How Christians Take Care Of Family | We Endure, Pt. 11 | Pastor Jim Jackson

Orchard Church | Pastor Jim Jackson

After reinforcing that Timothy’s gift of teaching God’s word was vital to the life of the church, Paul describes how the Gospel affects relationships by age and gender (1 Tim. 4:11-16). While Timothy was younger than some in the church and had the authority to correct older men, he was to do so with an attitude of respect and care. Correction served with arrogance rarely produces godly change. Timothy was to mentor younger men like an older brother, treat older women like his own mother, and relate to younger women like a sister. As the church is designed like a family, pastors are to counsel and care like a father (John 1:12; Eph. 2:19). Probably being single in his mid-thirties, Timothy had unique challenges as a pastor in a culture that valued age and marriage. Being the most eligible bachelor in the church and knowing sexual temptation, Paul tells him to act with ‘all purity’ (Gr. pas hagneia, ‘in every way clean/chaste’) towards the single women. Because women take verbal and touch cues and men take visual and physical cues, believers are to relate and date like brothers and sisters until marriage. As humans are ‘free information’ beings, sexual availability signals come from behavior, talk, and dress. God designed the marital covenant as the dividing line between sexual expression and sexual restraint (Heb. 13:4).