Timothy's Thoughts

M arriage licenses have been around since before I was born, so growing up, it seemed to me that a marriage license was just one of those things that people had to get, if they wanted to get married. I didn’t give much thought to why it was required. I remember hearing a story about a preacher who had conducted a wedding and sent the happy couple on their way before he realized he’d forgotten to have them sign the license. So, he chased after them, presumably so they wouldn’t be living in sin. But recent events have made me question, what is the purpose of that piece of paper? When you think about it, a marriage license serves no purpose in getting people married. The purpose of the marriage license is to prevent people from getting married. The state requires people to have a license to get married, so if a man walks into the office with his sister and says, “We want to get married,” the state says, “no, we don’t issue licenses for that.” Now the reason the state doesn’t issue license...

R ecently, we’ve been seeing a lot of the hashtag #lovewins. We know that love wins, but what does that look like? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not parish but have everlasting life.” That’s what it looks like coming from God, but what does it look like coming from us? Jesus died for the gay man as much as he did for anyone else, but most of us are not called to die or give our family members over to death in order to show our love for the homosexual. What can we do? Among some of the other posts I’ve seen recently, I saw the video below of Adrian Rogers concerning the most terrifying passage in the Bible. Must see: One of the Most Terrifying Verses. This short video is almost 3 minutes, but please watch it all. Very powerful from Dr. Rogers. Posted by Love Worth Finding Ministries on Friday, June 26, 2015 This passage doesn’t apply solely to homosexuality, but it includes it. Think about what it means that God h...

S adly, the US Supreme Court has passed down a ruling that redefines what the government calls marriage to include same sex unions. Because of their ruling, the state governments are now required to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples, no matter how opposed to this the residents of those states may be. This is disturbing, but it isn’t unexpected. The homosexual movement has eroded values in America, even among the people of God. How can we expect the US Supreme Court to have better values than we do? But what are we to make of this? As Christians we must remember that though it is now legal for same sex couples to commit to each other in so called “marriage,” this is not a marriage that is recognized by God. Nowhere in the Bible will you find any reference to people obtaining a license from the Government to marry. I don’t know when that started, but it doesn’t appear that a license is required for a marriage to be valid. Since a license isn’t required for a marriage to be vali...

I n preparation for an upcoming Sunday school lesson, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what the Bible has to say about deacons. It actually has far less to say than I would like. Primarily, there is Acts 6, which some people debate whether it is about deacons or not and 1 Timothy 3. One of the big debates is whether 1 Timothy 3:11 is referring to the wives of deacons or to women deacons. The word that is translated as “their wives” could also be translated as “women,” so there is some thought that Paul is giving qualifications for three distinct groups, pastors, deacons, and deaconesses. First, let’s be clear that the Bible makes it clear that women should not be preachers. Not only does 1 Timothy 3 talk about pastors being the husband of one wife, 1 Timothy 2:12 declares, “I suffer not a woman to teach, nor usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Since one of the qualifications of a pastor is to be able to teach, it would be impossible for a woman to fulfill the role ...

W hile looking for information about deacons, I became quite frustrated, because there are many different views about what deacons are and what the Lord intended for them to do. But after reading the Bible for myself and referring to guys like J.E. Cobb, Russell Moore, Steve Lemke, and of course, Jim Henry, I began to settle on an explanation that seems to make sense with what we see in scripture. A Deacon is a Servant The word deacon itself means “servant”, so it is obvious that a deacon is a servant. Some have said that the pastors are the leaders of the church and the deacons are the servants of the church. While that seems to make sense when looking at the meaning of the words, it seems a little lacking when we look at the events laid out for us in scripture. For one thing, pastors are also supposed to be servants. Jesus is a servant. All of the saints are servants. But there is an office in the church that we call a deacon. All deacons are servants, but not all servants are deacon...

I ’ve lost weight. To date, I’ve lost 54 pounds and will probably lose a total of 60 before I call it quits. When you do something like this, you don’t realize how much you’ve changed until people start asking questions. I think I’d lost about 30 pounds when I first heard someone say, “You’ve lost a little bit of weight, haven’t you?” But now, the questions are more along the lines of, “What have you been doing to lose the weight?” It’s a good question, but I don’t think people are asking the question they really should be asking. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me tell you what I did to lose weight. What I Did to Lose Weight Simply put, what I did was I ate fewer calories than what I burned. The fact is, it takes more work to maintain or gain weight than what it does to lose it. People who have struggled with their weight find that hard to believe, it is true. Your body is a calorie burning machine. Let’s suppose you weigh 200 pounds. If you did nothing but sleep all day,...