Bible Commentaries
1 Timothy 3

Verse 9

1 Timothy 3:9

I. Look at the remarkable combination of revelation and truth, and conscience which the text exhibits. The Apostle knew nothing or cared nothing for those controversies between revelation and conscience, or faith and conscience, or authority and conscience which now agitate men's minds. As these several things presented themselves to his mind there were no rival claims to be adjusted between them. Is Christian doctrine to be accepted because it is a Divine revelation of the evidence of which faith is to judge? or is it to be accepted because, and only as far as it commends itself to the human conscience? Modern writers have a great deal to say on this question. St. Paul had simply nothing nothing, at least, that he thought it necessary to say. Faith, and a pure conscience with him went hand in hand. Both were necessary, and there was no need to decide the limits of their respective domains. He had united them together in his direct charge to Timothy himself. He now unites them again in stating his qualifications for the first step in the ministry. A good conscience is the natural element in which a sound faith exists. Therefore, the man who deliberately thrusts away from him the former, renders himself incapable of holding the latter, or at least places himself in great danger of making shipwreck of it. A true faith cannot live in an impure heart, though it may be there dormant and inactive. Indulgence in sin, which obscures the lesser light of man's moral nature, must at length hide out the view of God Himself, though we have the promise of our Lord that the pure in heart shall eventually see God, and from which we may infer that it is darkness and sin alone that can entirely obscure Him. Yet we cannot doubt the fact that purity of outward life may co-exist with unbelief. It does not, however, by any means necessarily follow that purity of outward life involves that purity of heart to which our Lord's promise is attached. With regard to it, the teaching of the New Testament is no way doubtful. The power within man which triumphs over the strength of his natural corruption is the power of faith, faith in Christ as an ever-living Redeemer, and that faith is an instrument in the hands of the Holy Spirit, by which He works upon the hearts of men. It is thus alone, according to the teaching of the New Testament, that true purity of heart can be attained so far as man in his present state is capable of attaining it.

II. The idea which any man forms of the evil of sin, must depend upon the purity of his conscience; and it therefore follows that purity of conscience is an important element in determining our belief upon such doctrines as the Incarnation and the Atonement, or to use the words of the text, that those parts of the mystery of faith must be held in a pure conscience. And the same may be said of any conception of God which includes the idea of holiness as a part of His character. It is true that all our ideas of holiness are relative and imperfect, as are the teachings of conscience itself; but what idea of beauty, and excellence, and holiness, can be formed by one whose own heart and conscience are defiled, or how can such an one form any conception of the holiness of Him who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. The mystery of that faith whose seat is in the heart and conscience cannot abide in an impure dwelling-place. From the polluted sanctuary are heard the ominous words the cry of a lost faith: "Let us depart hence."

J. H. Jellett, Oxford and Cambridge Journal, June 7th, 1877.

Reference: 1 Timothy 3:9 . Homilist, 3rd series, vol. vi., p. 6.1.

Verse 13

1 Timothy 3:13

The Good Degree.

I. In what consists the good degree? It consists in a higher state of spiritual life a stronger faith, a higher hope, a more entrancing and captivating love; in short, a larger possession of God, as if the Deity within flung His own grace and glory over the soul in which He dwells. That such a state is both possible and blessed, a state to be desired above all other things, will be readily admitted. For that person must be unfortunate, who has not in the circle of his acquaintance some such saint, whose whole soul is aflame with God, and who walks around the familiar objects of daily life, consecrating with his own beauty every act and deed, and reflecting in a face like the face of an angel, the shining of the light that fills the soul within.

II. But a good degree includes a further idea, and that is a higher state in glory, a place nearer God in the world to come, a more perfect knowledge of Him, and a more entrancing enjoyment of Him for ever and ever. This, we must bear in mind, springs from the other, and is but its completion. Grace is but the preparation for glory, the blossom of which glory is the ripened fruit. The hope of such a reward is a grand and elevating sentiment, far above those gross elements, which have led some to regard the hope of reward as an unworthy motive for a Christian. We need not attempt to be superior to our Master, who for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross. The bestowment of any reward at all is wonderful when the work is all of grace. But our gracious Master knows that we have need of the stimulus of it, and He has made it worthy of Himself,

E. Garbett, Experiences of the Inner Life, p. 95.

References: 1 Timothy 3:13 . Church of England Pulpit, vol. xvii., p. 73; vol. xxi., p. 285.

Verse 15

1 Timothy 3:15

I. I cannot think of the Christian Church as if it were a selection out of humanity. In its idea it is humanity. The hard, iron-faced man whom I meet upon the street, the degraded, sad-faced man who goes to prison, the weak, silly-faced man who haunts society, the discouraged sad-faced man who drags the chain of drudgery they are all members of the Church, members of Christ, children of God, heirs of the kingdom of heaven. Their birth made them so. Their baptism declared the truth which their birth made true. It is impossible to estimate their lives aright, unless we give this truth concerning them the first importance. Think, too, what would be the meaning of the other sacrament, if this thought of the Church of the living God were real and universal. The Lord's Supper, the right and need of every man to feed on God, the bread of Divine sustenance, the wine of Divine inspiration offered to every man, and turned by every man into whatever form of spiritual force the duty and the nature of each man requires, how grand and glorious its mission might become! No longer the mystic source of unintelligible influence; no longer certainly the test of arbitrary orthodoxy; no longer the initiation rite of a selected brotherhood, but the great sacrament of man! The seeker after truth, with all the world of truth freely open before him, would come to the Lord's table, to refresh the freedom of his soul, to liberate his soul from slavery and prejudice. The soldier going forth to battle, the student leaving college, the merchant getting ready for a sharp financial crisis, all men full of passion for their work, would come then to the Lord's Supper to fill their passion with the Divine fire of consecration. They would meet and keep their unity in beautiful diversity this Christian Church around the Christian feast. There is no other rallying place for all the good activity and worthy hopes of man. It is in the power of the great Christian sacrament, the great human sacrament, to become that rallying place.

II. And then the ministry, the ministers, what a life theirs must be, whenever the Church thus comes to realise itself! We talk today, as if the ministers of the Church were consecrated for the people. The old sacerdotal idea of substitution has not died away. What is the release from such a false idea? Not to teach that the ministers are not consecrated, but to teach that all the people are; not to deny the priesthood of the clergy, but to assert the priesthood of all men. When that great chain is made, and justified in life, then, and not till then, lordship over God's heritage shall disappear, and the true greatness of the minister, as the fellow-worker with, and servant of, the humblest and most struggling child of God, shall shine out on the world.

III. Yet once more, here must be seen the true place and dignity of truth and doctrine. It is not knowledge anywhere that is the end and purpose of man's labour or of God's government. It is life. It is the full activity of powers. Knowledge is a means to that. Why is it that the Church has magnified doctrine overmuch and throned it where it does not belong. It is because the Church has not cared enough for life. She has not over-valued doctrine; she has under-valued life. When the Church learns that she is, in her idea, simply identical with all nobly active humanity, when she thinks of herself as the true inspirer and purifier of all the life of man, then she will what? not cast her doctrines away, as many of her impetuous advisers would have her do. She will see their value as she has never seen it yet; but she will hold them always as the means of life, and she will insist that out of their depths they shall send forth manifest strength for life, which shall justify her holding them.

Phillips Brooks, Twenty Sermons, p. 42.

References: 1 Timothy 3:15 . Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi., No. 393; vol. xxiv., No. 1436; J. Irons, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. viii., p. 359; Plain Sermons, vol. ii., p. 177. 1 Timothy 3:15 , 1 Timothy 3:16 . Expositor, 1st series, vol. iii., p. 74; Preacher's Monthly, vol. viii., p. 207.

Verse 16

1 Timothy 3:16

I. Note the facts recorded. These you will perceive to be points in the life of our Lord, commencing with His incarnation, and, reaching through the intermediate period, to the time of His final exaltation. Take away the Divinity of Christ, and His example, and His teaching, and His promises lose their power, and the whole body of faith becomes cold and formal as a carcase from which the living spirit has fled.

II. The greatness of the mystery involved in these facts. Wonderful beyond the thoughts of man are the manner and the completeness and the glory of redeeming love.

III. The practical lessons to be derived from these thoughts. (1) Foremost of all is the duty of believing and accepting this wondrous redemption, as alike due to God and necessary for ourselves. To know the will of a Saviour, and the sufficiency of His redeeming merits, and the glory of the inheritance which He has prepared for His people, will but aggravate despair if we are cut off from personal participation in them. (2) Again, we ought to give to these blessed hopes of salvation an importance predominant above all things else in the world. They ought to occupy the same place in our own estimate of life as they occupy in the dealings of God towards mankind. There we see that they are the first and the last, the Alpha and Omega of all. (3) See how vast is the debt of gratitude we owe to Him, who bought us with His blood. All we have, and all we are our zeal; our worship; our praise; our faith, though it never fainted; our hope, though it never grew weak; our love, though it never was chilled, would be but a poor instalment of its payment. It will be the glory and bliss of heaven to go on for ever fathoming its length, and breadth, and depth, and height, and yet for ever to find it towering upward above our utmost thought, in the infiniteness of that love which passeth knowledge.

E. Garbett, The Soul's Life, p. 76.

Joy to All People a Christmas Homily.

Every revelation is either an enigma or the solution of an enigma, a riddle or the reading of a riddle, according as we approach it. In the one case, it is a "mystery," in the human sense; in the other case, it is a "mystery," in the Divine sense; in the sense which mystery uniformly bears in Scripture not an unfathomable, inscrutable dogma, to which the mind must bow in its formal utterance, without endeavouring, without expecting to comprehend it, but a secret which God has told for the edification, for the comfort, of an inquiring, a perplexed, a struggling soul.

I. Which of us has not oftentimes felt the pressure upon him of the want of God. In seasons of adversity, of disappointment, of sickness, of sorrow, of anxiety, of loneliness, of the conviction of sin, who would not give anything for the personal assurance that he has God Himself with him. Nothing less than Incarnation which is the incorporation of God with the creature could have enabled God to feel with us in our trials. He rested not in words of pity, nor in acts of help, but came Himself to be one of us: surely this was a wonderful addition to what could otherwise have been; surely it is enough to make the Incarnation the most blessed of His gifts, and this festival of Christmas the brightest and happiest of our year.

II. The Incarnation is the key to Gospel doctrine, in both parts. It brings together the dignity of the body and the supremacy of the spirit. It says to us, God Himself, when He would deal most intimately with His creatures, began by taking to Himself a body. In that body He tabernacled through a lifetime, submitted even to grow in stature and wisdom, to eat and to drink, to sleep and to awaken, to speak, and pray, and work, to die, and to rise, to ascend into glory. Thus He taught us by His own example, how this framework of the body may be consecrated to His use, how even the spirit needs it for action, how the work even of eternity will want a body, glorified, but not destroyed, to do it as it must be done. The Incarnation, mysterious in one sense, is the key to all mysteries in another. God gives it, if not as an explanation, yet as a reconciliation; showing us, in Christ, how the body is honoured, and what is its place in the economy of the fulness of time. For action alike, and for communion, an incorporeal being is but half a man. Let us rest in nothing short of the full Christian doctrine. Tidings of great joy, the angel called it who came with it from God's presence. Joy to all people he further called it, as though to remind us that the Emmanuel' of our being, the God with us, was equally necessary to high and low, to rich and poor, to youth and age, to health and sickness, to life and death. The Desire of all nations is come to His temple, and that temple is the heart of mankind.

C. J. Vaughan, Words of Hope , p. 1.

The Mystery of Godliness.

I. The mystery of godliness may properly be taken as the description of God's dealings with mankind. How impossible it is for us to comprehend, even in a moderate extent, the dark, mysterious riddles which we meet with in the history of the world; the mere existence of evil there; the existence of a power competing with that of God Himself, and a power so strong as sometimes to appear capable of baffling the Holy Spirit of God; the existence of one whose position is such that he could venture to say to the Lord: "The kingdoms of the earth are committed to me, and to whomsoever I will I give them."

II. The simplest Christian, who knows very little, it may be, of the history of the world, may find abundant evidence of the mysteriousness of God's dealings if he looks into the mystery of himself. If he regards his life as a thing for him to speculate upon and unravel, then, forthwith, he will lose himself, and he will find endless riddles such as no human wit can solve; the guide has been a pillar of cloud after all, a cloud which may be followed as a safe guide in the wilderness, but into which, if he penetrate, he will inevitably lose his way.

III. If, then, we find that mystery essentially belongs to the revelations of God; if we find that in all there is light enough to guide, but not light enough to puff men up, as though they were able to comprehend the infinite, why should we not expect to find the same character of mystery belonging to the revelation of God to men in Jesus Christ? Here, above all, God gives light enough for guidance, but not light enough for unbounded speculation. It is good for us that the gate of godliness should be a gate of humility; it is good for us that we should admire the mercy of God, while we confess His ways to be past finding out; it is good that, as the elders cast down their crowns before the throne, so we should throw down all pride of intellect and self-conceit, and walk humbly with God.

Harvey Goodwin, Parish Sermons, vol. iii., p. 274.

Few words in the New Testament have ever been more strangely misinterpreted than these; few could be found which have been equally perverted, inasmuch as they have been used to inculcate notions the very opposite to their real meaning. They have been constantly quoted as speaking of the darkness and difficulty of some points in Christianity, whereas their real purpose is to commend the great and glorious nature of these truths which it has made known.

I. The substance of the Gospel revelation is, that God was manifest in the flesh, and justified in the Spirit; that He was seen of angels, and preached to the Gentiles; that He was believed on in the world, and received up into glory. This, then, is the mystery of godliness; this is the great truth, unknown and undiscoverable by our unaided reason, which the Gospel has now made known to us. The knowledge of God the Father is not called a mystery, because a mystery, in the language of the Apostles, means a truth revealed which we could not have found out if it had not been told us. Yet, as experience has shown that men did not, in fact, make themselves acquainted with God the Father, so it has been mercifully ordered that even what we could have discovered if we would, has yet been expressly revealed to us; and the Law and the Prophets are no less full and plain in pointing out our relations to God the Father, than the Gospel is in pointing out our relations to God the Son and God the Holy Ghost.

II. True it is, that the Bread of Life does not nourish us all, and, instead of seeing that the fault is in ourselves, and that with our sickly bodies the most wholesome food will lose its virtue, we are apt to question the power and usefulness of the food itself. True it is, that if we were but good and holy, it would be an idle question to ask about our faith, when our lives sufficiently declare it. But not more foolish is it to suppose that a man can be strong and healthy without wholesome food, than to think that we can be good and holy without a Christian's faith. Those who have tried it know that without that faith they would be nothing at all, and that, in whatever degree they have overcome the world and themselves, it is owing to their faith in the promises of God the Father, resting on the atonement of the blood of His Son, and given and strengthened by the abiding aid and comfort of the Holy Spirit.

T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. ii., p. 70.

I. To live on the edge of mystery is the very condition of our being. If we begin to discard doctrines from the Christian scheme because they are mysteries, it is hard to say where the process will end. Discard the Trinity, there remains the Incarnation. Discard the Incarnation, there remains the Atonement. Discard the Atonement, there remains the life of Christ, the miracles of Christ. Discard St. Paul, there remains the Church there remains, without adequate explanation, the world's history for eighteen hundred years.

II. There is no attempt in the Bible to conceal the fact that the Revelation which it conveys is mysterious. It is not unnatural that the human mind, in its pride of conquest and of power, should chafe impatiently under limitations which make it conscious of its feebleness. But it is not for us to fix the conditions of the Divine gifts. The brightest things are ever the most dazzling. We cannot gaze full in the face of the noonday sun; and the darkness in which God hides Himself is simply, we are told, light unapproachable.

III. All minds, it must be admitted, have not passed through the same discipline, nor can build their hopes on the same foundation. To some one truth has proved more precious than another more full of light, or strength or comfort. Saul might feel safe in the battle in his armour of proof, David, when trusting to nothing better than his shepherd's sling and stone. But any truth that is held as truth, is a help towards attaining further truth. It is the posture of the will before the Divine message that is the condition of knowing the doctrine. The temper in which we believe is much more important than the greater or less articulation of our creed. A stout ship, ere now, has outridden the wildest gale on a single cable. It is a dragging anchor an unstable mind that tells of the coming wreck of faith.

Bishop Fraser, University Sermons, p. 29.

References: 1 Timothy 3:16 . Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii., No. 786; vol. xviii., No. 1087; Ibid., Evening by Evening, p. 156; Expositor, 1st series, vol. ix., p. 382; H. P. Liddon, Christmastide Sermons, p. 107; Ibid., Church Sermons, vol. i., p. 97; C. Kingsley, National Sermons, p. 257; Homilist, 2nd series, vol. ii., p. 86; J. H. Hitchens, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xvii., p. 68; J. Kennedy, Ibid., vol. xxi., p. 57; Preacher's Monthly, vol. vi., p. 376; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 275; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iv., p. 86. 1 Timothy 4:1-5 . Expositor, 1st series, vol. iii., p. 142. 1 Timothy 4:6-16 . Ibid., p. 224; Christian World Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 65; R. W. Dale, Ibid., vol. vi., p. 289.