Posts from August 2022

The words of Paul to the Corinthians reveal so much about the response to the gospel when the lost hear it. “For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called” (1 Cor. 2:26). Why is this true? All of mankind is invited to come to Jesus, but so many of the mighty and noble do not answer the invitation. Much can be learned by looking at those…

One of the most “controversial” topics in the new testament appears in 1 Timothy 2:11-15, when Paul addresses the subject of a woman’s public role in the church. Through the last half of the twentieth century, and especially now, in the twenty-first, much of western society has recoiled in disgust from the very idea that there could or should be any distinction at between the roles of men and women within the church. Liberal protestantism led the way in asserting…

Some of the most specific biblical instructions about prayer appear in 1 Timothy 2. Here, the Holy Spirit not only gives us direction about the various “types” of prayers we may employ, he also points us toward some of the “objects” for whom our spirits and voices should be raised in prayer. While Paul does not give an exhaustive list of “prayer topics” in this context, the words of verses 1-2 show that the prayers we offer to our Father…

The scholarly community generally describes the letters Paul wrote to Timothy and Titus as the “pastoral” epistles. This is not really an accurate description because it derives from the denominational concept of a preacher as being THE “pastor” of a congregation. The new testament shows a distinctly different picture of the church, with each congregation having multiple “pastors” (i.e., shepherds, elders, overseers), not the “one-man-rule” so common in modern denominationalism. (Acts 14:23 shows clearly that each individual congregation had plural…