The Unashamed Worker

Let’s take a moment to pray together church. Father, may this message may this time be for you and for your glory and honor. And not for me. Not for us. Help me to rightly handle your word of truth this morning. Allow those hearing it to hear what you would have them hear to come away with a deeper understanding of how you would have them live. We ask all this in your name and through the name of your son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Something many of you may not know about me is I’m a landlord, and I have a couple of different properties in town, and there are many great things about being a landlord. I love providing a home for people. I love getting to know people. I love having an opportunity to speak into their lives to share a little bit about what it is to build a home and to take care of that home. But one thing that I found is that not everybody lives the way that I do, and not everyone has the same skills that I have. Though I have found that most tenants that I have met all believe that they share a skill with me. So new tenants move in and almost immediately, one of the first things I hear from them is I know how to paint. I’ve done it before. Would it be okay if I painted the apartment? After years of being a landlord, the answer is No. No. The best person who ever painted for me actually did a pretty decent job, but made some interesting choices. Decided to paint all of the heat vents and the trim and the doors all the same color. Wouldn’t be my choice, but at least it was neat. The worst one I ever did was about way more than just the paint, but the paint by itself was bad enough. This tenant slopped paint all over the trim and all over the ceiling, and it was splashed on the countertops and dripping down the cabinets in the kitchen. And it ended with most of a gallon of dark red paint in the carpet, with the paint can dried to the paint in the carpet. They moved out. And that was the last time I ever said yes to a tenant painting. I know there are many great tenants out there and I have rented to many great tenants, but I have discovered among tenants, among renters, a higher likelihood of not taking as good of care of a property versus somebody who owns. And at the end of their tenancy they move on. If they haven’t cared well for the apartment,they lose their deposit. And that doesn’t seem to deter some people. They just assume moving in that they’re going to lose their deposit and they just they just leave it and they don’t care.

I have to admit, even for myself, that I found a difference in how I thought about and how I treated property versus renting and owning. And now that I own a home, I put a lot of care into making sure that home will last, not even just for me, but that it will last beyond me. And that the home that Kate and I live in now, we built ourselves almost every nail and screw in that entire place was a deliberate decision by us to put there, and we want that home to be something that remains in good condition and it lasts beyond us. Why do I share this with you today? Well, we’re in this series together of talking about passing on the church to the next generation. And if you’ve been with us for the series, you will know that we believe that it is the job of the church to pass on the church to the next generation. And not only that, but to teach them to pass it on as well. And if you’ve missed any of the messages leading up to this point, I do recommend that you go back to our website and you take a listen of those, and you will find that we’re working together to build an image of what passing on the church looks like, according to the Apostle Paul.

Now, the church is not meant to be a rental. It’s not meant to be a temporary home. The church is not meant to be a place where we just come and get what we think we want and need, and then leave. The church is a home for the body of Christ, a permanent home, a place that is meant to be cared for and to be passed on with that same care. It’s a home for which we have specific building instructions and care instructions that have been given to us in God’s Word, and we are to care for it and build it, using those instructions to the best of our ability. So my point for us this morning is this if the future of the church matters to us, then how we live as workers of the church now must matter as well. We recently finished this Fan the Flame initiative here at church, seeking to help the body of Christ, to find places to serve the church and to help it to grow. Now, of course, you don’t need to wait for one of these initiatives. There’s always a need in the church for for people to serve and fill different roles. And you can always reach out to elders, to pastors, to staff. Fill out one of the connect cards and let us know that you’re interested in serving. And we would be excited to help you to figure out your spiritual giftings, to figure out a place to serve God in the way that he has gifted you.

And the biblical vision for church is one of people, all people, coming together, each in their unique place to serve God and His church. In 1 Corinthians 12, starting in verse 12, Paul talks about different people coming together as individuals in order to form a single, complete body. And this is what he says, for just as the body is one and has many members and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ. Now, there are two implications in this that matter for the way that we form the church today. First, there is an assumption by Paul in the way that he talks, that it tells us he is assuming that all the members are playing a role as a part of the body. All of the members together form one body. The second implication is that while all the parts are actively participating, they are not all the same. We do not all have the same gifts. We should not then all serve the church in exactly the same way at the same time. How God designs each one of us, how he gifts each one of us matters. And yet I have seen within the church in the past people who would never be given certain roles in any other position in society be being put into those roles in the church.

It matters that we serve and it matters how we serve in God’s church. I knew a pastor who took a spiritual gift assessment before he became a pastor, and pastor was the bottom of the list of spiritual gifts. He went ahead and did it anyway because that’s what he wanted to do. That’s how he wanted to serve. And the denomination he was in went ahead and put him in that role. Didn’t go very well. As we continue in our series in 2 Timothy today, in the passage that was just read for us, we’ll see three things that Paul wants Timothy and us to keep in mind about the workers who are passing on the church to the next generation. And at the end, we’ll discuss how to apply to the individual workers, to the church as a whole and to the leadership of the church who have the job of knowing and of helping the workers of the church find the right places to serve.

Now, before we dive into the Scripture this morning, I just need to remind us all of something that has been included in the rest of this message, but is not directly in my verses today. There will be a lot of references to work and workers today, but these references are all speaking to people who have already been saved, who are already a part of the body of Christ. None of these works are about earning or paying for salvation. Rather, we become workers of God as a result of what he has done for us. Because of the greatness of our God and what he has accomplished through Christ. Our work shows our genuine faith and salvation. It does not cause it.

Now, with that in mind, let’s look at what Paul says to Timothy about the workers of the body. And he says, remind them of these things and charge them before God not to quarrel about words which does no good, but only ruins the hearers. Do your best to present yourselves to God as one approved a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. Right away, we encounter the first thing we should keep in mind about the workers. The workers work for God, not people. None of the workers in the church work for other people to be seen by them or for their approval. The things the workers do and do not do as workers of the church are done and not done before God. All of those who are to be the workers of the church, then should be charged before God to do their work well, to be able to present themselves not as perfect, but to the best of their God given abilities. To be a worker who has no need to be ashamed of their work, but rather as one who can say to God, Hey God, I did the best that I knew how to serve you. I handled to the best of my ability that which you have given me to do. As Brian mentioned in his message two weeks ago, the context of chapter two here is instruction for Timothy that what he and many others have heard from Paul, he is to pass on to the men and women of the church, who will in turn pass it on to other men and women of the church. And the workers of the church then, are the people of the church, who are all together responsible in whatever roles and gifts they are given by God, to pass on the responsibility of the church to the next generation. This is everyone from the pastor who preaches, from the worship leader and the worship team who lead us in worship and prayer to the small group member who shares truth with another member with them, to the person who speaks truth to their neighbor, inviting them to be a part of the body of Christ. All Christians are meant to serve God with their gifting that they have received in order to perpetuate the Church of God. And they are to do this as those who are serving before God as men and women approved by God.

And about these workers, these members of the church, Paul tells Timothy, remind them of these things. What things? All of the important things that Paul has been writing to Timothy in the letter up to this point, remind them of these things. Remind them of the importance of the gospel message. Remind them of the genuine faith of Paul and all that he endured for the sake of the church. Remind them of the faith of Timothy himself that he inherited from his mother, his grandmother, and from Paul. Remind them of the importance of the genuine faith of each believer within the church, and of the current and next generations of all the faithful people who will share this with those who will become the faithful people of the next generation. And Paul charges Timothy to remind the workers of the church of these things, because the goal for the generations of the church is not to pass on to the next generation their own vision of the church, or their own ideas about the gospel, or their own ideas on different random topics about faith. The goal is to pass on the truth about God and His church, and to pass it on in God’s way. It’s to pass on the core of the gospel message and the things that can be known clearly about God, and not to get caught up in the weeds of things that we do not fully understand, or get caught up in fringe doctrines and ideas because the purpose of the workers and of the whole body is to serve before God, to please God, not to serve before people, to be seen by them, which is self serving. We serve God as He has designed us with the truth that he gives us.

This brings us to the second thing that we must keep in mind as workers of the church. The workers are to rightly handle the truth. In God’s church the truth matters. His word matters. The gospel, the good news about Jesus. It matters. The unashamed worker, then, is one who handles those truths with the reverence and the importance that they deserve. The unashamed worker focuses on the things of God, desiring to handle them in God’s way. By elimination, then those who force their way into roles that they are not gifted or called for, those who do not do their best to handle the word of truth rightly have reason to be ashamed, have reason to wonder if they are not approved by God, and they handle even the things of God in their own way. They like to argue about what they think about different words and doctrines and ideas, and they don’t truly care about the result of their words or actions. They care about what they get to do, serving the way they want to serve for their own purpose. And they care only that they get to present what they believe to be important, or how they understand different scriptures or what their personal vision for the church is. People who argue about these things with others in the church in this way aren’t serving God. Paul says quarreling about words isn’t doing good. It is ruining those who hear it. The workers here are pushing away people from God and from the church. Their focus and their purpose is not about the truth. And Paul clarifies that this is not just arguing about the definition of words, but an attitude of handling the ideas and truths about God. And he continues in verse 16 to 18, but avoid irreverent babble, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened. They are upsetting the faith of some. Again, this is presented in counter to rightly handling the truth, babbling about things that are untrue and don’t come from God or His word causes harm to not only the current generation, but to the next as well. And it leads people into more and more ungodliness. And if this generation is led astray by false ideas and false doctrines, then all who hear, these hearers will also be led astray.

And in this way, whole generations of people can be pushed down a path that is based upon false teaching that begins now. We’re to understand here that arguments about doctrines and words and ideas that do not come from God not only lead people astray, they also spread quickly. Paul uses this word gangrene to describe this kind of spread, which brings to mind a pretty gross picture. And even in biblical times, this disease was well known and it was thought of as like an ulcer like sore that ate away at the flesh around it. Now I’m real sorry. I know that’s disgusting, but I think that’s exactly why Paul uses this word. They knew of it even then, that if it was left untreated, gangrene would quickly spread to other parts of the body. Medical knowledge was fairly limited at the time. But we know that the disease often ended in death even with whatever treatments that they used. Gangrene still causes fear and revulsion today in those who know it. And even with our better medical treatments, it still causes a lot of damage. And just like back then, left untreated, it will almost always lead to severe damage and eventually death. And Paul wants this gross picture, this awful picture, this horrible thing, to make us sit back and think for just a minute how deadly to the church false teaching is. Falsely handling the truth leads people away from the church and away from Jesus.

The third thing we should see then, is that it is the job of the church to recognize and call out false teaching. This is vital to prevent it from spreading in the church. Next week, Josh Spencer is going to take us a little bit deeper in how we begin to deal with the actual people who are found to be false teachers in the church. But for now, the focus here is on the workers who are responding to false teaching that they have discovered. And Paul gives us an example of how we’re to do this. He gives us this example of two men who are teaching something that is false to the church. Now Paul simply calls out these two men by name and points out their false teaching. Among them, he says, those who spread irreverent babble and who argue about false things. Among them are these two Hymenaeus and Philetus. Now there’s truth to be taught about the topic they’re teaching about, but they are teaching something that is not the truth. There is a resurrection of the dead that all believers can look forward to. This is something that we can find clearly in Scripture. The Bible speaks of this as a future hope that we all have as believers. It’s one of the main doctrines that we hold fast to as the church. These men are teaching that this future hope, this future resurrection, had already happened. Now we aren’t told where they got this idea, or why they felt the need to teach it. But we are told they are teaching this thing that is false, and it should have been fairly clear even to them that this teaching was not true. So why should it have been clear? I remember a few years ago Pastor Larry taught a message about the coming of the kingdom, and he said something that has stuck with me all of these years. He was preaching about the idea of what the coming kingdom would look like, and he was addressing the idea of those who believe the kingdom has already come. And I don’t remember the exact word, but Larry in the message said something like, if the kingdom, if the resurrection has already come, I’m pretty disappointed. This is not what I expected it to be like. It made me chuckle. And it sounds like it makes you chuckle as well. But there’s a truth here that we can glean that Larry thought about what the Scripture said, about what the coming of the kingdom would be like, and then he looked at the world around him and he asked the question, is this happening? Does this seem to be true? Is this true? And I think so many people would be served by stopping themselves before they share something and asking themselves the question is what I’m about to share really true? And I think this is especially relevant in our social media age in which we live. There are so many false news articles and false quotes on the internet, fake stats all over the place. I know this is one many of you have probably seen, but it’s one of my favorite. 85% of the quotes on the internet are made up,Abraham Lincoln. I know, I know, it’s probably even been shared up here before, but it really brings to mind the truth about what’s out there. And if you do a search of fake quotes or misattributed quotes on Google, you will find page after page of things that have been attributed to a certain person, but that they never said or quotes that are twisted or false in some way, or news articles. There are websites out there dedicated to immediately responding to new news articles to say, is this news article true or not? There are websites that are dedicated to listening to political speeches and immediately putting up all of the things in the speech that was either misleading or deliberately fully false. We live in a world in which there is so much that is not true, and we would be so well served to ask the question ourselves is this true? I think it’s our responsibility as people, and especially as Christians, to rightly handle the truth in all areas.

And back to the Scripture example, Paul says, these two men have swerved, meaning that the truth about the resurrection is likely something that they even knew at some point. And it means that the truth can be known, something that can be considered and looked at by these two men and also by others. Workers in the church who have the desire to rightly handle the Word of God and the truth in whatever capacity or role that they have, need to be able and willing to ask questions when someone presents something, or when they hear something that they haven’t heard before. Questions like does this teaching fit with the reality of what’s happening around me? Does it align with what I know about God? Does it align with what the Word of God says about it? And if the answer to all those questions is yes, there’s a good chance that what is being shared and taught is true. But if any of those questions are no, then that’s a red flag for us to take a step back, to reevaluate, to rethink before we just immediately add that to our knowledge of what we know about God and about the truth, to take a step back and question before we decide that we need to share this as truth.

When I was a young new preacher, I started preaching at the age of 18 and I was way too young and too inexperienced at that time to really be preaching from the main pulpit. And I will admit that I just wanted people to like me. I just wanted to say things that they wanted to hear. And so, admittedly, I taught things from the pulpit at the age of 18 that I did not fully understand. And looking back, admittedly, some things that were untrue. I look back on that now and I shudder. What a terrible reason to be up in a pulpit. What a terrible reason to teach anything. I was not rightly handling the word of truth, nor was I doing my best to present myself as a worker approved by God. It’s not a careless thing to be a worker for God, and even more to speak for him and about him to others. All who serve God and speak about him must hold their words to a higher standard. God will hold those words to a higher standard. And why? Because the words of God’s workers matters. Rightly handling the truth matters. Our words affect more than just us. They affect the hearers, too. James says in James 3:1, Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. I didn’t think about that verse when I was 18, but I do now. Let me tell you, every time I have an opportunity to preach somewhere, this verse is the first thing that comes to my mind. It’s scary to think that God is going to judge what I say. The truth that I share to all of you. But I think the thing we miss with this verse is that although James is saying teachers will face stricter judgment, he isn’t saying only those who teach will face judgment for their words, just stricter judgment. We all will face God for the things that we say about him, for the truth and the way that we handle it.

Paul points to one last thing here, in that the words of those who teach falsely truly do affect people. The effect that Paul points to the final evidence that the words these men are teaching is false, is that the teaching itself is causing people to stumble. It’s causing some to be upset in their faith, to lose their faith, and in general, not always, but in general, teaching the truth should strengthen the hearer. It should bring people closer to God and it should support them in their faith. Of course, there are instances where people will hear the truth and they will not like it, because it will point out a sin in their life that they’re not ready to deal with, or a failure in them to live for the truth. But for the most part, we should expect the truth of God to bring people who are seeking the truth closer to him. It should draw them in. And if what is being taught is instead separating people from God, that’s a good sign for us to take a step back again and ask, is this really true?

Now, this whole sermon is filled with a pretty hard teaching. We are going to face the judgment of God for our words. That’s a lot of pressure. That’s a hard thing to think of. What if I make a mistake in what I say? What if I fail in my words or actions as a worker? Well, thankfully, Paul doesn’t leave us without firm hope. But God’s firm foundation stands. Bearing this seal, the Lord knows those who are his, and let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity. Here, Paul contrasts the false teachers and their teaching with what the hope of those who desire to rightly handle the truth is. If we are workers, not those who are perfect, but workers who are seeking to do our best for God, seeking to do our best to rightly handle his truth, we can rest. Not in our abilities, not on the teachings of men, on the foundation that is God and in His Word. God will never fail. His word will never fail. Following him and his teachings will never fail. And even if we fail, God’s foundation is firm. He continues to know those who belong to him. He continues to know those who seek to do the best they can to rightly handle his truth.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I see that there are three areas that this message needs to be applied for us today. The first way this area needs to be applied in is in the individual Christian life. I’d like you to think deeply this morning about the ways in which you speak truth about God into other people’s lives. Maybe that’s just to your friends, neighbors, or coworkers. Maybe it’s to your spouse or your children. Maybe you teach a Sunday school class, or lead a Bible study, or a men’s or women’s group. Maybe you are discipling someone. Whatever it is, all of us as Christians are at times called to speak to others about Jesus, even if it’s just sharing a testimony about our own walk. And as you think about those times in your life, I want you to realize how important your words are. They have the opportunity to affect people greatly. If you rightly handle the word of truth to the best of your ability, to the best of your gifting, those words can strengthen others in their faith or even help them to become part of the body of Christ. If you instead are careless or even deceptive with your words or with how you handle the truth, know that you are not only causing harm to others, but are potentially damaging your own relationship to God as his worker.

To the leadership of the church, I see that we have a responsibility to protect the church from false teaching, and one way that we do that here at Calvary is by requiring those who hold specific teaching roles to be members of the church so that they can be known and tested by the leadership of the church. We want to know that the people who have greater responsibility to teach here have greater accountability as well. And when false teaching is found, the leadership holds the responsibility to quickly cut it off and to teach the truth to the body.

Finally, it is the responsibility of the leadership to not only do these things, but to prepare for a time in the church when they will no longer do these things. That means preparing new young leaders to be ready to take up that mantle, and to do it with rightly handling the Word of God. Here at Calvary one of our values is in cultivating leadership, in raising up new leaders, in preparing and training leaders to be ready. And we also believe here in a plurality of elders, a plurality of leaders. We do that so that new and young leaders can step up and begin to lead, while experienced leaders are still there to stand beside them, to show them the way. And it is our responsibility to not only do this, but to teach this principle so that it continues long after we’re gone.

The final area of focus this morning is the church as a whole. It is one of the roles of the people of the church to seek to be a complete body of Christ, one that works together to serve God and to be workers approved by him. We are to help each other, to encourage one another, to love and good deeds, to speak truth to one another, to love one another as the body of Christ. You know, when I was that young preacher, I was not doing a good job. But the members of that church came around me, and some of them encouraged me in the ways that I was doing a good job, so that my spirit was not crushed, but others stepped up to show me the error of some of the things I was teaching. Through their help and their guidance, I became a better preacher, a person who was more ready to be a worker, approved by God. The whole church is responsible, in love for the church around them, to live out the one anothers so that the church grows as a healthy body, not just for this generation, but for the generation to come.