You are listening to a sermon from River Community Church in Prairieville, Louisiana. Remain standing, if you will, for the reading of God's word from 1 Timothy 6. But as for you, O man of God, flee these things, pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness, Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. I charge you in the presence of God who gives life to all things and of Christ Jesus who in His testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession. to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time. He who is the blessed and only sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see, to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. In his commentary on this section of 1 Timothy, Pastor Phil Reichen opens with a retelling of the U.S. military disaster in Somalia known as Black Hawk Down. You may have seen the movie. He writes, in the armed conflict following the downing of two American Black Hawk helicopters in the streets of Mogadishu, the city became a scene of unimaginable confusion. It was not always clear who was fighting whom. Eventually, military discipline broke down, and it was every unit for itself. When the fighting was over, members of the United States Army walked around the Somali soccer stadium in a daze, trying to figure out what had happened. There are many lessons to be learned from the street fight in Mogadishu. One of the most obvious is that soldiers need to know their rules of engagement, the guidelines that tell them what they can and cannot do in a particular conflict. He then goes on to organize his comments in a series of rules of engagement. And I kind of like that strategy. And so I'm going to do the same with some minor modifications. There will be four points here. First, know when to retreat. Second, pursue resiliency of character. Third, wrestle with what matters. And finally, be obedient and vigilant. But before we dive into these four rules of engagement, I want to remind you again of the militant nature of the Christian life and of Christian ministry. To engage yourself in Christ's mission, to be a disciple of Christ means you are engaged in a constant battle. Paul returns to this theme several times throughout the pastoral epistles, the letters. The reality is we are engaged in a real war, not against flesh and blood, people aren't our enemy, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. This is true for every Christian in every location around the world, but it is especially for those who are active in ministry and who are leaders in the church of the living God. For those of us who are called to be officers, this is deadly, serious, because it is not just our own lives that are on the line. We are responsible for every person in the church that we are called to shepherd. So if the leaders of the church aren't clear on the rules of engagement, if the commanding officers aren't clear on the rules of engagement, how will the soldiers in the trenches operate by them? How will the people in the pew know what to do? If the officers are confused, what hope do the soldiers have? My sermon this morning is therefore first to the leading men of the church, our elders, and then to everyone else who desires to be an effective man or woman of God. If you would be a capable combatant in the Lord's army, these are your marching orders. First, know when to retreat. It seems counterintuitive to say that the first rule of engagement is to run away. It's decidedly un-macho. But Paul has a reason for starting this way in verses 3-10. Indeed, much of the letter he has described the foolish, sinful, destructive character of false teachers and false teaching in the life of the church as being influenced by demonic ideas. They are misguided and unhealthy people, destructive for the life of the church, infecting the whole church with quarrels and dissension and foul suspicions and constant friction and controversy. What is more, they're driven by a carnal love of money rather than a pure contentment in the Lord and a love for his people. Paul's word to Timothy is this, run away from such things. He says, but as for you, O man of God, be different. Flee from these things. Flee controversy. Put as much distance as you can between yourself and the love of money. Fall back to the safe ground of contentment. Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies. You know that they breed quarrels. Instead, devote yourself to the plain teaching of the truth in accordance with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness. Kent Hughes observes, if we desire to be men and women of God, there are times when we must show our back to evil and run as fast as our legs will take us in the other direction. Indeed, such was the character and wisdom of Joseph when he was lured into a compromising position and found himself put in jeopardy by Potiphar's wife. It may have led to a prison stay, but it saved his life and the life of countless others. Similarly, Phil Riken writes, the first thing a soldier needs to know is what dangers to avoid. Good soldiers do not knowingly and carelessly walk into minefields, and neither do mature Christians. So Timothy's first rule of engagement is an order to make a tactical withdrawal. Men, if you find yourself being put into a compromising position with a woman, with a business deal, with a legal situation, or if you find yourself being caught up and pulled into a stupid battle over doctrine, over politics, inside or outside the church, or an interpersonal struggle where you're neither part of the problem nor part of the solution, get your behind out of there. Make a tactical retreat because your strength and vigor are needed elsewhere where the real fight is. Retreat to solid ground, to sound doctrine, to godly fellowship. Don't get caught out of position where you are outmatched and outgunned. Seek the high ground. That brings us to the second point. Pursue resiliency of character. As Rikens says, there's more to avoiding sin than simply beating a hasty retreat. If all we do is run away from one sin, we will likely find ourselves running right into the arms of another. Real growth and godliness means replacing the don'ts with do's. It means getting rid of vices and replacing them with virtues. Or as Paul writes, as for you, a man of God, God flee these things, pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfast, and gentleness. We might insert the word instead. Flee these things and instead pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfast, and gentleness. So even as we put distance between ourselves and the path of folly and heresy, We are to close the distance with another set of things, with Christian virtues, with Christian character qualities, because there is no strength of character without character. Paul uses six words to describe the character of a man of God, and we can divide them into three pairs. The first pair, righteousness and godliness, has to do with our outward behavior. Righteousness here refers to what I call a person's lived righteousness. This is not a righteousness that can save you. This is not the imputed righteousness of Christ. It's the righteousness that proves you are saved. The man who knows God deeply and mature in his faith is upright. He is just, he is fair, he is law-abiding. His relationships and business practices are characterized by moral rectitude. Everything's above board. The man of God is also a godly man. Paul has emphasized godliness throughout the letter. The word refers to the whole of Christian existence as an outworking of the faith in God and in our observable response to his covenant. It represents the summation of Christian piety, including true spiritual affections and true spiritual duties. In other words, a godly man is a man who is serious about the things of God. He's serious and devotes himself to things like worship and prayer and Bible study and generosity and hospitality and service. Together these words cover the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the Christian life. The second pair of words, faith and love, these are words that are attached at the hip in the New Testament. They summarize with hope in 1 Corinthians 13, the core lasting virtues of what it really means to be shaped by the gospel, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. Now, vertically, faith is our trust and dependence on God, our confident in His grace, in His power, in His goodness, in His love, and in His mercy. Faith is not only the means of our justification, the instrument by which we are made righteous in God's sight. Faith is how we are to walk as Christians. Faith is how we are to live as Christians. Faith is how we are to grow as Christians. We live by faith, trusting in God's will and in God's work in our relationships with one another. We've come this far by faith, leaning on the Lord, trusting in his holy word. He's never failed me yet. It's faith. But faith also works itself horizontally as we show ourselves to be faithful and trustworthy in our relationships with one another. A man who knows God's faithfulness and depends on God's faithfulness ought to be a man who is himself faithful. Love, likewise, must be expressed and experienced first in our love for God. We love Him because He first loved us. We love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Can you really be a man or woman of God if that's not true of you? Now this refers to more than just affection for God. This is not just emotional experience. The biblical idea of love refers to primarily a commitment of the affections. We must be committed to God, we must delight in him, and we must seek him in his kingdom and his glory first. Loving God totally, then love is expressed horizontally towards those around us. We love our brothers in Christ as our own family, loving one another as he has loved us, that is, sacrificially. And beyond the walls of the church, we love our neighbor as ourselves. The third pair of words has to do with our need for spiritual resilience. Steadfastness is understood by the word endurance. Equal translation there. It refers to the ability to remain strong and keep going under pressure. The man of God is a man who perseveres under great strain. Regardless of what's happening around him, what he's facing, he keeps putting one foot in front of the other. He keeps going. He's in it for the long haul. Similarly, the word gentleness refers specifically to one's meekness in the face of suffering. Now, meekness refers to strength under control. But here, the Greek word is combined with the word for suffering. So it's strength under control in the face of suffering. The idea is of a man who keeps his cool under pressure, who keeps his head about him while under fire, maintains his calm in the face of disaster. Combined, these words call to mind the resilient character needed by elite soldiers. I had a friend in Texas who served alongside Army Special Forces in counterintelligence. He told me one of the key traits of men who thrive in Special Forces is that they have a remarkable ability to, and I quote, embrace the suck. That means being able to endure and persevere in a very difficult trying situation and kind of like it. In a very uncomfortable situation and kind of enjoy it for a long time and not get tired of it. It means staying vigilant, keeping quiet, accomplishing the mission through the worst of the weather and the most stressful situation. It's needed by snipers who sit somewhere for days without moving. It's needed by infiltration companies who sometimes have to crawl for miles to get into and out of the target area. The same resilience is required of a man of God. Third, wrestle with what matters. Paul writes, fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. Now, both imperatives we find here in verse 12 are related to military or athletic engagements. Fight's obvious. But take hold of means literally to seize, to grip firmly. It's a wrestling sort of word. Recall the patriarch Jacob who wrestled with God so mightily that God had to dislocate the man's hip in order to get him to let go. And even then he didn't let go until God blessed him. That's the sort of taking hold of that Paul's talking about here. Isn't it interesting though? Now Paul tells Timothy to flee needless controversies, quarrels about words and divisions, and yet he tells him to fight the good fight of the faith. Ryken observes there are plenty of bad fights, but there's only one good fight. which is why Paul calls it the good fight. The warfare he has in mind is the defense of the central doctrines of the Christian faith. He means Orthodox Christianity, which Paul has described as the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ. The faith is the body of doctrine about salvation in Christ that was taught by the apostles and is recorded in the pages of the New Testament. This is what Timothy is to fight for. Think about minor doctrinal squabbles and petty quarrels as a chaotic melee in a low swampy battlefield. Everybody's fighting against one another. The fog of war is thick and it's hard to identify friend or foe. Paul's saying, don't fight that way. Don't fight that way. Retreat to the high ground where you can see more clearly. Look for stable footing and make sure the Word of God clearly supports you. Retreat to the one hill worth dying on, the hill of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Point is, godly men are not to be conflict-averse. Being conflict-averse is not a trait of a mature man of God. Rather, godly men are to be strategic about which fights they engage themselves in. They're to focus on the fights that matter the most. Ryken explains there are times when Christians, especially Christian ministers, will have to fight for it. Not that they are belligerent, of course. Paul has just told Timothy to pursue gentleness. But there is a fight to be fought, and every loyal soldier in Christ's army must fight it. As Calvin said, Christ calls all his servants to warfare. Similarly, in the novel Excalibur, Bernard Cornwell writes that a man should love peace, but if he cannot fight with all his heart, then he will not have peace. If a man cannot fight with all his heart, he will not have peace. That brings us to the next verb, to seize. The man of God is to wrestle mightily for eternal life. Paul reminds Timothy, to this you are called and about this you may the good confession and the presence of many witnesses. God has called Timothy and he has called you and me to eternal life. Now in a very real sense, we already are in possession of it. If you are filled with the Holy Spirit, if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, those are the same things, then you have eternal life. But eternal life is also something that we are to strive for, to pursue, to lay hold of and grab a firm handhold on for our future. We literally need to hang on to Jesus Christ for dear life. Like Jacob, we grab a hold of him and we cling on to him until he blesses us with resurrection. Until he blesses us with the life that he has promised us. Until he returns. It is for this that we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. It is for this that Paul sought to gain Christ, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible, I may attain the resurrection of the dead. Not that I have already attained this or I'm already perfect, he continues, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I don't consider that I've already made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. In his last letter to Timothy, Paul will write confidently, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. Henceforth, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day. And not only to me, but to all who have loved his appearing. Do you have this sort of confidence and confident grip on your own eternal life? Do you treat your own salvation and your own perseverance in the faith with this sort of seriousness? Is eternal life this important to you? Men, the Christian life is not a game. Christian ministry is not a game. Paul wasn't fooling around. Timothy wasn't playing something he could turn off when he got too difficult. And neither can you. There's a real war waging, you're really caught up in it, and it's something deadly serious. So stop fooling around. Stop fooling around. The battle isn't gonna go away just because you ignore it. Play the man, step into the fray, and take courage. God is calling you today to equip yourself for the fight of the faith and to get a firm hold on your own eternal life. If you don't do that, that's your fault. Fourth, be obedient and vigilant. Paul writes, I charge you in the presence of God who gives life to all things and of Jesus Christ, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time. Any good soldier, friends, must follow orders. This is no less true for the Christian soldier. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Christians and even Christian leaders who are fundamentally antinomian. That means that they are against the law, or it can mean that they substitute the hard law of God with a law light, such as just love people. The point is that they chafe at the real hard commands of Scripture. It's easy for a person new to God's grace to make this mistake. We're saved by grace and not by works of the law, right? So why do I need to obey the law? How can I live by grace and by faith and still be required to be obedient? Paul provides an in-depth answer to this problem in Romans 6-8, but in summary, what he says and what the Bible teaches us is that God saves us by His grace to deliver us from sin, and in doing so, He gives us the real ability to actually obey. The problem with the law is not that it's not good. The problem with the law is that you're not good. And since you're not good, you can't actually do it without the Holy Spirit's work in you. The gospel does not change the fact that we need to obey God's commands. Rather, the gospel changes the motivation by which we obey God's commands. In Romans 6, 17, Paul writes, thanks be to God that you who once were slaves have become obedient from the heart. to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. In Romans 8, three and four, he says, by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. In a nutshell, what I'm trying to tell you is this. It's not legalism to obey Jesus. It is not legalism to obey Jesus. It's faith. It is maturity. A mature Christian follows orders, and we need to be very, very cautious about questioning or disregarding the commandments of God Most High. Jesus did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, and He calls us to the same. We also need to be vigilant. Vigilance is implied in the exhortation to keep the commandment pure and undefiled. This is a watchword, a guard-keeping word. We are to be sober-minded, watchful, because our enemy, the devil, prowls around like a ravening lion seeking someone to devour. We are on watch duty to make sure the word of God and we ourselves are maintained pure and undefiled. unsullied and blameless. We will have to give account to God Himself for how we handle His commandments and how we handle ourselves. This is especially important because Paul reminds us that Christ is coming back. We are to keep watch until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which He will display at the proper time. Jesus is going to return, my friends. Jesus is going to return. He is going to appear, He will make Himself manifest, and the whole world will see Him. It's just a matter of time. Don't let the apparent delay of the Lord confuse you. Don't let people tell you that in the New Testament, they thought Jesus' return is really close, and then by the end of the writing of the New Testament, they realized it was probably a long way off. I don't think so. The truth is Jesus could return at any moment. It was true then, it's true now. Because Jesus is returning at his time. There is a countdown clock, a doomsday clock ticking. And when Jesus, when it hits zero, Jesus is coming back. He is not slow to fulfill his promises. He is not slow to return because he is patient. And he is not willing that one of his adopted children should perish. The gospel is being extended and proclaimed in all four corners of the earth to every nation under heaven. And when that is completed, then the end will come, Jesus says. So don't allow yourself to be deceived. The day of the Lord will come like a thief and the heavens will pass away with a roar and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Matthew 24.30 says, Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. Matthew 16.37 says, For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. Hebrews 9, 27 and 28 says, And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for Him. The point is, are you going to be ready? You would be man of God. You would be woman of God. Will you be ready? You've heard your marching orders. There's nothing new here that I've told you. You are to flee foolishness. You are to run away from sin. You are to avoid false doctrine. You are to pursue godly, resilient character. You are to fight with all seriousness for what really matters, the faith and eternal life, and you are to remain obedient and watchful over God's word, over yourself, until the return of Jesus Christ. Is this what you are doing? Is this what your life is about? Or are you living by some other rules of engagement? Are you marching to the beat of your own drum rather than keeping a step with the march rhythm of the Lord's army? Keeping a step with the Spirit. Let's pray. Thank you for listening to this sermon from River Community Church in Prairieville, Louisiana, where you will always find biblical preaching, meaningful worship, and the equipping of disciples. For more information on River Community Church and its ministries, please visit rivercommunity.org.