Jesus, The Servant of Lord

Pastor Jonathan ended last week’s sermon highlighting the two Old Testament quotations that Paul uses to encourage Timothy in the face of the foolish and irreverent talk that is upsetting the faith of some. “The Lord knows those who are his” and “Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.” That combination gives us the two essential aspects of Christian assurance. On the one hand, we have the sovereign grace of God. The Lord knows who are his, and no one can snatch us out of his hand. God is God, and, as we frequently sing at the end of our services, he is able to keep us from falling. On the other hand, we have the necessity of human action. God’s sovereign grace doesn’t lead to complacency. Christian assurance requires action; those who call themselves Christians can’t simply rest on their heels and drift because “God is able to keep me.” Instead, we must depart from iniquity, lest we fall into iniquity. The Lord knows those who are his, and those who are his depart from iniquity. These are the two sides of Christian assurance.

From there, Paul uses an analogy to describe the kind of leader Timothy should be. Every household has different kinds of vessels. You’ve got the dinner plates and the toilet bowl, the fine china and the cleaning bucket. Paul exhorts Timothy to be the dinner plates, to be the fine china. Be the useful vessel ready for every good work. And this means he must be cleansed. But what does that mean specifically?

It means fleeing the tendencies and temptations that afflict the young. It means pursuing virtue and holiness in a prayerful community. It means avoiding stupid and fruitless fights. God’s servant avoids stupid fights, is universally kind, is skillful at clarifying truth and falsehood, has a thick skin, and seeks to reveal error and call to repentance with humility and gentleness. 

Paul then describes what Timothy will be up against. Distressing times are ahead, and people will be marked by ungodliness and vice rather than virtue. People will be selfish, arrogant, unloving, reckless, enslaved to passions, and covered with a superficial veneer of godliness. From that group, there will be manipulators and schemers who will sneak in to households to ensnare gullible women—women who are burdened with sins, led astray by their desires, always jumping on the latest fad, and yet unable to grow in maturity and find stability in the truth. These manipulators and false teachers are like the Egyptian magicians who opposed Moses. Eventually, God will expose their folly, but in the meantime, they can do lots of damage. 

So what this passage gives us is a clear contrast between the Lord’s servant and the pagan sorcerers, between faithful teachers and false teachers. And so I want to spend the bulk of this sermon laying out the differences between the Lord’s servant and the false teachers. And I think this is absolutely crucial in our present cultural moment. There have always been false teachers who have opposed God and his servants. Whether it’s the ungodly in the days of Noah, the magicians in the days of Moses, or the Pharisees in the days of Jesus, there have always been false teachers. But they haven’t always had virtually unlimited access to God’s people. Our technology enables us to access countless voices from all different perspectives. We drive to work and we listen to podcasts. We stand in line and check our Twitter feed. We lie in bed late at night and scroll through Facebook. We voluntarily subject ourselves to Instagram influencers and Twitter pundits and Facebook celebrities and YouTube stars, as well as podcasters, politicians, journalists, cable news hosts, and thought leaders, not to mention the advertisers and companies who are getting rich off of all of it. And so, when you hear discussion of false teachers, I don’t want you to merely think of the obvious ones, like Joel Osteen and the health, wealth, and prosperity preachers. I want you to think of the entire eco-system of information and narratives and personalities and voices that you swim in. Because this ecosystem has an effect on us. It shapes us and molds us. It frames how we experience the world and take in events. What we’ve heard shapes what we hear. Old news shapes how we hear new news. 

So the question for us is: What kind of people should we listen to? What kind of people should we avoid? Because that’s what Paul tells Timothy. There are certain kinds of people that should be avoided. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, bad company corrupts good character. But first a few caveats.

1) Avoidance can’t mean total avoidance.

As Paul says elsewhere, in order to totally avoid such people, we would have to go out of the world. The issue is the influences we subject ourselves to, the people and perspectives and habits of thought that we immerse ourselves in so that certain behaviors become normalized. We live in the world, and therefore worldliness will always be around us. But, it’s important that we maintain a certain kind of spiritual and emotional distance from the worldliness that Paul describes here. In this world, we will have to talk to, work with, engage with, at times even partner with people that Paul tells us to avoid. 

2) As you listen, you may be tempted to think about the ways that your friends and neighbors are subjecting themselves to bad company.

You see clearly ways in which other people are failing to avoid such people. Let me caution you about that impulse. It may be that you will have opportunity to exhort or admonish someone about the company they keep, the voices that shape them. But your ability to do that with humility will flow from applying the truth to yourself first. We are always prone to recognize other people’s flaws and errors; we see them clearly (why can’t they?!?). But Jesus requires us to remove the log from our own eyes before going speck-hunting in the eyes of others. 

Bad Company

So what are some examples of “bad company?” What are the characteristics that Paul warns about? Chapter 3 gives us a vice list; these are common in the New Testament and in other Greco-Roman literature. I’ve grouped the list into different clusters for ease of focus. 

First, consider their loves.

They are lovers of self, lovers of money, lovers of pleasure, rather than lovers of God. This speaks to what is central to them. We are what we love. And these people love themselves and their own selfish desires. They love money because it enables them to gratify their own pleasures. So when you think about your company, about the voices you listen to, can you tell what their orienting love is? What is fundamental? Is it their own private pleasure and comfort? Is it wealth and ease? Are they simply selfish? Or do they love God?

Second, consider how they posture themselves in relation to others.

Paul says to avoid people who are proud, who boast and brag about their accomplishments, who can’t give other people credit, who are constantly puffing themselves up with conceit, who are swollen with pride, and who look down with contempt upon others. Sometimes the pride is empty vanity; they think more highly of themselves than they ought. Other times, their abilities and skills are real, but as a result, they treat others with contempt and look down their noses. Either way, such pride and arrogance, such haughtiness and conceit is to be avoided.

Third, consider how they relate to others.

Such people are disobedient to their parents. They despise their elders. They can only see the flaws of previous generations. They are therefore ungrateful, magnifying the failures of their parents and minimizing the good that has been done. Avoid such people. Not only that, but they are heartless and merciless. Heartless literally means “without affection.” Affection is the warm and familiar love that exists in a family or among close friends. It’s tender and loyal, and these people are treacherous and lack such affection. They are savage and brutal when attacked, forgetting that their opponents are human. They don’t love the common good, but instead seek their own private advancement. And they are unappeasable, prima donnas. No amount of efforts are ever enough. You can’t make them happy, and efforts to restore peace and harmony are constantly torpedoed. 

Fourth, consider their impulsiveness.

They lack self-control; they are dissolute, enslaved to various passions and impulses. They are hotheads, always itching for a fight and eager to escalate every disagreement so that it becomes World War III. When a sudden and violent reaction erupts, they let it ride. They are reactive and reckless and rash. They don’t think long-term; they don’t consider the consequences of their reactions. They lash out and erupt and cause immense damage, multiplying quarrels and breeding controversy wherever they go. 

Fifth, consider their speech.

They are abusive in speech, maligning people and blaspheming God. They are slanderers, those who run other people down, who misrepresent other people’s positions, who seek to manipulate by name-calling and demonizing other people. 

Finally, Paul highlights the way that such people frequently cover their evil with a veneer of godliness.

They have “the form of godliness while denying its power.” There is a superficial and hypocritical virtue that masks the self-love, the pride, the ingratitude, the impulsiveness, and the slander. And this superficial veneer of godliness comes in many shades. It might include name-dropping Jesus while otherwise speaking and living in a way that appalls him. It might include the ability to maintain decorum and respectability in polite society as a cover for selfishness, unholiness, and brutality. But we must realize that vice frequently loves to hide beneath a semblance of virtue; that’s how it is able to sneak into households and deceive people who are burdened with sins, putting them on the treadmill of “learning” but never arriving at a knowledge of the truth.

And let me just say that it is tragic that this list describes far too many of our leaders—in the church, in our civic life, in the media, in entertainment. The voices that bombard us, and that we willingly subject ourselves to on television and in our social media feeds, bear a tragic resemblance to Paul’s list. And therefore it is no surprise that we live in times of difficulty. 

Now in order to get a better sense of what to avoid, it might be helpful to describe the opposite characteristics. What’s the flip side of Paul’s list? If we are to avoid these people, what kind of people should we seek out? What is “good company?” Good company edifies. Encouragement and gratitude are frequently on their lips. They speak the truth, even when it hurts. They refuse to misrepresent their opponents. They seek to honestly represent their opponents position. They are humble; they don’t talk about themselves. They consider their own gifts and abilities with sober judgment. Mostly they forget about themselves and do their work. They are affectionate, easy to please, always ready to make peace. They honor their parents and their elders and give thanks for the many kindnesses of previous generations. They are self-controlled and disciplined; they soberly consider the long view, and they seek to do good to all people. They are faithful, loyal, wise, quick to listen. Fundamentally, they love God, not themselves or money or their own pleasure. Befriend such people. Listen to such people. Seek them out for their wisdom and their stability, so that you can learn to walk wisely in evil days. 

The Lord’s Servant

Now flipping the vice list is only one way to see the kinds of people we are to seek out and listen to. Paul also speaks to this directly in his description of the Lord’s servant.  First, the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome. And here we must make distinctions. Quarreling is not the same as fighting or disagreeing. There is a time for the Lord’s servant to fight. Think of Jesus with Pharisees; he publicly debated them; he intensely disagreed with them. He even called them out and used sharp words to reveal their errors (“brood of vipers,” “white-washed tombs,” “hypocrites”). And Jesus was not quarrelsome. So also with Paul. He forcefully refuted the Judaizers. He opposed those he called “mutilators of the flesh” who were enslaved to their bodily appetites. Even in this book, he has called out his opponents and their error by name. And Paul was not quarrelsome. 

The Lord’s servant must be ready to fight. He must be willing to fight. But he must not love fighting so much that he rejects peace. That’s quarrelsome. He must not always be looking for a fight, or breeding fights. Instead, the Lord’s servant is willing to fight when necessary, but is eager to find common ground and agreement where possible. Quarreling also involves being impulsive and reactive, flying off the handle, unable to dial things back. The Lord’s servant is looking to de-escalate if possible. And he has a sense of proportion. He knows when he needs to use a scalpel and when he needs to amputate, when it’s time for a soft word, and when he needs to drop a hammer. The quarrelsome man only knows how to escalate, and his attitude is “Ready, Fire, Aim.”

Additionally, the Lord’s servant must be kind to all, including his opponents. And again we must distinguish. Kindness does not equal niceness. Jesus was kind to the Pharisees, and he called them white-washed tombs. But our opposition to other people must be motivated by a desire for their ultimate good, and we must always be on the lookout for signs of hope, as opposed to hoping that they stay stuck in their error. 

The Lord’s servant must be able to teach. This means he aims to bring clarity to complexity, to define and describe issues in such a way that people understand better what we are even talking about. And this ability to teach goes hand in hand with kindness. The Lord’s servant first seeks to represent his opponents in a way that they will embrace; he will define and describe their position accurately. And then he will bring clarity about their error. He will unload with both barrels of truth in his refutation, but only after he has done the hard work of describing their positions.

And while doing this, he must have a thick skin. People will say false and evil things about him. He will be slandered. His reputation will be assaulted. He must not take it personally. He must patiently endure evil. In fact, according to Jesus, he ought to rejoice when slandered, and continue to show kindness and bring clarity in the heat of the controversy.

Finally, he must correct with gentleness. Notice: he is correcting. He is saying, “You are wrong. That’s false. That’s error. This is the truth. This is the right way to think and act.” But he’s doing so with gentleness, tenderness, and humility. This means that he’s self-aware and self-controlled. He is measured in his responses. He doesn’t react; he responds. He listens and then instructs. And his gentleness may, at times, have a bite to it, as it did for Jesus and Paul. And I think it is important to see where this kind of measured correction comes from. It comes from recognizing that he is not God. The Lord’s servant is not the Lord.

Notice what Paul says. Ultimately, God is the one who grants repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth. Changing the human mind and heart is a work of God, not man. The Lord’s servant teaches and corrects, but he knows that ultimately God is the one who changes the heart. He knows that he is in the midst of spiritual warfare. His opponents have been captured by the devil. There are dark powers at work in the midst of these controversies and conflicts. And the only way that people will come to their senses is if God acts. And God frequently chooses to act through the patient, kind, gentle correction and instruction of his servants. The Lord’s servant knows that he is in an instrument in God’s hands. He is the scalpel, not the surgeon. And so he seeks to be the best scalpel possible. He doesn’t blunt himself by being quarrelsome. He doesn’t allow the rust of love of money and pride and recklessness to stick to him. Instead, he loves God (not himself) and his sovereign grace, and he knows his role in the story that God is telling. 

The Lord’s servant knows that his fundamental role is to point to the Servant of the Lord. Which brings us to the Table.

The Table

This Table is the Table of the Servant of the Lord. The Lord Jesus was not quarrelsome, but kind to everyone, including the opponents that he righteously opposed. He was able to teach and instruct others, bringing clarity to confusion, and cutting right to the heart of the issue and exposing the hearts of men. He corrected his opponents with gentlenessAnd he patiently endured evil. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. And he was more than just a servant of the Lord. He was THE Servant of the Lord. He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and by his wounds we are healed. By his wounds we are delivered from the snare of the devil. By his wounds we can return to God in repentance and humble trust.