EPISODE 195 1 TIMOTHY CHAPTER 5 " Who should and shouldn't a Church support"

Welcome to Share the Word podcast. We're on 1 Timothy chapter 5, and when I think of the fact that at the time that Paul wrote these letters to Timothy, the church was relatively new, and the issues discussed in many of these chapters were new to them as well. Not like today. Today, when we think of who the church should help, the answer is still not easy. Hmm. All right, I'm listening.

1 Timothy chapter 5. Who should and shouldn't a church support? One thing that's very clear from today's chapter in focus is that Paul wanted Timothy to cultivate in the early churches he was overseeing a family atmosphere, in a good sense. We all know families that are close and supportive and nurturing, and others that are well not. But what a local church should feel like to its members is a good family. That's why Paul opens with a section saying things like, Don't sharply rebuke an older man, but rather appeal to him as a father, and to younger men as your brothers, and to older women as your mother, and to the younger women as your sisters in all purity.

Church leaders like Timothy were invested with real authority to direct the affairs of the early churches, but their relation to members was to be based on respect, and their direction carried out with gentleness. As Peter similarly instructed elders, Shepherd the church of God, but not as a lord over them. In other words, don't domineer people. Chapter 5 and 6 give church leaders a lot of principles to guide them in what can and can't, should and shouldn't be happening with regard to various groups within the church family. The churches Timothy was overseeing were all pretty new, and they needed guidance on how to deal with practical questions that were arising. Practical questions like what, Paul?

Well, one involved to what extent a local church should feel obligated to physically and financially assist members. The Roman Empire did not have the social safety net that exists in many countries today. In America, we have government-based social services, a lot of them actually, which are intended to help those in need. You know, Social Security, disability, child welfare, WIC, Medicaid, workman's comp, and so on and so on. These kinds of programs did not exist in first-century Ephesus, coming from the government anyway. The closest thing that society had was an active patronage system.

Wealthy families, powerful families, patrons as they were called, often offered protection, resources, and legal assistance to dependent lower classes of people. In return, they got those people's loyalty, political support, and sometimes labor if it was needed. This patronage system was deeply embedded in the social order of the Roman Empire, although it was not mandatory or universal. As we've already seen, many people from the lower classes flocked to Christianity because it was a unique environment where membership was not based on economics and class. Even slaves were considered spiritual equals within the Christian fellowships. But those who became Christians and joined the church, in the eyes of the rest of society, were often viewed with suspicion and ostracized, sometimes even by their own families.

So this became a real question in the churches: to what extent was a local church to act as a patron, essentially, and try to meet the physical and financial needs of needy members? Listen to some of Paul's instructions about this. I'm going to read from the Modern Language New Living Translation in this lesson. Take care of any widow who has no one else to take care of her. But if she has children or grandchildren, their first responsibility is to show godliness at home and repay their parents by taking care of them. This is something that pleases God.

Those who won't care for their own relatives, especially those in their own household, have denied the faith, and such people are worse than unbelievers. So Paul is saying off the bat here that the first responsibility for elder care falls to someone's natural family. Your parents, who took care of you for the first 20 years or so of your life, may increasingly need your help in the last 20 years or so of theirs. And if they do, it's only right for you to be there for them. It's simply a kind of repayment, Paul says, a debt you owe them. In fact, he adds, an unwillingness to do this is a denial of the faith.

Remember, that phrase means the essential doctrines and practices of Christianity. The church he goes on is only to step in in extreme circumstances and special cases. This is something too many in American society have gotten away from, maybe other places as well, because the government has so many programs and, truthfully, also because I think many older people consider it a show of weakness to admit needing help from their children as they age. But this is something that pleases God, Paul writes. It's part of being a family in the eyes of the one who designed the human family. The Old Testament had a lot to say on this subject, but before anyone write it off as part of the law and we can ignore things as Christians because we are not under the law, take into account how Jesus dressed down the Pharisees over failure in this very area.

It came up in the Gospel of Mark chapter 7. In that section, Jesus is calling out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees for, in his words, nullifying the law of God through their traditions. Specifically, the Pharisees had created a loophole just to get around this responsibility to be there for their parents as they aged and needed help. They would piously declare all their possessions and assets as korban, meaning dedicated to God. Sorry, Mom, I'd like to take care of you, and maybe we could build out an extra bedroom for you for some time, but right now all of my assets are tied up in korban, and I've dedicated them to God. No, Jesus told them.

Honoring your parents cannot be set aside with word games because it is part of what God said should be practiced among his people. Honoring our parents is part and parcel of God's moral law, which is in force in every age. I can tell you from experience that it was good to have my parents live with us for the last years of their lives. My children were positively impacted by that, I know, and they still often talk about it. My parents greatly appreciated it too and told me that many, many times. My father passed away first, and my mom lived on for another several years after that.

She was at my house until the day she went home to be with the Lord, and I wouldn't have had it any other way. I don't have any doubt that my kids will see it the same way when the time comes for me to need their help, because that was positively modeled and taught to them. I realize there may be some situations where this may be impossible, but this passage we're looking at suggests this should be the normal practice among Christian families: reciprocal love and loyalty. Parents show it to us when we are young and needy. Children show it to their parents when they are old and needy. But, Paul also tells Timothy, there may well be some cases where a widow has no family to step in during her time of need.

Maybe when she became a Christian, her family ostracized her, or maybe she doesn't have living children, or whatever the reason. In such cases, the church may need to step in. Keep in mind, though, that no local church can help everyone, even in that situation. At least I've never been part of a church that had the resources to. This is why Paul gives some realistic instructions here, beginning at verse 9. A widow who is put on the list for support must be a woman who is at least 60 years old and who is faithful to her own husband.

She must be well respected by everyone because of the good she has done. Has she brought up her children well? Has she been kind to strangers? Has she served believers humbly? Has she helped those who are in trouble? Has she herself always been ready to do good for others?

So, no, a church cannot be the social security net for every elderly member. But in exceptional cases, the church family should be there. The list refers to an actual role of qualifying widows which the church helped, namely older women who had been faithful wives and mothers who had themselves been ready to minister to others in need and serve the church. If such a member of your church family finds herself in a situation where she needs help, that's the kind of person the church should try to help. At verses 12 and 13, Paul tells him not to consider younger women for this kind of assistance, though, and makes the comment, because their physical desires will overpower their devotion to Christ and then they will want to remarry. And there's nothing wrong with that, except if she would then be breaking her previous pledge, as Paul put it.

That sounds like those who were considered for the list, considered for help or financial assistance from the church family, had themselves to commit to some kind of service to others to the church body in return, must pledge to help, say, certain ministries of the church in return. In essence, then, for those qualifying, the church may become their patron, since they had no other resources. But on their end, they had to be available to serve others in the church body in return. Paul keeps using the term widow here as opposed to a broader term that would be meaning people who are older generally, like of either sex, probably because women were much more vulnerable in that society, and women, more often than not, as was in my family's case, outlived their husbands, and so are far more likely to find themselves in this situation.

Tony actually is the pastor in our church who has to make the difficult decisions about who to help. It's tough to turn anybody away. We've talked about this several times, but a local church's resources are not unlimited. And so, as Paul told Timothy, we have to carefully consider who deserves more help than others, and that's why these guidelines are in the New Testament. The bottom line: Christian adult children should help their parents when the time comes if they need help. It's only right.

That's the God-honoring thing to do. But if there are no children to help and a widowed church member has no other adequate resources, and if she has been faithful to her own family and to serving and helping others in her church family, she is the type person a church benevolence fund should be assisting. By the way, if your church does not have such a fund, it should. Every church should set aside some way, either by percentage or by special offerings, a benevolence fund to help people in need. This has been the pattern even in the Old Testament times. Helping those who are widows indeed, as Paul calls them, older members who are truly alone in the world and truly deserving of care from a church family, is something a biblically functioning local church should be engaged in.

And let me say, I'm glad it's Tony and not me whose job it is to decide how this ministry gets carried out in our local church. Turning a corner at verse 17, Paul goes on to instruct Timothy on another question that's connected to this that has to do with showing some members special honor and giving them financial support. Listen again from the New Living Translation. Elders who do their work well should be respected and paid well, especially those who work hard at both preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, You must not muzzle an ox to keep it from eating grain as it treads it. And in another place, Those who work deserve their pay.

Now, the focus is turned to church leaders here, another category of elders, a different category of elders, elders in an official sense. As we've learned, elder was one title used of local church officers, pastor, overseer, or just leader, or other titles, and they all seem to be used interchangeably in the New Testament. The translation I just quoted gets the sense right, I believe, when it says, Elders who do their work well, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching, should be respected and paid well. Literally, Paul wrote that they are worthy of double honor. And the phrases following make clear that the double honor is first treating them with respect, but also paying them reasonably for their time.

I've heard some prosperity preachers suggest, actually more than suggest, that the double honor means they should be paid at least twice what anybody else should be paid who does secular work. That's a ridiculous, self-serving twist of Scripture. And at the other end of the spectrum, I've also heard some people argue that church leaders should not get paid, that there should not be any such thing as professional ministers because leading and preaching are just two among many gifts that make up the body of Christ. But that view seems to run right against what Paul is instructing here, doesn't it? As well as other passages like 1 Corinthians 9, where he even makes the point more clearly. By the way, churches that take that second view almost always stay tiny because the work of the ministry is limited to their best leaders and teachers' free time.

Obviously, when a local church decides to pay men who have strong leadership gifts and who are very good at teaching and communicating God's Word, they're going to do better because a man doesn't have to try to find the time to do the work of the ministry, but the work of the ministry actually becomes his life's work, his primary focus. On the pay question, of course, that's going to depend on financial resources that a church has. In a church plant I was leading years ago, which started with only a handful of families, my pay went from zero while we organized and got underway to part-time and then to full-time over the course of about three years as the church grew.

In an already established, well-established congregation, a hundred-year-old church that I came to at another point in my ministry years, I found that they didn't actually have a budget line set up for a pastor, and they wanted to discuss that with me when I came to be the pastor there. They said to me, in effect, Well, what do you think you should be paid? It's an awkward question. In that situation, somehow I came up with a split-the-baby kind of wisdom of Solomon answer. I suggested they ask ten working men in the church to anonymously write down their monthly salary or income, then have someone total those figures, divide by ten to get an average. That would be close to what the average working man makes in that community who's a member of the church.

You may have to cut away the highest and lowest numbers, like if somebody in your church is like Elon Musk, that would skew the numbers. But you know what I'm saying. My suggestion was that they pay a full-time pastor the average of what other working men in that community were making. That seems fair. A man who is not happy with that is in the ministry for money and not someone you want leading your church. Beyond that down-to-earth question, Paul instructed Timothy about the accountability of elders.

Church leaders are in an important position of trust and need to be exemplary. We certainly saw this back in chapter three. But temptations are real, being what they are. Sometimes even church leaders let God and your church family down by doing stupid things, obviously wrong things. Then what? Here's what Paul instructed, beginning at verse 19.

Don't listen to an accusation against an elder unless it is confirmed by two or three witnesses. But those who sin should be reprimanded in front of the whole church. This will serve as a strong warning to others. I solemnly command you in the presence of God and Christ and Jesus and the highest angels to obey these instructions without taking sides or showing favoritism, and never be in a hurry about appointing a church leader and so share in the sins of others. Keep yourself pure. Paul said, An accusation of sin against a church leader has to be established by more than one witness.

One random accusation should not bring a church leader down. But if there are multiple accusations from believable sources, Paul tells his lieutenant here, you can't be biased and show favoritism. That leader has to be confronted in church discipline just as any other member. And if the problem cannot be satisfactorily addressed and rectified, that leader should be called out before the whole congregation. I think he's saying the church needs to be told that a leader is being removed and the reasons why. Don't leave room for whispering and rumors.

Churches and Christian organizations that try and cover things up because, well, he's one of our key leaders and how's that going to make us look? We can't let this get out. It would be too embarrassing and harmful to the organization. Proceeding like that, failing to be honest, failing to hold up a church leader to the standard Scripture expects of them, that's a serious violation of God's expectations. And besides that, it will almost always, down the road, blow up. That's one tragic way Christianity gets discredited as hypocritical in unbelievers' eyes when it blows up.

This passage does not give us a list of what sins a Christian church leader should be disciplined over or what could result in him being removed from his office. But we do have those qualifications back in chapter 3, remember? Paul wrote there, an elder must be above reproach, a one-woman man, not overindulging in wine, not a bully, etc., etc. If a church leader is seriously failing in one of these areas or more than one of these areas, that should be addressed. Yet, like any other member of the body, Paul said, a leader should not be easily damaged by false accusations. It has to be clear-cut.

It has to be a clear-cut case of wrong. He must then, if it's clear-cut, be dealt with as any other member without partiality. If church members are to be examples when things are going well, they must also be examples when they let the congregation down. To lessen the chance of a church family having to go through the pain of removing a leader, Paul told Timothy, never lay hands on anyone too quickly. Laying hands on refers to the act of ordination, when a church confers upon a man the trust and the honor of spiritual leadership. Existing leaders physically laying their hands on and praying over a new church leader was the normal way of publicly consecrating a man for spiritual leadership.

Don't lay hands on anyone too quickly. This instruction applies both to a new convert as well as to someone who has only recently become a part of your church. No matter who they are, no matter how gung-ho they seem, no matter how gifted they appear, don't elevate anyone to be a pastor or an elder in your church that is not time-tested. This is a recipe for disaster. Church leaders need to be mature, spiritually grounded, have good character, and they need to have earned others' respect and confidence over time. To make sure Timothy takes these very practical instructions seriously, the apostle Paul then concludes this practical section in all caps and bold, saying, I solemnly exhort you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of His holy angels, maintain these principles.

At least that's how he would have written it if he had access to MS Word. These are principles, though, to govern how things should be done in the church, which is the household of the living God. I hope everyone listening today is not only an active member of a local church family, but of one that is biblically based and functioning according to the kind of God-given principles we're seeing laid out in these pastoral epistles. You'd like to be, but don't know where to start, how to find one? Email us at info at Share the Word, and maybe we can point you in the right direction of a good Bible church in your area. Thanks for listening.

This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. You know, getting support from your local church is important, but so is giving support to your family, friends, and your church. In most cases, the benevolence ministry is funded by church donations, so you can imagine there's a challenge of wanting to help and able to help. And just like us at Share the Word, as a nonprofit and a crowdfunded organization, we look towards our listeners and supporters to give us the ability to continue to spread the good news of the gospel around the world. If you'd like to help, simply go to sharetheword.org and click on Give.

Whether you make a one-time, support us monthly, or yearly, we thank you for that support and the ability to continue this Great Commission project. Don't forget to email us at info at sharetheword.org, or if you want to email Paul direct, it's paul at sharetheword.org. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.