1 Timothy 4:7-16
We’re going to read some scripture. This is 1st Timothy 4, 7 through 12. Paul writing to his son in the faith, Timothy, and let me read verses 7 through 12.
I have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales. Rather, train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.
This is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance. This is why we labor and strive, because we put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe. Command and teach these things.
Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in conduct, in speech, in love, in faith, in purity.
Well, last week we gave an introductory message to the book of 1st Thessalonians, and we’re going to put that on pause for a couple weeks because I wanted to give a message focused on the graduates today, but really, it’s a message that’s focused for all of us from 1st Timothy 4, verses 7 through 16.
I’ve sat through three commencement exercises. 1973, when I graduated from high school at Orange Christian Academy in Cleveland, Ohio. 1977, sat through a commencement exercise at Cedarville University.
1981, sat through a commencement ceremony in Grand Rapids, Michigan at Grand Rapids Seminary. I have to admit this morning, and maybe you can relate to this, I do not remember the name of the commencement speaker, nor do I remember anything they said. So, commencement speeches, the shorter the better.
I’m always fascinated by who is chosen to speak at a commencement. Usually, it’s the elite and the rich. University of Michigan this last year, I looked it up, their commencement speaker was Derek Jeter.
Derek Jeter grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Hall of Fame shortstop for the New York Yankees, and he was the graduation speaker at the University of Michigan. There was one graduation speaker that caught my attention this year, and I don’t know if anybody knows who this might be, but does anybody know who was the graduation speaker this past year at the University of Maryland? Anybody follow this story? Who is it? Kermit the Frog, you’re right. Kermit the Frog was the graduation speaker at the University of Maryland.
I almost showed a clip of his graduation speech; you can look it up on YouTube. Jim Henson, the man who invented the Muppets, graduated from the University of Maryland, so that’s a little bit of a connection there, and Kermit said that Jim had a hand in everything he did. I’m glad I got some laughter on that one.
But I thought this morning, what if we invited the Apostle Paul to give a commencement speech to graduating seniors, and what would the Apostle Paul say? As I thought about that, I landed on 1st Timothy chapter 4, and we’re going to very quickly go through six truths that I think the Apostle Paul would share with graduates on 2025, but also with all of us. So, this is from 1st Timothy chapter 4, and we’re going to jump into this and run through this rather quickly, but here are six truths if the Apostle Paul was sharing a commencement speech.
1. Train yourself to be godly
Here’s truth number one that Paul would share with 2025 graduates. Train yourself to be godly. That’s right out of verse 7. We read it in a scripture reading, and so let me paraphrase verse 7 quickly here, if you’ll give me some lead way here for 2025. Paul writes, have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales, have nothing to do with TikTok or Snapchat or whatever that’s called, but train yourself to be godly.
Train yourself to be godly. The word there, train, is the Greek word gymnós, from which we get the word gymnasium, and so the Apostle Paul is telling us that we need to focus on spiritual training. We hear a lot about physical workout plans, but we need to have a spiritual workout plan.
Paul writes about this all through the New Testament, Philippians 2:12, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, not work for your salvation, that’s a gift from God, work it out. He’s talking about sanctification, talk about growing in your walk with Christ, and so how do you do that? How do you train yourself to be godly? Well, this is a good start, being here with other believers and hearing God’s Word and encouraging one another, but certainly a good way to do that is to be in God’s Word daily, to be in God’s Word daily. You know, it’s been said, this book, the Bible, will keep you from sin or sin will keep you from this book.
It’s a little bit of a simplistic saying, but it’s true, that we need the Bible as the light for our life, the lamp for our feet, to guide us and to direct us through all of life. So, I brought a little prop this morning, and it’s a Bible, and this Bible is 52 years old. This is the Bible that I got as a graduation gift when I graduated from high school in 1973 in Cleveland, Ohio, and it was for my brother and sister-in-law, June 5th, 1973, congratulations on your graduation.
We hope this will be of good use to you, especially while you’re at Cedarville. May the Lord bless you abundantly. And so, I still have that Bible, and I don’t really use it because it has fallen apart.
But what do they say about a Bible that’s fallen apart? A person who has a Bible that’s fallen apart, their life isn’t falling apart, because they’re in God’s Word. So, I’d say train yourself to be godly. Probably don’t have time for this, but I’m going to squeeze it in.
I’m a big news junkie, and so, I taped the show Meet the Press, and I like to, Diane and I like to watch Meet the Press and kind of see that there’s a little bit of a bias there, and we kind of laugh at the bias or cry at the bias that’s in some of the news media. But two weeks ago, and I’ve watched it twice now, Meet the Press did an entire one hour. It was entitled Lost and Lonely, Lost and Lonely, and the entire show was about America’s mental health crisis, and they said that loneliness is a huge factor in our world today.
I scribbled all these notes just from watching it a second time. So, one of the primary individuals that they interviewed was Vivek Murthy. He was the 19th Surgeon General.
He’s now a former Surgeon General in the United States, and he wrote a book entitled Together, The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes-Lonely World, and as I watched that show, and they interviewed Patrick Kennedy, relative of the Kennedy family, former congressman, and some other experts in this whole area, and as I took notes, I thought, everything they are saying is from the Bible. They don’t know it. All truth is God’s truth.
And so, they started to lay out for us, here’s the issues today. 67% of Gen Z report feelings of loneliness, 50% feelings of anxiety and depression, 55 million adults experience feelings of loneliness from 2011 to 2019, teenage depression rates doubled. They said there is an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, especially in young people, and when you have that, it raises your risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide.
It also has physical impact. 29% higher percentage of heart issues, 31% higher chance of stroke, 50% chance of developing dementia as you get older. Vivek Murthy said that this loneliness and depression is comparable to a mortality rate of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, is the physical impact of this.
And so, they came up with some solutions. What do we do here? He said, we need to participate in faith groups. He’s basically saying, go to church.
Basically saying, go to church. They talked about delaying the use of social media. They suggested 16, the earliest, because social media contributes to all this self-comparison and a lot of other stuff that’s going on in social media.
They said, choose community. What is community? Where we know each other, where we help each other. And then they said, what you need is a purpose for living.
Why am I here? And they went on and on, and I said, they’re like preaching a sermon, they don’t know it. And so, train yourself to be godly. That’s Paul’s recommendation.
And he actually tells us why, verse 8, for physical training is of some value. It’s good to have a physical workout. It’s good to be on the treadmill.
But godliness has value for all things, holding promise for the present life, it’s going to help you here, and also the life to come.
2. Put your hope in the living God
Well, there’s a second thought here that Paul would give to the graduates, and we’re going to zip through the rest of these rather quickly. Put your hope in the living God, verse 10. It says, this is why we labor and strive, because we put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe. What’s Paul telling Timothy and us? Put your hope in God. Typical hope is the absolute assurance of something based on the promise of God.
And the scriptures tell us where not to put our hope. Psalm 20, verse 7, don’t put your hope in military strength. Don’t put your hope in the size of the United States defense budget, which is like 10 times larger than any other nation in the world.
Don’t put your hope in princes and leaders or in mankind. That’s Psalm 146:3. Don’t put your hope in money. That’s 1st Timothy 6:17. Yes, you need money to live, but that’s not where we put our hope.
We need to put our hope in the living God. God will never let us down. His promises are sure.
He’ll walk with us our whole life. And so, put your hope and trust in God.
3. Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young
Here’s a third thing that the Apostle Paul, I believe, would say if he was given a commencement address. Don’t let anybody look down on you because you’re young, verse 12. Don’t let anyone look down on you because you’re young, but set an example. So, Paul is addressing Timothy.
Timothy is a young pastor in Ephesus. And sometimes when a church has a young pastor and there’s an older congregation, your kind of like, well, what does this guy know? He’s young. But your age, your chronological age and spiritual maturity are not necessarily connected.
And there’s some people that are way, way further down in life and they’re not spiritually mature. And there’s some that are very young and they are spiritually mature. By the way, I had a friend who was called to be the pastor of a church.
It’s the church that he grew up in. And so, his first Sunday there, one of the ladies came up to him and said, oh, and by the way, pastor, I used to change your diapers in the nursery. And I don’t know, that’s probably pretty humbling for that new pastor.
But what’s Paul saying? Paul’s saying, don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young. I just went through a Bible and I began to jot some names down of young people that God used in a dramatic way. King Josiah, look it up, 2nd Chronicles chapter 34.
We don’t have time to look at it. King Josiah was the king of the southern kingdom of Judah. He became king when he was eight years old.
An eight-year-old king, yep. Now, he had some advisors, but what happened is you read King Josiah’s story that when he was 16 years of age, God started to work in his life and he started some reforms that brought a spiritual revival to the southern kingdom of Israel at the age of 16. About David, when he killed Goliath, whole Israel army was, no one was going to meet this great giant.
And David comes along bringing a lunch for his brothers and he’s just a teenager. He takes on Goliath and it’s a turning point in Israel’s history in that battle with the Philistines. Think about Daniel and his three friends, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego taken a thousand miles from home and brought into the Babylonian culture and they took a stand for their belief, didn’t they? And they were teenagers.
Think about the mother Jesus, Mary, probably 15 years old when she was conceived with Jesus of the Holy Spirit. She was just a young teenager and the angel appeared to her and she submitted to God’s plan for her life, even though she suffered ridicule from many others when she showed up in her hometown. Think about the feeding of the 5,000 and really 25,000 if you kind of include the whole picture there.
How did that happen? That’s because a young boy brought everything that he had, a lunch that his mom packed and gave it to Jesus and guess what happened? Great things happened. And so don’t let anyone look down upon you. If you’re young.
As I was working on this, coming to point number three, I remembered that somebody had given me an envelope last Sunday and took a pause from working on this sermon like, I haven’t read that envelope yet, and I opened it up and inside the envelope was a laid-out plan to develop a youth praise team here at Community Bible Church. A couple of people would say, you know what, we’ve got some young kids, we’ve got some young people, and wouldn’t it be great if we developed those talents so that our young people occasionally could be up here and some of your sons and daughters and leading us in worship? What a great thing that’d be, and we’re going to jump on that and develop that as God leads. Don’t let anybody look down on you because you are young.
4. be a role model
Here’s number four. Number four, don’t let anyone look down on you because you’re young, but be an example. Oh, here’s the challenge for young people.
You need to be a role model. You need to be an example. Paul lists five areas in your speech, what you say, in your conduct, how you live, in love, faith, and purity.
Boy, that’s a challenge today, not only for our young people, but for all of us. Be an example. Be a role model.
And no matter what the age of our kids are, they need to realize there’s somebody’s looking up at them. There’s somebody who is younger who is looking at another individual who’s just a little bit older, and so the elementary school kids look up to the middle school kids, and the middle school kids should be an example. And the middle school kids look up to the high school kids, and the high school kids should be looking at the college kids as an example.
And certainly, we as parents and grandparents, whether we like it or not, are role models for our kids and our grandkids. And what we desperately need today are godly role models. The apostle Paul writes, and he says, follow me as I follow Christ.
He writes to the Philippians, the things that you have learned and heard and received and seen in me, this is what I want you to do. And that’s the challenge of parenting. That’s the challenge of grandparenting.
That’s the challenge of pastoring. No one’s going to do it perfectly, but we want to live a life of integrity that our kids and our grandkids can look up to. And to be honest with you, they’re looking at our behavior more than what we say.
We can say all that we want, but the loudest message is going to be our lives and how we live our lives. And so, Paul says to the young people to be a role model. Two more to go, and then we’re done.
5. Do not neglect your spiritual gift
Here’s number five. It’s found in verses 13 and 14. Paul writing to Timothy, until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching.
Timothy’s a pastor. Here it is. Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through prophecy when the body of elders laid their hands on you.
So, here’s admonition number five to graduates and to all of us. Don’t neglect your spiritual gift. So, if you know Jesus as your Savior, the Bible says He gives all of us at least one spiritual gift.
They’re laid out in Ephesians chapter 4, many passages, 1st Corinthians 12, 1st Peter 4, Romans chapter 12. There’s at least a list of maybe 15 or 16 spiritual gifts, and you have at least one of them. And so, the challenge is for us as followers of Jesus is to discover, to develop, and to use that giftedness.
How has God gifted me? And we’ve all been gifted in different ways. And you can begin to tell that giftedness early on. I’ll embarrass one of our graduates this morning, but I’ll tell you, Andrew Hoeft has the gift of helps.
That’s one of the gifts. How do I know that? Because Andrew’s always asking me, do you need any help? Can I do this? Can I move this? Can I help you with this? That’s a spiritual giftedness. Someone who is looking on the radar and they’re looking for areas to help.
There’s the gift of giving. There’s the gift of hospitality. There’s the gift of pastor, teacher.
There’s a multitude of gifts. One of the things that I believe that is we have to stand someday before the Bema Seat judgment, not to be judged for whether we’re going to heaven or hell, but for what we’ve done with what God’s gifted us, one of the questions He’s going to ask us, I think, is, how have you used your giftedness? What did you do with the gift that I gave you? And so as young people and as adults, we need to use our giftedness. I was going to seminary in Grand Rapids and Diane and I went to a small church called East Leonard Baptist Church.
And I’m going to seminary and probably my second year of seminary and I’m thinking, I guess if I’m going to go in the ministry, I better not just sit in a pew. I better volunteer to do something. So, I went to the pastor and I said, hey, I’m a seminary student, but I would be willing to try to teach a class.
He says, okay. He says, would you mind teaching an adult class? I said, no. And so, I started teaching back in my seminary days an adult Sunday school class.
Those people, it was horrible. It was horrible. But like anything else, the more you do it, you know, you begin to get the rhythm and you begin to develop.
I preached my first sermon in that church. I still remember it. It was from Exodus chapter 17.
And I had notes written out and I went through all my notes in 15 minutes. Now some of you are wishing I would do that today. And I’m like, oh man, we can’t end this early.
And so, I kind of went through it again and try to lengthen it a little bit. But don’t neglect your spiritual giftedness. You know, when you see someone using the gift in the church, we need to encourage them.
We need to encourage the Macomber girls that played that piano solo. Find them after the church and encourage them. Last week, Ann Walton played a special number for us.
And I’m not just saying this, I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but on Tuesday, I texted her and said, hey, thanks for sharing that number. Now that was really a blessing. And that’s what we need to do when we see someone serving God and using their giftedness.
6. watch your life and doctrine closely
Here’s the last one. Last one, number six. The Apostle Paul, watch your life and doctrine closely.
Verse 15 and 16, be diligent in these matters. Give yourself wholly to them so that everyone may see your progress. Verse 16, watch your life and your doctrine closely.
Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourselves and your hearers. So, here’s Paul. He’s giving some advice to Timothy and he says, watch your life and also watch your doctrine.
So, you need to know what you believe. You need to know the five fundamentals of the faith and you need to be committed to that so that you’re not carried away with every new wind and doctrine that Paul writes about in Ephesians chapter four. But he also says to watch your life.
I think Paul means we need to take care of ourselves, don’t we? I mean, you hear a lot about self-care today and self-care can be taken to the extreme where life’s just all about us and taking care of ourselves. That’s not biblical. But we also need to take care of ourselves physically, mentally, and emotionally.
We need to take care of ourselves. It’s like the speech that the stewardess is going to give when you’re on the plane and if you lose cabin pressure, what do they say? If you got young kids with you or other people with you, put the mask on who first? Yourself. And so, we need to take care of ourselves.
We need to take care of our bodies, which are the temple of the Holy Spirit. We need to take care of ourselves physically and emotionally and spiritually. A couple things that have contributed, I believe, in longevity in ministry, and if you know the statistics today, pastors, very few pastors, or I don’t know what the percentage is, but a lot of them burn out, don’t finish well. So, pastors need to take care of themselves. So, for 15 years at the end of the month of May, I went to the Moody Pastors Conference in Chicago.
Students graduate, they brought in 1,500 pastors from all over the United States, and for three or four days they fed us well. We got to sit under sermons and preaching and great music and great fellowship, and it was a spiritual recharge. I remember the one year I went, Dr. Joe Stowell was president of Moody Bible Institute, and there was this big banner across Torrey Gray Auditorium.
It seats about 2,000 people, and they put it up for the pastor’s conference, and they said, relax, you’re not in charge. I mean, I don’t have to do anything? Quite frankly, the church’s graciousness in allowing us to go to the other side of the state, and yes, crisscross, like come crisscross back and forth, but when does a pastor get preached at? Who’s a pastor to a pastor? And so, when we’re over at Maranatha for that period of time, basically July and August in the summer, I’m hearing a lot of sermons. And yes, I have a responsibility as campus pastor and teaching the class, but I’m getting fed.
I remember years ago, and this is back when we had an evening service here, and so I would leave here after our evening service, drive over to Maranatha, get over there at about 11 o’clock at night, and then be busy all week, and then turn around, come back for the weekend, and be here, and catch up on a week’s mail, try to make some visits, and preach. And I remember I came back and one of the ladies said at the end of summer, how was your vacation? Like, my vacation? I mean, driving back across the state eight times and having like four days off the whole summer. Like, yeah, it was great.
Thank you for asking. But just to say that those weeks help recharge both of us. Watch your life and watch your doctrine closely.
There’s all sorts of warnings about false teachers in the New Testament. Acts chapter 20, Paul warns the Ephesian elders about false teachers that are going to come in. Philippians chapter 3, there’s a warning about Judaizers who are trying to say, you need to keep the law first.
You need to go back to the law in order to be saved. No. And so Paul writes the book of Galatians and saying, hey, if anybody preaches any other gospel, then you’re saved by faith in Christ alone, through faith alone, by grace alone.
Let them be accursed. And so, watch your life and doctrine closely. Well, six truths that I think Paul might share if he was sharing a commencement ceremony.
Train yourself to be godly. Put your hope in the living God. Don’t let anybody look down on you just because of your age.
Be a role model. Don’t neglect your gift. And watch your life and doctrine closely.
If you do that, you’ll get to the end of life. God will say to you, well done, good and faithful servant.