Timothy's Thoughts

L ast time I asked you to consider what you want 1 Timothy 2:12 to mean. Depending on what you’ve been taught, here are a few things you might want it to mean: Women can’t preach or teach in the church. Women can’t argue with their husbands. Women shouldn’t disagree with their husbands at church. Women can teach, but only women and children. Women can teach men, as long as their husbands aren’t in the class. Paul just found it painful to listen to women teach. This has nothing to do with women today. This deals with the home and not the church. I’m sure there are many others, but the important thing is that you don’t try to force this passage to mean what you want it to. It may mean what you want it to, but be open to the possibility that you are wrong. A good place to start with understanding a verse is to look for the complete thought. The verse and chapter markings are not part of scripture. They are there to aid us in finding passages, but they often create breaks in pa...

B ible study sounds like a good thing to do, but how many people do it well? For many people, the extent of their Bible study is that they read the Bible. There are various plans to read the Bible through in a year. That’s a good thing to do, but there is a risk that a person will read the words in an effort to meet the daily quota without understanding the passage. Some people don’t even do that much. For some people, the limit of their Bible study is that they have a few favorite passages they read from time to time. They may have memorized these passages, but we often find that they use them out of context. My favorite example of this is when people mention that the Bible says “where there is no vision the people perish” just before they talk about the need for a leader to cast a vision. In context, that verse has nothing to do with a leader casting his vision. And the worst form of Bible study is to listen only to what the preacher says. Preaching is good, but preachers can be wr...

S ometimes it is easy to forget just how amazing God’s creation is. I planted some seeds the other day. I looked online to see how long it would take for them to come up. What I saw indicated that it could take from two to four weeks—a whole month. Why does it have to take so long? I wondered. But when you think about it, seeds are an amazing thing. A seed can lie dormant for weeks, months, or even years. It doesn’t do much, it just sits there. We pack them in little envelopes and ship them around the country. They sit on store shelves, waiting for someone to pay a couple bucks for the package. And then we put them in the ground. We may add water or wait for God to, but that’s about all we do. Then from that tiny little speck comes a green shoot. Some will grow several inches in a day. Roots form. Leaves unfold. The plant continues to grow and branches form. Before long, the plant has flowers, beautiful in their detail, that form. Then as the flower withers, fruit begins to form and...

W e often think of leadership in terms of who has the authority to tell other people what to do. This probably develops from childhood. Parents are the leaders of their families. Children who don’t respect that leadership may receive a few good swats on the backside. But authority isn’t always so clearly defined. There are many cases in which a group of equals choose to follow a leader. Consider the case of a church choir. We could correctly make the claim that the choir director derives his authority from the church, since the church elected him, but the choir is voluntary. Its members don’t have to participate and yet they show up and look to the director for leadership. Maybe a better example would be a small group Bible study. Five or six people decide to get to get together for a Bible study. They are all equals, but one of them leads. That one person may set the time they will meet. He will control the format of the Bible study. He may choose which section of the Bible they will ...

S atan isn’t stupid. He may be a lot of things, but he isn’t that. God created Satan as a beautiful creature, one of his angels, but Satan turned against God and was cast from heaven along with those who followed him. I’ve often wondered how a being like Satan could stand in the presence of God and still imagine himself to be God. Though I suppose it is not unlike those of us who see how amazing this world is but reject the God who created it. Another thing I’ve often wondered about is Satan’s role in the crucifixion of Jesus. Did Satan not understand what was happening? Was Satan like many of the leaders of that time who thought Jesus was setting himself up to declare himself king of the Jews? Jesus died at the time of Passover. I can’t help but wonder if the leaders feared that Jesus would follow in the steps of Moses and attempt to lead the people out from under Roman rule at the end of Passover. But is that what Satan thought? And what of the end of the world? We know that Sata...

D espite the claims of some people, there isn’t much people can do to guarantee that a book will be a bestseller. You can dump a bunch of money into it and that might produce more sales, but the sales may not be enough to recover the cost. But consider the book Heaven is for Real from Thomas Nelson, which has recently had a quick climb up the bestseller lists and compare it to The Shack , which had a similar climb a few months ago. They are so alike that we could almost classify them as a genre. Both books handle the unknown. The Shack paints a picture of God, while Heaven is for Real paints a picture of heaven. They are both written by Bible scholars. They both have an emotional draw that makes the general reader feel good about the topic. They both disregard the clear teaching of the Bible concerning the topics they discuss. If you scan the Google search results for these books, what you’ll find is a fairly even distribution between those readers who are impressed with the book ...

T he saying “Preach the gospel at all times; use words if necessary,” is often attributed to Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone (Francis of Assisi), though no one seems to be able to find any evidence that he actually said this. No matter who coined the saying, it grits the gourd of some folks. The saying itself sounds rather profound because of the irony built into it. When we hear someone talking about preaching the gospel, we immediately think of someone using the spoken word, since that is what preaching is, but then it turns it around to imply that words may not be necessary. In a way, that sounds good because it is very important that our actions reveal the love of God. We can also think of the sermons people preach and the lessons they teach, and we can see ways in which they might get the point across better if they would show us what they mean rather than just lecturing. The problem with this statement is that words are always necessary. What we do to show the love of God thro...