True Godliness Found in Eating, Drinking and Being Merry

I'll get us to turn to one Timothy, and we're going to read from chapter three verse 14 through to chapter four verse five. One Timothy three verse 14. As we continue our series on the first letter to Timothy, hear these words. Paul writes to Timothy, "I hope to come to you soon. But I am writing these things to you, so that if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth. Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness. He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory."

"Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. For it is made holy by the word of God and prayer." So far, our reading. On this Palm Sunday, as Christians, we use to commemorate and to appreciate the kingly authority of Jesus who came into Jerusalem on his way to the cross.

As we celebrate that thought, that concept of King Jesus, we read this morning of God's desire for His people to be merry people, to eat, to drink and to be merry. Yet many of us, woohoo, someone said in the back. Yeah. Yet many of us, if we're sort of honest and if we've been Christians perhaps for a little while, may not be so comfortable with that word "merry". We're okay with eating, we're okay with drinking, but perhaps not the word "merry".

Because for many of us, we might eat and drink in shame. We eat and drink with guilt. And yet our passage is saying that Christians of all people should be the most proud and unashamed about enjoying these things. If I had spoken and used the word "joy", perhaps then we would have thought of the inner graces of the Holy Spirit's work, the fruit of joy in which He brings out in us. But to be merry reminds us of all the excesses of the hedonistic lifestyle we see on our TV screens, that we hear about in our lunchrooms, and perhaps even chastise ourselves over after a weekend with our mates.

But to be merry, Scripture will tell us this morning, is actually to be godly. How can I say that? Well, in our passage this morning, we come to it after Paul has talked a lot about godliness in the church, particularly in the immediate context, as Tony preached last week and I the week before, godly leadership. And Paul says, as he comes to this passage after talking about elders and deacons, Paul says, "No matter how good your elders are, no matter how orderly the house of God is, there will come a time where people will depart from the faith and devote themselves, verse one, to deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons." And what will these so-called teachers teach?

Will they deny the virgin birth? Will they confuse the deity of Christ? Will they reject the authority of Scripture as God-inspired truth? Well, perhaps they may. But the thing that Paul has sensed the Holy Spirit saying, the thing that he has led to give specific attention to, is the teaching of these people summarised in verse three, that they forbid marriage and require abstinence from food.

In other words, these teachers will deny people the enjoyment of sexual relations and prevent them from eating a rich variety of food that God has given them. These demonic teachings will sprout within the church when people start putting an emphasis on the things that don't matter and overlook the things that matter most. Paul says these teachers are liars whose consciences have been seared. Now there is debate or different understandings of this word being used here. Some commentators suggest that it's an image of someone's conscience which has been so burned, like skin burnt in a flame, that they have lost all sensitivity.

Their conscience, therefore, is hardened against the truth of God, and they lose all sense of understanding what is right from what is wrong. Others suggest that being seared points to the practice of slave owners, who used to brand their slaves with red-hot irons to mark them as their property. So that when Paul is speaking of these men, these teachers, as being seared, he is saying that they walk around with a giant "S" on their foreheads, branded in their slavery to Satan. In either case, the understanding is clear that these teachers were hardened against the truth and were slaves of the lies of Satan. Now, while we look at the content of their teaching, let's be careful not to get hung up on the where, or rather the when, of finding these people.

Paul says that this teaching will be given in the later times, verse one says. And I know that many here will think of it speaking of the time just before Christ's return, the dispensational end times. But if you know your church history, you will recognise that within only a single generation of Paul having written these words, a man by the name of Marcion of Sinope founded a movement within the Christian church called Marcionism, an influential teaching that denied the physical body of Christ, that said that the God of the Old Testament was an evil God that had to be conquered by the good God of the New Testament, and called Christians to a strict lifestyle away from the evils of the physical world, marked by a severe asceticism, a discipline that caused people to reject things that were seen as indulgent, like rich food, like sex within marriage. In other words, within a single generation, the early church was thrown into heresy on the teaching of how Christians should view the very things that Paul is talking about here. And so when we read "later times", don't be confused.

The later times mentioned here has existed from the establishment of the church and I will warn you, will continue until the Lord Jesus returns. Now, what is vitally important to understand is the context in which Paul gives this strong refutation of the teaching. We started by reading the final verses of chapter three. After Paul has listed, like I said, the qualities of good leadership, godly leadership within the church, Paul transitions and he goes into chapter three verse 14. And he says, "Here are my instructions to you, Timothy, that you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which Paul says, is the church of the living God, a pillar and a buttress of the truth." In fact, many experts, many scholars will say that we find the purpose statement of the entire letter of First Timothy right here.

The reason we have this letter is to explain how we are to live in the household of God, the church of the living God. Paul qualifies this household and says that in the centre of this household is a treasure of immeasurable worth, an object of priceless value, and that treasure is the truth, he says. The church is the pillar and the buttress of the truth. Now, take note of that statement. The image being built here is of a sturdy structure that houses, that secures incredible wealth, like a pillar that holds up a roof, like a buttress or a foundation that supports the entire structure. So the church secures the truth.

Now, as we've seen earlier, Paul has identified, Paul has defined this truth as the gospel of Jesus Christ. William Mounts, in his commentary, says that the idea that the church is a pillar and a buttress of the truth means not so much that the church is the thing that is protected by the gospel. Amazingly, the gospel is protected by the church. That sounds risky, but it's very significant. God has given the responsibility to all of us to defend, to protect the truth.

And it makes sense within the context of all that Paul has been writing to Timothy so far. Paul's instructions about, firstly, how the law works in chapter one, what grace is, Paul's telling of his conversion story, the false teachers that he's rejecting, the scope of salvation, men and women in church leadership, elders, deacons, all have this one focus: to preserve the integrity of the gospel message. And then, in order to emphasise the significance of this gospel, to stress the importance of the church's mission, Paul cites part of an ancient hymn that was probably known by the Ephesian church in verse 16. "Great indeed," he writes, "we confess, is the mystery of godliness. He who is Christ was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory."

This ancient hymn, as we heard on Thursday night at our Reformatio class, is an early confession. An early confession that proclaims two things. Firstly, the work of Christ, that He was God incarnate, that He died and was raised by the Spirit, and that He ascended to glory on His throne. Then it describes the ensuing obligations of the church, which is to preach the gospel to the nations, that the world may believe, and so that Christ may receive the glory that He deserves from those people. In other words, true godliness is found in the face of Christ.

Both a true and a right belief of who He is, and then, perhaps surprisingly, as Paul moves into chapter four, not simply the right confession, but the right behaviour of Christians. So immediately after this confession, Paul moves towards what the church ought to do, from confession to conduct. And perhaps then, not so unsurprisingly, if you think about it, Paul says a person's godliness is found in the way they treat the simple things. Specifically, things like sex and food. Now immediately after talking about these things, Paul is starting to say that true godliness is found when we live under the smile of God's providence.

Because Paul says, to reject what a good creator has made good is to reject the creator. And that is the opposite of good. That is wrong. The late Baptist preacher Haddon Robinson tells the story of a time when he and his wife had some dinner guests over, and one of these guests was a so-called nutrition expert. When Robinson's wife brought out the mashed potato, the guest pushed the mash to the side and said that since these potatoes had been peeled, they had lost all their nutritious power because the vitamins are in the skins.

When the roast beef came out, he remarked that the meat was overcooked and all the important minerals in the juices had been lost. And when a freshly baked slice of bread was passed to him, he asked if the flour had been stone ground, and it had not. So he replied, "Well, I may as well be eating baked sawdust." The man seemingly went home hungry that night. But Robinson said that by the end of the evening, he would have been more than happy to have fed that man a knuckle sandwich.

We know that feeling of giving a good and a gracious gift for it to be rejected by ungrateful people. Nothing stings quite as painfully as a nose turned up at an attempt of love. And so it is, Paul says, that the person who looks at the gifts of God and turns them into something evil, things always intended for good, well, they slight the character of God and they humiliate Him to His face. Yet, we also know that Scripture tells us that a life spent pursuing those gifts is also not real life either. And perhaps it's wise for us to take stock of that truth as we hear this truth this morning, in a way that only Martin Luther could put it.

He said, "Human nature is like a drunk peasant. Lift him onto the saddle on one side and watch him topple over on the other." Human nature has a way of pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other, and the danger is that we may hear Paul's words this morning and think that gives us licence for hedonism, the things that plague Australian society so much. We know, don't we, that you can have all the wine, all the women, all the waffles in the world and still not be happy.

The great delusion that every generation toys with is that life can be fuller when you have more. But Jesus tells us that life does not consist of the abundance of things that we possess. In fact, Jesus says in Luke 9, you can gain the whole world and lose your soul. Therefore, the millionaire in his mansion on the canals of the Gold Coast is not necessarily happier than the person in a one-room apartment in the Western Suburbs. The married person is not necessarily happier than the one who is single.

A person can eat and drink champagne and lobster and die in misery. And so the wise Christian understands that the gifts God intended for good can easily become a curse. So then, what's the remedy? Is it to deny, as these Ephesian teachers were apparently doing, that these gifts are good? Is it to reject them as bad and despising them?

No. Do we get rid of them? No. Paul says that the right enjoyment of those gifts is found in receiving them consciously from the hand of a good God. They are to be received, Paul says, with thanksgiving.

So that when you truly know that God is the source of all that you possess, you gain mastery over those gifts and you may enjoy them properly. Nothing is to be rejected, Paul says in verse four, if it is received with thanksgiving. For he says, it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. Ask yourself, what makes a heart thankful? Is a person thankful when they have a sense of feeling of gratitude?

Is being thankful having a sense of enjoyment in that gift? Well, we've all seen people who are very cheerful, very grateful even when they receive something nice. Who hasn't seen that boy that receives a gift on Christmas and they're really chuffed, but they notice that they haven't been particularly thankful. Something seems missing when they receive that gift. They are happy, they are very excited, but you realise that they have never connected that gift to their parents.

Their enjoyment of the gift was never tied to their enjoyment in the love of their parents. And so a child can focus all their enjoyment on that gift and entirely forget a dad who worked long hours to afford that bike. And so we know that a cheerful heart does not necessarily equate to thankfulness. So then what does it mean to receive these gifts with thanksgiving? Well, it's tied to what Paul says in verse five, that the gift is made holy by the word of God and prayer.

A gift is sanctified, the NIV, I think, says. A gift is lifted up above the mundane and it is seen in a different light. And this is done where there is a recognition that this has come from the hand of God who has firstly spoken something over this gift through His word and has been responded to by prayer. The power of thankfulness, therefore, doesn't lie in a grateful heart, but in a sensitive one. A heart that notices, that senses the hand of God in everything it receives.

James 1:17 famously says that "every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father". It's significant that James' statement invokes the nature of God as Father, when speaking about these good gifts. And it corresponds exactly to how Jesus taught us about who God is as well. Jesus once taught his disciples and said, "Consider the birds. Consider the lilies.

They neither sow nor reap. They neither toil nor spin. Yet the Father provides for them all. And are you, His children, not more precious than birds or flowers? Don't get lost chasing after all these things for, Jesus says, all the nations of the world seek after these things, but your Father already knows you need them."

The revolutionary teaching of Jesus is that God is our Father. And He's a Father who doesn't dabble in the occasional miracle. Every little thing is a gift of God. Every bit of clothing, every bit of food. And what Jesus teaches us about God, the good creator, is that there is nothing normal about the most normal things in life.

That every good thing, no matter how small, is a gift from the heavenly Father. Because He is the origin and the source of all that is good in our lives. Last night, many of us joined together in the festivities of the upcoming marriage of your pastor and pastor's wife to be. And wasn't there something tangibly spiritual about the moment? I've received, last night and this morning, dozens of messages that alluded to this, that somehow thanked me for whatever happened last night.

What did happen last night? Was it because a pastor who's supposed to be a spiritual person was hosting it? Was it because it was held on a church property on its sacred ground? What was it exactly that elevated our hearts and our minds in the midst of the celebration? There are moments in life when you have experienced something good, whether it is good food or good friendship or generous love, and it's been enough to make you think that you have touched heaven for a second.

The goodness of the gift feels supernatural. There is something of the goodness of the experience that thrusts our hearts and our eyes upwards. You know, of all the times that I've heard Christopher Hitchens, the staunchest atheist of his generation, deny God, of all the times, there was one issue that he found the most difficult to explain in merely physical terms. And that was the human heart's ability to appreciate the transcendent.

How do you explain the appreciation of beauty? How do you explain the appreciation of art, of good cuisine, of companionship, and not go beyond a merely physical explanation? One of the most hardened atheists of this past generation could not explain the transcendent nature of good gifts. It's why Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American writer of the nineteenth century, once wrote, "Our creator would never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal." True godliness, Paul says, is found in being sensitive to the fact that we live under the hand of a good and kind creator.

And nothing that God has declared good in His word, and nothing that is received and prayed over with thanks should be rejected. And so we might be surprised by joy to hear this, but of all people, Christians should eat, drink and be merry. Because our hearts have looked rightly from the gift that is good, up towards the One who is transcendent and holy. Our eyes and our souls have moved away from those things toward a good Father with good intentions towards us, and there, we find our greatest joy. I'm going to paraphrase C.S. Lewis here, but he says that humanity's problem with our obsession with food and alcohol and sex is not that we are pleasure-seeking fools, but that we are satisfied with too little.

We find those things and we satisfy ourselves in those things when he says the majesty of God is the most pleasurable thing we will ever experience. We stop short of that. We are fools. We are satisfied too easily. It means then that we should never miss the opportunity to say grace before our meals.

If you don't have a habit of doing that as a family, even by yourself, to say thank you for that sandwich, thank you for that cup of soup, thank you for that Sunday roast. It's time to start that habit. And if you've neglected it, it's time to start again. What about that thought that before or after every moment of intimate union within the marriage? To say thank you for the gift within that marriage.

Receive the gifts with thanksgiving and lift them to the levels of the transcendent because your God loves you in that moment and in that moment, He has shown it to you again. So in closing, true godliness is to recognise firstly, the confession of Jesus Christ that He is the good God who became incarnate. He showed His goodness by the sacrifice of Himself on the cross. He was vindicated by the Spirit. He was watched on by the angels, and then He was taken up in glory.

True godliness is knowing and believing that central truth, a gospel protected by the church, a pillar and a buttress of that gospel. But then secondly, that genuine godliness is put on display for the world to see when Christians gleefully, heartily, merrily enjoy the bounty of God's riches. They do so with full hearts of holy thanksgiving because they've come to know that through the work of Jesus Christ, they have received a God who is their Father. And so, friends, let's eat, let's drink, let's be merry, for our Father has loved giving these gifts to His children. Let's pray.

Father, we thank you that as we come together in this place, that we may recognise, that we may see, that we may touch, that we may believe that the Lord is good. We thank you, Lord, for the abundance of Your gifts. We thank you for the things that you have given specifically for our bodies to enjoy, our health that is tied to it, our nutrition that is tied to it. Oh Lord, but the transcendent awareness of goodness tied to those things as well. Help us, Lord, to heartily and merrily enjoy those things. Help us, Lord, to understand that those things are never the end.

That they always, Lord, point us to the very good giver behind them. Lord, we pray for the way that we juggle those things, that we hold those things well in our lives. We pray, Lord, that we may do this with a trust that the Holy Spirit is with us, will guide us, will steer us. But Lord, help us to be so joyful, so thankful, to have our hearts so full because we have a Father who gives us everything we need and everything we could desire. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.