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(upbeat music) - Drive Time Devotions is a Saddleback Church podcast. We want to
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- We're in day three today.

Have a look together through First Timothy chapter six, the last chapter of the
book of Timothy. We're going to be looking at verses 11 to 16. And in these
verses, we have Paul's charge to Timothy and they're a charge to us too.

This is how you live the life of faith. You ever have one of those days where
you feel like, I just don't, I don't feel motivated today. We all do.

I do, Paul did, Timothy did. And so in verses 11 to 16, Paul charges Timothy,
here's how you live it. Here's what you do.

Whether you have the emotion or not, here's what you do. Listen to verses 11,
first of all, verses 11 and 12. Where he says, but you, man of God, flee from
all this, the financial temptations we talked about yesterday.

Flee from all this and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance,
and gentleness. Fight the good fight of faith. Take hold of the eternal life to
which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many
witnesses.

Now that is a charge. I mean, that is a speech that rivals any speech you hear
in some movie of some coach telling his football players to get out there on the
field and win one for the Gipper or whatever it happens to be. That is a speech
to rival any speech that you might have heard on a battlefield telling the men
and the women to go out there and win this battle because it has to be won.

Paul is saying, here is the charge. And there's three words, three phrases in
these verses that are very powerful in living out the life of faith. Pursue,
fight, and take hold.

You pursue. You flee from all this. And instead, you pursue.

You can't just run away from sin. Where do you run? If you try to run away from
sin and that's all you're trying to do, you're going to run right back into sin.

No, you've got to know what you're running after. So you flee from all this. And
you pursue.

And then he gives this incredible list, righteousness, godliness, faith, love,
endurance, and gentleness. You wake up in the morning and you feel unmotivated.
You don't know what to do.

What do you do? Run after righteousness. Right relationship with God and right
relationship with others.

Run after godliness, the character of God, his love, his heart being shown
through your life. Run after faith, trusting him in a way you haven't trusted
him before. Run after love.

Pursue it today. Run after endurance. Even though you don't feel like it, pursue
gentleness today.

I love that one, gentleness. It's a reminder, that last one. Let's just take the
last one as an example, gentleness.

It's a reminder that all of these, they're not personality traits. They are
spiritual fruit in our lives. Gentleness is developed in our lives.

Love is developed. Endurance is developed. If I look at myself and I say, I want
to be more gentle.

I want to be more patient. I want to be somebody who is without a temper,
doesn't fly off the handle like I do. But I think, that's not me.

You've got to be kidding. I can't do that. I don't have the personality for it.

You've missed the point. Gentleness is not a personality. It is a fruit.

The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness. Gentleness in
your life. It's a fruit that grows and develops in your life.

Now, how does it grow? What is it that develops gentleness and all these other
characteristics in people's lives? Well, it's many things, but let me focus on
two of them.

You want to pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and
gentleness? What develops those qualities? Two things.

One, seeing life from God's point of view. God's wisdom is gentle, the Bible
tells us. The way God sees life, he sees it through gentle eyes.

He sees it through eyes of righteousness, eyes of faith, eyes of love. Beginning
to see myself, see others, see this world through the wisdom of God, that
develops gentleness. That develops endurance and love in me.

Number one, you see life from God's point of view. And the way that I learned to
do that is by reading God's word. There's something about God's word that helps
me to see it from God's point of view rather than my point of view.

So I see life from God's point of view. And then the second thing I do is I
spend time with Jesus Christ. I just talk to him.

I sit with him throughout the day, a brief conversation here and there. Maybe at
the beginning of the day or the end of the day, it's a longer conversation. I
read a few verses out of the Bible, and I think about what he's saying to me in
that.

In those ways, I spend time. I realize that I am in relationship with Jesus
Christ throughout the day every day. And why is that so important?

Because we're relational people. And to become more gentle, you have to spend
time around gentle people. To have more endurance in your life, you've got to
spend time around people who have more endurance in their life.

And you need to find fellow believers who are gentle and who endure. But you
also need to realize that Jesus Christ has all these qualities. So as you spend
time with him, you become more like him, like Jesus' first followers.

You have James and John, who were called the sons of thunder because they had so
much anger against everyone. They were always saying, let's take that city over
there. And they didn't trust you, Jesus.

Could we send down lightning bolts on them and just wipe them all out? That's
the spirit that they had. But John, by the end of his life, becomes known as the
apostle of love.

Why? Not because he tried to be more loving, because he spent time with Jesus
Christ. And that inevitably rubbed off on him.

You pursue-- that's the first thing you do in this motivated life of faith. You
pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness. Second
thing you do is you fight.

We talked about this a number of chapters ago, and the fact that although the
Christian life is a journey, the stronger picture of it in the New Testament is
it is a fight. It is a good fight. It's not a dirty fight.

It's not an evil fight. It is a good fight. It is a worthwhile fight.

Yeah, there is a battle to living your faith every day. There's a battle to
trusting God. There is doing what he wants and not what I want.

It's saying no to temptation and saying yes to God. What is this good fight of
faith? It is the fight against the direction this world is taking.

Everything around you in this world is going in the opposite direction of faith.
So sometimes I liken it to walking up a down escalator. If the escalator is
going down and I just stand still on it, I'm going to go down with it.

If I start to walk up, I'm fighting against the general motion of everything.
And you've got to fight against the general motion of this world. You've got to
choose to do that day to day.

Who are we fighting? Well, you're not fighting the people in this world. You're
not fighting that guy at the office, or you're not fighting even that person who
is putting out that maybe immoral material.

Who we're fighting is Satan, because he's the one who motivated that guy at the
office to act that way, or he's the one who motivated that person to be immoral
in their life. That's who we're fighting. Never forget that we're fighting the
evil one.

When we start to fight people, we get the battle in the wrong way. You fight the
good fight of faith, and although you might have to confront people sometimes,
you realize that that fight is against the evil one. It's a good fight, because
we're trusting in a good God.

And you focus on the good and not the evil. Good always overcomes evil. That's
why it's the good fight.

You fight, you pursue, and then you take hold. Take hold of the eternal life to
which you were called. When you were called to life by Jesus Christ, he gave you
that life.

It's his gift. It's his gift of grace. But each day when I wake up, I have to
take hold of the life that he has given and live it out.

I don't create this life. I take hold of what he has created. Now, I can choose
to take hold of other things every day of my life.

I can take hold of my selfishness. I can take hold of my discouragement. I can
take hold of-- well, there's a long list.

But I also can choose, as a believer in Christ, I can take hold of what God has
put into my life. It's there. You have it.

You can take hold of it. So take hold of that eternal life to which you were
called. When do you start living eternal life as a believer?

Well, the truth of the matter is although there's a huge jump in quality of your
eternal life when you get to be in heaven, you change then. There's no more
tears. There's no more sin there.

The fact of your eternal life is settled now. You began your eternal life the
moment you became a believer in Jesus Christ, moment you began to follow him. So
you take hold of that life.

Now, Paul is not through. He's going to continue to encourage Timothy with a
charge to live out these three things-- pursue, fight, take hold. Listen to
these words, verses 13 to 16.

Listen to them not as written to Timothy. Listen to them as written to you. In
the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Christ Jesus, who, while
testifying before Pontius Pilate, made the good confession, I charge you to keep
this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ,
which God will bring about in his own time.

God, the blessed and only ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone
is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can
see, to him be honor and might forever. Amen. Now that, that is faith
motivation.

Paul says, in the presence of Christ, who made the good confession before
Pontius Pilate, he told Pilate that he is the way, the truth, and the life. He
didn't use those exact words, but he talked about the fact that the truth is
found in Christ and that he is the Son of God. Paul says, I want you to live
this without spot or blame.

Now, is he saying there, you have to be perfect? No, he's saying be trusting.
And don't take those words to say you have to try to be a Pharisee and never
make a mistake.

That without spot or blame means that Jesus Christ has done something in your
life. Without spot, those are words that are used for a perfect sacrifice. We're
not the perfect sacrifice, Jesus is.

Blameless, blameless because of what Jesus has done. So you can keep this
command without spot or blame, not because of what I have done, but because of
what Jesus has done. It is in trusting what Jesus has done that I live out this
charge to pursue, to fight, to take hold of the life of faith.

Let me pray for you. Lord, I pray for us together. And I pray these words of
Paul.

I pray that God, you would give us in your sight the power to live out this life
of faith, to keep this command as those without spot or blame until you're
appearing, our Lord Jesus Christ, which God, we know you will bring about in
your own time. And God, we recognize you as the blessed and only ruler, the King
of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the one who is immortal, who lives in
unapproachable light, whom no one can see or has seen. And Lord, we want, if
we're going to pursue, if we're going to fight, if we're going to take hold, we want the
glory to go to you.

So do you be honor, do you be glory, do you be might forever, amen.