09.09 | A Beautiful Warfare
1 Timothy 1
‘This charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you, that by them you may wage the good warfare, holding faith and a good conscience. By rejecting this, some have made shipwreck of their faith’
1 Timothy 1:18-19
All was not well in the church.
Anyone whose been a Christian for any length of time will know this, that the Church can be quickly hit by issues. Relational issues. Power issues. Theological issues. Structural issues. While it is easy to romanticise the earliest forms of church, the New Testament quickly makes plain to us that the Church is a movement that will know both battles on the outside, as well as battles within.
As one missionary pioneer put it: “Where two or threes are gathered together in His Name, sooner or later there will be a mess.”1
Mess is hard to deal with. Mess causes pain. Mess is … messy. And messes need cleared up.
The letter we’re starting today goes into such themes. Paul is writing to his young mentee, Timothy, who is leading the network of house churches in Ephesus.2 These churches are a little less than a decade old, and yet already are experiencing mess. This mess is coming from certain powerful figures who have started teaching new ideas that contradict core truths of the message of Jesus. They’re teaching people a return to laws and limitations, speaking a ‘gospel’ that is exclusive and cultish. They’re preying on young widows with their teaching, mobilising them to wasting time on gossiping and outback theories. They are allured by the possibilities of leveraging their preaching for amassing a personal fortune. The ingrained background of paganism and magicians in Ephesus—centring on the cult of Artemis—has seeped into the young church, bringing cultish elements with it.
It’s causing division. It’s causing the abuse of the vulnerable and entitlement in the able. It is creating barriers to those most in need of God’s love, and it is bringing the church into disrepute through leaders whose impressive showmanship isn’t backed up by personal integrity.
Paul’s solution is to write to Timothy, with a letter he intends to be read to the whole Ephesian church. And his message is simple:
Start clearing up the mess.
How?
Paul urges Timothy to bring people back from clever ideas to simple truth, from exclusivism to the expansive love of the Father, from leaders who are impressive in confidence to leaders who are impressive in integrity and who have received the most impressive grace. He urges them back from being a community of much chitchat to being a community of much prayer.
Paul has a phrase for Timothy that frames all this:
Wage the good warfare.
The word ‘good’ here is the Greek word kalos. It’s other meaning is ‘beautiful’.
Sometimes our call is not to peaceful listening but intentional confrontation. Timothy, as we will learn, is a young leader who struggled with fear. This call to confrontation almost certainly called him out of his comfort zone. Those he was confronting were likely older than him, more confident that him, and wealthier than him.
And yet, Paul tells him, the warfare here is a beautiful warfare. It contests noisy charisma with simple integrity; cultish religiosity with the lavish grace of love; complex theories with committed prayerfulness. It is church returning to simplicity, to grace, to truth, to peace. It is the return to the simplicity of ‘the love you had at first’.3
Warfare, indeed. Confrontation that requires courage. Correction that requires intention. Saying no to what is corruptive and yes to what is true.
For the church will be messy. And yet the cleaning up of such mess, is truly, essentially, and deeply, a beautiful warfare.
Reflect:
Reflect on your church community.
Are there places where you see mess rather than peace?
Begin in prayer. What might the beautiful warfare of the Kingdom look like in helping it back to health?
Pray:
Father,
When the church is messy,
I’d rather run.
When the church causes pain,
I’d rather shout and yell at it.
When the church has met me with hard religion,
Rather than healing grace,
I have bled inside.
And so,
Father,
In the atmosphere of your healing love,
Would you lead me in the steps of
The beautiful warfare,
And grant me grace for the
Healing,
Wisdom,
Hope,
And responsibility that you invite me too.
For I desire that your Church
Be beautified,
Unto the revelation of the person of Jesus to the world,
And the inhabitation of your heart.
In Jesus’ Name
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Ecclesiastes 3:16-6:12 | Psalm 106:34-48
George Verwer: More Drops, p.18. George founded the missionary organisation Operation Mobilisation, which now operates in over a hundred countries across the world. George combined a deep love of Jesus with radical fidelity to His Gospel, with a wide global experience of churches being places of both great beauty and great complexity. He prayed constantly for missionaries and their families in OM. My wife, Lydia, as a child of OM missionaries, was a part of this, and I know he held us in prayer too. He is now in glory, but his legacy is enormous.
The letters to Timothy and Titus are traditionally known as the ‘Pastoral Epistles’. Tom Wright argues that they may be better described as ‘The Mentoring Epistles’, as in them we get an insight into how Paul was mentoring these emerging leaders. See The New Testament in its World, p.528
As Jesus speaks to the Ephesian church some years later, in Revelation 2:4