The Good Confession

1 Timothy 6:11-16

September 29, 2019 • Mount Pleasant UMC

The sermon title today, if you happened to notice it in the bulletin, may have created several different images in your mind. The word “confession” can mean a lot of different things. If you grew up Roman Catholic, confession might look like this: a small enclosure with a priest on the other side, to whom you shared the sins you had committed since the last time you were there. The priest would hear your “confession,” give you some actions to do to make up for your sins, and pronounce absolution or forgiveness of sin. You were forgiven…until the next time you sinned. And I’m not making light of that; for that tradition, that’s a very important spiritual practice. For others, the word “confession” might bring up images of police and lawyers and courtrooms—people and places where one might “confess” a wrongdoing, a crime. A confession is admitting that you did it. On a smaller level, it might bring up an image of a time when you did something wrong and had to confess it to your parents. I still remember the time in first grade when I had to admit my parents that the money I had was taken from the Sunday School offering. Today, some might think of the many “confession” websites where you can go and make an anonymous statement about something you feel guilty about, or even just something you’re thinking about. Though, I have to wonder, if these online confessions are anonymous, why do they have a “Share on Facebook” button underneath them?

“Confession” stirs up a lot of images and maybe a lot of feelings—it’s different for different people. But in the passage we read this morning, Paul talks to young Timothy about a “good” confession. Those aren’t words we use together very often. A “confession” is usually about something we did that was bad, unacceptable, maybe even illegal! What, exactly, is a “good” confession? And why is Paul focused on Timothy’s “good” confession? This morning, I want to take us all to Ephesus, a seaport town in Asia Minor, and we’re going to walk alongside Pastor Timothy as he hears from his mentor and spiritual Father, Paul.

Now, honestly, if I could pack us all up and take us physically to Ephesus today, I would do that. Aside from the Israel, Ephesus is perhaps my favorite Biblical site that I’ve visited over the years. Rachel and I were privileged to spend a day there five years ago, and even though it’s a huge archaeological site today, only a fraction of the original city has been uncovered. What has been uncovered, though, does tell us several things about the city. For one, it was a prominent Roman city, boasting a population of around a quarter of a million, the fourth largest city in the Roman Empire in the first century (Price, Handbook of Biblical Archaeology, pg. 311). It had underground plumbing and wealthy apartments that overlooked the main street. It was a place of emperor worship, and there are several altars still existing from the first century where people offered worship to Artemis and other gods, including Caesar. Ephesus was in a strategic location, and a lot of trade passed through this place (cf. Archaeological Study Bible, pg. 1914). Paul likely chose to establish a church here because of that; share the Gospel here with a traveler and that person would take it back home and it would spread again from there. Now, in Paul’s day Ephesus may not have been as important as it once was, but it still continued to receive the attention of Rome until the early third century and it was a city Paul loved. So when false teaching began to arise in the church there, Paul sent Timothy to deal with it. Never mind that Timothy was young when he came there (cf. 4:12). He had the authority of Paul himself, founder of the church, behind him.

Unlike many of the other letters in the New Testament, this letter wasn’t necessarily meant to be read aloud as a sermon in the gathering of the church. This is a pastoral letter of advice, a personal letter from Paul to his “true son in the faith” (1:2), Timothy. And so throughout the letter he gives advice about deacons and elders and how to deal with false doctrine and even how to lead worship. As he comes to the end of his letter, this mentor and friend wants to share some personal encouragement for his young protege, and that’s where we come into the letter this morning. There are four pieces of advice Paul has for Timothy, four things he encourages this young “man of God” to do, and we’re going to move quickly through the first three so we can focus on the last one. Together these set a tone and a context for our life as men and women of God. So, let’s dive in to these few verses.

The first thing Paul tells Timothy to do is to “flee from all this.” Sort of feel like you’ve arrived in the middle of a conversation here? Paul is telling Timothy to run away from something; to “flee” gives us the idea that something is after us, doesn’t it (Demarest, Communicator’s Commentary: 1, 2 Thessalonians, 1, 2 Timothy, Titus, pg. 225)? So what is after us? What is “this”? In the section just before this one, and in the section just after, Paul is focused on money, so the “this” must have something to do with that—and I can hear you groaning right now because we’ve already heard from Marshall about our challenging church finances. Let me put you at ease: that’s not what Paul is talking about and that’s not what I’m going to talk about. Today, anyway. In the passage just before, Paul is contrasting a lust for money with the virtue of contentment. What he wants Timothy to flee is not money itself but the way money chases after us and gets its hooks in us, the way money convinces us it’s the most important thing in life. Today, we hear that in our advertising: “You need it. You want it. You deserve it.” Flee that, Paul says, and not because money is evil. This is the famous passage that often gets misquoted; what Paul says here is, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (6:10). You don’t have to look very far in our world to see that Paul’s word is still true. Today, just like then, people worship money in every way possible. So Paul says flee the kind of life where money rules everything. If it rules you, it will not lead you to do good. Horst Schulze, founder of the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, tells how they evaluated success in his organization. It wasn’t based on the bottom line, even though that’s how most businesses and most organizations look at things. His perspective was that Wall Street would take care of that, and more than that, if they got the customer experience right, the bottom line would take care of itself. He says excellence is always about the mission. In his hotel chain, the mission was customer satisfaction, not making more money. And because of that focus, his business was wildly successful. I have a feeling that Schulze, being a Christian, got that idea from Paul. Flee a life in which money is the central thing.

Which leads to the second thing Paul tells young Timothy. In your flight away from that kind of life, there is a direction to go. As you’re fleeing head where you can find righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. This is a list that sounds somewhat similar to the “fruit of the spirit” Paul lists in Galatians 5, which might tell us that both lists are not something we conjure up or somehow work up in our lives, but instead something the Spirit works in us. Still, Paul tells Timothy to pursue these things. “Pursue” means to make it a lifelong goal, something that isn’t achieved overnight but takes a long time, most likely a lifetime, to gain (cf. Earle, “1 Timothy,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 11, pg. 386). That word also tells us that “they don’t come about by accident. They occur in someone’s life because that person has chased after them energetically” (Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Epistles, pg. 76). It’s not like we wake up one morning and, oops, we’re righteous, or we’re gentle, or we’re more godly. When Paul tells Timothy to “pursue” these things, he expects that every morning, living in a city where emperor worship was expected and normal, Timothy will make a conscious decision to live in a different way than the culture around him. He will choose to live in line with the life of Christ. He will actively and energetically pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness.

Third, Paul calls Timothy to “fight the good fight of faith” (6:12). In his second letter to Timothy, a letter most scholars believe was Paul’s final letter, he uses the same image to describe his own life: “I have fought the good fight” (2 Timothy 4:7). If you were to translate this literally, it would read, “Agonize the good agony” (Earle 386), which is a little awkward. Originally, the word for “fight,” agon, referred to an athletic contest. It described someone who competed in the gymnastic games, someone who exerted every ounce of energy they had in order to win. It referred to a “disciplined and determined struggle” (Demarest 226). So the “fight” Paul is talking about here continues of the pursuit he described in the verse before. No matter what comes against us, we keep the goal in sight, or as has been said, we keep the main thing the main thing. And that main thing, according to Paul, is to grab ahold of the eternal life that was promised to us.

We do that by making the good confession. But before we rush into that phrase, I want to take a moment, maybe a bit of a detour but hopefully not too far off track, and talk about what Paul and other New Testament authors understand when they say “eternal life.” When we hear that phrase, we  usually think of life after this one. Life in heaven. We picture it as some sort of nebulous, ghostly existence, floating on clouds and strumming harps, while we watch what happens down here. We talk about someone who has died “watching over our loved ones.” But, I gotta tell you, sitting on clouds and strumming harps and watching the mess than takes place down here—that honestly doesn’t sound very enticing to me! I’m not sure that sounds so much like heaven as it does…well, the other place. And that kind of life is not what Paul is thinking of anyway when he tells Timothy to take hold of “eternal life.” Eternal life does not start the day you physically die. Eternal life doesn’t start when the preacher says nice words over you at your funeral. Eternal life is something that starts when we “make the good confession.” Eternal life is something we can experience here and now. To quote a title of a recent John Ortberg book, “Eternity Is In Session,” right now. Our death is not an end; it’s just a transition from one place to another, from one kind of existence to another. This life, C. S. Lewis said, is just the introduction to the great story, the one that goes on and on and on. Don’t skip the introduction, but realize it only prepares us for the real story, for real life. And while we may wonder what “heavenly” life is going to look like or be like, the only thing we know for sure is that Jesus will be there. There’s an old story about a country doctor who was making house calls (so you know it’s an old story), and in one home, he was visiting with a patient who was dying. It was only a matter of time, and as the doctor turned to go, the patient asked him, “Doc, what’s it going to be like? What’s eternity like?” The doctor scratched his head and said, “I don’t know, honestly, but do you hear that scratching at the door? That’s my dog, and he has no idea what it’s like inside here. He’s never been in here. He just knows his master is in here, and so that’s where he wants to be. That’s the way I picture eternity. Jesus is there, so that’s where I want to be.”

And Paul says we “get there,” we move into that life by making this good confession I’ve been teasing all morning. Remember that Ephesus was a significant Roman city and with all the government functions that took place here, so there would have also been a strong military presence. When men (and they were all men in those days) either signed up or were conscripted to serve in the Roman military, they were expected and required to make a public declaration of their allegiance to the emperor. They were to confess that from now on, their main purpose would be to live however and do whatever the emperor commanded. Paul reminds Timothy, then, that he has enrolled in the Lord’s army, that he is a soldier in Christ’s company, and that his first allegiance, ever since his confession, is to Jesus. So his “good confession” is, first and foremost, his confession of Jesus as Savior and Lord. His first confession is a declaration that he believes in Jesus, that Jesus is Lord (and Caesar is not) and that he will serve Jesus in everything he does (cf. Wright 75; Demarest 226). I remember the day I did that in my own life. I’ve shared before: it was in Bible School class when I first understood that Jesus not only died for the world, he died for me. I gave my life to him and asked him to be my Lord and friend for the rest of my life. And he has never turned his back on me, even in those times when I have failed him. Every morning, when I wake up, I go to prayer and commit my day and my life to him again. The “good confession” is, first and foremost, our commitment to follow Jesus, and if that’s not a confession you have made, if that’s not a relationship you have entered into, then today could be your day. Don’t leave here this morning without being certain of where you are in connection to Jesus. He wants to be your Savior, Lord and friend, and he will never leave you nor forsake you.

But I think Paul has in mind more than that when he talks about a “good confession.” I think that because, in the context of this letter, Paul drops this challenge to Timothy in the midst of a lot of other instructions about how to live life. Once you have given your life to Jesus—what then? I remember as a teenager going to a “testimony” service in a church of another tradition with a friend of mine, and even at that age, I couldn’t help but notice how all of the testimonies centered on the moment when Jesus had saved the witness. Now, that’s a great story to tell, but for most if not all of them, that event had happened many years before. I wanted to ask, “What has Jesus been doing in your life lately?” I didn’t ask, but I wanted to! Once we have given our lives to Jesus, he wants to work in us, grow us more and more into his likeness, help us become the people his father God envisions we would become. That’s why Paul surrounds this challenge with very practical instructions.

For the sake of time, I’m going to focus just on four instructions that are right around our passage this morning, and the first set has to do with contentment. Paul encourages Timothy (and us) to have “godliness with contentment;” those two things are intimately linked together. Paul says there are folks in Timothy’s community who were saying that the way to get rich is to get religion. I remember a guy many years ago telling me that when he took his current job, his boss told him to go to church. That’s where he would meet the best customers and make the most money. Now, going to church changed him and he became a strong believer in Jesus, but that was not his original motive in going to church. It’s just that Jesus showed up along the way! Paul says, in effect, if you became a Christian just to get rich, you’re following the wrong path. Become rich in godliness. Become content with what you have. If you are always wanting more, Paul says, you’re going to end up in trouble. You’re going to end up some place you don’t want to be (cf. 6:6-10). Be content. Do you have clothing and food? That’s enough for the day, Paul says.

Paul also tells Timothy to instruct his congregation to “not be arrogant,” a command he ties to not putting our hope in wealth. The word for “arrogant” means “to be lofty in mind.” In other words: if you have resources in this world, don’t think of yourself as better than others, better than those who don’t. This is something the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, learned. He was a well-educated man. He had a degree from Oxford University and was ordained as a clergy person in the Anglican Church. In that time, that was a well-respected position, and while he might not have had a lot of money, he was part of the “upper crust” of British society. He was also a high churchman; he loved the high liturgy and ordered worship that is part of the Anglican tradition. He believed preaching belonged only in the church, but there came a time in his life when God began working on him. As he preached a warm-hearted message about a relationship with Jesus, he was often asked not to return to certain churches, and about the same time he began to hear about the way God was working through field preaching. His friend, George Whitefield, invited him to Bristol and somehow convinced Wesley to put aside his preconceptions about the practice of field preaching. Wesley wrote about it this way: “At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people.” Had Wesley remained arrogant, thinking himself better than “those people” or above the practice of preaching wherever God opened a door, you and I might not be here. Don’t be arrogant.

Instead of arrogance, Paul says, put on “good deeds.” He gives Timothy this instruction for his congregation: “Do good…be rich in good deeds…be generous and willing to share” (6:18). Good deeds do not save us; good deeds are the evidence of our salvation. The reason we have teams who go to Costa Rica and Guatemala and downtown Detroit and St. Louis and all the other places our teams go is not so that we can impress God with how good we are, not so that we can get God to love us more. It’s because we know how much God loves us and we want others to know that love. The reason we participate in things like Serve the Valley and city-wide clean-up days and ringing bells for the Salvation Army and the Faith-Education Roundtable is not so that we can somehow earn “Jesus points” and cash them in for a trip to heaven. We do those things because we love our community and we want to share the love of Jesus with anyone and in any way we can. The reason we support missionaries in places like Chile and northern Africa and Haiti and Lafayette and Indiana State University is not so that God will be impressed by how much we give. It’s because, as Jesus said, those who have much are called to give much (cf. Luke 12:48). Sometimes, what’s needed in our country or our city or even in our neighborhood seems overwhelming. There’s just too much broken that needs healing or fixing! At times when I feel like that, I remember the wisdom of Mother Teresa, who said she knew she could not fix all of the problems of Calcutta, so she just focused on the one in front of her. “Never worry about numbers,” she said. “Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you.” Or, you might put it this way: be rich in good deeds.

With the last one, Paul stops preaching and goes to meddling because in his final words to Timothy, he says this: “Turn away from godless chatter” (6:20). I don’t know about you, but I need to take that verse and put it in Sharpie at the top of my iPad, or I need somehow to have those words pop up every time I open the Facebook app. I think most of what we call social media today could be called “godless chatter.” There are times I find myself mindlessly scrolling through Facebook or Twitter and after spending far too long immersed in the cat videos, memes, and pictures of other people’s dinner, I hear that still, small voice inside me asking, “What are you doing here?” What are you accomplishing by mindlessly scrolling? Some of the television that I engage in is nothing more than godless chatter as well. Now, I’m not saying everything we do, watch or listen to has to have the name “Jesus” in it or be overtly religious. I love good entertainment as much as the next person. But, let’s be honest, there’s a lot that passes for “entertainment” today, even in the Christian world, that is a waste of time. It’s “godless chatter.” And, to get even more meddlesome, there are a lot of times our actual face-to-face conversations are godless—they are not honoring to God. When we speak about someone instead of to them, when we speak about something without knowing the truth, when we tarnish someone’s reputation—Paul says, “turn away from godless chatter.”

Now, here is the larger point I believe Paul is making: is it possible that our “good confession” is seen more in our actions than it is heard in our words? It is possible that the old saying is true: “I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day”? Is it possible that you still are the only Jesus some may ever see? Our “good confession” may begin with our words but it is confirmed and affirmed in our actions, with the way we treat each other, with the choices we make about how we live our lives, with the decisions we make. Several weeks ago, I suggested a question I stole from Andy Stanley, a question we can use in every situation to determine how we live out our good confession. The question, you may remember, is this: “What does love require?” What does love require? Now, unlike the way our world would often answer that question, the answer is not always, “Just let whatever someone wants to do happen.” No, that’s not love. That may be sentimentality, but it’s not love. Sometimes love requires us to say, “No.” To let a child run into the street or to let him touch a hot stove is not love. That’s child abuse. To let someone run into known sin, to let someone do what you know will cause harm—that’s not love. That’s neglect. What does love require? It requires us not to be arrogant. It requires us to be content with what God has given us. It requires us to do good deeds. And it requires us to speak things that lift up, build up, instead of tear down. What does love require? It requires us to make a good confession: trusting Jesus, and living in such a way that others want to learn to trust him, too.

This morning, we’re going to do that first “good confession.” We’re going to stand and affirm our faith before we go to prayer. (The second part of the good confession is up to you.) So let’s join together; the words will be on the screen.

Pastor: This is the good news which we have received, in which we stand, and by which we are saved.

People: Christ died for our sins,

was buried,

was raised on the third day,

and appeared first to the women,

then to Peter and the Twelve,

and then to many faithful witnesses.

We believe Jesus is the Christ,

the Anointed One of God,

the firstborn of all creation,

the firstborn from the dead,

in whom all things hold together,

in whom the fullness of God

was pleased to dwell

by the power of the Spirit.

Christ is the head of the body, the church,

and by the blood of the cross

reconciles all things to God. Amen.

(UMH 888)

You may be seated; let’s pray.