Today’s Passage: 1 Timothy 6
The letter ends where the false teachers were quietly heading all along, which is money. Paul has warned about people who traffic in controversies and word-games, and now he tells us what was underneath the smoke: these men “regard godliness as a means of gain.” They had found that religion could be made to pay. And so the last chapter of 1 Timothy becomes the New Testament’s most searching passage on wealth, and it is severe, and it is also kinder than most people remember. It begins somewhere else entirely, with slaves in Christian households and how they are to treat their masters, a passage that has to be handled honestly and not hurried past. Then it turns on the false teachers and their appetite, and out of that comes the great sentence: godliness with contentment is great gain. We brought nothing in and we will carry nothing out. Those who want to be rich walk into a trap. The love of money is a root out of which all kinds of evil grow, and some, craving it, have wandered off the road and run themselves through with sorrows. Then Paul turns to Timothy and says: you, run the other way. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, gentleness. Fight the good fight. Hold on to eternal life. And he seals that charge with a doxology so high it seems to leave the ground, the blessed and only Sovereign, King of kings and Lord of lords, dwelling in light no one can approach. Then, having reached the throne room, he comes straight back down to the practical and tells the wealthy members of the church what to do with their money, which is not to leave it but to hope differently and to give. The last line is the letter in four words. Guard what has been entrusted to you.
As you read, hold this: Godliness with contentment is great gain, so flee the craving that pierces a soul, set your hope on the God who richly provides, and guard the good deposit until the King of kings appears.
Context The world of 1 Timothy 6
Something like a third of the population of a great Roman city was enslaved, and the churches of the first century were full of both slaves and slave owners sitting in the same room and eating at the same table. We must say plainly what that institution was. Roman slavery was not a job. A slave was legally a piece of property, could be beaten, could be sold away from a spouse and children, had no protection against a master’s appetites, and could be tortured as a matter of routine legal procedure. It was brutal, and Scripture nowhere pretends otherwise. Paul is not describing this arrangement approvingly, and he is not proposing it. He is writing pastoral instruction to people who were already inside it, most of whom had no legal power to change their situation at all, and telling them how to live for Christ where they actually stood that morning. It is worth knowing that this same letter, in its first chapter, lists slave traders among the lawless and rebellious for whom the law was written, which tells you exactly what Paul thought of the trade that supplied the institution. And it is worth knowing where the gospel logic ran once it was let loose. Paul’s shortest letter was written to a slave owner named Philemon about a runaway named Onesimus, and in it Paul asks the master to receive the slave back “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother,” and offers to pay the man’s debts himself. A seed like that does not stay in the ground forever.
The other half of this chapter’s world is money. Ephesus was rich. It was a port and a banking center, and the temple of Artemis functioned as one of the great treasuries of the ancient world, holding deposits and lending at interest. Religion and money were already thoroughly entangled there before any Christian teacher arrived. Meanwhile the traveling philosopher who charged fees for wisdom was a familiar figure across the empire, sometimes respectable and often a fraud, and satirists made good sport of the holy man who talked about virtue and watched the collection plate. That is the type Paul is describing in verse five, men who had worked out that piety could be monetized. And the congregation itself was mixed, as verse seventeen makes clear: there were genuinely wealthy believers in that church, people with land and houses and slaves, sitting beside people who owned nothing at all. Paul does not tell the wealthy ones to disappear. He tells them what to do.
1 Timothy 6:1–5 (BSB)
¹ All who are under the yoke of slavery should regard their masters as fully worthy of honor, so that God’s name and our teaching will not be discredited. ² Those who have believing masters should not show disrespect because they are brothers, but should serve them all the more, since those receiving their good service are beloved believers. Teach and encourage these principles. ³ If anyone teaches another doctrine and disagrees with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and with godly teaching, ⁴ he is conceited and understands nothing. Instead, he has an unhealthy interest in controversies and disputes about words, out of which come envy, strife, abusive talk, evil suspicions, ⁵ and constant friction between men of depraved mind who are devoid of the truth. These men regard godliness as a means of gain.
Notice first the phrase Paul himself uses: “under the yoke.” That is not the language of a man who thinks the arrangement is fine. A yoke is what you put on an animal, and Paul knows exactly what he is describing. He does not soften it, and neither should we. Christians have argued about this passage for centuries and some have shamefully used it to defend the indefensible, so let us be careful and honest. Paul is not establishing slavery, commending it, or telling anyone that God ordained it. He is writing to believers who were already the legal property of other people, most of whom could not change that fact by any means available to them, and he is telling them how to live as followers of Christ inside a wrong they did not choose and could not escape. And his reason is missionary: “so that God’s name and our teaching will not be discredited.” The whole city was watching to see what this new faith did to a household. If Christian slaves became insolent, the gospel would be dismissed as a movement that ruined servants, and the door would close on every master and every household in Ephesus. So Paul asks these believers to do the harder thing, and he asks it of them as free men, because that is what they were before God even while they wore a collar in the city.
But do not stop there, because the seed of the whole matter is planted in verse two. A slave with a believing master is not to take advantage of the fact that the man is now his brother. And there it is, quietly: brother. The master and the slave are family. They sit at the same Table, they are washed in the same blood, and the one Paul calls a beloved believer is the man who legally owns the other. You cannot leave a truth like that lying in a church and expect the institution to survive it forever. Paul had already written that in Christ there is neither slave nor free, and when he had a live case in front of him he wrote to a master and asked him to take his runaway back on entirely new terms.
"no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother. He is especially beloved to me, but even more so to you, both in person and in the Lord." Philemon 1:16 (BSB)
That is the trajectory. It took the church far too long to follow it out, and the failure is a real one and should be owned rather than explained away. But the logic was always there in the text, and when believers finally set themselves against the slave trade in earnest, they were not departing from Scripture. They were catching up to it.
Then Paul turns on the false teachers, and his diagnosis is worth reading twice, because it is a diagnosis of character and not merely of doctrine. The man who teaches another doctrine and will not stand with “the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ” is, Paul says, “conceited and understands nothing.” Puffed up and empty at the same time. And then the tell: he “has an unhealthy interest in controversies and disputes about words.” The word behind unhealthy interest suggests a sickness, a fever, a craving. Some people are not seeking truth at all; they are addicted to the argument itself, because an argument is where they get to be the cleverest person in the room. And look at what grows in that soil, because Paul names the crop: envy, strife, abusive talk, evil suspicions, constant friction. Every one of those is a relational wound, not an intellectual error. Bad teaching does not stay in the head. It goes through a congregation like an infection and leaves people suspicious of each other. And under it all, the root Paul has been circling: “These men regard godliness as a means of gain.” They had found that piety pays. That is where the letter’s last great subject opens up.
1 Timothy 6:6–10 (BSB)
⁶ Of course, godliness with contentment is great gain. ⁷ For we brought nothing into the world, so we cannot carry anything out of it. ⁸ But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. ⁹ Those who want to be rich, however, fall into temptation and become ensnared by many foolish and harmful desires that plunge them into ruin and destruction. ¹⁰ For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. By craving it, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.
Paul takes the false teachers’ own word and turns it over in his hand. They think godliness is a means of gain. Very well, he says, so it is, only not the gain you had in mind: “godliness with autarkeia, pronounced ow-TAR-kay-ah. Strong's G841, sufficiency, contentment, having enough. Autarkeia was a technical term in Greek philosophy long before Paul picked it up. Built from autos, self, and arkeō, to be sufficient, it meant self-sufficiency: the ideal of the wise man who has trimmed his desires down so far that nothing outside him can disturb him. The Stoics prized it above almost everything. Paul takes the word and keeps the freedom while completely replacing the foundation, and the difference is everything. The philosopher’s contentment rested on himself, on the strength of his own detachment; the Christian’s rests on Someone else entirely. Paul uses the related word of himself when he tells the Philippians he has learned to be content regardless of his circumstances, and then explains the secret in the very next breath: he can do all things through Christ who gives him strength. That is not self-sufficiency at all. It is Christ-sufficiency wearing the same clothes. And notice the word learned. Contentment did not come to Paul with conversion or with age; he acquired it, in prisons and shipwrecks and hungry nights, the way you acquire any skill, by practice under pressure. So if you do not have it yet, you are not disqualified. You are in the middle of the lesson, which is exactly where he was. is great gain.” Hear the two halves. Godliness by itself can be counterfeited, and these men had done it. Contentment by itself can be nothing more than a temperament, and some people are simply placid. Put them together and you have something the world cannot manufacture and cannot take away: a life reverently bound to God that has stopped needing more in order to be at peace. That is wealth. And it is genuinely great gain, because a man who has it is unbribable, unhurried, and free.
Then two reasons, and the first is the plainest fact about human life: “we brought nothing into the world, so we cannot carry anything out of it.” Every one of us arrived with nothing but a body, and every one of us will leave the same way. There is no exception and never has been. The richest man who ever lived went out through the same narrow door as the poorest, and the estate was distributed behind him. A man in the dust once said it better than anyone.
"saying: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD.”" Job 1:21 (BSB)
Job said that on the day he lost everything, and he said it in worship. And the second reason follows from the first: “if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.” That is a startlingly short list, and Paul means it as a floor rather than a ceiling. He is not commanding anyone to reduce their life to bread and a cloak, and he is about to speak to wealthy believers without telling them to divest. He is naming the point past which everything is extra, so that gratitude has somewhere to start. Most of us reading this have far more than food and clothing, and have long since stopped noticing either.
Now verse nine, and read it with precision, because Paul is very exact here. He does not say that those who are rich fall into a trap. He says “those who want to be rich.” The trap is in the wanting. A man of modest means can be caught in it completely, and a wealthy man may, by God’s grace, not be caught in it at all. The verbs are violent: ensnared, like an animal in a net, and then “plunge them into ruin and destruction,” which is the picture of a man dragged under water. And what does the snaring? “Many foolish and harmful desires,” which is honest about how it works. Nobody decides to ruin his life. He simply wants one more thing, and then another, and the wants multiply until they are steering him. And then verse ten goes down to the root of the whole business, and names it with great care. It is not silver. It is the philargyria, pronounced fil-ar-goo-REE-ah. Strong's G5365, love of money, silver-love. Philargyria is a compound of phileō, to love, and argyros, silver. Literally, silver-love. And the precision of the word is the mercy of the verse, because Paul does not say that silver is a root of evil; he says the love of it is. Money in Scripture is a tool and a trust. Abraham was wealthy, Job was wealthy, Joseph of Arimathea was wealthy and gave the Lord his tomb, and the women who supported Jesus and the Twelve out of their own means were doing something the Gospels record with honor. What Paul is naming is not a bank balance but an affection, a heart that has quietly transferred its trust from God to a number. And notice that he does not even say it is the root of all evil, though the phrase is often quoted that way. He says it is a root, from which “all kinds of evil” grow, and the history of the world will supply you with the branches: the marriage neglected for the career, the friend defrauded, the vote sold, the truth shaded in a report, the poor squeezed, the family divided over a will. Then the last image, and it is his own: “some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.” Not struck down by an enemy. Pierced themselves. The man walks off the road chasing something bright, and the wounds he collects are self-inflicted. It is a picture more sad than angry, and that is exactly Paul’s tone. Nobody has ever gotten to the end of that road and been glad. .
Let this be heard the way Paul meant it, and no other way. It is not a rebuke aimed at anyone’s income, and it is not an invitation to look sideways at a neighbor with a newer car. It is a warning about the direction of a heart, and the only heart any of us can examine is our own. The question is not what you have. It is what you would do to get more, and what you would feel if it were taken. There is a word elsewhere that gives the whole cure in one sentence, and the cure is not austerity.
"Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, for God has said: “Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.”" Hebrews 13:5 (BSB)
There is the ground of contentment, and it is a Person, not a budget. What we are really reaching for when we reach for money is security, the promise that we will not be left. And God has already said the words we were trying to buy.
1 Timothy 6:11–16 (BSB)
¹¹ But you, O man of God, flee from these things and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness. ¹² Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made the good confession before many witnesses. ¹³ I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who made the good confession in His testimony before Pontius Pilate: ¹⁴ Keep this commandment without stain or reproach until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ, ¹⁵ which the blessed and only Sovereign One—the King of kings and Lord of lords—will bring about in His own time. ¹⁶ He alone is immortal and dwells in unapproachable light. No one has ever seen Him, nor can anyone see Him. To Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen.
“But you, O man of God.” Paul swings around and addresses Timothy directly, and the title he uses is an old one out of the Old Testament, the name given to Moses and Elijah and Samuel, men who belonged to God and spoke for Him. He lays it on a young minister with a bad stomach in a hard city. And the first command is not to argue, refute, or explain. It is to run. Flee from these things, the way Joseph fled a house, the way you would leave a burning building without pausing to discuss the fire. Some dangers are not to be reasoned with at close range. Then, because a man running away needs somewhere to run, Paul gives him six things to pursue: righteousness and godliness, which are how a life stands before God; faith and love, which are the two hands of the Christian life; perseverance, which is faith with its teeth set; and gentleness, which is the last word and the one we would have left off. A man who is fleeing greed and fighting for the truth could very easily become hard. Paul will not have it. Gentleness is on the list.
“ agōnizomai, pronounced ah-go-NID-zo-my. Strong's G75, to contend, strive, struggle, exert oneself to the utmost. Agōnizomai comes from agōn, the arena, the place where the games were held, and it means to contend there, to strain with everything in you against a real opponent for a real result. Our word agony comes straight from it, and so does agonize, and the Greek keeps the sweat in it that our English has partly lost. The New Testament uses it of a runner in training who denies himself everything, of Epaphras wrestling in prayer for a church, and of the Lord Jesus in Gethsemane, where Luke uses the noun for His anguish as He prayed. So this is not a poetic flourish. Paul is telling a tired young man that the Christian life includes a genuine contest and that he must throw himself into it. But look at the two words attached: it is the good fight, and it is the fight of the faith. Good, because unlike almost every other contest human beings pour themselves into, this one is worth the blood it costs and the outcome is already secured by Another. And of the faith, because the thing being contended for is not Timothy’s reputation, his position, or his rightness in an argument. It is the deposit of truth about Christ that he was given to hold. Know which fights are yours. Most of the ones that tempt us are not this one, and the energy they consume was meant for this. of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made the good confession before many witnesses.” That confession was almost certainly Timothy’s own public declaration of faith, probably at his baptism, spoken out loud in front of a room full of people. Paul reaches back to that day and holds it up in front of him: you said it, in public, and they all heard you. And notice the wonderful order in “take hold of the eternal life to which you were called.” The calling came first. Eternal life is not the prize at the end of a successful career of fighting; it is the possession he already has by God’s call, and he is told to take a firmer grip on what is already his. That is what Christian effort always is. Not climbing toward a life we might earn, but closing our hands more tightly on a life we have been given.
Then Paul raises the charge into the highest court there is: “I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who made the good confession in His testimony before Pontius Pilate.” Feel the weight of that pairing. Timothy made his good confession in a room full of friendly faces. The Lord made His standing bound before a Roman governor with the power of life and death, and He did not flinch, and He went from that room to a cross. So when Paul asks a young man to hold his ground, he does not ask it as one who has never been asked; he points at the Lord Himself, confessing the truth in the worst room any witness ever stood in. Whatever this costs you, Timothy, He has already paid more for the same confession. Keep the commandment “without stain or reproach until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ.” That is the horizon of the whole Christian life. Not until it gets easier, not until the church settles down, not until retirement. Until He appears.
And at the mention of that appearing, Paul cannot go on writing prose. He breaks into worship, and these two verses are among the most magnificent in the New Testament. God “will bring about” that appearing “in His own time,” which settles a great deal of anxious speculation before it starts. Believers who love this Book have held different views about the order and timing of what lies ahead, and this is not a place for the church to divide; what Paul actually says here is that the day belongs to God and is set by Him, and that is enough to build a life on. Then the titles come one after another like bells. The blessed and only Sovereign, the one true Ruler, at a time when the emperor was being called lord and divine in temples all over Asia. The King of kings and Lord of lords, which strips every earthly power of any claim to the top rung. He alone is immortal, and the word means He alone has deathlessness in Himself; every other living thing, angels and men alike, holds life as a loan from Him. He dwells in unapproachable light, which is a staggering image, because we usually think of God as hidden in darkness and Paul says He is hidden by brightness, unreachable not because there is too little to see but because there is too much. “No one has ever seen Him, nor can anyone see Him.” Moses was hidden in a cleft of the rock and shown only the afterglow. And then, because there is nothing else a soul can do in front of that, Paul simply worships: “To Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen.” Stop and join him. This is the God who calls you His child.
1 Timothy 6:17–21 (BSB)
¹⁷ Instruct those who are rich in the present age not to be conceited and not to put their hope in the uncertainty of wealth, but in God, who richly provides all things for us to enjoy. ¹⁸ Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, and to be generous and ready to share, ¹⁹ treasuring up for themselves a firm foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life. ²⁰ O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you. Avoid irreverent, empty chatter and the opposing arguments of so-called “knowledge,” ²¹ which some have professed and thus swerved away from the faith. Grace be with you all.
Now watch Paul come down from the throne room and speak to the wealthy members of the Ephesian church, and pay attention to what he does not say. He does not tell them to sell everything. He does not tell them to leave the congregation until they have redistributed their estates. He does not shame them, and he does not flatter them either. He gives them three commands, and every one of them is about where the heart rests and what the hands do. First, do not be conceited, because money quietly persuades a man that he is a better sort of person than the man without it, and it is a lie. Second, do not “put their hope in the uncertainty of wealth,” and the phrase is exact: wealth is not evil, it is uncertain. It can be lost in a season, and it certainly cannot follow you past the grave, so it makes a poor foundation for a soul. Put your hope in God instead. And then, right there, in the same sentence, comes a clause that should be read aloud in every discussion of money the church ever has: God “richly provides all things for us to enjoy.” Richly. To enjoy. The God who warns us about loving money is the same God who fills the world with good things and means for His children to take pleasure in them. This is the answer, once and for all, to the counterfeit holiness of chapter four, and it forbids us from turning this chapter into a religion of guilt. Gratitude, not grimness, is the Christian posture toward God’s gifts.
Third, and this is where the money actually goes: “do good, to be rich in good works, and to be generous and ready to share.” There is the lovely turn. Paul takes the word rich out of the bank and puts it into the deeds, so that the question becomes not how much a believer has but how much good he is doing with it. Generous and ready to share, which means open-handed and quick about it, not needing to be asked three times. And then the promise: they are “treasuring up for themselves a firm foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life.” Money given away is not money lost; it is money sent ahead. The Lord Himself said to store up treasure in heaven where nothing rots and nothing is stolen, and told us that the heart always follows the treasure. And notice the last phrase, because it is the sharpest thing in the paragraph: “that which is truly life.” Paul has just implied that the life the wealthy are tempted to secure with their wealth is not the real one. The real one is held by a different grip entirely, and the way to take hold of it is, of all things, to open your hands.
Then the closing charge, and it is the whole letter in four words. “O Timothy, parathēkē, pronounced par-ath-AY-kay. Strong's G3866, a deposit entrusted to another for safekeeping. Parathēkē is a banking and legal word. In a world without safe-deposit boxes, a man leaving on a journey would place his valuables in the hands of a trusted friend, and that deposit was called a parathēkē. It was not a gift. The friend could not spend it, improve it, trade it, or lend it out. He held it, intact, and handed it back exactly as he received it, and to fail in that was one of the most shameful breaches of trust the ancient world recognized. That is the picture Paul chooses for the gospel. The truth about Christ is not Timothy’s property to develop, update, or make more appealing to the market in Ephesus. It was placed in his hands to keep and to hand on whole. Paul uses the same word twice more in his final letter, telling Timothy to guard the good deposit by the Holy Spirit, and saying of his own soul that he is convinced God is able to guard what he has entrusted to Him until that day. Hold those two together and you have the balance of the whole Christian life. We are given something to guard, and we are ourselves something God is guarding, and He will not lose His deposit. The faith is not ours to alter. It is ours to keep, to live, and to place in the next pair of hands, and that is what every generation of believers who ever loved this Book has done, which is why you are able to read it this morning. .” Everything else in six chapters has been leading here. Guard it against the myth-spinners and the word-fighters, against the men who banned marriage and the men who sold piety, against irreverent empty chatter and the “opposing arguments of so-called knowledge,” which is Paul putting quotation marks around a word those teachers used of themselves. They called it knowledge. Paul says it is nothing of the kind, and he points at the evidence: some who professed it have “swerved away from the faith,” and the verb is one of a man missing the mark, going wide of the target he was aiming at. There is the whole tragedy of Ephesus in a syllable. They were aiming at something and they missed.
And then, after all that, the last line: “Grace be with you all.” Not with you, singular, but with you all. The letter was addressed to one man and it was always meant to be read aloud to the whole church, to the elders and the widows and the wealthy and the slaves and the young mothers and the men who had been arguing about words. Paul does not end with a rule. He ends the way he began the letter and the way every letter he ever wrote ends, with grace, because grace is the only thing that ever made any of these people what they were, and it is the only thing that will keep them.
Study notes Going deeper
So the letter closes, and it is worth standing at the end of the road and looking back down it. It began with a man who called himself the worst of sinners and could not get over the fact that he had been shown mercy, and who told us in a single sentence what this whole faith rests on: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. From that foundation everything else in the letter was built. Chapter two lifted the congregation’s hands in prayer for everyone, including the emperor, because there is one God and one Mediator between God and men. Chapter three set out what kind of people should lead the household of God, and then broke into the great hymn of the mystery of godliness, He appeared in the flesh and was taken up in glory. Chapter four tore down a counterfeit holiness that forbade God’s good gifts, and put in its place a table blessed with thanksgiving and a soul in daily training. Chapter five put the family to work, feeding widows, honoring elders, and refusing every kind of favoritism. And chapter six has told us what to do with our money and our appetites while we wait, and has ended with a young man told to guard the deposit until the King appears. It is all one thing. Paul named the whole subject when he told Timothy why he was writing: so that he would know how one ought to conduct himself in God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth. That is the letter. How to live in God’s house. And twice, once near the beginning and once here at the end, the writing simply could not stay on the ground and rose into worship.
"Now to the King eternal, immortal, and invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen." 1 Timothy 1:17 (BSB)
Hear how exactly it matches the doxology of chapter six, the same eternal King, the same immortality that belongs to God alone, the same unseen glory, the same Amen. Paul opened with that and he closes with it, and everything between the two doxologies, the elders and the widows and the food laws and the wages and the warnings about silver, sits inside that frame. That is how the ordinary business of a church is meant to be conducted, with the throne in view at both ends. So take the letter’s last charge as your own, because it is. Guard what has been entrusted to you. Flee the craving that has pierced so many, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness. Receive God’s good gifts with thanks, since He richly provides all things for us to enjoy, and then open your hands and be generous with them. Fight the good fight, and hold on to the life that is truly life. He is coming, in His own time, the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, and every day of quiet faithfulness is bringing that morning nearer. Learn the Word, guard the deposit, and give thanks.