1 Timothy 1

Today’s Passage: 1 Timothy 1

The letter begins with a job to be done. Timothy has been left at Ephesus to stop certain men from teaching what is not true, men who have wandered off into myths and endless genealogies and who want the title of teacher of the law without the least understanding of the law. Paul tells him what the goal of all right instruction actually is, and it is not winning an argument: it is love, from a pure heart, a clear conscience, and a sincere faith. Then he explains what the law is for and what it is not for, and gives a hard list of the people it exists to arrest. And then something happens in the middle of the paragraph. Paul mentions the glorious gospel entrusted to him, and the word entrusted stops him. He remembers who he was when that trust was handed over. Out comes the most personal sentence he ever wrote, the confession of a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man who was shown mercy, and the trustworthy saying that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom, he says, I am the worst. The paragraph ends where such things should end, in praise: honor and glory to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God. Only then does Paul turn back to Timothy and hand him his charge, to fight the good fight holding faith and a good conscience, with a sober word about two men who let the conscience go.

As you read, hold this: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and Paul puts himself forward as the worst of them so that no one may ever conclude that mercy has run out.

1 Timothy 1:1–5 (BSB)

¹ Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, ² To Timothy, my true child in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. ³ As I urged you on my departure to Macedonia, you should stay on at Ephesus to instruct certain men not to teach false doctrines ⁴ or devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculation rather than the stewardship of God’s work, which is by faith. ⁵ The goal of our instruction is the love that comes from a pure heart, a clear conscience, and a sincere faith.

Notice first that Paul does not soften his office because he is writing to a friend. He is an apostle “by the command of God our Savior,” which is a stronger word than he usually chooses, and he uses it because this private letter is going to be read aloud in a congregation that needs to know Timothy is not acting on his own initiative. Then look at the greeting, and notice what he adds. In every letter to a church Paul writes “grace and peace.” Here he writes “Grace, mercy, and peace.” He slips mercy into the middle of the blessing, and by the end of the chapter you will understand why that word could not be left out.

Timothy’s assignment is stated in a single breath: stay on at Ephesus, and instruct certain men to stop. It is worth pausing over how unglamorous that is. Paul had preached in that city for three years; Timothy is left behind to clean up after the men who came in afterward. And the trouble is described with real precision. Myths and endless genealogies. Long chains of names and stories that could be argued over forever without anyone ever arriving anywhere, because arrival was never the point. Paul says such teaching “promotes speculation rather than the stewardship of God’s work, which is by faith,” and that little contrast is the whole quarrel in miniature. Speculation is the sort of talk that goes on and on and leaves the house exactly as it found it. God is not looking for speculators in His house. He is looking for stewards, and the work is carried on by faith, not by cleverness.

And then verse five, which every teacher and every parent and every person who has ever been drawn into a religious argument ought to have written on the inside of the eyelids. “The goal of our instruction is the love that comes from a pure heart, a clear conscience, and a sincere faith.” That is the target. Not a well-defended position. Not a reputation for depth. Love. And Paul names the three springs it must flow from: a heart that has been cleansed and is not divided, a clear conscience (συνείδησις) syneidēsis, pronounced soon-ay-DAY-sis. Strong's G4893, conscience, the inner witness of right and wrong. The Greek word is built from two ordinary pieces, a prefix meaning with or together, and a verb meaning to know. Syneidēsis is knowing-along-with, the strange second knowledge a person carries about his own conduct, as though a witness stood inside him watching. Paul is very fond of the word and uses it more than anyone else in the New Testament, and he treats it with great seriousness without ever treating it as infallible. A conscience can be weak, he says elsewhere, and it can be strengthened by better knowledge. Here in this letter it can be seared, burned over like scarred skin until it stops feeling anything at all. But a clear conscience, one with nothing hidden behind it, is presented as one of the three springs of real love, and later in the chapter Paul will name it as one of the two things Timothy must hold on to if he is to keep from wrecking. That should tell us how practical this is. A man can be perfectly orthodox and be lying to himself, and a soul that has learned to carry small unconfessed things gets steadily less able to love. There is a reason the New Testament links a clear conscience with the blood of Christ, for no amount of resolve can scrub the inside of a person. But what we cannot cleanse, He can, and He does, and the way back is always the same short walk: tell Him the truth. , and a faith with no acting in it. If instruction is not producing that, then whatever else it is producing, it has missed. You can test a great deal of teaching with this one verse, and you can test yourself with it too, quietly, without saying a word to anyone.

1 Timothy 1:6–10 (BSB)

⁶ Some have strayed from these ways and turned aside to empty talk. ⁷ They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not understand what they are saying or that which they so confidently assert. ⁸ Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it legitimately. ⁹ We realize that law is not enacted for the righteous, but for the lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinful, for the unholy and profane, for killers of father or mother, for murderers, ¹⁰ for the sexually immoral, for homosexuals, for slave traders and liars and perjurers, and for anyone else who is averse to sound teaching

“Some have strayed from these ways and turned aside to empty talk.” The verb behind strayed is the word for missing a mark, and it is a sad picture: men who were aiming at love from a pure heart and drifted, degree by degree, until they were aiming at something else entirely. What did they land on? Empty talk. Paul is blunt about the vanity of it. They want the title of teacher of the law, and they do not understand a word of their own confident assertions. Sit with that combination for a moment, because it is a dangerous one in any century: great confidence, great vocabulary, no understanding. It impresses people. It has never once made anybody well.

Then Paul does something careful and generous. He will not let his quarrel with these men turn into a quarrel with the law of God. “Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it legitimately.” The law is not the problem. The law is holy and good and given by God, and the fault lies entirely with men who use a good thing for a purpose it was never made for. What, then, is the lawful use of the law? Paul answers with a principle: law is not enacted for the righteous. A man who loves his neighbor does not need a statute to keep him from murdering him. Law is written because of the lawless. It exists to name and restrain and expose wickedness, and it functions like a mirror or a plumb line, showing us what is crooked in us that we would never have noticed on our own.

And then the list, which Paul does not soften and neither should we. It follows the order of the commandments as it goes: those who despise God, then those who strike at father and mother and at human life itself, then sins of the body, then the stealing of persons and the corruption of truth. The sexual sins are named there plainly, and the Scripture is consistent from Genesis onward that God has given the union of the body a home, the covenant of one man and one woman, and that outside that home it does harm. That is what the list says, and we say it soberly and without relish, because of where the paragraph is going. Notice the last item: “anyone else who is averse to sound teaching.” The list does not end with the spectacular sinners. It ends with a wide door that has room in it for every one of us, and it ends there on purpose. And notice, too, that within four verses Paul will put himself on the list, at the top of it. The point of a mirror is never the mirror. It is to send you somewhere to get washed.

1 Timothy 1:11–14 (BSB)

¹¹ that agrees with the glorious gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted. ¹² I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, that He considered me faithful and appointed me to service. ¹³ I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man; yet because I had acted in ignorance and unbelief, I was shown mercy. ¹⁴ And the grace of our Lord overflowed to me, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

Here is the turn, and it happens because of one word. Paul says that sound teaching agrees with “the glorious gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted,” and the moment he writes entrusted the argument stops. He cannot say that word without remembering the hands it was placed into. So the letter breaks into thanksgiving, and it is thanksgiving aimed at the right place: “I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, that He considered me faithful and appointed me to service.” Every verb there belongs to Christ. He strengthened. He considered. He appointed. Paul supplies nothing to the transaction except the man who needed it.

And who was that man? Paul spells it out without a scrap of self-protection: “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man.” Three words, and each one is a sentence of its own. A blasphemer, meaning he had spoken against the name of Jesus and tried to make others do the same. A persecutor, meaning he had hunted believers from house to house, dragging off men and women to prison, and had stood approving while one of them was stoned to death. And a violent man, a word that means something harsher than merely aggressive; it describes a man whose cruelty carried an edge of arrogance, who enjoyed the power of it. He tells the Galatians the same story in his own hand.

"For you have heard of my former way of life in Judaism, how severely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it." Galatians 1:13 (BSB)

Then comes the great word of the chapter: “I was shown mercy (ἐλεέω) eleeō, pronounced el-eh-EH-oh. Strong's G1653, to show mercy, to have compassion on the wretched. Eleeō means to show mercy, and mercy is not the same thing as grace, though the two travel together everywhere in Scripture. Grace looks at a person who deserves nothing and gives him a gift. Mercy looks at a person in misery and does not give him what he has coming. Grace answers our emptiness; mercy answers our guilt and our wretchedness. In the Greek Old Testament this word group carries the great Hebrew word for covenant kindness, the steady, loyal, undeserved goodness of the LORD toward people who have given Him every reason to be finished with them. That is why the beggars on the roads of Galilee cried out with exactly this verb, “Have mercy on me, Son of David,” and why the tax collector in the temple could not manage a prayer longer than a request for it. Now watch where Paul places it. He is writing to instruct a church about overseers and widows and money, and he grounds his right to speak in one fact: I was shown mercy. Not I earned my place. Not I proved myself. He had been on the wrong side of the war, and the King pardoned him and then, unbelievably, commissioned him. Remember that this is the same word he tucked into the greeting of the letter, grace, mercy, and peace. He had learned that a man never outgrows his need of it, and neither will you, and there is nothing but rest in admitting so. .” And Paul gives a reason that must be read carefully, because it is easily misheard. “Because I had acted in ignorance and unbelief.” He is not offering an excuse; a man who has just called himself a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man is plainly not making a plea for leniency. He is telling us the truth about his condition. He was not a cynic sinning against light he possessed; he was a zealous man, blind, sincerely wrong, doing damage in the dark, and the Lord met him on a road in the middle of it. Grace, he says, “overflowed” to him, and the verb means to flood over the banks, more than enough, more than the need, arriving with faith and love packed inside it. He had come to Damascus carrying letters of arrest and hatred in his chest. He left carrying faith and love that were not his own.

1 Timothy 1:15–20 (BSB)

¹⁵ This is a trustworthy saying, worthy of full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst. ¹⁶ But for this very reason I was shown mercy, so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display His perfect patience as an example to those who would believe in Him for eternal life. ¹⁷ Now to the King eternal, immortal, and invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. ¹⁸ Timothy, my child, I entrust you with this command in keeping with the previous prophecies about you, so that by them you may fight the good fight, ¹⁹ holding on to faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and thereby shipwrecked their faith. ²⁰ Among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.

This is the summit of the day, and it deserves to be read slowly, out loud if you can. “This is a trustworthy saying (πιστός) pistos, pronounced pis-TOSS. Strong's G4103, faithful, trustworthy, and full of trust. Pistos is the adjective from the great word for faith, and it faces in two directions at once. It can describe a person who believes, and it can describe a person or a thing that can be believed, that is faithful, dependable, worth putting your weight on. Paul uses it in both senses within a few lines here: Christ “considered me faithful,” and this saying is trustworthy. It is the word used of God Himself over and over in the New Testament, the plain declaration that He is reliable, that He will do what He said. And Paul attaches it to a fixed formula that he introduces five times across these Pastoral Letters, always with the same phrase, “this is a trustworthy saying.” These were almost certainly lines the churches already knew by heart, short confessions repeated at baptisms and gatherings, worn smooth by use before Paul ever quoted them. Think of what that means. Before there was a single page of the New Testament in most of these churches, ordinary believers were carrying the gospel around in sentences they could say from memory. And Paul adds that this one is “worthy of full acceptance,” which is a merchant’s phrase, the way you would speak of a coin that is good everywhere and will be taken at full value in any market in the empire. This saying will not be discounted anywhere. Take it at face, in any country, in any century, on any day of your life. , worthy of full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” There is the gospel in eleven words, with nothing hedged and nothing withheld. He came. He came into the world, which means He was somewhere else first and chose to enter, and the whole weight of who He is stands behind that little verb. And He came for a stated purpose, to save sinners. Not to advise them. Not to grade them. To save them, which is a word for pulling a drowning man out of water. Every other qualification we might try to smuggle in falls away in front of that sentence, because the only credential the sentence asks for is the one every reader already possesses.

Now look at the tail of verse fifteen, because it is astonishing. “Of whom I am the worst.” Not I was. This is a mature apostle writing decades after Damascus, a man who has planted churches from Antioch to Corinth, been beaten and shipwrecked and stoned for the name of Jesus, and who is at this moment instructing another man on the government of the church of God. And this is still how he speaks of himself, in the present tense. It is not false modesty; false modesty always has one eye on the audience. It is a man who has never gotten over being forgiven, who still feels the shape of the door he was carried through. And it is not despair either, for the very next verse turns that self-estimate into good news for everybody else. He says he was shown mercy “for this very reason,” so that in him, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display His perfect patience (μακροθυμία) makrothymia, pronounced mak-roth-oo-MEE-ah. Strong's G3115, patience, longsuffering, a temper held long under command. Makrothymia is one of those Greek compounds that tells you its meaning if you take it apart: makros, long, and thymos, the heat of the soul, the passion that flares. Long-tempered, then, the exact opposite of what we call short-tempered. It is not indifference and it is not weakness. It is a strong feeling held under command for a long time. The older English versions rendered it longsuffering, and that is still the best word we have had for it, because it keeps the cost in view: not merely waiting, but suffering long while waiting. The Greek Old Testament uses this family to translate the LORD’s own self-description to Moses, slow to anger, and Peter uses it to explain why the Lord has not yet come, that He is patient, not wanting anyone to perish. And Paul says Christ put this attribute on display in him, and the verb he chooses is the word for making a public demonstration, showing something off where the crowd can see it. Consider what that means for how we read our own long delays and our own slow progress. Every day the Lord bears with a stubborn heart, He is not merely tolerating it; He is exhibiting something about Himself that the angels can see. He is not slow because He is uninterested. He is long-tempered because He is love, and because He intends to have us in the end. as an example to those who would believe. Do you see what Paul thinks he is? An exhibit. A specimen case, put on public display, so that no one who ever hears the gospel afterward can say, “not someone like me.” If the Lord took Saul of Tarsus with the blood of the saints on his hands, the argument is over. Mercy has not run out.

And a heart that has seen that cannot stay quiet, so Paul does the only thing left to do. “Now to the King eternal, immortal, and invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” The words tumble out in worship. King of the ages, the One whose reign has no beginning and no end and no successor. Immortal, the One who alone cannot die, who does not wear out or diminish. Invisible, the One no eye has seen, who dwells in unapproachable light. The only God, which in a city with a temple to Artemis on its skyline was not a pious phrase but a public claim. Praise Him. That is the right and natural end of thinking hard about mercy, and if our theology never arrives at a doxology, something has gone wrong upstream.

Then Paul turns back to the young man and hands him the charge, and it is a soldier’s word: “so that by them you may fight the good fight.” He reminds Timothy of the prophecies once spoken over him, the words that had marked him out for this work, and tells him to let them fight for him when he is weary. Two things must be held on to, and note that they are exactly two of the three springs from verse five: faith and a good conscience. The order matters. Some, Paul says, have “rejected” the good conscience, and the word means to shove away deliberately, to push aside a thing that keeps getting in the way. That is how it happens. Nobody wrecks all at once. A man silences the small voice, then silences it again, and by the time his doctrine collapses the conscience has been gone for years. And then the picture: they “shipwrecked their faith,” which to a man who had been in the water three times was no figure of speech.

Be careful here, and let Paul say what he actually says. He does not tell us that God dropped a child of His. He tells us what these men did to themselves: they pushed away a good conscience, and the profession of faith they were sailing in went on the rocks. What is wrecked is the ship, the visible profession, the useful ministry, the good name, the peace of a clean heart. And look at what Paul intends by handing Hymenaeus and Alexander over to Satan, a solemn act of putting a man outside the shelter of the congregation and into the exposed world for a season. The purpose is stated in the same breath, and it is not destruction: “to be taught not to blaspheme.” That is a father’s discipline, not an executioner’s sentence. Even here, at the darkest edge of the chapter, the aim is that a man should learn and come back. The God who is long-tempered with the worst of sinners has not changed His character by the twentieth verse.