The Man of God

00:03 Invite you this morning to turn in your copies of the Scriptures to the book of 1 Timothy. I'd like to share this morning the first message and then probably a number of messages from the book of 1 Timothy. 1 Timothy was written to a young pastor. And where you have messages to a young pastor or to a pastor, 00:25 you also have messages to a church. And so we want to look at this pastor and the messages that were to impact his life and the congregations that he served in his ministry. And there were quite a number of congregations that he served. 00:43 And so the purpose behind this upcoming series from 1 Timothy is we are praying that God would lay His hand upon a man in our congregation to preach the Word and to answer the call of God upon his life. We are looking in about three months, 01:04 just a little over three months, in calling a man and laying our hands upon him in response to God's call and God laying His hand upon the brother and possibly his wife if he is married. And we want to pray that way. 01:22 But we also want to prepare our hearts to recognize God at work, to recognize God at work in this brother's life, whoever he is, and that we would draw near unto God especially in this most important work of the church. But we also want to, 01:41 as men and women of God, do the same as the man of God. The man of God in the passage of Scripture here in 1 Timothy, represented by Timothy as the man of God, the church leader. 01:57 But we also recognize that as men and women of God, we also have a responsibility to live out our faith and to fulfill the responsibilities that God lays on us, whatever those responsibilities are. And that we would all be seeking God not just in relation to calling another pastor, 02:17 but in relation to the call of God upon our own lives. For all of us, all of us who know Christ, have God's hand upon us to call us to some type of service. Now, as I have said many times, God did not save us to sit. He saved us to serve. He did not save us to sit. 02:38 He saved us to serve. And we recognize that that's an important part of our spiritual development and of our working and living in the kingdom of God. So let's read this passage of Scripture from chapter 1, verse 1 through 17. 02:54 "Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ our hope, to Timothy, a true son in the faith, grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. 03:10 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is in faith. Now, the purpose of the commandment is love, 03:29 from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith, from which some, having strayed, have turned aside to idle talk, desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor the things which they affirm. But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, 03:51 knowing this: that the law is not made for a righteous person but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, for fornicators, for sodomites, 04:11 for kidnappers, for liars, for perjurers, and if there is any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God which was committed to my trust. And I thank Christ Jesus our Lord who has enabled me because He counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry, 04:32 although I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man. But I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. And the grace of our Lord was exceedingly abundant with faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. 04:48 This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief. However, for this reason, I obtained mercy that in me first Jesus Christ might show all long suffering as a pattern to those who are going to believe on Him for everlasting life. 05:08 Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God who alone is wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen." I want to introduce you to the man of God. Four characteristics this morning of the man of God from chapter 1. The man of God loves the truth. 05:29 Secondly, the man of God understands sin. Thirdly, the man of God rejoices in the gospel. And fourth, the man of God recognizes the authority of the King. 05:42 So when we come to pray for a call upon a man to be in leadership and in pastoral training and leadership of our congregation here, we need to look for a man of God, a man who loves the truth, a man who understands sin, a man who rejoices in the gospel, 06:04 and a man who recognizes and comes under submission to the authority of the King. Now, first of all, we see the man of God loves the truth. Paul is a sent one here. He is an apostle of Jesus Christ by the commandment of God. 06:24 And so what we have here initially is where the man of God gets his call. Where does the call come for the man of God or the woman of God, specifically the man of God to lead out in a church, but a woman of God or a man of God to fill the role that God has called us as servants of Christ in the kingdom of God? 06:43 Where does that call come? It comes from God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ our hope. Now, you look over in Galatians, you don't have to turn there. But Paul is very clear that his role as an apostle was not something that he sought after. He was not even seeking the Lord. 07:03 He was not even looking for a call from God. And yet God called him, much to his surprise. Paul, an apostle not from men nor through men, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead. And so Paul is very clear in various Scriptures that he received his call as an apostle from God. 07:24 Ephesians 1:1, "Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God." This is not something that we seek after. 07:33 It is not something that we necessarily tell God what we feel called to do or tell God where we want to serve. But it's something that comes from heaven, from a divine call of God upon a person's life. All of the gifts of God to His people come that way. 07:55 Whether it's a call to teach Sunday school, whether it's a call to lead out in worship, whether it's a call to teach children, 08:03 whether it's a call to serve on a committee, whether it's a call to represent Christ in the community as a businessman, the call comes from heaven and is recognized by men. Men do not do the calling. They do not do the initiating. 08:24 Rather, God does the calling. The command of God is given, and then man responds. And so when we come to a weekend, second weekend in November, when we make some of these decisions, we will be seeking who is God calling, not who should the church call, but who is God calling. 08:44 Of course, then the church has a part of that to recognize that call and then to place their divine sanction upon the call that has already come from God. And so the man of God is being addressed by the man of God, Paul addressing Timothy. And both Paul and Timothy receiving their marching orders, 09:05 if you will, their place of position, their point of service in the army of God to serve there in that post until Christ gives them other instructions. 09:21 So then he says, Paul, he's talking about magnifying his office not for pride, but to exalt Christ. You see, when Paul reminds people that he's an apostle, and he does that occasionally because his apostleship was being challenged in many places as his ministry progressed. 09:43 And so he had to remind people that he was an apostle at times, but it was not for selfish glorification. He wasn't puffing his chest out saying, "Hey everybody, I'm an apostle." No, he was doing so to protect the work of God, to protect the flock of God, to protect the church of God, 10:02 and to glorify God in His grace and magnificent, overwhelming benevolence that He would call somebody as wretched as Saul to be an apostle. And that's how it is here in this passage of Scripture. He is reveling not in his position, but he's reveling in His grace, 10:23 in the grace of God that called him and equipped him. Now, to Timothy, he writes, "To Timothy, a true son in the faith." Now, who was Timothy? Well, we may know him as if you compare Scripture with Scripture, there's quite a number of Scriptures in the New Testament that refer to Timothy. 10:44 He was what Paul called a true son in the faith, a sincere son. In fact, Paul said in some place that he has nobody like Timothy who will fully do his bidding and is an assistant to Paul like none other. He was likely a convert from Lystra, 11:05 the area of Lystra which Paul visited with Barnabas on their first missionary journey. You read about it in the book of Acts. He was likely the son of a Jewish mother and a Greek father. The Jewish mother was the one, his mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois, 11:25 who taught him in the things of God, who taught him in the Scriptures of the Old Testament. His father being a Greek, there's no indication at all that his father was a believer. And so what the nature of his relationship with his father was, we do not know. 11:41 But we know that he got most of his spiritual training from his mother and grandmother who were Jews and understood the Old Testament Scriptures. And by the second missionary journey that Paul took to Lystra to visit the church that he had planted, the congregation had, well, Timothy had caught their attention. 12:01 Timothy had been recognized by the congregation and by Paul as an unusual young man, as an unusual young man who had the call of God upon him. And they began to recognize the call of God. He became Paul's constant companion. 12:18 Some of the places where Timothy served was in Berea and in Athens and in Macedonia and Jerusalem and in Rome. Paul planned to send him at one point to Philippi and Ephesus. And he shows up by name in a number of the places where Paul wrote to several New Testament epistles. 12:38 He says, "I and Timothy write to you," or "I along with Timothy." Timothy's with me. And so Timothy is a man who loved the truth, who loved the Lord, and who loved the church. 12:50 That's the call of the man of God who is called to leadership, to love the Lord, to love the gospel, and to love the church of Jesus Christ. So then Paul says, "I want you to, I sent you to remain in Macedonia," or excuse me, "in Ephesus." When he went to Macedonia, 13:12 that he would charge that they teach no other doctrine. Now, the Ephesians had had a lot of training by Paul. But Paul even told them that from your own ranks of leaders, that there will arise grievous wolves who will spread false doctrine and false teaching. And so he says, 13:31 "I want you to remind them that they teach no other doctrine, nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is in faith." Now, what's he talking about here? Well, he's addressing, I think, two things and particularly one. 13:54 The two things that he would be addressing here, as you look at the historical setting, is number one, Gnosticism. You've heard us talk about Gnosticism. Gnosticism had a primary belief that matter or the world of matter around us, the material world, is evil. And so because of that, 14:14 they developed elaborate theories of different forms of God because God, in their opinion, could not create matter since matter is evil. 14:26 And so God had to have another part of God, another type of God that created another type of God that created another type of God that created another type of God to get to the place where God, one of the gods, could actually create something evil. And Christ, in their opinion, was the highest manifestation of God. 14:48 And so they developed a bunch of genealogies and weird, strange belief systems to find pedigrees to link them to God. And that led to a certain intellectual elitism and arrogant speculation. 15:11 Now, when he talks here, he talks about giving heed to endless genealogies and to fables which cause disputes or speculation, people having an idea about how to wrap a theology around our particular false doctrine and false teaching. 15:33 And so they looked at the core, and there were fables and endless genealogies to try to make their faith make sense, but not based on the word of God. And so then there was another group of people called the Judaizers. The Judaizers, you've heard of them probably. They were Jewish law keepers. 15:54 Some of them claimed to be believers in Christ, but they wanted to take the, they had such an elevated position of the law that they wanted to take the Christians back under the law. So they were Jewish law keepers. 16:08 And it was popular in the ancient world for these Jewish law keepers and law promoters that they would develop genealogies based on the genealogies of even of the Scriptures, Old Testament and New Testament. 16:24 And then they would weave elaborate stories about these names that are in the text and try to fit them all together in a kind of historical fiction. You know what that is. We have that even with us today, historical fiction. 16:43 You can go to almost any Christian bookstore on Amazon and buy books on historical fiction. And so they take a story that is probably more or less true, and they wrap a whole bunch of things into it. And sometimes I've read enough historical fiction that you're not exactly sure where the history starts and stops and the fiction starts and stops. 17:04 It's kind of just kind of all blended together. And that's what these people were doing in a fairly major way, developing tales of romance and tales of fiction and even took the genealogies of the Old Testament and the gospel and wove these stories together in imaginary biographies. 17:24 That's what was happening in the culture. And Paul says, "I'm sending Timothy to stop this, to stop this, and to warn them that our faith is not necessary to have all this highfalutin, detailed fable, make-believe genealogies. 17:47 And so we want to stick with the truth as it has been taught by the apostles and experienced in the gospel so that they should not give heed to fables or myths and these endless genealogies that bring up disputes and speculation." The word here in verse six is, 18:07 "And some having strayed, having turned aside to idle talk." The word there means swerve. They've swerved off course. They've swerved away from the gospel into following out, following some of these weird and made-up ideas that really have no foundation in reality. 18:26 This is not talking about discussing biblical truth. This is talking about fabrications. 18:34 This is not saying that we can never have a discussion where we may disagree on biblical truth, but it is talking about that we not give ourselves to fables and to made-up things that really have no basis in reality, have no basis in the gospel, and have no merit at all. 18:55 And so we here instead see that the man of God will have a love for the truth, verse five. Now, the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith. 19:11 So we're looking for a man who loves the truth from a pure heart and a good conscience who can say that his sins are under the blood and he's walking in victory over sin and from sincere faith, that he can say that his faith is real and not hypocritical, 19:32 not hypocrisy. So we want to find a man, find a man. Paul was that man. Timothy was that man. You are that man and woman we trust. And we are looking here at Living Water for another man who loves the truth from a sincere heart, a pure heart, good conscience, and sincere faith. 19:53 Proverbs 23:23 says, "Buy the truth and do not sell it." Now, not that the truth is for sale, but it's an illustration to say, whatever you do, invest in the truth and hang onto it and don't let it go. Also, wisdom and instruction and understanding. 20:10 That should be the man of God's mentality when it comes to truth. He's going to latch onto it. He's going to hang onto it. And regardless of what comes around him of fables and from those having itching ears, he's going to stand on the truth of God's word because he loves the Lord, he loves the truth, and he loves the church. 20:31 Proverbs 3:3, "Let not mercy and truth forsake you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart." Ephesians 6:14, "Stand therefore having on the belt of truth." Psalm 119:127, "Therefore I love your commandments more than gold, 20:51 yes, than fine gold." How much do you love the word of God? How much do you love the truth of God? How much do you love the reality that the Scriptures has us walking in a biblical worldview that makes sense, that is cohesive, and that is scripturally based, and that answers the questions of life? How much do you value that? 21:11 Then seek it, love it more than gold, and don't sell it. Don't let it go. Don't sell out to the truth. Sell out in the truth. You see, we are living in a day of fantasy. These fables speak of fantasy. 21:32 It's amazing to me the things that people do with reality today. They drink it away. They smoke it away. They dance it away. Anything to get out from under reality, anything to have a few minutes of reprieve and live in a make-believe world. And we find more and more people are losing connection with reality. 21:51 You have young people in schools that are pretending to be cats and dogs, litter boxes in our schools. I kid you not. This is true. It's happening in LaGrange, probably happening here in Goshen as well. 22:13 They're called Furbies, thinking they're an animal. 22:17 A disconnect from reality, fantasy world. And Paul says, "We don't have to live in a fantasy world. We can live in the real world. 22:29 We have a real world that God wants us to live in where reality is defined by Him and makes sense and has meaning and purpose." What would we call people that are disconnected from reality? There's a psychological term for that. It's called schizophrenia. 22:48 We have a culture that is becoming schizophrenic. It's got multiple personalities, doesn't know who it is on what day. They pretend their way through life. And then people must affirm you in your false reality. So you want to be a woman, but you're a man? Then you can live in a fantasy world, 23:10 everybody says. And then if I'm going to really accept you, I have to accept your fantasy world. Wrong, wrong. You see, the Christian can come along and say, "Brother, sister, friend, let me tell you about the God of reality who really, really loves you and who really has a plan for you, 23:29 who created you for a purpose, who gives meaning to life. You don't have to live in a fantasy world to cover up the pain of hopelessness and despair." The one who would help others, brothers and sisters, the one who would help others must be rooted in reality. 23:53 You cannot live in a fantasy world and help others. Amen? You must be rooted to reality. And reality is defined as God defines it. 24:09 Then and only then can the man of God reach out to others who are in various forms of fantasy and emotional and spiritual disconnect and help draw them back to the truth of God and His word. Someone said this. 24:29 It was Jay Kessler, actually. He said, "Shortly after I got my driver's license, I was driving too close to the middle of the narrow road, and I sideswiped another car. The crash tore the front fender, two doors, and the rear fender from my dad's car." He said, "After I found out everyone was okay, I stood in the ditch and prayed, 24:49 'Dear God, I pray this didn't happen.' I opened my eyes and saw that the car was still wrecked. Then I closed my eyes again and squinted real hard and prayed again, 'Dear God, it didn't happen.' Then I opened my eyes, but it happened anyway." See, that's being rooted in reality. 25:08 Reality does not deny that bad things happen. Reality can look at the truth of a situation and say, "This is what is real. This is what happened. Now, this is what you need to do about it. 25:23 This is what God will do about it if you surrender your life to Jesus Christ." One leadership speaker said, "As preachers, our job is to present unashamedly the Christian moral point of view." It's just plain true, folks. This is the way God is, and your life needs to be congruent with reality. 25:46 Otherwise, we're just giving in to fables and endless genealogies which have no point and lead to despair. So the man of God loves the truth. The second thing this morning is the man of God, and we may not get through all these, so don't worry. When we're done, we're done. 26:06 Or we may be done before we're done. We may quit before we're done. I think you get the real picture there. The man of God understands sin. The man of God understands sin. Now, I don't say that the man of God lives in sin. 26:25 Neither do we say that the man of God has to have experience in sin. But the man of God must understand sin because sin is a part of the reality of life. 26:41 And so he says in verse seven, "Desiring to be teachers of the law." This is why I think that he was primarily addressing the Judaizers here who wanted to be teachers of the law and bring everybody back under the law. And Paul's saying that understanding neither what they say nor the things which they affirm, 27:00 but we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully. If you use the law for what it was intended to be used for, it's good. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimonies of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple, and so on. David said it over and over and over in the Psalms, "I love your law. It is perfect. 27:20 It is meaningful. It is life-changing. It is transforming in our lives. We come under its authority, the law of the king of the kingdom." Nothing wrong with the law. So what is the law for? It's to show us our need for Christ. It's to show us what is right and what is wrong, what is good, what is bad, what is evil, what is righteous. 27:41 And so he says that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous person. When our righteousness is found in Jesus Christ and His righteousness being credited to our account and being placed in our column, if you will, 28:01 and being rooted in our hearts through the new birth, that His righteousness means that we no longer need the law to govern our lives. 28:13 We rather use the law for what it was intended to do, to expose sin so that people know in reality what is sin and what is not sin, what is good, bad, right, and wrong, and so on. 28:28 So he says, "The law is for the lawless." And let me give you three purposes of the law as I understand it. Number one is to inform the conscience. Why do you teach your children? Why do you teach your children good and bad? Why do you establish rules and laws for your children? It's to inform their conscience so that they, 28:50 from little up, understand their conscience tells them that certain things are good, certain things are bad, certain things are right, certain things are wrong, and to inform their conscience. The law does that. 29:01 "I had not known sin," Paul said in Romans, "I had not known sin except by the law." And so the law sensitizes the conscience and informs the conscience. The law also restrains wickedness. The law also restrains wickedness. 29:18 And so when you have a law against stealing, 29:24 it serves as a restraint for those who would steal. When you have a law against perjury, lying under oath, you have a standard that says it's wrong. 29:36 There are punishments involved, and it hinders those who would go wholesale into lying and perjury by restraining wickedness to a certain degree. And then it is used to convince of sin. How do you know what sin is except by the law? 29:54 And so he says it's used for the wickedness of the human heart. The lawless, the rebel, those in rebellion. The ungodly and sinners, the unholy and profane, those who strike their fathers and mothers. Some translations translate that strike as opposed to murder. 30:17 You could be executed in some cultures for striking your father and mother, not even just killing them, but striking them. And for manslayers, murderers, it is for fornicators and adulterers and homosexuals, for kidnappers, 30:37 for liars, for perjurers, anything that is contrary to the word of God, anything contrary to the word of God, contrary to sound doctrine. How do you know it? Because the law says it. And this law is the reality of the character of God. 30:58 And it is God's reality that defines what is right and wrong, good and evil. And so the man of God comes along and must know something about sin. Like I said, it does not mean that he lives in sin, God forbid. 31:21 It doesn't mean that he even had to go way out in sin. 31:25 But it does mean that he must understand the sinfulness of his own personal heart and his own personal sin and the sin that so easily besets and the sins that are common to man so that he can assist others in overcoming sin. 31:47 That's the whole point. The whole point of the man of God is, as a pastor, as a leader, as a helper, as a teacher, is to assist others who are broken down in sin. They may not understand sin. They don't understand why they hurt. They don't understand why they can't get free. They don't understand what God can do for them. 32:06 And they don't understand the principles of God's word that will set them free. 32:10 And so into this room steps the man or woman of God and says, "Let me tell you how to get free from sin." Praise God. This is the man who knows about the sinfulness of the human heart, is not surprised by sin. I told a young man recently, I said, 32:29 "You could tell me anything that you want to tell me about anything you've done, and it would not surprise me." Why can I say that? Because I've seen a lot, and I understand a lot about sin. I haven't experienced all of it. But I have talked to people that have. 32:46 And to give hope to the sinner that your sin can be forgiven, your sin can be overcome. In prison ministry, we are taught in our training, do not ever ask what a man or woman is in prison for because it really doesn't matter. 33:06 It's not our business to ask. If they want to tell us, that's fine. And every once in a while, you'll find a smart aleck in prison that thinks he can shock you by telling you what he did. Well, when you've talked to the death row inmates, you've baptized them, you've led them to Christ, you've heard their confession, 33:25 you know what they've done, you know how they got there, then I don't want to say that nothing shocks you or surprises you because every so about the time you say that, there's something that takes sin to an even deeper level. But we understand that it's the depths of the human, the sinful human heart. 33:45 And the man of God must understand the law and the violation of the law so that, rooted in the reality of the truth, he can rescue those who are in the pit. It all comes together. He knows the destructiveness of sin and warns others. 34:07 He knows that there is no pit so deep, but that God's love is deeper still. He understands how to get free in Jesus Christ. And this morning, we can tell you, based on the authority of God's word, that there is freedom in Jesus. 34:28 There's freedom in Jesus. The third thing that we notice this morning now in this passage of scripture is not only does the man of God have a love for the truth and an understanding of sin, but he understands the gospel. He understands the gospel, the good news. And so in verse 10, 34:48 after he's outlined the law here, he says, "According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God which was committed to my trust," or some translations say, "over which I have been made a steward of the gospel," the glorious gospel of the blessed God, 35:09 the glorious gospel being that no pit is so deep that God's love and the mercy and grace of Jesus cannot reach into and lift one out, the glorious gospel that can take a bad man and forgive him and take him to heaven, 35:29 that can take a bad man, a terrible man, a worthless man, a wretched man, a man like Paul says he was a chief of sinners. And one who was a persecutor, a blasphemer, and an insolent man, which means violently arrogant. 35:51 The gospel message of Jesus Christ can take that man and rescue him, forgive him, equip him, use him, and take him to heaven. That's profound. We were talking in our class this morning. 36:11 Every other religion on the face of the earth, any that I'm aware of anyway, all have man's self-effort to try to get good enough for God, to try to get good enough for heaven, or whatever it is is out there after death, even if it's reincarnation. Maybe it's not heaven, but it's, "I want to come back in the next life. 36:31 I don't want to come back as a fly. I want to come back as a king." And so if I do bad works, I'll come back as a fly and get stepped on and then have to work in that life to get into a better life. I want to come back as a king. I'm in the median or the if I'm in the caste system, I want to come back and be in a higher class. 36:51 That's how they do. And how do you do that? By hoping that your bad works are overcome by your good works or that your good works are good enough that it cancels out your bad works. And somehow, you can lean this ladder of self-effort against nothing and reach heaven. 37:12 That's the religions of this world. They think that you can lean your ladder against nothing, climb to the top, and get to the moon. Can't be done, can it? Young people, children, can you reach the ladder? 37:33 Can you reach the moon from your ladder? No way. Neither can you reach God by good efforts. 37:42 He must reach down and do the work of salvation and give us the gospel message that by repentance and faith in Christ, we can be accepted by Him because of what Jesus Christ has done for us on the cross. 37:58 The gospel compels us to serve. Verse 12, "I thank God, thank Christ Jesus, our Lord, who has enabled me because He counted me faithful, putting me in the ministry." Can you imagine Paul just thinking how amazing this is that I was a blasphemer, 38:18 a persecutor, and violently arrogant, but I obtained mercy from God, abundant mercy, grace enabling me to serve God in the call that He's placed me in? He received the grace of God. He was a blasphemer, a persecutor. 38:38 But his intentions, he said, somehow, I'm not quite sure what Paul is quite getting at. He says he did it ignorantly, in unbelief. So God did have mercy on him. I guess Paul was saying, "I didn't know really what I was doing, ignorant and unbelief." And Jesus also said, 38:58 "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do." So blinded, he was blinded. It wasn't like he knew and chose to do it. He didn't know and chose to do it. And so God gave him mercy. 39:14 And he did it in such a way that his conscience could say that he was doing it ignorantly, in unbelief. But the grace of our Lord was exceedingly abundant with faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. 39:30 This gospel is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners like Paul, sinners like Adam and Eve, sinners like wretched people in Noah's day who could have repented, 39:51 sinners like Mary Magdalene, sinners like John Newton. 39:58 It's interesting here, he uses this term in verse 10, kidnappers, as a lawless, evil deed, kidnappers. 40:12 We're living in a day where there's much sex trafficking happening, people being kidnapped and sold as sex slaves around the globe 40:23 for the pleasure of men. It's disgusting. It's horrible. Can God save a sex slave trader? Can He? If he repents and trusts Christ. So was John Newton. 40:42 He wasn't into sex trade. He was but into slavery. Even after he became a Christian, he continued for a period of time in the slave trade, ignorantly, not fully understanding the implications of what he was doing. 41:00 God turned the light on for him, and he repented. "However, for this reason, I obtained mercy that in me first Jesus Christ might show all long suffering as a pattern to those who are going to believe on Him for everlasting life." You see, 41:18 the man of God who loves the truth, understands sin, and understands the gospel because he recognizes what he's been saved from can be long suffering with others. 41:34 That's what he says in verse 16, "That in me first Jesus Christ might show all long suffering as a pattern to those who are going to believe on Him for everlasting life." So the long suffering that we have received, we extend. The grace that we have received, we extend. 41:54 The mercy that we have received, we extend. The love that we have received, we extend. 42:03 Our final point, and we'll just mention this this morning, is the man of God recognizes the authority of the king. I love this verse. When you get a hold of the truth of this section of scripture, you cannot help but break out in doxology. Verse 17, 42:23 "Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God, who alone is why. Be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen." This is the man of God who comes under the authority of the king. Let me say this, 42:44 beware of the man who has never bowed his will to anyone. Beware of the man who has never bowed his will to anyone because there is a distinct possibility he has never bowed his will to God. Beware of the self-willed man. 43:06 Beware of the one seeking position, seeking credit, seeking honor and glory. Beware of the man who thinks that he sits alongside God as if there's another place in the Trinity for him. No, there is no place in the Trinity left. 43:27 It is fully occupied by the King who is eternal, immortal, invisible. We are not eternal. We are not immortal. We are not invisible. We are very visible. We are very created. We are very human, and we are very finite. And one who recognizes that will bow his head, 43:48 heart, and knees to the king. 43:54 So this is the kind of man we're looking for. This is the kind of man we want to be. This is the kind of woman we want to be, one who loves the truth, one who understands sin so that he may help others, one who rejoices in the gospel, 44:16 and one who recognizes and submits to the authority of the king. 44:21 Father in heaven, thank you for this teaching from scripture, this clear word from God about the man of God, Paul, the man of God, Timothy. 44:37 And we trust, Lord, that we can put our names here somewhere that it would even be about the man and woman of God here at Living Water. O Lord, continue to fashion and form us into the very image of Christ. 44:56 And may you call forth a man and his wife who would truly know God and be able to serve at the commanding officer from heaven. In Jesus' name, Amen.