Timothy's Thoughts

“ G odliness with contentment is great gain,” Paul told Timothy. Most people turn that around, believing that if they can gain a lot then they must be godly. I work in a corporate environment and all most people care about is what other people can do to help them advance their careers. That takes priority over the product. If producing a good product will advance their career, they’ll produce a good product, but what they really want is to advance their career. There are times that it’s hard to stay content in that kind of environment. People are always asking what you’re doing to advance your career or why you haven’t reached some level in your career. But I can’t help but think that another statement by Paul is very true in the corporate world as well. “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” Paul is referring to the fact that we can take nothing we gain in this world into the next, but there is some truth to that in the corporate world ...

“ D o you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?” It’s a question we might ask a person we’re trying to share the gospel with, but would you believe there is a bad connotation to the concept of “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?” In some evangelical circles, the personal relationship with Jesus Christ is viewed as the highest form of the Christian life. In other words, a person has a personal relationship with Jesus and they need nothing else. Jesus talks directly to them, so nothing could be better, right? Wrong. The problem is that most elevated relationship in the Bible is that of Jesus and the church, not Jesus and the individual. I’m sure that at this point, some of you are thinking I’m grasping at straws. After all, isn’t it true that all saved people are part of the church automatically and so the only thing we need to strive for is the personal relationship? No, that isn’t true. Aside from a few passages that could be taken either way, all of the references ...

O n my way to work one morning, I happened to hear John MacArthur on the radio talking about the importance of the church. In particular, he was talking about the local church, not the big invisible body of believes that some people believe everyone who has been saved is a member of. He got off on things like church membership and lettering members from one church to another, baptism and the Lord’s supper, all of which he is for. I won’t repeat all he said, but he also got off on the issue of parachurch organizations, which is any faith-based organization that works outside the church and/or across denominational lines and engage in social welfare and evangelism efforts. Perhaps to my shame, this is a topic I’ve avoided. This is partly because I have friends who either currently or sometime in their past worked for one of these organizations. It’s a difficult situation to be in when you end up saying something against the organization a friend works for, especially when it has the ap...

I was listening to Dr. Tony Evans the other day and he had a view of 1 Corinthians 11 that I thought was interesting. You recall that this passage talks about the relationship between men and women, but it gets off into this thing about long hair and short hair. I’ve heard some people say that Paul was dealing with the customs of his day so some of what he said might not have the same application today. I’ve never liked that idea because it opens the door for us to ask how much of the rest of the Bible doesn’t apply to us today. Dr. Evans made the point that this dealing with the man being created before the woman. The woman was created to help the man. The woman is there to fill in the gap of what is missing in the man. Dr. Evans says that is why Paul gets off on hair. The man has short hair and often has a whole lot less of it, but the woman has long beautiful hair. She makes up for what the man lacks in looks. What the man lacks in other areas of life, if wife makes up. It remi...

H ave you ever thought about why the world is round instead of some other shape, like flat or square? I hadn’t really given it much thought, but I found a very strong spherical magnet the other day. It had some metal filings on it. The magnet was about the size of a ball bearing. How do you get metal filings off a round magnet? I tried wiping them off with my finger and then with a tissue, but I succeeded only in pushing them around to the other side. It made me think. Isn’t that what happens at a much larger scale with our world? There are things that try to wipe us out, like storms or famine or extreme heat or cold. Flood and fires come, but what do we do? We stay here affixed to our planet, but we might move around to a safer location. The shape of our planet keeps us from being wiped off into space. I did eventually solve my problem. It turns out that the magnetic bonds of the molecules in Scotch tape are stronger than the magnet I found. By rolling the magnet across the tape, ...

H ow easy it is to say something wrong. The other day, someone asked me a question and I gave an answer, but after she walked away I thought about what I had said and realized that I hadn’t given her the correct answer. It wasn’t an important question. She was asking it more as small talk than anything else. This particular person picks up the trash where I work, so she speaks to many people throughout the day. Now suppose she repeats what I said. That person will also have the wrong information. That information could spread, simply because I misspoke. We all know that gossip is wrong. We’ve heard that all our lives and yet there are so many people who engage in it. I think what happens is that people don’t see what they are doing as gossip—they’re just repeating information someone else gave them. Of course, we all know that gossip is talking about the personal details of other people’s lives. The danger in gossip isn’t so much that we’re talking about people as much as it is so ea...

I saw an interesting statistic. In 2010, there were an estimated 1.8 million single fathers. That in itself isn’t particularly interesting until you consider that the same source estimated that there were 70.1 million fathers in the United States. I realize there are problems in the American home and many marriages fail, but the fact that of 70.1 million fathers, less then 3% are considered single fathers ought to tell us something about the value people place on marriage. To be fair, I think the statistics left “common law” marriages out of the single dad figure, but the fact is that people still place value on a man and a woman raising children together. Maybe they’re confused about the need for people to get married and stay married, but they believe that children need the influence of both women and men.

W e get upset about some of the dumbest things. I was once told about a man who worked in an area where the janitors didn’t go in to collect the trash, so the people in that area would have to carry their trashcans out and set them outside the door for the janitor to dumb. This man, apparently newly hired to work in the area, came into work one morning and saw all of the trashcans sitting outside the door. Trying to be nice, he collected them all and put them back beside the desks. When his coworkers came in, some were furious. It so happens that in that area there were round trashcans and square trashcans. Only the higher salary grade people were supposed to have the square trashcans and the lower salary grade people were to have the round trashcans. I’m sure the lower salary grade people didn’t mind getting the square trashcans, but the higher salary grade people who ended up with the round trashcans were very upset. As silly as that sounds, it was told as a true story. The work en...

T here’s a difference between nice people and good people. Often, when people say that a person is a good person, what they actually mean is that they are nice people. A lot of people are friendly. A lot of people will do nice things for you. It wouldn’t surprise you if someone said they visited an unmarried couple who are living in the same house and while visiting them he had an enjoyable time talking to them over a delicious meal. And yet, the Bible tells us that the lifestyle of these people is not good. In fact, it tells us that fornicators don’t go to heaven. The sad truth is that there are a lot of nice people who are on their way to hell. The day will come when they will stand before God and all they will have to show for a reason for him to let them into heaven is that they were nice people. They will have done nice things for other people. But God will look at them and tell them that the requirement isn’t that they be nice, but that they be good. We like nice people and w...

S ome homosexual activists sat down with some Baptist leaders the other day and demanded that they apologize for what Baptists teach about homosexuality. The meeting went about like you would expect. It was cordial on both sides. The homosexuals questioned by the Baptists would apologize about what they had once taught about non-Caucasian races and the Baptists essentially told them that they were only teaching what the Bible says. They can’t change what the Bible says because they didn’t write it. When you consider this issue, the difference between what many Baptists once taught about the various races and what they are teaching about homosexuality is that the racial lines were drawn on the color of a man’s skin, which he is born with and cannot control. On the other hand, what the Bible says about homosexuality is always about the actions. If you define homosexuality as being attracted to someone of the same gender, then it is no sin and any Baptist who is worthy of calling himsel...

T he Bible says that it rains on the just and the unjust. But that doesn’t mean that you get rain whether you are just or unjust. Consider how God stopped the rain for three and a half years because of sin. Or consider the great flood. The whole world got wet, but Noah and his family stayed dry. But here’s the thing, if a just person prays for rain and God sends it, his unjust neighbors are going to get part of that rain. You won’t see a selective cloud that dumps rain on just one house. I won’t got out of my way to stretch this thought more than I should, but if you want to be blessed, hang out with the people God blesses. When their cup runs over, you’ll get the overflow.

I t’s taboo in writing circles to call writing a hobby. Needless to say, I’ve upset a few people in writing circles, but frankly, I’m not overly concerned because I think there are a lot of writer types who think too highly of themselves. What is wrong with calling writing a hobby? I think the reason it is taboo is because so many people attend writer conferences and hear the so called experts tell them that they should view it as a business rather than a hobby. For tax purposes and expense purposes, I totally agree, but the reality of the situation is that if writing is a business, most writers are pretty lousy businessmen. It takes about three months to write a novel. The author then takes the manuscript and sends it off to a bunch of people, usually only to receive a rejection letter from some and no feedback at all from most. After having had the manuscript rejected, the typical author sits down and writes another and then another. After doing this a few times, a few of them actu...

I read an article the other day in which the writer talk about how he had once prayed for $500, thinking that was about all God could give him at that time, but he went to a conference and heard a man talking about praying for the impossible, like a cure for cancer in his lifetime. Since that time, great strides have been made toward a cure for cancer. The thing is, if we truly believe that nothing is impossible for God, why aren’t we praying for bigger things? By that, I don’t mean that we should be greedy with our prayers and pray for the new Porsche when the used Impala will do. And while it is good to pray for peace in Jerusalem and world peace and freedom to preach the gospel in China—all of which the Lord can do in his time—I question why we aren’t applying this principle to things a little closer to home. How often do we sit around talking about why God doesn’t answer our prayers rather than being confident when we go to him? If we know we are asking amiss, that is one thin...

I ’ve heard my pastor say that if there wasn’t a sermon preached, a song sung, or a class taught that he would want to be at church, just for the fellowship. I believe he is sincere in what he says and of course, our church always has sermons from the word of God and good singing, but I wonder how many people across America do exactly that. How many people attend church because they want the fellowship rather than because they desire to hear the gospel preached? We’ve conditioned ourselves to think otherwise. We accuse people of going to the lake or going to the ballgame instead of attending church. We’re critical of people—and rightly so—when they schedule their family gatherings on Sunday and go to those rather than attending church. But we’ve conditioned ourselves to think that people wouldn’t attend church just because it is fun. After all, aren’t there more entertaining things to do than go to church? Why, some churches even mimic those activities because they don’t believe they...

M egan Basham recently wrote an article about "gay marriage" supporters targeting employers and employees . As I read the article and saw how gay activists are expressing their dislike for the decisions that some organizations are making and it is resulting in change in their favor I began to think, “Isn’t that what Christians have been doing for years?” Over the years, there have been many boycotts by Christians because of something a companies are doing. I was a kid when there was a boycott on Walden Books because they were selling pornography. It wasn’t that long ago that there was a boycott on Wal-mart for supporting homosexuality. Target was boycotted because they wouldn’t let the Salvation Army bell ringers stand in front of their buildings. And then there was all this stuff about Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays . That fact is, we may not like what the gays stand for and we may not understand why a group that represents less than two percent of the population...

“ N o more clothing” was the gist of a post I saw on Facebook. It came from an organization that had been collecting clothing for the people in Joplin, but they had reached the point that they had more clothes than they had time to sort through. Granted, it was a small organization with limited volunteer labor, but it got me to thinking. What are we doing making people sort clothing after a disaster? Think about it. When a disaster strikes a call goes out for donations. Often, it doesn’t come from the people involved in the disaster as much as it comes from people who want to help. But then they run to their closets and pull out all the stuff that is too small, too large, or out of style. It’s the stuff they were saving for the next yard sale or the stuff they were going to give to Goodwill, but they hadn’t gotten around to it. All of that is loaded into boxes and shipped to the disaster area. Once there, someone has to go through those boxes, throwing away the junk and arranging the...

S ummer is upon us and that means that ‘tis the season for church camp and summer mission trips and lots of other things. For those of us that aren’t going, that means there are probably people asking us for money to send them on their way. If you know me, you know that I’m willing to support a worthy cause. My problem is that I can’t afford to support everyone who wants money for camp or to go on a mission trip or whatever cause they have. I don’t want to say that I won’t support anyone or anything, so it comes down to a question of which I should support and which I shouldn’t. When I look at church camp, I have no doubt that it is a worthy cause. I’ve heard many stories of kids going off to church camp and getting saved. Sometimes it takes getting them away from a familiar environment or immersing them in the gospel for a few days to get them to hear what we’ve been trying to tell them for a long time. So I’m happy to give if it will help kids go to came who wouldn’t otherwise go t...

S ome years ago, I was a music director. It was a small church and an unpaid position, but I took my job seriously. It was during the heat of the contemporary vs. traditional music debate and I had it in my head that if we could just get some newer music into the church services we would see growth. Being the young man that I was, I had this vision of singlehandedly turning that church around and I was going to do it through the music ministry. In my mind, I saw hundreds of people deciding to attend our church because our music was the kind of music they enjoyed. I look back now and laugh at that, not because I’m against churches using more contemporary music, but because I see now that the music program won’t provide sustainable growth for a church. I won’t say that some people don’t consider what kind of music the church has when they consider a church, but I’ve realized that if a church is going to look like what the Lord wants a church to look like, the church members are going t...

A poll shows that most Americans view homosexuality, fornication, and having a baby outside of marriage as morally acceptable, but they see abortion, pornography, and adultery as wrong. I could have told them that without doing a poll. The poll simply confirms what most of us already knew. But why the split? My hypothesis is that Americans draw a line between what we do to ourselves and what we do to others. Abortion is wrong because it kills a baby. Adultery is wrong because it unfaithful to the spouse. Pornography is wrong because it often includes images of children who have no control over what is being done to them, not to mention the fact that many people waste their employer’s money looking at it. But when people look at homosexuality, and fornication, I suspect that they think that what two consenting adults do in their spare time is up to them as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone who didn’t consent to it. Something that supports that idea is that I’ve had people tell me that t...

C ompared to the rest of the world, most Americans are wealthy, but the funny thing about wealth is that those who are wealthy seldom realize they are wealthy. We’re always looking at those who have more than us. If we have two cars, we’re looking at those who have three cars and a boat, not realizing that some people can’t even afford one car. One of the things that adds to the problem is that people look at the bills they have each month and wonder how they will pay them. It’s hard to feel wealthy when your bank account is empty at the end of the month. But we’re wealthy. And Christians more so. Christians are heirs to the wealth of God and he owns everything. Unfortunately, some prosperity preachers have tried to tell people that that means God wants them to have a lot of money. I think a better way to look at it is that we have a trust fund of immeasurable value. It is ours, but God is holding it for us so that we don’t use it the wrong way. Since you are wealthy, wouldn’t you ...

S everal years ago, I bought a cantaloupe. It was juicy and sweet, so I saved the seeds. I planted a few, with some success, but most went into a plastic bag and the bag went into the freezer. A decade passed, as they do, and I found that I had not only a bag full of those seeds, but a bag of acorn squash seeds and several small packets of seeds of various kinds that I had collected over the years. Because they were so old, I didn’t expect any of them to grow and they were just taking up space, so I dumped them—some in the garden and some in the compost pile. It was hundreds of seeds. They came up. Not all of them or even most of them, but I looked the other day and I have young cantaloupe and squash plants growing. I would say I have about twenty-five or so. Seeds amaze me. If you’re looking for a miracle, look at seeds. They can lie there looking dead for many years. So much water passes under the bridge. Life happens. The world changes. And then, you drop them on the ground and le...

T here is a thing that is bothering me. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but many young people aren’t taking on the responsibility of adulthood. I’m taking it out of context to use it this way, but I am reminded of I Corinthians 13:11, “Whan I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” A preacher friend, Bro. Fox, once quoted that verse to me. He and his wife were like a third set of grandparents to us and I learned a great deal about leadership and Christian service from him. I look around and I see young men—and perhaps the young women are worse than the young men—who have failed to mature, as they ought. They reach the age of eighteen, head off to college and instead of taking on the responsibility like they should, it is just like high school without parental supervision. I heard a man that I would guess is in his forties say, “Don’t call me Mr. Smith; that’s my father.” Literary agent Rach...