Letters to Timothy: Good Practical Advice – Focus on Character
May 1, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
I Timothy 1:12-17

Today we begin a new sermon series that is about practical wisdom. Paul is writing to Timothy, and we’re not really sure whether Paul actually wrote these letters or whether they were written in his name, which was a fairly common practice in Bible times. People that were part of a school of a rabbi or a leader would write in their name. But he’s writing to Timothy, a young protégé, who was the pastor at Ephesus, which was the second largest city in the Roman Empire.
We’re going to look at that for the next five weeks and look at just some of the practical advice that he gives to this young pastor as he begins his ministry. So would you listen now as we hear the Scripture read here this morning?
¹²I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service,¹³even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief,¹⁴and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.¹⁵The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost.¹⁶But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.¹⁷To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.Amen.
Join me in prayer. O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel and then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
Practical advice. I asked you to send me the best piece of advice you’d ever received and I received some fun ones, some very interesting advice. Here are some of them: “Greed lowers your IQ. You get greedy, you get dumber.” “There are very few problems in life that can’t be solved with a credit card and a positive attitude.” “If someone offers you gum or a mint, take it.” Then there’s this one, which I’ve been pondering a lot, and I think it has deep spiritual meaning. Stephen Tipps sent it to us: “When driving never back up farther than you have to.” That’s logical, but … well anyway, that’s the best piece of advice and worth framing, I think.
So I want to talk about the advice Paul gives to Timothy, it’s given to him as a young pastor. And I want us to work this way through this Scripture, so you can take your bulletin, your insert, and follow along as we kind of work our way through it. I think it gives us some pretty profound truths.
Here’s the first. He begins, “I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service.” The first thing I want you to know is that he judged Paul to be faithful. He didn’t judge him to be successful. His focus was on his character, not on his achievement.
Early last year I was invited to an event in which I was privileged to hear David Brooks, the New York Times columnist speak. He was trumpeting a new book that was coming out. It’s called The Road to Character. I got the book, and it was very frankly the genesis of this whole series. I want to read to you the beginning of it. It’s a little long, but it really moved me. He says, “Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between the resume virtues and eulogy virtues. The resume virtues are the ones you list on your resume, the skills that you bring to the job market that contribute to external success. The eulogy virtues are deeper. They are the virtues that you get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being whether you’re kind, brave, honest, or faithful, what kind of relationships you have formed.
Most of us would say that the eulogy virtues are more important than the resume virtues. But I confess that for long stretches of my life I have spent more time thinking about the latter, than the former. Our education system is certainly oriented around the resume virtues more than the eulogy virtues. Public conversation is, too, the self-help tips in magazines, nonfiction best sellers. Most of us have a clearer strategy for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.
I was born with a natural disposition towards shallowness. I now work as a pundit and a columnist. I am paid to be a narcissistic blowhard, to volley my opinions, to appear more confident about them than I really am, to appear smarter than I really am, to appear better and more authoritative than I really am. I have to work harder than most people to avoid a life of smug superficiality. I’ve also become more aware that like people these days I have lived a life of vague moral aspiration, vaguely wanting to be good, vaguely wanting to serve some larger purpose while lacking a concrete moral vocabulary, a clear understanding of how to live a rich inner life or even a clear knowledge of how character is developed and depth is formed.”
So these resume virtues, we do concentrate on them. We’re sending these seniors off, and we hope that they will develop great resume virtues, that they’ll take the right classes, that they will get good grades so it will go well on their transcript, that they will join the right clubs so that will be on their resume, so they will get the right internships, and that will go on their resume. That way they can get a job.
I have a daughter who’s graduating from the University of Texas with a degree in honors from English and Spanish, and she doesn’t have a job. So if any of you have one, that would like to contact me, please give me a call. Just a matter of personal privilege, it will be on television, too. So those of you watching on live stream, from wherever you are…
So we want them, we focus on resume virtues do we not? But somehow it’s so interesting when we talk about college. It’s like with regard to the character virtues we think we sort of give a pass, like it’s Las Vegas. If it happens in college we think, “Yes, I did that, and it’s terrible, but it was in college.” Like that somehow makes a difference.
I don’t know where that comes from. I think it probably comes from our stupid stories that we tell. But it isn’t true. Because we head off to college, and we’re not just developing resume virtues, but we need to now begin to develop our own set of character virtues, of eulogy virtues. We have to decide what we’re going stand for, who we’re going to be and what matters to us. We need to begin to practice doing what’s right. Perhaps we’re not just beginning that practice, that’s been all through high school as well.
Jimmy Brill gave to his son David, when he left him at college, this word. He said, “Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.” It’s not just about school, it’s about developing a sense of character, about doing what’s right, about those eulogy virtues.
Well, Paul’s writing to Timothy, and he’s explaining what to look for in a leader. When you’re choosing people for your church to help lead what should they be like. Here’s what he says, “They should be above reproach, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money, but not double tongued or greedy.” With the exception of the phrase “an apt teacher” note that it has almost nothing to do with competence, with skill. It’s all about character.
When people come to apply for a job here at the church and I’m interviewing them, I want to know if they’re competent, if they can do the job. That’s not all that hard to figure out – what they’re skills are. Sometimes you miss. What’s much harder to figure out is their character. What kind of people are they? Am I going to be able to trust them? Are they going to tell the truth? Are they going to be loving to the congregation? Are they focused on doing justice? Are they followers of Jesus? These are the things that are at the core.
I don’t know how many of you have been following the Laremy Tunsil debacle. This is very interesting. Laremy Tunsil is graduating from, or rather is leaving, I don’t think he’s graduating from Ole Miss. He’s going to be maybe in the top five of the NFL draft. Some people had him as number one. He’s an offensive tackle. And literally minutes before the draft begins he sends out a Tweet of himself smoking pot. I’m sure his agent was just dying. And then he admits on video that he took money from the Ole Miss coaches to pay the bills. So he drops from maybe number three or four or five down to number 13. It says something about the NFL by the way that he didn’t fall farther than that. He lost at least $10,000,000 because of character. Character matters.
Now this word faithful gives us a very specific way of thinking about character. So remember what David Brooks said. I thought it was so interesting. He said, “I lacked a concrete moral vocabulary.” Well, the Scripture gives us a concrete moral vocabulary and that vocabulary is that we enter into a relationship with the living Christ. The word faithful is a relationship word, isn’t it? So we enter into this relationship with the living Christ, and that Christ lives within us and shapes us from the inside out. We are formed. We are shaped from the inside. Paul writes elsewhere, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”
This book gives us a very specific image of how we are to live, how we are to act. Christ gives us a specific paradigm, a model. Then as we enter into that relationship we are formed by the power of the Holy Spirit, never being there completely, but always being formed to be more like Christ.
At the end of every prayer I suspect most of you say, “In the name of Jesus Christ we pray.” Do we have any clue what that means? The word name in Scripture refers to character. So a name in the Bible is given to someone to demonstrate or to form their character. It’s very much like Native American names were. You could call someone Running Brave, and that indicates they’d be fast and swift. It’s about their character. So when we say “In the name of Jesus” we’re saying, “I’m praying in the character of Jesus. And if this prayer isn’t in the character of Jesus, then I hope you don’t hear it, God.”
I know some people who aren’t Christians who pray in the character of Jesus and some people who are Christians pray not in the character of Jesus. So this is about our character being formed from the inside out – to be like Christ.
The most frequently received piece of advice I got was from those who said someone had said to them, “Remember who you are. Because you’re going off to college, remember who you are. If you’re at work, remember who you are.” Here’s who you are, we read it a minute ago, “Judged to be faithful and appointed to his service.” So now we live into that. That’s who we are. Now we live into that character.
The first thing is that character matters, character, not accomplishment, not achievement, not acquisition, but character matters.
Now here’s the second thing. He says “Even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, a man of violence, I received mercy, because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief. And the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came in the world to sinners of whom I am the foremost.” I can say to these seniors and to all of you that character matters. But you’re going to mess up. You have already and you will again.
People often say to me, “Tom, the thing I like about your preaching is that you’re so transparent. You come down to our level. You’re as bad as the rest of us.” I’m going to tell you something. I am not transparent with you. I’m not. I’m translucent at best. The real brokenness of my life I don’t share with you guys. I’d be ashamed and embarrassed to do so. But I know it’s there. And there are not many days that go by that I don’t think to myself, that I don’t marvel and am deeply humbled that even as I am, God can use even me, even me, full of mistakes and brokenness.
You see, the power of the message is not that my character is so great. The power of the message is that I’m redeemed. I’m redeemed, not rejected. I’ve been chosen by God. And he’s judged me to be faithful. Even though I’m a mess, God is at work in my life. That’s the witness that God is at work in my life and through my life and will be till the end.
I had the privilege a couple of weeks ago of going to the graduation of the Bridges to Life prison ministry at the Stringfellow Unit. The prison was built first in 1908 as a prison farm, and you walk into the building, and you feel like it’s built in 1908. It’s like a caricature of an old style prison. So we gathered in this room, a little chapel. And these men, have spent weeks talking about their crimes, talking about how God had been at work in their lives, talking about the way their crimes made an impact on victims and on their families, and taking responsibility for those crimes, talking about what was going to be different in their lives. I have to say that these men were from young up to their 70s, and it’s profound and moving. One young man just really got me. He was so incredibly articulate. He’s a graduate of the University of Houston, a veteran who served in Afghanistan. We don’t know what his crime was, but afterwards we were having some pizza, and I asked him, “So what do you plan to do?” I wasn’t sure if he was getting out or not. He said, “When I get out I’m going to be a drug counselor at the VA hospital. I’m working at that right now.” That gave me a clue as to maybe what his crime was. I’m going to use what God has done in my life to make a difference in the life of someone else.
I was driving yesterday, and I saw a sign on a church billboard that said, “God can make your mess into a message.” I thought that was pretty good. Like its right there on a sign for me on Saturday before Sunday morning, right there. I’m at the point where I’m saying, “God give me something, give me anything!” Boom! There it was. I got it!
You are redeemed, not rejected. And I’m going to say to these young people that when you make a mistake, and you will, God will never give up on you. God will never give up on you.
The third thing he says is, “For that very reason I received mercy, so that in me as the foremost of sinners Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.”
An example, and the word example there is the word like model. It’s like a picture. Yesterday I put together a Cozy Coupe. You know what that is? Raise your hand if you know what a Cozy Coupe is. I knew some of you would know. It’s a Little Tike’s thing. It’s to be a gift for my grandson. So I dump it out, and it’s all over the place. The parts are everywhere. I could easily pay someone to put this together. Why did not do that? So I decide – okay, let’s get after it. So I looked at the instructions, and they made no sense to me whatsoever. What do you do? You get the box, and you set it there, and it’s got a picture. And you try to put these things in this way, and you look at the instructions, and they still don’t make sense. Then you look back at the box, because it’s a model, a picture.
The word in Greek here literally means a schematic or a design, a model, a picture. It’s translated as example. Here’s the deal. It’s saying that your life is to be a model for what it means to look like as a Christian.
Now we have a tendency to get confused and we have a tendency to mistake being faithful and having character, for being well thought of. To mistake people believing we have character with actually having character. We tend to find ourselves pursuing applause and popularity instead of real character. Because sometimes you have to stand up for what’s right and it’s not popular.
I was reading in the Road to Character book, and it’s full of a lot of biographies, and one of them was of George Marshall, who was a general in the Second World War. He ended up being Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his Marshall Plan after the war. He was not a particularly good student when he was young and ended up going to Virginia Military Institute, VMI, where he says his character was formed. And from that time on he resolved that he would always tell the truth. So he would tell the truth and sometimes it was popular. There’s a story about FDR being in a cabinet meeting with him and FDR said, “Don’t you all think that the next war will be won by air superiority and sea power? And don’t you all agree with that?” And everyone around the table said, “Yes, Mr. President.” Then when he got to George Marshall the president said, “What do you think, George?” And George said, “Well, Mr. President, I’m sorry but you’re wrong.” It comes to be a time when you just have to say what the truth is.
One of the pieces of advice someone sent me was this one. It says, “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the right thing is to tell the truth.” That led to a great discussion about what was that one thing out of a hundred times was. But then he said, “The truth may hurt, but even so it’s still the truth.”
So you might say to yourself, “Look, I don’t’ want to be an example for anybody. My life isn’t that good. I don’t want to be an example for anybody.” Friends, you don’t have a choice. You bear the name of Christ. You bear the name of Christ. People will look at you and say, “So that’s what a Christian is.” It’s like those celebrities that say, “I don’t want to be a role model.” Well, too bad. You are a role model. That’s the way it is. And you are, too. And you may say to yourself, “I’m not trying to convince anyone to live like me. Don’t look at me.” Too bad. You are a role model. People are going to look at you. They’re going to say, “That’s what a Christian is.” So character matters all the more.
The last thing is he says, “To God be the glory, to the king of the ages, immortal, invisible…” We sang a hymn about that just a minute ago, “…to the only God be honor and glory forever and ever.”
I’ve loved following the Rockets. It’s such a bummer to see them not do well and get beat. The only good news is that they got beat by Golden State, the best team like ever. And Stephen Curry – it’s hard not to like the guy. Here’s the deal with him. He played for a small Christian high school, so Virginia Tech, who he wanted to go to, wouldn’t look at him. So he went to Davidson, a small liberal arts school. There he ran across a coach who was interested in not just developing basketball but character. And his walk with Christ began to flourish.
Here’s what he wrote recently, “The Holy Spirit is moving through our locker room in a way I’ve never experienced before. It’s allowing us to reach a lot of people. And personally I’m just trying to use this stage to share how God has been a blessing in my life and how he can be the same in everyone else’s. God’s given me talents to play basketball for a living, but I still have to work hard to improve every day. I know that in the grand scheme of things this is just a game that can be taken from me at any moment, but I love that basketball gives me the opportunity to do good things for people and to point them towards the man who died for our sins on the cross. I know I have a place in heaven waiting for me because of him. And that’s something no earthly prize or trophy could ever top. There’s more to me than just this jersey I wear. And that’s Christ living inside me.”
So here’s my practical advice to all of us, to our seniors. Don’t focus on achievement. Don’t focus on accomplishment. Don’t focus on applause or accolades. Don’t focus on acquisition. Focus on character. “You have been judged to be faithful and called into God’s service.” So remember who you are.
Let’s pray together. Lord God, we confess that sometimes we focus on the wrong things. We get drawn into these resume virtues that we pursue with all our hearts and minds and souls and we ignore those eulogy virtues. Forgive us, God. Remind us that you have judged us to be faithful and that we have not just a vague desire to be good but draw out of us a desire to be just like your Son Jesus Christ, who died for us and who lives within us. In whose name we pray, Amen.