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(upbeat music) - Drive Time Devotions is a Saddleback Church podcast. We want to
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com for locations and service times in your area. Please visit us this weekend.
- Well, welcome to chapter five of First Timothy, day one of our look at chapter
five in Daily Drive Time Devotions.

We're going to look at verses one and two today. And as we look at these verses,
we're looking at a chapter in chapter five which focuses on how we handle our
relationships, especially how we handle our relationships in the church, how we
handle our relationships between believers. It is, there is no doubt that it is
discouraging to your life of faith when your relationships go bad.

So what can you do to encourage a life of faith by handling your relationships
right? These are verses, this chapter, much of it is about how to handle our
relationships right between one another as believers in Christ. And you get that
from the very beginning in verses one and two, which we're going to focus on today.

Let me read those for you from First Timothy chapter five. Do not rebuke an
older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men
as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters with absolute
purity.

It's pretty obvious as I read these verses, how we're to treat one another in
the body of Christ in the church. We're to treat one another as family. These
verses tell us that our relationships in the church are family relationships.

We've got fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters. And I want you to notice
even at the very beginning as we start to walk through these verses together
that the verses don't focus on how other people are to treat you. That's not the
focus at all.

The focus is on how am I supposed to treat other people? If that's what I would
always focus on and everyone else always focus on, then we're going to have healthy
relationships. And so Paul, to his son in the faith, Timothy, just starts to
open things up and says, here's how it works.

Here's how it works in the body of Christ. Here's how you treat each other so
that you have healthy relationships and a motivated life of faith. First he says
older men.

What do you do with older men? Well, give that older man the kind of respect
that you would or should give to your own father. And how about older women?

Well, treat that older woman as if she were your mother. Now, I have to admit
that the only problem with this application of this verse is it's very hard to
find a woman who will admit that she is an older woman. But if you do find one,
treat her as if she is your mother.

Treat younger men as brothers and women as sisters. Don't you just love the
honesty of the Bible? Paul recognizes that the close relationships that we have
to one another in the body of Christ could be used as a temptation.

And so when he says treat younger women as sisters, he says do that with
absolute purity. Be careful of temptation, he says. We're going to come back to
that in a minute.

These verses are all about how we're to treat each other in the body of Christ,
and they say we are to treat each other as family. And so it's very appropriate,
like maybe some churches have done in the past, or maybe even your church does
now, to say to each other in the body of Christ, hi brother or hi sister.
Churches used to call each other that, brother Smith or brother John, sister
Anne.

If the person that you're talking to in the body of Christ is a lot older than
you, you could take the risk and say hi mom or hi dad, because that's who we are
to each other. Now that might feel a little bit strange to you, but that is what
God means for his church to be. Treat each other as family.

Now specifically, how are we to do that? There are two words in these verses, in
these two verses, that focus on how we're to treat each other as family. The
first word is respect, the second word is purity.

Do those two things, and you're treating each other as family in the body of
Christ. First, respect. Paul says when you're talking to an older man, don't
rebuke them harshly, but exhort them, encourage them.

Respect their life experience. That's part of how we treated each other as
family. Don't just write somebody off, and if they have more experience than you
in an area, listen to that experience.

Respect that experience. Nobody likes to be written off, nobody likes to be
ignored, nobody likes their experience to be discounted. So you respect that,
and by the way, it's not only so you'll have a better relationship with them,
it's because their experience matters.

Because the fact that they have more experience in an area might just help you
in that area. So don't cut off that channel of experience and of life by
rebuking them harshly, but instead exhort them, encourage them, and respect
somebody's life experience. And Paul also says respect goes to how we treat each
other as fathers and brothers and mothers and sisters.

Respect the relationship that you are in. A fellow Christian, somebody else in
your church, you're a brother, you're a sister. They're your dad, they're your
mom, and you must treat them that way.

The way that you write emails, the way that you talk to them or talk about them,
we're to respect that relationship and everything that we do. I find that we
violate this sometimes. We get angry with each other.

We're disappointed at the direction that the church is going, so we start to
treat each other as if we're, I don't know, we're fellow members of a board of a
business. The minute you begin to treat a brother or sister in Christ that way,
it doesn't matter what the issue is. It doesn't matter whether you win the issue
or you lose the issue in that case, Satan has won.

Because the key for those who are outside of the church, seeing as being the
church of Christ in the world, is the way that we love each other. And Paul
tells us here that the key, the picture of the way that we love each other is
you treat each other as family. So whatever the issue, whatever is happening,
you respect the relationship that we are in in the body of Christ.

And you always treat fellow believers as brothers and sisters, as moms and dads.
You respect the relationship. You respect the life experience.

That's the first word about how we treat each other in the body of Christ. It's
the word respect. The second word is the word purity.

It's what he says at the end of verse two, with absolute purity, absolute
purity. The word absolute reminds me of that verse, I want to avoid even the
appearance of evil. Living Bible translates that phrase, only think pure
thoughts about them, referring to these sisters, the younger women.

Well, Timothy is a younger man. And so Paul with great honesty is saying,
Timothy, you want to be careful to think of younger women that you're serving
only as sisters and think of them with absolute purity. You could be tempted.

You could be tempted to think of them with sexual thoughts, with immoral
thoughts. Don't do that, Timothy. Don't let Satan take you down that road.

That is how he ruins relationships within his church. So you focus on purity in
our relationships. You focus on respect in our relationships.

And when you think about this, the way that things go in the body of Christ, the
way that things go in the church, if we would only obey this verse, we would
have so few conflicts in the church. The conflicts in the church, conflicts with
fellow believers, they are rarely about the issue that you're discussing.
They're almost always about how you treat each other regarding the issue that
you're discussing.

They're rarely about the decision that needs to be made in the church. They're
almost always about how we treat each other. So how are you treating your fellow
believers lately?

Your moms and dads, your brothers and sisters in the faith. If you will do, if I
will do what God says to do here, it will strengthen your life of faith. And it
will strengthen the faith of everyone that you come into contact with.

If you do not do these things, all of a sudden you're in turmoil in your
relationships and in your life of faith. And all of a sudden, not only is it
hurting their faith because of how you're treating them, they're having to walk
through some difficult roads, it's hurting your faith because you know the
turmoil in your relationships. How are you doing?

And treating each other in the body of Christ. Let's take a minute to talk to
the head of the body of Christ, the one that we all follow. Let's talk to Jesus
for a minute.

Jesus, thank you. Thank you for your church. Thank you that you put us together
in a family.

And you know, we are imperfect people in this family. We struggle and we're
tempted and we go wrong directions and we get angry with each other. We have
conflicts, we have irritations.

Lord, in the midst of all of that, help us to treat each other as family, to
respect. To treat with purity, to recognize who we are in the relationship that
we have to each other. And to realize that Satan wins when all of a sudden we
treat each other not as part of the family, not with love.

They will know we are Christians because of our love for one another. So Jesus,
you put that love into our hearts. It's love from you towards one another.

I pray you'd pour it out through our lives. And if there is a brother or sister
in Christ, a mom or a dad, that for some reason the respect isn't there. For
some reason the relationship is broken.

God, show us how to make it right. Show us how to do our part. We can't do their
part for them, but we can do our part.

And beginning, Lord, with our hearts, change our relationships, we pray. In your
name, amen. Join us tomorrow, we're going to continue in 1 Timothy 5 and look at
the priority of family relationships.