Manuscript - 1 Timothy 4:6-11
Take your Bibles with me and go to 1 Timothy 4. 1 Timothy 4. We are going to read the first 10 verses tonight and focus on verses 6-11:
Remember, 1 Timothy is a book of instructions for the church. It’s called a “pastoral” epistle. Paul is giving instructions to Timothy, who was acting as the pastor of the church in Ephesus, on how the church should be run. It is a very helpful book for us because it tells us how God wants a church to run, what matters to God in a church and in a pastor.
I’ll never forget the time when Audrey was around 2 years old, and we were at St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis. We had actually just been voted in at Bible Baptist, and we were there for Audrey’s last appointment and we had some time to kill so we went and found the great Bellevue Baptist Church there in Memphis just to drive around.
Bellevue is one of the largest churches in the Southern Baptist Convention. It's had at least three great pastors. R.G. Lee, who was known for the great sermon "Payday Someday", Adrian Rogers - who you've probably heard on the radio with his "Love Worth Finding" radio ministry and Steve Gaines, who has been their most recent pastor.
Every one of those guys were great pastors who God used. So I don't want what I'm about to say to sound like a cricitism. But there church, it's not just a church, it's like a city. The thing that stuck out to me as we drove around wasn't how big the auditorium was (it's huge) but the nicest baseball fields I've ever seen and the advertisement for the church youth baseball league.
So imagine this shock - we drive from Bible Baptist to Bellevue. A church whose choir is double the size of our church on a good day. A church who has more money in baseball fields than we do on our whole church budget.
One of the hardest things about being a pastor is comparison. It’s a constant struggle and temptation. If I have to measure “success” in the ministry by comparing our little church with Bellevue Baptist, I’m going to feel like a lifelong failure. But it’s worse than that - because we don’t have to go to one of the biggest churches in the world to find churches to unfavorably compare ourselves to. There are plenty of churches here in Mattoon that seem like a lot more impressive than our little church.
So here is a question we have to ask - how do you measure the success of a church? How do you measure the success of a pastor?
In our text today, Paul says that “if you do these things, you will be a good minister of Jesus Christ.” So Paul gives us a list of things that make someone a good minister.
Let’s read the whole text.
[1] Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;
[2] Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;
[3] Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.
[4] For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving:
[5] For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.
[6] If thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ, nourished up in the words of faith and of good doctrine, whereunto thou hast attained.
[7] But refuse profane and old wives' fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness.
[8] For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.
[9] This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation.
[10] For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.
[11] These things command and teach.
1 Timothy 4:1-11 (KJV)
This passage tells us three things a person has to do if they want to be called a good minister of Jesus Christ. Now in context it's talking to Timothy. Timothy is a pastor. We can assume, rightly, that this is giving advice for pastors, for people in the pastoral ministry. The word minister here is actually the same word that just means servant. Any servant of Jesus Christ also should be doing these same things. And because every Christian is serving God, every Christian should be doing these things.
In fact verse 11 says, "These things command and teach." This is not just for pastors. This is for everybody. But it is especially important for pastors.
So let's pray and I'll give you the three things that are required if you're going to be a good minister of Jesus Christ.
Pray
The first requirement, if you're going to be a good minister of Jesus Christ, is found in verse 6.
[6] If thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ, nourished up in the words of faith and of good doctrine, whereunto thou hast attained.
1 Timothy 4:6 (KJV)
The first requirement is...
1. A good minister has to eat well.
It says, "Nourished up in the words of faith and good doctrine, whereunto thou hast attained."
So what it's saying here is that a good minister has to make it his duty to study the words of faith and good doctrine, to feed himself constantly on the words of the scripture. A minister that does not or will not study the Scripture continually is not a good minister according to these verses.
We're not talking about being educated. I don't think at the end of the day you have to have a doctorate from a seminary to be a good minister.
We're not talking about being wonky. We're not talking about being someone that naturally likes to read and be the smartest person in the room. That kind of thing can be the source of pride, which is not good for a minister.
What we are talking about being in the scripture and studying the scripture regularly.
This week before I started studying for this message, I was thinking about something that my old youth pastor said to me more than once. We'd be discussing somebody that was in the ministry and quit or was disqualified and He said “I guess that person just stopped studying.” That stood out to me. And I thought about it many times since.
I'm going to be honest, church. I have preached at this point through most of the scripture. I have notes of every sermon that I've preached. Not just the notes for the sermon, not just my sermon manuscript or my sermon outline, but the notes that went into making that sermon manuscript and sermon outline. I could probably go back ten years and preach the exact same messages that I preached then and almost nobody in this church would remember it.
But I would be robbing you, robbing my own soul, and hurting our ministry.
I could also go online, find the manuscripts of hundreds of other preachers that are on there, maybe edit it a little bit and pass it off as my own. I could say Skip Heitzig or Clarence Sexton or John MacArthur or Mark Dever is a better preacher than I'll ever be. I'll just read their sermon to the people and they'll never know.
But I would be robbing you, robbing my own soul, and hurting our ministry.
There's a new temptation. AI, it turns out, is really good at writing sermons. I can open up ChatGPT or Claude or Grok or a million other tools and say, "I'm preaching this week on First Timothy 4:6-10. Write me a 3,000-word sermon on this passage" and what comes out would be remarkably good. Completely unique and remarkably good.
But you know what? I would be robbing you, robbing my own soul, and hurting our ministry.
Because one of the marks of a good minister of Jesus Christ is that he is personally feeding on the word, feeding on the gospel, feeding on good doctrine. I am supposed to be ministering out of the overflow of what God is doing in my life. And that doesn't happen if I'm pulling sermons off the shelf. It doesn't happen if I'm having ChatGPT nuke something up for me. It only happens through dedicated study.
I have to be feeding constantly on the good food of the Scripture if I'm going to be a good minister of Jesus Christ. I have to go deep.
A good minister, first and foremost, is a minister that studies the Word of God, not just to get a product, but out of a personal love and desire to know God better.
A good minister has to eat well.
The second thing this passage tells us you have to do to be to be a good minister is...
2. A good minister has to reject junk.
Verse 7 says:
[7] But refuse profane and old wives' fables...
1 Timothy 4:7 (KJV)
These are some interesting words. The word "profane" here is a word that means unholy conversation. Common, worldly, unholy conversation. I could fill my mind and fill our pulpit with just worldly stuff. I can talk about sports. I can talk about politics. I could give you a bunch of self-help advice. I could write jokes. None of those things are necessarily bad. They're just profane. They're not holy. They're not godly. They're not what the pulpit is for.
The second thing Paul tells Timothy to reject is old wives' fables. Remember in the church at Ephesus there were people that were obsessed with what Paul called "fables". They were these ideas that were taken from the Old Testament where people were trying to fill in the blanks. Maybe they'd read the genealogies and they'd invent these crazy stories to go along with the genealogies.
I've never seen this movie but there was a movie that came out, I don't know, maybe ten years ago, with Russell Crowe about Noah. It was a big Hollywood production and in his movie there were rock monsters and there were all kinds of politics going on in the land and there was environmentalism. I remember reading a summary of it and thinking, "What? That's not in the Bible. Where did that come from?" That kind of thing is not too much different from the kind of stories that were being told about the Old Testament in Ephesus in Paul's day.
Paul wanted Timothy to give no place to this stuff in his own mind and no place to it in the church. It's not worth thinking about.
I would say a modern thing that a lot of pastors like to talk about is conspiracy theories. Man, I could stand up here and I could spin conspiracy theories and I could tell you about the Illuminati and I could tell you about all of the various shady things going on in the government and how this thing that happened isn't real and that thing that happened wasn't real. It's all a big conspiracy; it's all a big hoax.
And you know what? I might be right one out of every ten times. Because there are conspiracies. There is a devil and he does control things in this world and there are shady things that happen even in our country.
But you know what? I can't prove them and it's not my job to think about those things and it's not my job to teach you those things. It's my job to teach you the Scripture, to teach you the good and faithful doctrine that nourishes our souls. Because this book here, it is true. It's not one-in-twenty times true. It is twenty out of twenty times true. It is right, it is just, it is pure, and it is what we need to think about. We have to reject the profane and the old wives' fables. We have to reject the things that don't rise to the level of Scripture.
So good, a minister has to eat well.
A good minister has to reject junk.
And number 3:
3. A good minister has to exercise.
Look again at verses seven and eight with me:
[7] But refuse profane and old wives' fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness.
[8] For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.
1 Timothy 4:7-8 (KJV)
There's a beautiful metaphor here. It is the metaphor of exercise. The word "exercise thyself" comes from a word that literally means "exercise naked". Its a word that we get our word “gymnasium” from.
The people of the Roman world, the Greek world, placed a heavy emphasis on exercise. Because of that the apostle Paul uses a lot of exercise language in the epistles.
A couple weeks ago the last time that we talked about 1st Timothy, I talked about the dangers of asceticism. The danger of this idea that we have to deny ourselves in order to be better Christians. You might be tempted to think that any kind of discipline in the Christian life is a bad thing. Well Paul corrects that here with these verses because he commands us to discipline ourselves, to exercise ourselves towards godliness, towards being like God.
If you want to be great at a sport, it takes discipline. If you want to be great at basketball, if you want to be the next Caitlin Clark or the next Steph Curry, those people have shot thousands and thousands of baskets. Every day for years and years and years they do grueling ball-handling drills constantly. They study the game constantly. They are watching what they're eating, taking care of their bodies, all to put a 29.5-inch ball through a rim 10 feet up in the air.
Paul said, "Exercise yourself, not for sports but for godliness." Physical exercise does profit a little. Honestly I would be a worse pastor if I just let myself go and never exercised. My mind is connected to my body and I got to keep my body in some kind of shape in order for my mind to be in good shape, in order for me to extend as much as possible my ability to minister to you.
Too many people read this bodily exercise profit little and they're like, "Well I guess I'm just gonna sit on the lazy boy and get fat." That's not Paul's point here.
Paul's point here isn't that it's bad to physically exercise. Paul's point is that physical exercise only helps you physically. Spiritual exercise helps everything in this life and everything in the life to come.
If you become a person who is disciplined spiritually, you discipline your mind. What you think about, you discipline yourself to read the Scripture. You discipline yourself in your prayer life. You discipline yourself in your church attendance. You discipline yourself! Exercise yourself! If you do those things, that is going to have benefits in this life!
It's going to make you a better father, a better husband, a better co-worker, a better grandparent, a better mother. It is going to enrich every part of your life. Being godly reaps dividends all across your life.
But it's not just your life. It's not just here and now that is affected. If you give yourself to being a godly person by studying the Word of God and trying to live the Word of God, it is going to have dividends for eternity! You are laying up treasures, not just for this life but the next life.
So to be a good minister, to be a good servant of Jesus Christ, you have to feed constantly on the Word of God. You have to reject the nonsense alternatives that are always popping up. You have to live it. You have to exercise it. You have to have some kind of discipline in your life. If you do those three things, it doesn't matter what the visible fruit is. You will be a good servant of Jesus Christ.
Now look at verses nine and ten:
[9] This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation.
[10] For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.
1 Timothy 4:9-10 (KJV)
No one really knows what Paul was talking about when he said, "This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation." He could have been talking about exercising yourself to godliness or he could have been talking about how we serve the living God, the Savior of all men. Honestly both of those things are faithful sayings. Both of them are worthy of all acceptance.
But look at the last verse there, verse 10. Serving the Lord is not a promise of an easy life. Paul said we labor and suffer reproach. It is a work that is supposed to be hard work and it is a work that other people will scoff at you for, will reproach you for, but none of that should matter because we trust in the living God who is the Savior of all men.
Let me quickly deal with one little aside from this last verse and it will be done for the night. Some people have read that verse, "He's the Savior of all men," and taken it to teach something called universalism. Universalism teaches that everybody is saved because of Jesus.
So you can never trust Christ. You can be a Hindu or you can be a Muslim or you can be an atheist. Completely reject the gospel and be saved.
That is not what the Savior of all men means. We know that because it doesn't jive with the rest of the scripture. Paul himself, the man that wrote these words, said he wishes that he could be accursed for his countrymen. The entire New Testament makes no sense if everybody just automatically is accepted in the gospel.
But it also doesn't make sense just by itself because the next phrase says "specifically those that believe." So what did Paul mean when he said the Savior of all men?
I think there are two right ways to understand this phrase:
Jesus is the Savior of all men in that He is the only Savior available to all men.
Jesus is the Savior of all men in that His death is adequate to save all men, but only effective for those who believe.
Conclusion
So what does it mean to be a good minister of Jesus Christ? Whether you're a pastor or just a faithful Christian serving the Lord in your home, workplace, or community, these three things are essential:
Eat well – Feed daily on the Word of God and sound doctrine. Don't just prepare sermons or lessons for others; let the truth nourish your own soul first.
Reject junk – Guard your mind and your teaching from worldly distractions, conspiracy theories, and anything that doesn't measure up to the pure Word of God.
Exercise – Discipline yourself toward godliness. Spiritual training isn't optional; it's the path to blessing in this life and the life to come.
And remember: this life of faithful service won't always be easy. You will labor. You may suffer reproach. But you can endure because you trust in the living God, the Savior of all who believe.
Let's pray.Manuscript - 1 Timothy 4:6-11
Take your Bibles with me and go to 1 Timothy 4. 1 Timothy 4. We are going to read the first 10 verses tonight and focus on verses 6-11:
Remember, 1 Timothy is a book of instructions for the church. It’s called a “pastoral” epistle. Paul is giving instructions to Timothy, who was acting as the pastor of the church in Ephesus, on how the church should be run. It is a very helpful book for us because it tells us how God wants a church to run, what matters to God in a church and in a pastor.
I’ll never forget the time when Audrey was around 2 years old, and we were at St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis. We had actually just been voted in at Bible Baptist, and we were there for Audrey’s last appointment and we had some time to kill so we went and found the great Bellevue Baptist Church there in Memphis just to drive around.
Bellevue is one of the largest churches in the Southern Baptist Convention. It's had at least three great pastors. R.G. Lee, who was known for the great sermon "Payday Someday", Adrian Rogers - who you've probably heard on the radio with his "Love Worth Finding" radio ministry and Steve Gaines, who has been their most recent pastor.
Every one of those guys were great pastors who God used. So I don't want what I'm about to say to sound like a cricitism. But there church, it's not just a church, it's like a city. The thing that stuck out to me as we drove around wasn't how big the auditorium was (it's huge) but the nicest baseball fields I've ever seen and the advertisement for the church youth baseball league.
So imagine this shock - we drive from Bible Baptist to Bellevue. A church whose choir is double the size of our church on a good day. A church who has more money in baseball fields than we do on our whole church budget.
One of the hardest things about being a pastor is comparison. It’s a constant struggle and temptation. If I have to measure “success” in the ministry by comparing our little church with Bellevue Baptist, I’m going to feel like a lifelong failure. But it’s worse than that - because we don’t have to go to one of the biggest churches in the world to find churches to unfavorably compare ourselves to. There are plenty of churches here in Mattoon that seem like a lot more impressive than our little church.
So here is a question we have to ask - how do you measure the success of a church? How do you measure the success of a pastor?
In our text today, Paul says that “if you do these things, you will be a good minister of Jesus Christ.” So Paul gives us a list of things that make someone a good minister.
Let’s read the whole text.
[1] Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;
[2] Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;
[3] Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.
[4] For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving:
[5] For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.
[6] If thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ, nourished up in the words of faith and of good doctrine, whereunto thou hast attained.
[7] But refuse profane and old wives' fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness.
[8] For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.
[9] This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation.
[10] For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.
[11] These things command and teach.
1 Timothy 4:1-11 (KJV)
This passage tells us three things a person has to do if they want to be called a good minister of Jesus Christ. Now in context it's talking to Timothy. Timothy is a pastor. We can assume, rightly, that this is giving advice for pastors, for people in the pastoral ministry. The word minister here is actually the same word that just means servant. Any servant of Jesus Christ also should be doing these same things. And because every Christian is serving God, every Christian should be doing these things.
In fact verse 11 says, "These things command and teach." This is not just for pastors. This is for everybody. But it is especially important for pastors.
So let's pray and I'll give you the three things that are required if you're going to be a good minister of Jesus Christ.
Pray
The first requirement, if you're going to be a good minister of Jesus Christ, is found in verse 6.
[6] If thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ, nourished up in the words of faith and of good doctrine, whereunto thou hast attained.
1 Timothy 4:6 (KJV)
The first requirement is...
1. A good minister has to eat well.
It says, "Nourished up in the words of faith and good doctrine, whereunto thou hast attained."
So what it's saying here is that a good minister has to make it his duty to study the words of faith and good doctrine, to feed himself constantly on the words of the scripture. A minister that does not or will not study the Scripture continually is not a good minister according to these verses.
We're not talking about being educated. I don't think at the end of the day you have to have a doctorate from a seminary to be a good minister.
We're not talking about being wonky. We're not talking about being someone that naturally likes to read and be the smartest person in the room. That kind of thing can be the source of pride, which is not good for a minister.
What we are talking about being in the scripture and studying the scripture regularly.
This week before I started studying for this message, I was thinking about something that my old youth pastor said to me more than once. We'd be discussing somebody that was in the ministry and quit or was disqualified and He said “I guess that person just stopped studying.” That stood out to me. And I thought about it many times since.
I'm going to be honest, church. I have preached at this point through most of the scripture. I have notes of every sermon that I've preached. Not just the notes for the sermon, not just my sermon manuscript or my sermon outline, but the notes that went into making that sermon manuscript and sermon outline. I could probably go back ten years and preach the exact same messages that I preached then and almost nobody in this church would remember it.
But I would be robbing you, robbing my own soul, and hurting our ministry.
I could also go online, find the manuscripts of hundreds of other preachers that are on there, maybe edit it a little bit and pass it off as my own. I could say Skip Heitzig or Clarence Sexton or John MacArthur or Mark Dever is a better preacher than I'll ever be. I'll just read their sermon to the people and they'll never know.
But I would be robbing you, robbing my own soul, and hurting our ministry.
There's a new temptation. AI, it turns out, is really good at writing sermons. I can open up ChatGPT or Claude or Grok or a million other tools and say, "I'm preaching this week on First Timothy 4:6-10. Write me a 3,000-word sermon on this passage" and what comes out would be remarkably good. Completely unique and remarkably good.
But you know what? I would be robbing you, robbing my own soul, and hurting our ministry.
Because one of the marks of a good minister of Jesus Christ is that he is personally feeding on the word, feeding on the gospel, feeding on good doctrine. I am supposed to be ministering out of the overflow of what God is doing in my life. And that doesn't happen if I'm pulling sermons off the shelf. It doesn't happen if I'm having ChatGPT nuke something up for me. It only happens through dedicated study.
I have to be feeding constantly on the good food of the Scripture if I'm going to be a good minister of Jesus Christ. I have to go deep.
A good minister, first and foremost, is a minister that studies the Word of God, not just to get a product, but out of a personal love and desire to know God better.
A good minister has to eat well.
The second thing this passage tells us you have to do to be to be a good minister is...
2. A good minister has to reject junk.
Verse 7 says:
[7] But refuse profane and old wives' fables...
1 Timothy 4:7 (KJV)
These are some interesting words. The word "profane" here is a word that means unholy conversation. Common, worldly, unholy conversation. I could fill my mind and fill our pulpit with just worldly stuff. I can talk about sports. I can talk about politics. I could give you a bunch of self-help advice. I could write jokes. None of those things are necessarily bad. They're just profane. They're not holy. They're not godly. They're not what the pulpit is for.
The second thing Paul tells Timothy to reject is old wives' fables. Remember in the church at Ephesus there were people that were obsessed with what Paul called "fables". They were these ideas that were taken from the Old Testament where people were trying to fill in the blanks. Maybe they'd read the genealogies and they'd invent these crazy stories to go along with the genealogies.
I've never seen this movie but there was a movie that came out, I don't know, maybe ten years ago, with Russell Crowe about Noah. It was a big Hollywood production and in his movie there were rock monsters and there were all kinds of politics going on in the land and there was environmentalism. I remember reading a summary of it and thinking, "What? That's not in the Bible. Where did that come from?" That kind of thing is not too much different from the kind of stories that were being told about the Old Testament in Ephesus in Paul's day.
Paul wanted Timothy to give no place to this stuff in his own mind and no place to it in the church. It's not worth thinking about.
I would say a modern thing that a lot of pastors like to talk about is conspiracy theories. Man, I could stand up here and I could spin conspiracy theories and I could tell you about the Illuminati and I could tell you about all of the various shady things going on in the government and how this thing that happened isn't real and that thing that happened wasn't real. It's all a big conspiracy; it's all a big hoax.
And you know what? I might be right one out of every ten times. Because there are conspiracies. There is a devil and he does control things in this world and there are shady things that happen even in our country.
But you know what? I can't prove them and it's not my job to think about those things and it's not my job to teach you those things. It's my job to teach you the Scripture, to teach you the good and faithful doctrine that nourishes our souls. Because this book here, it is true. It's not one-in-twenty times true. It is twenty out of twenty times true. It is right, it is just, it is pure, and it is what we need to think about. We have to reject the profane and the old wives' fables. We have to reject the things that don't rise to the level of Scripture.
So good, a minister has to eat well.
A good minister has to reject junk.
And number 3:
3. A good minister has to exercise.
Look again at verses seven and eight with me:
[7] But refuse profane and old wives' fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness.
[8] For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.
1 Timothy 4:7-8 (KJV)
There's a beautiful metaphor here. It is the metaphor of exercise. The word "exercise thyself" comes from a word that literally means "exercise naked". Its a word that we get our word “gymnasium” from.
The people of the Roman world, the Greek world, placed a heavy emphasis on exercise. Because of that the apostle Paul uses a lot of exercise language in the epistles.
A couple weeks ago the last time that we talked about 1st Timothy, I talked about the dangers of asceticism. The danger of this idea that we have to deny ourselves in order to be better Christians. You might be tempted to think that any kind of discipline in the Christian life is a bad thing. Well Paul corrects that here with these verses because he commands us to discipline ourselves, to exercise ourselves towards godliness, towards being like God.
If you want to be great at a sport, it takes discipline. If you want to be great at basketball, if you want to be the next Caitlin Clark or the next Steph Curry, those people have shot thousands and thousands of baskets. Every day for years and years and years they do grueling ball-handling drills constantly. They study the game constantly. They are watching what they're eating, taking care of their bodies, all to put a 29.5-inch ball through a rim 10 feet up in the air.
Paul said, "Exercise yourself, not for sports but for godliness." Physical exercise does profit a little. Honestly I would be a worse pastor if I just let myself go and never exercised. My mind is connected to my body and I got to keep my body in some kind of shape in order for my mind to be in good shape, in order for me to extend as much as possible my ability to minister to you.
Too many people read this bodily exercise profit little and they're like, "Well I guess I'm just gonna sit on the lazy boy and get fat." That's not Paul's point here.
Paul's point here isn't that it's bad to physically exercise. Paul's point is that physical exercise only helps you physically. Spiritual exercise helps everything in this life and everything in the life to come.
If you become a person who is disciplined spiritually, you discipline your mind. What you think about, you discipline yourself to read the Scripture. You discipline yourself in your prayer life. You discipline yourself in your church attendance. You discipline yourself! Exercise yourself! If you do those things, that is going to have benefits in this life!
It's going to make you a better father, a better husband, a better co-worker, a better grandparent, a better mother. It is going to enrich every part of your life. Being godly reaps dividends all across your life.
But it's not just your life. It's not just here and now that is affected. If you give yourself to being a godly person by studying the Word of God and trying to live the Word of God, it is going to have dividends for eternity! You are laying up treasures, not just for this life but the next life.
So to be a good minister, to be a good servant of Jesus Christ, you have to feed constantly on the Word of God. You have to reject the nonsense alternatives that are always popping up. You have to live it. You have to exercise it. You have to have some kind of discipline in your life. If you do those three things, it doesn't matter what the visible fruit is. You will be a good servant of Jesus Christ.
Now look at verses nine and ten:
[9] This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation.
[10] For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.
1 Timothy 4:9-10 (KJV)
No one really knows what Paul was talking about when he said, "This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation." He could have been talking about exercising yourself to godliness or he could have been talking about how we serve the living God, the Savior of all men. Honestly both of those things are faithful sayings. Both of them are worthy of all acceptance.
But look at the last verse there, verse 10. Serving the Lord is not a promise of an easy life. Paul said we labor and suffer reproach. It is a work that is supposed to be hard work and it is a work that other people will scoff at you for, will reproach you for, but none of that should matter because we trust in the living God who is the Savior of all men.
Let me quickly deal with one little aside from this last verse and it will be done for the night. Some people have read that verse, "He's the Savior of all men," and taken it to teach something called universalism. Universalism teaches that everybody is saved because of Jesus.
So you can never trust Christ. You can be a Hindu or you can be a Muslim or you can be an atheist. Completely reject the gospel and be saved.
That is not what the Savior of all men means. We know that because it doesn't jive with the rest of the scripture. Paul himself, the man that wrote these words, said he wishes that he could be accursed for his countrymen. The entire New Testament makes no sense if everybody just automatically is accepted in the gospel.
But it also doesn't make sense just by itself because the next phrase says "specifically those that believe." So what did Paul mean when he said the Savior of all men?
I think there are two right ways to understand this phrase:
Jesus is the Savior of all men in that He is the only Savior available to all men.
Jesus is the Savior of all men in that His death is adequate to save all men, but only effective for those who believe.
Conclusion
So what does it mean to be a good minister of Jesus Christ? Whether you're a pastor or just a faithful Christian serving the Lord in your home, workplace, or community, these three things are essential:
Eat well – Feed daily on the Word of God and sound doctrine. Don't just prepare sermons or lessons for others; let the truth nourish your own soul first.
Reject junk – Guard your mind and your teaching from worldly distractions, conspiracy theories, and anything that doesn't measure up to the pure Word of God.
Exercise – Discipline yourself toward godliness. Spiritual training isn't optional; it's the path to blessing in this life and the life to come.
And remember: this life of faithful service won't always be easy. You will labor. You may suffer reproach. But you can endure because you trust in the living God, the Savior of all who believe.
Let's pray.
