforts on the cause of unborn children that are being
aborted.
Let us remember to pray for those involved in the leadership of the movement and this
afternoon if you desire at 2 o'clock there is going to be a rally at the state capitol
that all of us are invited to be a part of.
Okay let's open our Bibles together now to 1 Timothy chapter 3.
We're going to study the last part of this chapter that talks about arranging order in
the church's ministry.
This is a manual in some respects of the ministry of a local church and in it Timothy learns
the importance of a church staying on course with the message that God has given us, the
gospel, and the importance of arranging an order in the ministry that honors God in the
church's operation.
You might ask the question why is God so particular about a way a church arranges itself?
The answer is because the church is his creation.
He has exalted the church to a special place in his plan.
It is the bride of Jesus Christ.
It is the body of Christ.
It is united to him and therefore the church is important.
The church of Jesus Christ is given the central role for this age.
Now that is a significant statement.
What it means is that it is more important what happens in the church today than what
happens in Washington DC or in Moscow.
More important than the signing of a peace treaty or the breaking out of hostilities
in some remote part of the world is what happens in the church of Jesus Christ.
More important than the death of a famous person or if you can believe it, more important
than the trial of O.J. Simpson is what happens in the church of Jesus Christ.
Somebody has said though the church has many critics, it has no rivals.
The point is that the church of Jesus Christ is preeminent in the world as far as God is
concerned.
It may not be as far as man is concerned, but as far as God is concerned the church
has the central place.
What place is that?
Well in our text we are going to see.
He says, I am writing these things to you hoping to come to you before long, but in
case I am delayed I write so that you may know how one ought to conduct himself in the
household of God which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the
truth.
And by common confession great is the mystery of godliness.
He who was revealed in the flesh was vindicated in the spirit, beheld by angels, proclaimed
among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.
The first place we see that the place of the church is the center of God's plan.
The very center of God's plan.
The place of the church is two-fold.
It is the residence of God and it is the repository of truth.
Now follow this with me.
It is the church where the living God dwells.
It is the residence of the living God.
Now some people are oblivious to that.
One little child attended church with his parents and then when he knelt to say his
prayers before going to bed that night he prayed, dear Lord we had such a good time
in church today, I wish you could have been there too.
But you see God was there.
He's always here because the church is where God lives.
It is the residence of the living God.
In the Old Testament there was the tabernacle and then the what?
Hello?
Anybody home?
The temple.
Now God isn't limited to a tabernacle or to a temple.
In fact the heavens themselves could not contain God but God chose to manifest his presence
in the Jewish tabernacle, that tent of the meeting, and then the permanent building that
Solomon built, the temple.
It was there that the Shekinah of God was visibly manifested and now God dwells in the
church.
It is described in the New Testament as a place of living stones.
A place of living stones.
In other words you and I are stones that God is building.
The church is not the building we live in, it's us.
It's the people who compose the church and it is in us that God dwells.
God has not withdrawn from his people, God is here in his people.
And then the church is the repository of truth.
Notice he calls the church the pillar and support of the truth.
A repository is a person or a place where something is entrusted.
It is a person in whom something is confided.
It's a room for storage of something, a repository.
Kind of reminds me of that extra bedroom we have in our house which has sort of become
the storage of all unclean things.
A repository.
Well in a much more positive sense the church is a repository of the truth.
You see in the Old Testament God chose Israel as a people to receive his revelation.
He revealed himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their descendants.
Israel received the truth about the one God who created everything.
In the midst of all of the polytheism and the false religions Israel had the truth.
God gave Israel the responsibility to keep the truth and to spread it.
And of course we know that Israel was much better at hanging on to it than they were
at spreading it.
And ultimately Israel fell short of the truth it did have.
God in this age has made the church the repository of truth in the world.
We now are responsible to hold the truth of the living God, to preserve the truth and
to disseminate it to the world.
Verse 16 is an example of the truth, and we'll come back to it in a moment, of the truth
that we hold.
The truth that we are responsible for.
The truth that we are then to disseminate to the world.
Turn back with me to Ephesians chapter 2.
Timothy was the pastor of the church at Ephesus, right?
So you would expect that Paul might say some similar things to the letter to the church
at Ephesus as he would to their pastor.
In the second chapter of the book of Ephesians he says in verse 19, you are no longer strangers
and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and are of God's household.
Same term as he used back there in 1 Timothy, the household of the living God.
Having been built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself
being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building being fitted together is growing into a holy
temple in the Lord.
We are the residents of God.
God doesn't live in a temple in Jerusalem, God lives in the temple of his people.
And then he says in verse 1 of chapter 3, for this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus
Christ, for the sake of you Gentiles.
And then he says almost parenthetically, but it's not unimportant.
If indeed you have heard of the stewardship of God's grace which was given to me for you,
that by revelation there was made known to me the mystery as I wrote before in brief,
and by referring to this, that is the letter I wrote to you before, when you read you can
understand my insight into the mystery of Christ.
What is he saying here?
He is saying that not only is the church the residence of God, the church is the repository
of truth.
I have received the mystery of Christ and I have given that to you.
And today we have the truth of God in this word, the Bible.
We treasure it, we preserve it, we proclaim it, we disseminate it to others, because that
is the place of the church in God's plan.
He intends for us to be the place where he lives and makes himself known in the world.
So what an honor has been bestowed upon us that we should be the dwelling place of God
and those assigned with the blessed privilege of maintaining his testimony in the world.
And we are his plan, he has no plan B.
God hasn't assigned some angels up there to come down and do our job for us if we fail.
We are his plan, we are the church.
If you came in this morning feeling kind of low and like a zero with the edges rubbed
out and like you don't really make much difference in the world, let me tell you something you
do.
Not because of who you are, but because of what God has called you to be.
God has called you out to be a part of the church, which is the very center of everything
he's doing in the world.
You don't have to feel left out by the White House or the Kremlin.
You don't have to feel like you're surpassed by the heroes in the sports world or the wealthy
and the famous, for you are a part of what God is doing.
And his place for the church is the very center of his plan for what he is accomplishing in
human history.
You don't expect to hear that on the NBC News tomorrow night.
You won't be there.
The world doesn't recognize this, but it is the truth that God tells us in his word.
Secondly, we can say that the place of the church is in the center of the world scene.
The place of the church in the world scene is explained in the text back in 1 Timothy
again.
There are three statements that I would use to describe what the place of the church is
in the world scene.
The place of the church is in the first place to present living faith against dead religion.
He calls us the church of the living God.
The church of the living God.
We are those who believe in a living God, who have a faith that is alive.
The place of the church in the world scene is to present living faith against dead religion.
The world's religions are without life.
They are filled with death.
They seem right to a man, but the end thereof, according to the writer of Proverbs, chapter
13, verse 12, are the ways of what?
Death.
World religions come in many different shapes and sizes and colors and hues and all the
rest, but they all have one thing in common.
They all lead to death.
Every one of them.
I don't too often agree with the pope.
But in some statement that I missed, apparently some time back, he denounced Buddhism.
He tried to make up for it, unfortunately, in a statement yesterday.
But when he was in Sri Lanka this week, you may have read the Buddhists were very angry
and protested because of what he has said about their religion in the past.
Religion leads to death.
Islam leads to death.
The religion of Shinto in Japan leads to death.
And dead Christianity leads to death.
World religions have no life to them.
The purpose of the church of Jesus Christ is to live out a faith that is real in the
face of dead religion.
Israel was to do that too.
Back in the book of Isaiah, he denounces idolatry.
What idolatry for the moment just stand in for the idea of world religion?
Human man-made religion.
Isaiah chapter 44 verse 8.
God says this, is there any god besides me?
Is there any other rock?
I know of none, those who fashion a graven image, that is, in the context of what I am
saying, those who make up a religion, are all of them futile.
And their precious things are of no profit.
Even their own witnesses fail to see or know so that they will be put to shame.
A number of times in the book of Isaiah he says that religion, man-made religion, whether
it's made out of silver and gold or wood, or it's made out of philosophies and ideas,
man-made religion leads to death.
And shame for those who follow it.
But the church of Jesus Christ, its place in the world scene, is to show a living faith.
A living faith.
How do we do that?
Through changed lives.
By having different standards, different values than the world in its religions.
By being of one heart and one mind, George McDonald, however, said, division has done
more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that's ever been spoken.
That may be true in his day.
I think one unknown writer puts it better for our day.
He says religious differences are not nearly so disastrous as religious indifferences.
There's the problem today.
But the point is that God has us here for a role.
And that is to live out faith against dead religion.
Secondly, to proclaim the truth against deception.
We are the pillar and the ground of truth, he says.
We are to proclaim the truth against the deception that is in the world.
The word pillar is just exactly what it sounds like.
It's talking about a column that supports something.
That holds it up in view.
So what he says here is that the church is a pillar to hold up in view the truth.
The truth.
Religious deception is demonic in its origin.
In chapter four, verse one, he says, the Spirit explicitly says in the latter times, some
will fall away from the faith paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons.
That is, teachings that come from demons that are intended to deceive people in the way
that they think.
Religious deception is demonic.
There's an old Spanish proverb that says, where God has his church, the devil will have
his chapel.
Wherever the church is holding up the truth so the people can see it, there will be false
ideas and false religions abounding around it to try to distract and to deceive people.
But nonetheless, we are to hold up the truth.
Now what is the truth?
Well, he tells us in verse 16, great is the mystery of godliness.
He says great is the mystery that belongs to God-centered living.
Great is the mystery that accompanies godliness.
Great is the mystery that godliness embraces.
He says first of all, it is this, God was revealed in the flesh.
God was revealed himself in the flesh.
This of course is a reference to the incarnation.
It implies the pre-existence of the God who came at Bethlehem and was revealed in the
flesh.
He was vindicated, it says, in the Spirit.
I understand that to be a capital S. Jesus Christ's claim to be God was vindicated by
the work of the Holy Spirit.
We think of his baptism.
When God the Father spoke from heaven and the Holy Spirit came down in the fashion of
what? a dove that lived on him.
The Holy Spirit came upon him, vindicating his claim.
He claimed to be God by the miracles that he did, and Jesus said the miracles that he
did, he did by the Holy Spirit.
In his resurrection according to Romans 1-4, the Holy Spirit vindicated Jesus Christ, showing
that he was in fact the Son of God.
Fourthly, as a result of his ascension, the Holy Spirit gave testimony.
Jesus said, I'm going back to heaven and when I get there I'm going to send the Holy Spirit.
So he ascended back into heaven and who came?
The Holy Spirit.
So at least four ways that I've just mentioned, he was vindicated in the Spirit.
He was beheld by angels, meaning that these spiritual beings that we cannot see saw him
in his earthly ministry.
He was proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, that has to do with our work,
our commission.
He was taken up in glory.
It is he was returned to heaven where he entered into his session, into his present ministry.
And so we have six beautiful statements, probably either a hymn or an early creed that the church
had fashioned at the time that Paul was writing this.
And so when he says that the church is the pillar of the truth, he is saying here is
the truth that we are holding up for the world to see.
No one else is going to do this.
This is our work.
And then he says that the work of the church is to protect the truth against detractors
because we're not only the pillar of the truth, we're the support of the truth.
The word support means a buttress, a bulwark, a stay.
It's that which helps protect the pillar.
There are people, there are influences, there are movements, there are philosophies that
seek to erode and to undermine the church of Jesus Christ.
They seek to erode and to overthrow the truth that the church holds up for the world to
see.
In the face of that, we are to protect the truth.
We're to do everything we can to see that the truth is kept intact.
We are to come to the defense of the truth when it's attacked in our world.
Jude, who was a half brother to the Lord Jesus, writes these words in the little epistle that
bears his name.
Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt
the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which
was once for all delivered to the saints.
Jude 3.
He says once and for all God delivered to us the truth, the doctrines of revelation.
And he says, now brethren, contend for it.
Now we're to contend for it without being contentious.
Some Christians get that confused.
But contend we are to do.
We are to exert ourselves to the point of agony to fight on behalf of the truth, to protect
it from its detractors.
In the world stage there is no more central action than that in the church.
It is dealing, we are dealing with the issues of eternal wait.
And in the world scene our job is to present a living faith, to proclaim the truth, and
to protect the truth.
But finally I want to talk about the place of the church in the believer's life.
Because he insinuates this to us as well.
There are three ideas suggested in the language that Paul uses with Timothy to tell us what
the church's place ought to be in the believer's daily life.
He says that I and you, we are to see the church as a place first of all to be related.
To be related.
He says I want to tell you how to conduct yourself in the household of God.
Somebody has said a Christian without a church is like a bee without a hive.
God has created us as Christians to be a part of the church.
Not in a peripheral sense, not on the edge of things, but a part of it.
In the hive.
God wants us to see the church for us as believers as a place to be related to others.
Secondly, he wants us to see the church as a place to be responsible.
For he talks to Timothy about how one ought to conduct himself.
The word is must in the Greek language.
We would a whole lot rather talk about maybes than musts.
Might than must.
But God talks about some musts.
There are some responsibilities that we as believers have, some obligations, and they
can be summed up in the word faithful, old fashioned as it may seem.
To be faithful to pray.
To be faithful to attend.
Someone has said if absence makes the heart grow fonder, some people sure do love the
church.
To be faithful to give.
To be faithful to serve.
Some unknown preacher to me in a different age as will be obvious had a very pungent
statement.
I sometimes wonder whether the church needs new members one half as much as she needs
the old bunch made over.
Judging by the way multitudes in the church live, you would think they imagined that they
had a through ticket to heaven in a Pullman palace car and had left orders for the porter
to wake them up when they head into the yard of the New Jerusalem.
Someone else said if there were as many idle parts in an automobile as there are members
of the average church, you couldn't push it downhill.
Some of you remember Bud Wilkinson who was the famous coach, football coach at the University
of Oklahoma.
He was being interviewed one time by a reporter who asked him because he was on the President's
fitness council, what would you say is the contribution of modern football to physical
fitness?
Wilkinson replied absolutely nothing.
Would you care to elaborate?
Said the non plus reporter.
Certainly replied Wilkinson, I define football as 22 men on the field desperately needing
rest and 40,000 people in the stands desperately needing exercise.
So is the average church.
The place of the church in the believers life is that it's a place to be related, a place
to be responsible and then a place to be respectful.
Paul says to Timothy, here's how you ought to conduct yourself.
You see there's an appropriate way to conduct oneself and there's an inappropriate way to
conduct oneself in the church.
We ought always to remember whose church it is.
Therefore to be gracious and deferential to one another.
We need to be respectful of other believers as the children of God.
To be respectful of Sunday ministry, I read one statement recently that said some who
watch Saturday Night Live come to church Sunday morning dead.
I would just wonder how God views that.
If we're respecting God and His church when we come to church tired because of the way
we use Saturday night.
We need to be respectful of what's happening in the services.
When a soloist is singing for example to remain in the back until the soloist is finished
so we don't distract other people and be discourteous to come on time to the services.
I wonder how God feels about us just straggling in for the first 10 minutes of a service.
Is that showing respect to God and to His church?
We need to be respectful by being friendly and reaching out to the other person, speaking
to them, greeting them.
If God's role for the church takes such precedence in the world, then what place ought the church
to have in my life and in my family and yours?
God has given a place of honor to the church.
He's given it the central role for this age.
Believe me, the church will prevail.
It will succeed because that's what God has called the church too.
The question is will we be a part of it?
The church has had its enemies but it's always victorious.
Diocletian who was a Roman ruler in the third century felt that he had finished off the
church.
In fact, a medal was struck by Diocletian that bore this inscription, the name of Christians
being extinguished.
There was a monumental pillar that was raised to his honor.
It was raised in Spain.
It gave his full name, which I'm not going to read, but it said Diocletian, to Diocletian
in his honor, for having extended the Roman Empire in the east and the west and for having
extinguished the name of Christians who brought the Republic to ruin.
People go and observe the busts and the pillars to Diocletian.
He's dead.
He's been dead a long time.
The church of Jesus Christ lives.
It cannot be extinguished.
But we who are a part of it, what place does it have in our lives?
Not because of who we are but because of what God is doing.
I don't know how many of you like mosaics.
I'm not crazy about them but I like them especially when they're old.
When you tour in some parts of the world, you're taken into places where old mosaics
exist.
You think about that.
Here is something that an artisan, a craftsman, hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago worked
on.
A little piece of shell or a glass or a stone.
Meaningless in itself, but that artisan took the stone and polished it or took the shell
and shined it and shaped it and then placed it into one little spot.
Over and over again, the artist did so with these meaningless little pieces until he had
produced a masterpiece.
That's what God is doing.
Using a shell here and a stone there, polishing and shaping us to be a part of the church,
his masterpiece.
Let's value the church.
Let's value the church for the place that God has given it.
And let's give the church the place in our lives and our values and our priorities that
God wants it to have.
Sir Isaac Newton was a well-known scientist, as you know.
He discovered the law of gravity.
What many people do not realize is that he was also a dedicated Christian.
At the height of his career in studying physics and mathematics, you know what he did?
You know what he did?
He laid it all aside in order to study the Bible.
There was someone who asked him about it.
In fact, some of his fellow scientists tried to lure him back into science.
And his reply was, I do not want to be trifling away my time when I should be about the king's
business.
Powerful statement.
If it was true hundreds of years ago for Newton, it's still true today for us.
To be about the king's business and the church, his masterpiece.
Let's bow together.
Have we counted the church as being a third or fourth priority?
Something we're involved in when we have the time or the means?
Do we count the church as being frankly insignificant?
If so, we've somehow missed the picture here of what the church is and God's plan.
What we have need of is to come back to the Word of God and to see what God says about
the church.
That it's a place for us to be related.
Are you related?
Are you plugged in?
Are you a member?
Are you responsible to the church?
Are you a part of what the church is doing?
Are you respectful of the church?
Do you conduct yourself in such a way that it shows respect for God's masterpiece?
Father, there are points of thought and conviction to all of us as we think through these various
things.
And it's not comfortable for some of us.
It sticks.
It hurts.
But thank you for doing it because you're reminding us of what's important.
We acknowledge to you that our thinking gets so messed up by the pressures in our culture
and its values.
Help us to see today the value of your masterpiece and what you have called us out to be a part
of.
And may our hearts respond to that by renewed devotion and dedication to you and to the church
of Jesus Christ, His bride.
We pray this in Jesus' name.
Amen.