1 Timothy 1:18-20

Welcome back with us as we start another week,
working our way through Timothy,
coming to a close today in the first chapter,
bringing that chapter to an end as we jump in in
verse 18,
a pretty significant switch of directions,
but an interesting passage here.
So I’m going to go ahead and just read all the way through the end of the chapter,
just two or three verses,
and then we’ll stop and talk about it.
“I’m giving you these instructions,
Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies
made earlier about you,
so that by following them you may fight the good fight,
having faith and a good conscience.
By rejecting conscience, certain people have suffered shipwreck in their faith.
Among them,
Himanias and Alexander,
whom I have turned over to Satan,
so they may learn not to blaspheme.”
So you’re going to see this throughout the book,
these little moments where Paul says
something encouraging to Timothy,
kind of a state of course,
fight the good fight,
that’s going to come up again.
We’re going to see that phrase again later.
It is kind of a partly it’s the way Paul writes and partly it’s the purpose of this letter.
He’s writing to Timothy to kind of spur him on and encourage him as a leader.
And so we don’t know a great deal.
This isn’t the last we’ll hear about it,
but we don’t know a great deal about what the prophecies were,
but it seems clear that at some point,
Timothy’s family dedicated him to service, partnering him with Paul,
and Paul is now telling him to sort of live
up and live out of that,
so that by following you may fight the good fight.
And I think in the church context, Michael,
fight the good fight is a really fascinating phrase.
In other words, he doesn’t tell him that you may do well.
He doesn’t tell him so that you’ll get it right,
that you’ll be correct.
Paul seems to presume that there’s going to be struggle in leadership.
And I think that’s very interesting that
fight is a tough word,
but that there is a kind of
grinding that happens to be leader,
that it’s not all smooth sailing,
that there is some pushback and there is some struggle and there is perhaps some conflict and that Timothy
needs to fight the good fight.
Now, you could read into that lots of stuff.
Don’t fight the bad fights.
Make sure those things you’re fighting.
But I just think that’s a really interesting way for him to put that.
Yeah, so I think it’s interesting not only that he says that,
but that it is paired with
these earlier words.
So let’s just remind ourselves of it here when he says,
“Timothy, my child, in accordance
with the prophecies made earlier.”
When you’re a young person and prophecies get made over you, inevitably,
because of that mixture of youthful optimism and as well as this idea that someone’s speaking
this thing that you believe will be true now,
but also even more so into the future.
I think there’s this sense in which it’s easy to glorify what might be.
It’s easy to live into the glory of the hypothetical.
But anybody who has led,
and Clint, I think to your point,
anyone who has worked in that
regular process of leadership with people at all,
but now more specifically in the church,
I think what you’ll discover very quickly is that where there are many people,
there are many motives.
There are certainly many understandings of scripture and what it means.
And as Timothy is now being addressed here,
I do think there’s a kind of mentor tone that
Paul offers.
But the quickness by which Paul moves from encouragement to,
I think it would be fair
to say, Clint, it’s pretty blistering language as it regards these individuals,
Hymenaeus and Alexander.
I mean,
fundamentally, Paul is encouraging Timothy who received this prophecy.
Yeah, it’s going to be a tough run.
And simultaneously,
he says,
and some people are,
they’ve fallen off the bandwagon and
they’re in a bad spot.
So I do think there’s a dual nature kind of thing happening here.
And maybe this makes the most sense if you consider the context that you have an older, more mature leader,
who, by the way,
Paul knows something about conflict, right?
I mean,
they’re clearly both inside the church and with those forces outside the church.
Paul is well aware of the struggle.
And so as he shares this with Timothy,
I think we can hear in it,
you know, maybe a little bit of a
reminder that it’s not always going to be easy.
It’s going to take effort.
Yeah, I think you could preach an entire sermon just from verse 19.
Fight this good fight, Timothy.
And then he goes on,
“Having faith and a good conscience,” and it’s interesting, the pairing there,
faith to believe in something,
to subscribe to something,
to accept something, and a good conscience, a good sense of morality,
a good system of ethics,
a behavior that is
connected to that belief,
that the way one lives for Paul is an outflowing of their belief,
an outflowing of their faith.
And so faith should lead to good conscience.
And what happens when you get them wrong?
Look at the next part here.
By rejecting conscience, in other words, by getting the moral ethical part wrong,
by offending conscience,
certain persons have suffered a shipwreck in the faith.
Fascinating language.
Really?
They have sunk their faith.
Yeah.
Their faith sank because they didn’t practice the right moral ethical things to support it.
And it’s fascinating that he tells Timothy faith and good conscience,
and then goes right on in
the next sentence to say,
“But by bad conscience,
you get a bad result in the faith.”
And then he’s going to go on,
we’ll cover the people that are named in a moment.
But that is a fascinating phrase,
and I think there is a deep wisdom there from a discipleship
perspective, from a church perspective.
If I were reading this,
I think if I were in Timothy’s shoes and trying to make sense of this,
this is one of the moments where I would think, “Oh,
Paul knows some stuff.”
Yeah.
But there’s some depth here.
So this too stuck out to me,
Clint.
So I looked up here,
this word that is translated conscience,
because I was curious what’s happening there.
So the Greek word is synodasis,
and it is translated every time as conscious,
conscience, and it has that idea of distinguishing between what is morally good and bad.
And I find the clarity of that really, really intriguing,
because,
and I know we’ve mentioned Romans now a number of times in the study,
and I somewhat apologize for
that, but I feel like it lives very much behind a lot of Paul’s writings.
It fleshes out some of these things.
And his constant return to this idea of law and grace is very much implicit here in this
language of conscience, because as he has laid out so clearly,
the law teaches us where we go wrong.
And the conscience for Paul seems to be in a lot of his writings,
I think, very simple.
The conscience is a relatively reliable guide.
Now,
moral ethicists that follow along in the Christian tradition,
they’ve in some ways
asked some questions and complexified some of those thoughts.
But Paul, at least in my reading of Paul,
seems to have a pretty basic understanding that humans
by nature generally have a pretty good sense of that discernment between right and wrong.
And so the fact that there are some individuals who have rejected that basic sense,
that they’ve turned from what is essentially in the light and they have chosen darkness is for Paul
an inexcusable choice.
And the fight in some way appears to be related to this idea of simply
living on the right side of conduct,
the right side of not to say the law,
but certainly the right side of choice.
And it’s amazing how simple Paul frames that to be,
but it is clearly
a linchpin.
It’s important.
Yeah.
And again,
the language helps us here.
We can read the word good as a fairly shallow, maybe even superficial.
But in Greek, that’s very close, at least for Paul,
I would argue that that’s
very close to godly.
Not just good in some generic sense of simply right and wrong,
but deeper than that, the sense of God approved.
A good conscious is a conscious and a lifestyle approved by God,
and that’s what faith leads us to for Paul.
And when your conscience leads you astray,
the ship of your faith is not seaworthy.
It’s not carrying you.
It’s not weathering the storms.
It’s not avoiding the obstacles.
It is destined.
It is in danger.
And ultimately, it’s going to sink.
It’s not seaworthy.
And so, I mean, this idea of a seaworthy faith,
it just,
I don’t know, this is a rich verse,
I think, from a sermon perspective or from a
discipleship or devotional perspective.
There’s just a lot there.
And then Paul moves from a kind of generic,
you know, this is generally true to very specific examples of what has gone wrong.
And he says, “Among these people are Hymenaeus and Alexander.” Now,
we only know that these at
one point were companions of Paul.
They worked with him or they were in his circle.
Something happened here.
And he says,
“Whom I have turned over to Satan.” And that sounds like a very dramatic
kind of phrase to us.
It means,
essentially, we expelled them from the community.
We told them they are no longer part of the church.
They are outside the community.
I’ve handed them over to Satan.
Why?
So they may learn not to blaspheme.
Notice that the punishment is for their education.
It is done in the hope.
They are held accountable in the hope that they will buy repentance
return to a good conscience,
return to a solid and trustworthy faith.
These are texts that are difficult because they do speak to conflict and contention and division
in the early church.
But I think it’s important that Paul,
speaking to a young leader,
points out that even when those hard decisions have to be made,
they’re made in the hope that ultimately
they might do some good for the people involved.
And this, Clint, is not the only letter where
we have a section like this.
And I want to just point out that Paul,
even when he says some very,
very hard things about leadership or about a way to interact with someone who’s lost their way,
note that he is explicit in connecting that to what would be the positive good.
So, once again,
so that they may learn not to blaspheme.
I think that though the harshness of that language may
sort of grab our attention,
this idea of taking them over,
turn them over to Satan,
that may grab our attention.
But don’t miss that Paul envisions or imagines that this is for the sake of teaching
something.
And maybe there’s some rhetoric in that,
and Paul is just speaking harshly.
But as we see in other letters,
the individual in the Corinthian community,
who he says needs to be
turned out because of his conduct,
says for the sake of their ability to be received again,
in order for there to be reconciliation,
do this action.
I think that is a fundamentally
Christian conviction that we see Paul instructing Timothy,
that even when we do hard things,
we do that hard thing for the sake of the one,
that the hard thing is being done.
That God’s grace is able
to work even in difficult circumstances.
I think there’s a little bit of preaching in that.
That may not be incredibly close to the text itself.
But I think it’s powerful,
just the fact that
even though these individuals get named,
Paul hasn’t in mind a kind of learning that he hopes for them.
And I mean, ultimately, that’s the hope of all Christian life is that we learn somewhere along the way.
Yeah, and I think you wanna take a moment to connect this.
What did Paul claim of himself?
I was brought into the faith even though I was a blasphemer.
We saw that in verse 13.
And Paul,
again,
it’s very subtle, but what is Paul saying?
I recognize blasphemy.
I had done it,
but I was called to something else and brought into the faith.
And when you choose to blaspheme,
then by consequence, you also leave the faith.
You have a shipwreck in the faith.
So, I think a really strong passage,
a really interesting way to end this chapter.
I think some really profound words to a young man who is trying to lead the church.
The idea,
just from a sort of 100-mile perspective,
what do we see about leadership?
Fight the good fight.
If I were talking to somebody about this verse and they were in leadership,
yeah, you’re not going to avoid all the battles,
pick the right ones,
fight them the right way,
stand up for what matters,
and do so with a good conscience and a strong faith.
I mean, there’s a lot to be said here for a young man who is trying to make his way into
some leadership and I think is a strong way to close out this opening chapter.
Starting tomorrow,
we begin to change the focus knob a little bit as Paul looks interestingly at his world and then
at the society they live in and ultimately narrows that focus down to the church throughout
the next couple of chapters.
And I think that he’ll have a lot to offer,
a lot to think about,
some stuff that may be a little uncomfortable along the way as well.
Well, I think, friends, that will be it for today.
Thanks for being with us.
I hope that you’ve
enjoyed this.
You will like it.
Maybe subscribe if you want to join us for more studies in the future.
But that said, we look forward to continuing our study tomorrow.
Until then,
be blessed.