Training (1 Tim 4.6-10)

Training

Advent 3: 1 Timothy 4.6-10

Jason Procopio

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been trying to see how the season of Advent isn’t just about getting ready to celebrate Christmas. It is that, but it’s a lot more than that.

Remember, we saw that in the Bible, God’s people live through repeated cycles of waiting and fulfillment: they wait in Egypt before being rescued from slavery; they wait in the desert before God gives them the promised land; they wait in exile before returning to Jerusalem; and they wait for four hundred years before God sends the Messiah, the Savior he had promised them—which of course is what we celebrate at Christmas.

And we’ve seen that we, Christians in the 21st century, are waiting too. We are waiting for the return of Christ, at which time he will make all things new.

So over the last two weeks, we’ve talked about how we wait in times of crisis, and how God encourages us in our wait. 

But we haven’t yet talked about how we wait, on a day-by-day basis—what life in exile actually looks like.

In our minds, waiting is almost always a passive affair. You sit by the phone and wait for it to ring. You stand in line and wait for your turn. You sit at home and you wait for your guests to arrive.

But in the Bible we see that these periods of waiting for the people of God are never meant to be periods in which we just get to sit around and do nothing, saying “Where is God? I don’t know. I wonder when he’ll show up.”

At the beginning of Luke’s gospel, we see two really great examples of people who are waiting well.

After Jesus’s birth, Joseph and Mary bring him to the temple for the ritual of purification that all Jewish boys had to go through. And in the temple at that time we see two people—a man and a woman—who are both present. 

The first is Simeon. Luke 2.25:  

Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.

So Luke says that while Simeon waited for “the consolation of Israel” (the fulfillment of God’s promises of the Messiah), he was righteous and devout. That means that he had given himself over to knowing Scripture and to obedience to God’s Word in worship. He knew the Word, and he lived the Word.

The second example is an old woman—Luke says she was “advanced in years”, v. 36—named Anna. And in Anna’s case, Luke is even more explicit. He says (v. 37):  

She did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day.

Here’s the point. Both Simeon and Anna were waiting for the Messiah to come. They were waiting for the consolation of Israel. And, like everyone else, they were in a kind of holding pattern: they didn’t know when the Messiah would come.

But they weren’t waiting around doing nothing—they were waiting actively. They had trained themselves in what it means to wait faithfully. Simeon was righteous and devout (which doesn’t just happen on its own); and Anna spent all of her time worshiping the Lord, fasting and praying. They were waiting, but their waiting was anything but passive.

So that’s what we’ll be looking at today—what we are called to learn to do while we wait for Christ to return. And to do that, we’re going to go to 1 Timothy 4.

Training for Life (v. 6-7)

Let’s remember what’s going on in this text. (It shouldn’t be too hard; we were in 2 Timothy just a few weeks ago, and the context here is similar.) 

Paul is writing to his young protégé Timothy, who is now the pastor of the church in Ephesus, a church Paul himself planted. He wrote this first letter because there were some issues cropping up in the church in Ephesus which Timothy was having to deal with (namely some false teachers who were trying to sneak their way in and preach a false gospel), so Paul is responding to these issues with counsel for Timothy on how to deal with them.

But as always, Paul can’t just give advice; he’s also going to speak to Timothy about Timothy’s faith, and how to care for his own soul in this contentious context.

He begins chapter 4 by talking about the false teachers cropping up in Timothy’s church, who impose weird rules of asceticism that the Bible never does, and he reminds Timothy of why the gospel should free us from those ideas. As Christians we have a great deal of freedom to take pleasure in the things God has created, as long as we do it appropriately, as God intended, because Christ died to fulfill the law for his people, so we are not saved through works of the law, but by grace, through faith, alone. 

So Paul says (v. 6):  

6 If you put these things [the truths of the gospel] before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. 

Now in v. 6 we have our first big point.

Timothy has been trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine. He knows his Bible well. And he knows it so well that he can communicate it to others—he can “put these things before the brothers.”

I’m going to say something that may be shocking to some of you: learning takes time. 

Hearing doesn’t take time; understanding doesn’t necessarily take time. But learning—being trained in something—takes time. And the more complex the subject is, the longer it will take to learn it.

We saw a few weeks ago in 2 Timothy 3 that Timothy had been trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine from childhood (2 Tim. 3.15). At this time Timothy was a young man—probably close to my age, maybe a little younger—but he had been learning these things since he was a little boy. Which means that, at minimum, he had twenty or thirty years of learning the faith under his belt.

If you haven’t been a Christian for very long, and you’re feeling a bit frustrated that you’re not progressing as quickly as you think you should, please let me reassure you—everyone feels that way. We all want to move more quickly than we do. 

And that’s exactly why we’re talking about this during Advent: this isn’t going to happen in a day. Or in a year. Or in ten years. This is the day-in, day-out, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, year-by year discipline which will over time form and shape us into the people God calls us to be. This is our life while we wait.

So what does this life consist of?

Paul gives both a negative and a positive command. Let’s look at the negative command first, v. 7:

7 Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. 

Literally, this command says, “Stay away from profane old wives’ tales.” He’s talking about ideas which might sound reasonable, but which have no basis in reality. 

A while back on Facebook I saw someone post an article that said you should cook onions twenty minutes (maximum) after you cut them, because otherwise they suck in all the bacteria in your house and can make you sick.

That’s an old wives’ tale. People eat raw onions all the time and they don’t get sick.

Most of the time, old wives’ tales are harmless. But when you take these kinds of ideas and apply them to spiritual things, they become irreverent, because they have no basis in the truth God has revealed to us; and the damage can be huge, because you’re not just talking about cooking advice, but about how to care for your soul, how to honor and glorify God.

And unfortunately, there are thousands of these irreverent, silly myths floating around in Christian circles, all the time.

Just one example. Some people will think, “I don’t need to spend time in the Bible, I don’t need to study and learn and grow in the knowledge of doctrine, because I have the Holy Spirit, and he’ll give me everything I need.”

They might not say that out loud, but functionally, that’s how they operate.

These people will sit and pray, and they’ll say, “Holy Spirit, speak to me.”  And they’ll wait for the Spirit to start buffering, and the download to begin. They’ll flip randomly through their Bibles to see if a verse jumps out at them. If that doesn’t work, they’ll throw on some Christian rock worship and see if that helps. And once they start to feel something, they know the Spirit is doing his work in them.

That’s wrong. That’s not how it works. That’s just as wrong as those who say they don’t need to ask the Spirit to speak to them, because they have the Bible.

If you look at how the Bible describes growth in Christian maturity, it is almost never in terms of radical, extraordinary acts of the Holy Spirit in which he comes down and gives you a jolt of power, but rather in perfectly ordinary acts of obedience which, over time, make us more like him.

We read the Bible—yes, we actually read all the words that are written there—and the Holy Spirit works through his Word to slowly and steadily change our hearts…and occasionally he breaks through and does something exceptional. 

I heard someone give an example of this recently, and the day I heard him say it, the same thing had just happened to me. So I’m going to borrow it. 

A few weeks ago I was going through my reading plan, and I was in the book of Daniel. If you know the book, you know that the first half of Daniel is full of awesome stories we love—the lion’s den, the three friends in the fiery furnace. 

But the second half of the book gets really, really weird.

On this particular morning, I was in one of the weird parts. In Daniel 8, Daniel receives a vision of—I’m not even kidding—a unicorn. (It’s not called that, but that’s what it is.) 

But it’s not a “normal” unicorn—you know, a horse with a horn coming out of its forehead. This was like that, but it was a goat instead of a horse. The goat-unicorn beats up a ram with its unicorn-horn, and later that horn breaks off and becomes four other horns, and out of one of these horns grows a tiny horn that eventually becomes really big.

I think we can agree: that’s weird. That’s a weird story. And that was my time in the Word that day. 

I’ll just be honest with you: that particular chapter didn’t do a lot to “feed my soul.” I did not get a Holy Spirit download that morning. Of course, there is meaning behind that vision—all the Word of God is profitable to us, and we should try to understand why that text is there. 

But that morning, as I read, I didn’t feel much.

The next day I was in chapter 9. Daniel’s coming hot off the heels of this really weird vision, and he’s freaking out. He prays that God would help him understand the vision he had received.

And at the end of chapter 9, the angel Gabriel appears to him to help him understand, and he says (v. 23): 

At the beginning of your pleas for mercy a word went out, and I have come to tell it to you, for you are greatly loved.

And when I read that verse, something occurred to me. I realized that God gave this word to Daniel—he gave Daniel this vision and the explanation of the vision—so that Daniel would write it down, and transmit it to his people (us included). And he gave us this word—this weird vision and its explanation—because we too are greatly loved. 

Because God loves us, he doesn’t leave us in the dark. He tells us what he’s doing and what he’s thinking, no matter how strange it may seem to us at first.

And I found myself comforted and moved by the love of my God who would faithfully preserve and transmit his Word, and speak to someone like me, because I don’t deserve that kind of love from an infinite God.

But listen—to get to that point of comfort and encouragement, I had to go through the frankly laborious reading of the goat-unicorn.

Brothers and sisters, this is what we call spiritual discipline. It is laborious, repetitive, and sometimes even boring…but God uses it to shape our minds and hearts to love and trust him, and occasionally, he breaks through and meets us in his Word in a particular way, giving us exactly what we need at that moment.

And that is why Paul follows up his negative command to have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths with his positive command (v. 7 again): Rather train yourself for godliness.

This word “godliness” (also “piety” in some translations) can sometimes throw us off—it means more than acts of worship, or observance of religious rituals. Godliness is being like God. It is sharing God’s loves, God’s hates, God’s desires, God’s character. 

Of course it can seem presumptuous of us to think we know what God is like, but it’s not—he has told us what he is like. 

In theology we talk about the incommunicable attributes of God, and the communicable attributes of God. God’s incommunicable attributes are those things that are only true of God—he is all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent, eternal, sovereign. 

But God also has a number of attributes that he shares with human beings, and which we can grow in. 

He is wise—and we, too, can grow to be wise. 

He is loving—we too can grow to be loving. 

He is holy—we too can grow to be holy.

So Paul tells Timothy that while he should avoid irreverent, silly myths, he should train himself in becoming like God—train himself in growing in godly character, and in obeying God’s commandments, which are a reflection of that character.

Let me put it simply: Paul’s telling Timothy to train himself in knowing God as he has revealed himself in Scripture, and in living according to what he learns.

And like any training, it’s a process. It takes time; it takes work; and it takes discipline. There are a lot of elements that can come into play here—Donald Whitney lists Bible reading, prayer, worship, evangelism, serving, stewardship, fasting, silence, journaling and learning as all being spiritual disciplines. But since Paul has talked about how Timothy has been trained in the words of the faith and the good doctrine, we’ll stick to that for now.

We talked a few weeks ago about discipleship, and what these disciplines look like in community—let’s talk a minute about what this looks like individually.

This is what this kind of training looks like for me. There are lots of faithful ways to do this, and I’ll surely refine my routine over time, but this is how it works for me today. And let me just give you an honest disclaimer: I don’t always do this well. I’m not where I want to be yet in my discipline. But this is what I shoot for.

Most mornings, I typically get up at 5:30 a.m. (Since Zadie was born, often that veers closer to 6:00, but it’s almost never later than that.) 

If that sounds early, it is. I am not a morning person. My natural rhythm is, go to sleep at four a.m., wake up at eleven, and work until nine or ten at night. I get up so early because I have a family now, so I can’t keep up that rhythm; but also because I know myself, and I know that if I don’t do it then, it probably won’t get done. I’ll get distracted.

But that early in the morning, there’s nothing to distract me. The wifi is off (we cut it off at night), my computer’s asleep, my phone is off. 

So I’ll get up, I’ll get a cup of coffee, and I’ll sit down with my Bible. I don’t sit down with a devotional book, or with a commentary, or even with a study Bible, but just the Bible. All those theological tools can be helpful, but they’re words about God, not the words of God. If I take the time I’ve set aside to be with the Lord and use it to read theology, it’s like reading a biography about that person when that person is in the room. “No thanks, don’t talk to me, I have this biography about you.”

So I’ll read my actual Bible, in which God himself speaks to us (and yes, sometimes it is a struggle because I’m still sleepy), and then I’ll go back and pray in response to what I read. (Even if it’s Daniel’s goat-unicorn vision.) 

After that, I’ll run through the day ahead of me and pray for the day—whatever meetings I might have, or sermon prep, or family time. 

By the time I’m done with all of that, it’ll be time to get dressed and ready so that I can go wake up the kids. Sometimes Zadie wakes up early and interrupts that time, so I have to work around that. 

Once the kids are up, we’re off and running. The day begins, and during the day, I’ll have hundreds of opportunities to obey God, or to disobey God. 

There will be moments when people annoy me, so I can choose to speak to them with patience and gentleness, or to be harsh with them. 

There will be moments when I’m tired at work, so I can choose to press through and work to the best of my ability, or go on YouTube for four hours and watch people fall down. (Yes, that’s the kind of thing I like watching on YouTube.) 

There will be moments when I have the opportunity to be generous, or to be selfish. To dwell on sinful things, or to turn my mind to the things of God.

And during those moments, it’s all discipline. It’s making the effort to obey God’s commandments to the best of my abilities, in the most practical of situations.

When I’m done with work, I’ll head home, and on the way home I’ll pray for the evening ahead of me—because I honestly don’t know what’s going to meet me when I open the door. Will I find two adorable children who are obedient to their parents and happy to see me? Or will I find depraved little monsters who only think of themselves? 

Will I find a wife who is happy to see me, or a wife who is ready to pull her hair out because she’s just spent all day with the little monsters? 

I never know. So I’ll pray that God helps me to love them well, to love Loanne well.

I open the door, and my second shift begins. 

I’ll be honest with you—all of this often feels like work. There’s nothing extraordinary about it; when I read my Bible in the morning, I don’t usually get up from my chair wiping my eyes and trembling from my incredible encounter with the Holy Spirit.

And it’s far from perfect. If you’re carrying around this idea that a pastor doesn’t struggle with the same things you do, you need to get rid of that idea. When I resist temptation, I don’t feel like a knight defeating a dragon; I feel like a weak man trying to fight off an enemy way stronger than I am. And I fail far more often than I want to admit to anyone.

It’s not always fun. It’s not always exciting. It’s not always emotionally stirring. 

It’s discipline.

But I can tell you without any qualifications that I love God far more today than I did when I met him seventeen years ago. And I am more obedient to God’s commands during the day than I was seventeen years ago. And I’m better able to love other people, and be more generous, and be more self-sacrificing, than I was seventeen years ago. It’s not perfect, but it is better.

We train ourselves in godliness—we work at it, we toil at it—because that is how we grow while we wait for Christ’s return. It’s often tedious; it’s not always fun. 

But you do it—day in and day out, year after year. 

And then one day ten years from now, you’ll wake up and realize that you’re actually mature in your faith, and you’ll wonder how you got there. 

You’ll find yourself able to counsel others with the words of Scripture, and you’ll surprise yourself—“I didn’t even know I knew that!” 

You’ll find yourself able to think back over the entire story of the Bible and suddenly appreciate why the New Testament authors are constantly referencing the Old Testament.

You’ll find yourself reacting patiently to something that would have thrown you into a rage ten years ago.

You’ll find yourself comforted and restful in the middle of a situation that would have sent you into a spiral of anxiety and fear ten years ago.

One day, you’ll wake up and realize that you are more like God now than you were ten years ago, and it happened without you even noticing it was happening.

That, brothers and sisters, is training for godliness. That is what the Christian life looks like.

But here’s the question: if it really is that much work, if it really takes this much effort, why is it worth it?

Training for Eternity (v. 8-10) 

We talked about Simeon and Anna at the beginning—these two people who were actively waiting to see the Messiah. There is a beautiful moment in Luke 2 when Simeon, this devout and righteous man who had been waiting for the Messiah, finally sees him. Luke tells us that the Spirit had told Simeon he would not die before seeing the Messiah with his own eyes. 

And then Mary and Joseph bring the baby Jesus into the temple, and he knows. He knows that this baby is the Messiah God had promised.

So we see here this beautiful picture of a man who had run his race well, who had arrived at the end of his life…and he knew it. You would think that knowing you would soon be dying would be a depressing idea—but we don’t see any depression in Simeon at this moment.

He takes the baby in his arms, and he blesses God, and says (Luke 2.29-32):  

29  “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, 

according to your word; 

30  for my eyes have seen your salvation 

31  that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, 

32  a light for revelation to the Gentiles, 

and for glory to your people Israel.” 

All his years of learning and discipline and waiting, all his years in training himself in devout righteousness, had brought him to this moment—when he was finally able to enjoy what he had been waiting for.

That is what Paul is trying to express to Timothy in v. 8-10. We’ll read starting at v. 7 again:  

7 Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; 8 for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. 9 The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. 10 For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. 

Brothers and sisters, if all of this sounds like a lot of work, it is. But it is work with a purpose. There is a goal in view. 

And if you want to know how important that goal is, look at Paul’s example of bodily training. 

No matter how much I hate to say it, I can’t dispute that physical exercise, and eating right, is good for your body. You’ll feel better, you’ll be stronger, your overall quality of life will improve.

But no matter how much you exercise, you’re still going to get old. Your body will still wear out. You’ll get wrinkles. The muscles you pride yourselves in will get spongy. You’ll come to the point where even sleeping will start to hurt. You’ll wake up in the morning feeling like you’ve just finished running a marathon, when you’ve just been laying there.

Bodily training is useful, but its usefulness is limited.

That’s not the case for training in godliness. Paul says, while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.

Or to put it another way: while we are living on this earth, the Christian life is practice for heaven.

Training in godliness holds promise because in the life to come, in heaven, godly is all we will be. Christ will return, and renew this earth, and glorify us; he will eradicate sin and its effects. So we will be, through his power, like him. We will be godly, down to our DNA.

That’s really important, because it is only through godliness that we are able to enjoy God. 

Our nature, as beings created in the image of God, longs to be in the place where God is everything. And as we grow in godliness, we feel that longing—we feel that desire for heaven—more and more.

When Christ returns and renews us, we will finally be able to enjoy that which we have desired for so long, maybe without even realizing it: namely, God’s glory. And we will enjoy his glory because we were made for it—only godly people love God’s glory, and we were made to be godly.

And so while we wait for that day of Christ’s return, we discipline ourselves to grow in godliness—why? Ultimately, we do it because we have our hope set on the living God.

And you can’t hope in what you don’t know or can’t imagine.

You can’t look forward to a holiday at the beach if you have no idea what that would look like. You can maybe have a vague anticipation of something good that’s coming, but you can’t experience any full pleasure in that anticipation. You can’t get ready for it if you have no idea what it is.

We learn to know God, and to be like God, because he is our hope. He is the end goal. God himself is the great promise of heaven. And if we don’t know who he is, or what he is like, we can’t find any pleasure in him today, and we can’t get ready for the day that we will see him and be like him.

And so we train ourselves in godliness. The better you’re able to swim, the more you can enjoy the water. The better you know God, the more like God you are; and the more like God you are, the more you can enjoy the God you know.

One day Christ will return. One day he will make all things new. One day he will make us new.

But he hasn’t come back yet. We are still here—exiles in this fallen world, waiting for our Savior to return

And the good news is we don’t have to wait for his return to begin living our eternal life. As we grow to know him today, we begin to enjoy him today. Someone (I think it was Brian Davis) put it this way: “God is the tall, refreshing glass of water on a hot day; the spiritual disciplines are the straw.” We are thirsty for God, we want more of God…and we learn to enjoy him through the ordinary discipline of reading his Word, praying his Word and living his Word.

So brothers and sisters, have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Reject those ideas of the Christian life which seem logical at first but which have no basis in Scripture.

Rather, train yourself in godliness. The only way you can reject irreverent, silly myths is if you have been trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine. So learn to know your Bible well—all of it. Don’t worry if it takes time. Don’t worry if it’s hard. Be patient. Keep at it. Do it together.

And live what you learn. Be obedient to the Word.

Grow in godliness. Grow to know God as he has revealed himself in Scripture, and to live according to what you know. Grow to be more and more like Christ, more and more foreign to this broken world.

And do it all in order to enjoy God more here and now… 

Toil, and strive, because you have your hope set on the living God. 

And as you grow in godliness, in this broken world which is the place of our exile, hold on to the promise that our living God, our Savior, is coming.

We wait, and we groan in our sufferings, and we lament over the state of this broken world. 

But we wait actively, as those who have a sure and solid hope—that our waiting will soon be over, and we will be like him, and we will see him and know him as he is.  

Now before I close, let me speak to anyone here who might not be a believer. 

At the end of v. 10, Paul says that everything we do in training for godliness, we do because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. 

This verse has often been misunderstood to mean that all people will be saved—this is not what Paul means when he says that God is the Savior of all people. He means that there is one Savior for all people. 

We have all rejected God and turned away from him. And as a result, we are all under his just condemnation. But because God loves his people, he provided a Savior—Jesus Christ. He sent his Son to live a perfect life in our place, and to take the punishment of his people, in our place, so that we might be considered righteous, because he was righteous for us.

Christ is the Savior of all people in that he is the only Savior. If we reject Christ, we reject the only hope for salvation we have. But if we believe and trust in him, he becomes not just humanity’s Savior, but our Savior.

Everything we’ve been talking about this morning, we do because of what he has done for us.

God has promised us eternal joy in his presence, because we will be made like him. We all want to be happy. And there is one source of eternal joy offered to us. We were all created to know God, and to find perfect and eternal joy in him.

So if you don’t know Christ this morning, I’ll invite you to do the same thing as the rest of us: come to the Lord we find in Scripture, and learn to know him in Scripture. Let him tell you why you’re here. Let him tell you why he made you the way he made you. And trust that if you follow him, your joy won’t last merely as long as you’re alive, but forever, as you enjoy him forever.