Good to be with you here today on this uh lovely day.
I wore a a protest against the gloom tie today.
It's blue for the blue darkness, you know, but I got green in there because there's always hope that the sun will come out and the grass will grow again.
What do you think?
>> All right.
Uh my text today uh is 2 Timothy chap 2 22- 26.
Uh if you're a visitor here today for the first time, you wouldn't know that we're working on the pastoral epistles together.
And I kind of love this passage.
I actually loved another passage more, but somebody else snagged it first, so I couldn't have it.
And it's very experiential for me.
I hope to uh show that it's, you know, it's kind of where your future lies, but it's also where your present lies.
is sort of for 25 year olds and and also people who are older than that.
Listen to God's word.
Why don't we stand and and listen to the word of the servant of the king, Apostle Paul says to Timothy.
So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace along with those who call on the Lord for a pure from a pure heart.
In other words, we're doing this together.
Verse 23 have nothing to do with foolish ignorant quarrels or controversies.
You know they breed quarrels and the Lord's servant must not be quarrelome but kind to everyone able to teach patiently enduring evil correcting his opponents with gentleness.
God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil after having been captured by him to do his will.
Let's pray for a moment.
Lord, give us ears to hear wherever we are in life this word that you have for us.
And we pray it in your name.
Amen.
Please be seated.
First of all, I want to say every story I tell you is absolutely true.
Though I have every right and privilege and I promise you solemnly that I've changed details.
So if you think you know who I'm talking about, you're wrong.
But the essence is absolutely true every time.
So the wisest pastor I know was preaching on the book of Ephesians 10 or 15 years ago in a large church meditating on the fact that Jesus himself is our peace as the text says.
And the pastor was saying that and he was pointing out that the gospel is the gospel of peace and it brings reconciliation between people who would not necessarily be at peace and so forth.
And then he began to apply the text to the life of his congregation which was a large one in a city large city in the south.
And he said you know we haven't always practiced this.
we have um not pursued peace with people who are of different ethnic and socioeconomic positions.
And not only is that true of our whole city, but it's true of our church.
And he began to talk about some episodes from the history of his church.
And one of the elders there who'd been present in the church for a long time uh caught some feelings.
They were not happy feelings.
They were angry feelings.
He was hurt.
He was upset.
He got up and walked out.
and he was a prominent elder and everybody saw him do it.
And people walk out on sermons from time to time.
If you're preaching, you need to know that.
They walk out because their baby is crying.
They walk out because you're talking about death or broken relationships or a divorce and it's just so intense they they just have to get up and leave.
And that's permissible.
And often people do that and they explain to the pastor, "I've left for this reason.
No offense, I was just overwhelmed.
A lot of times they come back in after they've collected their thoughts.
This man did not come back in because he wasn't of a mind to collect his thoughts.
He was angry.
And the pastor spoke to him.
He said, "Uh, you know, one of your vows as an elder is to support the work of the church to the best of your ability." and walking out on the pastor when lots and lots of people saw it is not supporting the work of the church to the best of your ability.
And of course, if you need to collect yourself, leave, come back.
That's fine.
But you stayed out.
And um you know, if I do something that you think is wrong, it's heresy.
That's one thing.
But if you think I make a mistake of judgment, come to me privately.
We'll talk it out.
But um you really can't walk out on me in the middle of a sermon as an elder and not come back.
And he waited and there was a period of silence and and then my friend, very wise man said, "If you disagree, if you think you are right to do that, then we probably need to take it to the whole session." And the man said, "No, no, I was completely wrong.
I was angry.
I was upset.
What you said was true.
And it just it just bothered me so much.
I walked out.
I will never do it again.
and I'm going to tell the whole session that I apologize for what I've done.
Now, my friend told me this story and as he finished it, I easily began to think of other occasions when other pastors I know have had someone get up and walk out on them.
Not because their nose was bleeding, not because the baby was crying, not because the topic was divorce and they were divorced, but out of anger.
And one man I know quite well um is afraid of controversy.
And his most powerful elder, the patriarch of the church, walked out.
And he dared not talk to that man.
He thought he dared not.
He never said a word to the man.
And that man did what he willed for the next 20 years.
And the pastor was faithful and miserable because his number one elder, the number one elder in the church was in open conflict with him.
And he wouldn't do anything about it.
Another time, again, a situation I know well, not personally, it didn't happen to me, but I know well, there was an elder who became very upset with his pastor, and he walked out on the pastor, not once, but there's a debate about this, whether it was five, seven, eight, 10, or maybe 11 times.
And he walked out from the front of the church as the pastor began to preach week after week.
And a couple people said to him,"Hey, you really shouldn't do that." And he said, "Uh, I kind of hear you and I kind of don't." And he kept it up for a while.
And he was never corrected until years later.
And during that time, he went around feeling self-righteous in his protest against the pastor, recruited people to his cause, caused all manner of conflict in the church until finally a group of elders said, "We got to put a stop to this.
This man is sewing dissension openly and of course it was much harder because the wound had festered for years.
What does Paul say?
Paul says, "Correct your opponents with gentleness." Now, of course, when you hear these stories, even as I recount what happened to my friends, I I I feel visceral distress on their behalf.
I'm I'm not feeling gentle even though these events occurred years ago to other people.
I'm I'm not in a gentle mood as I describe them.
Imagine what it's like when it happens to you.
And so it's very important that we see that Paul's teaching is embedded in a line.
I'm going to I'm going to go back to verse 24 repeatedly.
If you have a Bible with you in any form, you can uh look at it.
But in 23 and 24, he begins by saying uh you know, you need to pursue righteousness.
I'll explain that in a second why he starts that way.
And then he says, "Don't have anything to do with foolish quarrels, ignorant controversies, pointless problems, no silly quarrels.
Don't be quarrelome, but be kind to everyone." Point one, able to teach.
That is to say, able to teach people who are making a mistake.
Patiently enduring evil.
Sometimes you do nothing.
Sometimes a problem is not ripe.
Sometimes a problem is so small, you just say, "I'm going to put up with it because it's not clear.
It's not definite.
We have more important issues to work on, but we do correct opponents and we correct them with gentleness and hope of bringing them to repentance.
Now, it's interesting that when Paul writes to Timothy, who's pretty young, still somewhere in his later 30s, he mentions youthful passions in this passage in this vicinity.
And we think of passions first of all as evil often, but you know, you can have good passions, right?
At my house, I have a passion to unload the dishwasher if the dishwasher is done.
And you know, there it is.
I I try to beat my wife because I love to un unload the I have a passion for the dishwasher.
And some of you have innocent passions.
Now, when you hear hear the word passion, you think of sexual passions.
It's curious that when Paul re um corrects and teaches and trains Timothy, he never mentions sexual matters with him.
But he does repeatedly mention the problem of quarreling and dissension.
I think that's really important for um younger leaders because younger leaders sometimes are prone to quarrel and you are doctrinally deviant.
And I'm going to correct you.
That's why they termed uh years ago this phenomenon caged Calvinists.
I found Calvinism and everybody who disagrees with me is a dreadful monster.
And so you just put this person in a cage until they're done fighting.
Stop quarreling.
He actually says, not only stop quarreling, but um we should flee youthful passions.
Verse 22, and pursue righteousness.
Which means that the passion may be the passion of anger or quarreling is something you should run away from.
Which means that when someone says something upsets you, one of the solutions is to walk away.
He says, "Have nothing to do with foolish quarrels." The Greek word behind that can mean upsent yourself, depart from.
In other words, if someone says something outrageous and you feel outraged, one thing you can do is simply leave the room or start talking about an athletic contest you don't care about at all.
It can't possibly upset you or change the subject somehow or other.
Just don't get caught up in these matters.
Flee temptation.
Run away.
Now, of course, everybody loves Tom Petty these days.
He's been dead for almost a decade, so it's good to love him.
And we love the song, I Won't Back Down, right?
And so, there a lot of people say, "I'm not going to back down from a fight.
I'm not going to back down from a quarrel because Tom Petty told me not to do that." And he's not inspired.
There is a time to back down, to walk away, to say, "It's just not that important.
I'm not going to get passionate about this in a destructive way." Um, when Paul speaks to Timothy, you notice in verse 22, he says, "Flee youthful passions and pursue." Here's what you should run for.
Run away from passions.
Run toward righteousness, faith, love, and peace.
There's a little bit of a I don't know, planned words isn't the right way to say it.
It's uh it goes like this.
Youthful passions.
In the Greek, it goes passions flee pursue righteousness.
Flee this, pursue that.
That's how you handle it when you have nothing to do with these matters.
Quarreling, flee temptation, pursue love.
I just want to talk about that separately for a second.
If you're in a small church, it's kind of easy to love everybody.
If you have 100 people or 150 people in your church or 75 people in your ministry, you can know everybody and love everybody.
But you have to pursue love when you minister in a larger church.
Many of you will graduate from here.
You'll be in a larger church.
You'll have maybe a subordinate ministry, a niche ministry, but you also serve the whole church.
And it's a it's a blessed challenge to try to love an entire church, especially when you don't know all of them.
And the way you do that is by doing things like praying for the whole church and praying that you will love the church.
And when you stand up in front of an ailing group, you know, you've got your regular group, but you're in front of maybe the whole church for some reason.
Maybe you're preaching.
Maybe you're teaching a big class.
You pray that these people whom you don't know.
They don't know you and you don't know them.
Pray that you will love them and pray that they will feel that you love them as you speak even though you don't even know each other.
So that they may actually say something afterwards like, "We don't even know you.
We hardly know you.
We've seen you walking around the building, but I don't know.
We we feel like you love us." And that's the fruit of prayer.
that you will love people, pursue love.
Now, of course, we love the people in the church.
It all starts with love of God and to love each other.
You have to avoid quarrels.
You have to avoid foolish quarrels.
It's not always easy to know how to do that.
You know, there's that moment in Proverbs chapter 26 that talks about what we do with quarrels and it says, "Answer a not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself." And it also says, "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes." Which we understand to mean that it's hard to tell.
Sometimes someone's spouting off nonsense and you think to yourself, "This is just so far off.
I don't even know where to get started.
I'm just going to leave and somebody else will correct this person.
And another time, somebody's spouting off such nonsense, you think to yourself, if if he's allowed to continue in these preposterous ideas, he could actually win somebody to some of these ideas, somebody better correct him.
And here I am.
I guess it's got to be me.
And you don't know when to do that.
You pray.
You ask the Lord to guide.
You might talk to fellow Christians who are in this situation with you seeing this this clearcut error and you decide who's going to address this buffoon who keeps on spouting nonsense.
Now the years have gone by and the church has always had quarrels and fights and heresy and errors.
Just to be clear, we always correct heresy, mistakes that undercut, destroy the gospel itself.
And major error, we also correct.
It's it's the in between foolishness, the little battles that we wonder about.
And John Calvin said something very helpful in the institutes in one place.
He said, you know, you can tell a doctrinal discussion is useless, that's his word, or vain if it edifies no one because scripture is profitable.
And if there is no fruit from discussion, if you have a fruitless question, an empty speculation, we have to say no, we meditate on the matters that edify the church.
We also know from the apostle John that ego is a problem when he was opposed by datrees.
He said daties likes to put himself first and his teaching will ruin his hearers and his prattling sounds like gang green.
We must have nothing to do with them.
Over in Titus chapter 3:10, it says, "As for a person who stirs up division, warn them once, then twice, and then have nothing to do with them." That is to say, warn them first, and then shun them second.
Now, you may think to yourself, "Boy, you've told me a lot of things to do, and you haven't told me which ones I should do when." That's correct.
I have not.
It's not always clear.
It's hard to tell.
But sometimes it is clear that we need to wait into a situation.
We're not being quarrelome now.
We're being kind.
We're teaching.
It's a significant elder, a significant problem, and we have to do something about it.
Well, I said significant elder because I want to talk about an elder again.
So, I told you about stories I had nothing to do with, but now I'm going to tell about times I did have something to do.
So, I've been a pastor a couple times, and a couple times I've been an interim pastor and led session meetings.
And on one of those occasions, we had our first session meeting and people were wondering how it was going to go and there's a little bit of tension.
How's the new guy going to do?
And it went really well until I moved.
I said, "Okay, we're done.
Anybody want to move to dismiss with prayer?" And somebody in the prominent position hopped up and said, "Wait, I have a motion." Now, the nature of his motion was one that made a bunch of people in the room prickle immediately.
I had no idea what he was saying or why.
I just knew that it upset a bunch of people.
And so I said to I said to the crowd um the people the group of elders and pastors who were there I said um I think we're going to have to table this because I have no idea what this motion is about and I can't moderate a discussion that I don't understand and the people graciously said good idea we'll bring this back next month well that gave me a month to talk to the elder who um made his sudden motion as we were about to leave.
Um, I also talked to elders who were livid with this man who pulled a stunt again in a session meeting.
Who does he think he is disrupting our session meetings?
And um I talked to him.
I said, "You want me to be an effective pastor here?
I'm sure." Yes.
And for me to be an effective pastor, I have to know what motions are coming before the session.
So, you have to tell me what you're going to move before you move it.
Does that make sense?
He said, "Yes, it makes sense because I can't moderate a discussion that I can't comprehend." Now, also, I have to tell you that um if you do this again, I will move that it be tabled again.
Now, that's a really nice Presbyterian way of saying never do that again.
And then I kind of hammered the nail in a little further and I said, "Of course you would have the right to challenge the chair." Now, in case you don't know it, the right to challenge the chair means you have the right to be voted down by everybody but yourself because no one is going to uphold a challenge of the chair when the chair, the moderator, the pastor has just gotten started.
Nobody wants to do that.
And so I was saying very gently, don't do that again.
I will give you a hearing for your motion and everyone will get to hear what you have to say and we'll discuss it and we'll vote on it.
Okay?
And so he presented it the next month and we voted on it and we voted it down and he said, "Okay, I got to make my motion." And we became friendly afterwards because he had a chance to use his voice.
He had a friend who was in the same little group of elders who had, you know, distresses about things.
And his friend said to me, "So, I've got an unpopular motion, too." I said, "Okay, great.
Uh, what is it?" He told me what it was.
I said, "You know, I really think that motion is not going to get anywhere, but I told you all that if you have a motion, I'm going to get it in front of the people and they're going to get to present it and we'll vote on it and we'll decide what we think." and he so um you tell me what it is, explain it to me, explain it to me.
He said, "Okay, I'm going to put you on medium early in the session and you'll get to speak to it." He said, "Great.
Thank you." And he presented it.
And about threequarters of the way through his presentation, he realized that a big chunk of what he said made no sense.
And he said, "I think we're just going to stop now." And then there was a vote.
And he voted for his motion and nobody else did.
And afterward he said, "Thank you so much for letting me present my motion.
I feel good.
I got to say what I wanted to say and it was voted down by the brothers.
Thank you." And we became friendly.
Now, obviously, this was a church that had some some stresses and some strains.
And um because this sort of thing happened, some of the other elders started warning me who I should talk to and who I shouldn't talk to.
They wanted me to stay away from the troublemakers.
Now whenever I hear people say stay away from the troublemakers, it always has a different effect on me.
And what they said was, you know, come sit at the happy table, the friendly table with all the happy elders who will support you no matter what.
And I said, well, that's an interesting hypothesis.
Um, I will take it under advisement.
And that's a that's a very nice way of saying no.
And and at the next next time we had a a meeting, you know, the elders, the the good elders, the kind elders were trying to shepherd me over to the right table, the proper, the friendly table, the the good people table.
And then there was the table with there was [snorts] there was one spot open at the there might be troublemakers over here table.
And they saw me tilting that direction and somebody whispered, "No, no, don't don't don't sit next to him.
He's a troublemaker." And I said, 'You know, there's one seat open at that table.
I think I'm going to sit there.
And I did.
And I found out that that alleged troublemaker was a man with opinions, highly intelligent, very successful in business, and he had a lot of views about the good of the church.
And he came from New York City.
And what do you expect?
I mean, New York City people, they're just they're they're mouthy.
I was born in New York City.
I get to say that.
They're mouthy.
and they express their opinions and and some people are just going to think they're rude but they're passionate and he became my friend and I found out he's wise and he was helpful and I don't want to make too much of my experience but if you try to love people you pursue love and you're kind and gentle friendship breaks out sometimes instead of trouble.
I want to go over this one more time.
Look at verse 24.
Notice what the passage says about us.
About us, it says first, we are the Lord's servant.
We're God's servants.
Our goal is not to win votes or to persuade the session to vote our way or to get everybody to come on to our program.
Our our purpose is to serve God.
We're God's servants.
And as God's servants, we are kind.
We're gentle.
Just think about how gentle Jesus was with Peter after he betrayed the Lord three times.
Or think about how gentle Jesus was with Thomas who said, "I will never believe unless I see the prince of the nails in his hand." And Jesus said, "Here's my hand." That's gentle.
It's correction, but it's gentle.
Or think about the way Paul corrected those Corinthians who were so enamored with tonesues and they were just wowed by tonesues and they wanted to speak in tonesues and they spoke in tonesues in public without interpretation and Paul said um can I just can I just ask you a question?
Is this pursuing the common good?
Uh are are we going to reach the common good when people speak in incomprehensible public tongues?
No.
Does clear teaching and prophesy promote the common good?
Yes.
Though he doesn't crush the tongues speakers, he just promotes teaching and promotes prophecy.
He's gentle.
He's able to teach.
Paul taught.
Timothy taught.
He should be able to teach.
You should be able to teach patiently enduring evil.
sometimes other times lovingly confronting it as you pursue the health of the church.
So that's my prayer for all of you that you would have the ability to discern when it's time to walk away.
let a silly controversy go sense you're getting angry and just disqualify yourself from the conversation or when before God for the good of the church out of love for the church out of love for the Lord is a sense that you are God's servant weighed into the conflict and gently correct error so you're not like my friend who refused to ever deal with that elder and lived in misery for 15 or 20 years and the church suffered for it do when the church has peace.
When controversy is properly handled, we can go forward in our mission.
We can pursue love and godliness and peace and the gospel.
Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, I do pray for our group men and women here.
Some of them are in ministry right now.
Others have much much ahead of them.
Give us, we pray, patience and wisdom as we do your work.
discernment and love in Jesus name we ask it.
Amen.