1 Timothy 1:3-5
“What does God want me to do?”
The question haunts every serious Christian.
It haunts us because the answer eludes us. How else could we account for the nagging recurrence of the question?
How else indeed.
Could it be the question that deludes us into thinking there’s an answer that eludes us?
While God doesn’t tell most people exactly what he wants them to do, he has made the answer to another related question abundantly clear. We could frame that question like this:
“What does God want us to do?”
God’s vision is for the church. My mission is implicit in that vision. That mission provides plenty of guidance regarding how I ought to serve my God.
The body of Paul’s first letter to Timothy opens with a two-fold statement of mission:
As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies (1 Timothy 1:3-4b ESV)
Paul reminds Timothy of his charge to charge the Ephesians not to innovate in their teaching. He had assigned his agent with a challenging mission. Timothy must wield Paul’s spiritual authority over those in authority. And Paul’s authority came from the command of God,
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, (1 Timothy 1:1 ESV)
So, everyone had their marching orders. But what about us?
Contemporary Christians sometimes become so desperate for guidance that they try to appropriate specific instructions like these to themselves. They comb through the New Testament to create a laundry list of specific guidance. But that was never the intended purpose of New Testament instruction. For the most part, the New Testament consists of letters written to specific people in a particular situation. Even the gospels were each written to a specific audience. In every case I can think of all the New Testament material was written to solve or prevent a problem in the first century church. Paul’s instructions to Timothy and his to the Ephesian leaders apply directly to just one situation, theirs.
That doesn’t mean we can’t find guidance here. We can. We just need to look at the charge that applies to us. It is what we share with the Ephesians, Timothy, and Paul. It is the fountainhead of the specific guidance we’ve just considered. One of the things it teaches us is how to keep ourselves and others on that straight and narrow without resorting to creating a list of prescriptive do’s and don’ts.
Timothy came to Ephesus to give orders. But how can anyone do that in a law-free society? In the very next section, we’ll see that these wayward leaders had been attempting to teach the law. Was Timothy supposed to make teaching the law illegal? Did Paul want him to write and enforce a law prohibiting the teaching of the law? Certainly not.
We don’t need law to insist on a shared behavioral standard. To the Corinthians, who had taken this law free life into license, Paul wrote:
All things are lawful; but not all things are expedient. All things are lawful; but not all things edify. (1 Corinthians 10:23 ASV)
The kingdom of God operates on expediency instead of dogma. But this standard presumes a shared mission. In the second sentence of the verse above Paul mentions one aspect of that shared mission – “not all things edify.”
The Greek word translated “edify” in the ASV is “oikodomeo.” It means to build a house (oikos). But “oikos” referred to more than just a building. An oikos was a building but it was also a social and economic unit in the ancient world. Building up an oikos required not only construction but also farming, training, and trading. It required carpenters, laborers, tutors, and managers to maintain and expand the holdings of the householder.
Back in first Timothy we find similar language:
…nor to give heed to fables and endless genealogies, that cause questions rather than the building up (oikonomia) of God that is in faith: (1 Timothy 1:4 Young’s Literal Translation)
This noun form (from which we get our word, “economy”) emphasizes household management rather than its physical construction. It connotes the administration of resources to ultimately generate more of them. Jesus told parables teaching that believers should invest his wealth to bring him a return at his return.
Here in 1 Timothy 1:4 Paul gives us the basis of the divine economy, the currency of his kingdom which is faith.
The leaders in Ephesus were to refrain from the pursuit of doctrinal variants because those things didn’t multiply faith. They had been chasing a side hustle during work hours. They had been neglecting divine wealth to build some kind of worthless social collateral. What they had been doing was prohibited implicitly by the task we share with God himself – the building up of his house in faith.
God’s charge to Paul, Paul’s charge to Timothy, and Timothy’s charge to the Ephesians were predicated on this overarching charge to the household of God, which is the church. So, Paul goes on in vs. 5 to speak of the charge.
But the end of the charge is love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned: (1 Timothy 1:5 ASV)
We might call this large charge, a mandate. It’s the mandate from God himself and all the specific guidance we might need flows from it. Under this charter we serve and under it we lead. Those who wander from under it must be corrected for their own sake and for the sake of God’s house.
Let us ask ourselves today. Am I working to bring a return for God in his household or have I been drawn into self-serving diversions? Do I manage the resources under my control to multiply the only thing God values? Or have I placed higher value on material goods or personal advancement? Can the output of my life be summarized as love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and unhypocritical faith in myself and others?
Every Christian is a steward in God’s household. Another word for stewardship is “ministry.” Each of us should minister the measure of faith allotted to us for the building up of God’s house in faith. This is the bounty that Christ will be looking for when he returns. It is his charge to his servants until we see his face.
Nathan Wilkerson 