1 Timothy 4:12-16 & 5:1-2 | Episode # 1204

May 28, 2026

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

1 Timothy 4:12-16 & 5:1-2

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for over 25 years. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word verse-by-verse and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

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Transcript

This is Hope Alive, where we apply God's Word to our daily life. My name is Chad Harrison. I'm first a husband, a father, and a grandfather. I'm also the teaching pastor at Lake Community Church in Dadeville, Alabama, on beautiful Lake Martin. I've been serving as a pastor for over 30 years. I also serve as the Tallapoosa County District Judge. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word verse by verse through the Bible and to find his purpose and will for your daily life. If you would like sponsor this podcast, go to the Show Notes, where there's a link where you can make a donation. I pray in the name of Jesus that God would open his word to you, allow you to see him and to know him, so that you would know his will and his way for your life, that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today. Word of God, please speak to the hearers of your voice today in the name of Jesus. Amen. He says. He says to him, very good for him, let no one despise your youth. Meaning you can learn this when you're very, very young. You can. You can learn this when you're super young. I want you to hear me. It does not require age to know the wisdom of God. And age does not necessarily define that you know the wisdom of God, all right? The qualifications for the wisdom of God are the measure of your faith, period. Period. The measure of your faith, all right? So a young person can know God's will and God's way and be able to teach it. I want you to listen to me. We're not talking about a novice. He's going to deal with that in Second Timothy. All right? What is a novice? Somebody new to doing this. He warns against placing a novice in too high position too early because it'll mess them up. I'm going to tell you as a pastor, it's hard because I want to take people and I want to put them in positions and help them, okay? Some people aren't ready for it. They're just not. And that's okay. That's okay. That doesn't mean they're not gonna be ready next week or next year or next month or whenever that is, they may be, all right? It's hard for me to re know that I have to let the Holy Spirit lead me. And, you know, I'm not. I'm just being honest with you. I'm not very good at that, all right? I'm good at pastoring, and I'm good At raising up leaders. And I'm good at leading leaders. I don't know why I am, but I am. I'm not boasting. I'm just good at it. I just comes naturally to me. I've never wanted to be a leader, but I know how to lead. Every room I walk in, every place I'm at, I'm the leader, okay? I don't know why I wish it weren't. So. Kathleen asked me, you know, now that you're a judge, sometimes you have the afternoon off at times she says, are you bored? And I go, you mean to be by myself and nobody messing with me? No. No, I'm not bored. No, I'm not. No, it's just me and Jesus, okay? I would rather it just be me and Jesus and Kathleen a lot of the time, and then my children and my grandchildren. Just mainly my grandchildren, but my children, too, okay? I wish it would be that way. And that's all I had to do. I would rather it be that. Listen to me. I'm not lying to you. I'm not lying to you. I'd rather love to get away from people. I can't, because God won't let me. He won't let me. And you know what? That's his will. And so I must submit to his will and his way. All right? But in being a leader, I'm not always best at certain things. Anything even you're called to do, you won't be good at everything. And one of the things I'm not good at is figuring out how to insert people into where they're called to be all the time. I'm not great at it. I'm just not. Never had been, never have been. I can pick them out. I'm. I'm a good recruiter. You know, I can pick out all the athletes. I don't necessarily know where to put them on the field. You know, somebody won a national championship this year doing that. He says, let no one despise your youth, but be an example to the believers. Now he's. This is a very great. This is a great. This is a great verse. For he says, be an example to believer in word, in conduct, in love, in spirit, in faith and in purity. Wow. Wow. Wow. That's powerful. That's powerful. Notice it's six of them, which is the number for man. He's telling him in his humanness, okay? In your humanness. You need to be an example as a human being, okay? To the other believers. You need to. You need to be. You need to be a good knower of. These are for leaders. He's writing this to Timothy. Okay. If you're going to be a good pastor, you need to know the word. You need to know the word. He says. He says you need to act like you know the word. Okay, let me say this. My conduct has gotten better. It has. My conduct has gotten better. Kathleen gets on me far less than she used to. Really comes from God. But it comes from God working with y'. All. It don't come from me. I don't understand. Not somebody not operating into gifts. I mean, why. I mean, they're your superpowers. Why would you not operate in your gift? Listen to me. I've already told you. My. Some of my gifts I don't like. I. I'll be you. I know you think I want to get up here and teach all the time. I'm compelled to do it. I would rather not. I don't know how many times Kathleen tells me I got to go to church Sunday morning. I don't want to go. Being real with you. There's a compulsion that comes from God to use your gifts. It's an affront to God to not use. Use your gifts. Am I right? It is as ugly as spitting in his face. I'm not using my gifts. You died to give them to me. Yeah. I don't need that. How ugly is that? Y' all ever seen somebody get a gift from somebody that was really important and they just acted ugly about it? I have. And notice his gifts are all good and you don't operate in your gift. I mean, really, really. If you want to talk about ugliness before God, somebody who's got a gift, doesn't use it, refuses to use it before God. I mean, that's an affront to him as your father. I can't get past that. It's an affront to him. He says. He says, which was given to you by prophecy and the laying on of hands of the eldership. What he's saying is these gifts are anointed by God. We probably need to do that more. Maybe that's what we need to do. When we recognize a gift in somebody, we come and we lay hands on them and we pray over it. It's not a bad idea. That's coming from. I didn't think about that for tonight. It's not a bad idea. We see a gift in somebody, but the problem is immediately when tell them y' all come up front so we can anoint you in that gift. They're going like. I mean, they're going to be like, what's that? What's that? What's that bird that Wiley Coyotes chasing after, huh? Road run. They're going to be like, road run right out the back door just fast as they can go. Hold on. You're going to pray over me about a gift that I got? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, we could be like Wiley Coyote and set up bombs to keep them from going out. They going to steal. They're going to beat it, you know, be out. Okay, we'll just get blown up ourselves. We probably all still think about it. Still. I'll think about it. I'm thinking about it right now. You know why? You know why I ought to think about it? Because he says, meditate on these things. Isn't that what he says right there? He said, meditate on these things. Give yourself entirely to them. What he's saying is you can't lead if you're not willing to give it all. Jesus paid it all. All to him I owe Sin had left a crimson stain he washed me white as snow. He paid it all right. He paid it all. All I owe all. That's a Greek word that means all, Doc. It means all. Meditate on these things. Give yourself entirely to them that you may progress and it may be evident to all. Wow. Wow. He says, take heed to yourself into the doctrine. Continue in them, for in doing them, you will save both yourself and those who hear you. That's that process of salvation. When you do it, you save yourself and you save those who hear you. Some good stuff wasn't from experience. All right? Now what I think. What I think is wonderful is some of the very practical leadership skills that Paul imparts to Timothy, which I find. I find so powerful. So powerful. And, and, and let me say this because the world tells you lies, okay? I want you to hear me because it's really important. As we get into it in the church, we tend to emphasize certain giftings, and we place those giftings as more important than other giftings. That's why Jesus says, if you want to be first, you got to be the servant of all. Because he wants you to understand that your giftings. If you're going to operate as a leader, you got to. You gotta. You gotta serve, you gotta. You know, you gotta show up. You know, you gotta. You gotta do what you can do, be. Be where you can be. And. And there's. And so many times we say everybody's a leader, and I want you to hear me, because I think this is really important when, when you hear that and we teach it in our school systems. Okay. That everybody's a leader or you do a couple of things. First of all, you diminish the gift of leadership by acting like it's common. But then also what you do is you say to the child that's not a leader and is never going to be a leader, that somehow their giftings is not as important to. As the leadership giftings. Because the leadership giftings everybody's got to have and you got to learn how to be a leader, be the best leader you can be. Well, I'm just going to tell you that only 10% of the churches of the church's leaders and high quality leaders are very small number. They just are. They're a very small number. And those people can become very conceited in that position because the church gives so much credulity to it, credibility to it, and it causes the church to be very. We'll use a southern term, cattywampus. Okay. All right. It's like riding down the road and somebody's got their load all on one side of the truck. It's just lean and cattywampus down the road. A lot of our churches are that way because we place all the emphasis on the leader. And we don't place emphasis on some of the very most powerful foundational gifts in the church. Both the, both the ones that are, you know, very out there and dynamic and those who that are very base layer and important encouragement helps things like that, that, that we don't operate in properly. And oftentimes what we've done is we've made the leader, we've emphasized the leader so that it causes them to become puffed up, thinking that they can just do what they want to. And it begins to be very. They no longer are leading people, they're leading where they want to go. And you. What Chad said. Yeah, it becomes what Chad says rather than what God told you. And it should never be what somebody said. You can always use them as an example. I heard this from this guy and this is what it means to me. And that's powerful. But it should never be. Well, my pastor said if it's that way, then you are cattywampus. I mean, you are. All right. And one of the ways we lead here is we understand the principles of leadership, which. These are just fundamental ideas that he's about to give here. In these couple of verses he says, don't rebuke an older man, but exhort him as a father. Boy, that's a fundamental foundational way to do things. And for, for Timothy, he needed to hear that because he was a young man and he needed to understand if I'm going to approach an older man about something, I need to exhort him to what could be rather than to rebuke what's not. Okay. And I don't know how to say it anymore to you, but when I was God's gifted me, I know that when you deal with gifts, you've got a responsibility. Some are given one, some are given two, some are given five. Talent. People are responsible for it. There are five talents. Those who've been given much, much is required. You can't play games with that. Okay? I have a gift with people. Get them to, get them to do what they should be doing. Okay? One on one. You know, Stacy used to be amazed. This person's coming in, they're going to be so mad. I don't know how you're going to deal with them. 20 minutes later, they're walking out of my office doing exactly what they needed to do. Okay, That's a gift. But that does not make me better than somebody. Okay? That does not make you better than somebody. And older men and older women need to be exhorted and you'd be treated with respect. So just a common principle. Hard for young men to get that sometimes it's hard for young men to understand that. And when you see a young pastor who kind of gets in trouble, not in trouble by moral issues, but in trouble with the leadership of the church. And you see that going on a lot nowadays because we got a lot, a lot of young pastors who are in very large churches. And what happens is all of a sudden you see grown older men start, you know, bucking because they, they tired of the spur and the whip, you know, and, and you know, they cause problems for that young pastor. And the reason is, is because he's, he's having trouble leading older men. Well, I can tell you this. You can't lead an older man who is pig headed and has his conscience seared. I just tend to stay away from them. Okay? But you can lead older men who have a tender heart toward God, even if they're wrong about a lot of stuff, okay? And the way you do that is you exhort them, you encourage them in what you see God doing in their life, and they'll follow you forever. Okay? Principle. Just say, I got to learn to do it. I don't know how to tell you how to do it. You just got to learn to do it. If you're a leader, you got to learn how to do that. It's just a fundamental principle. Paul's telling Timothy, do that. And you got to treat young men as a brother. What is he saying? You can't be lord over them. You got to be a brother to them. You got to treat them as equals, okay? And listen, people want to put you on the pedestal, okay? You just kick their knees out when they try to do that, okay? It's hard to put something on a pedestal when you can't walk, okay? Don't let them do that. Don't let them do that. Don't. If you're a young leader, don't let people put you on a pedestal. Not going to work. It's not going to be good for you. Not going to be good for them. Just, I mean, you know, just shut that thing down, okay? It's not. It's not how it works. Not about that. He says, he says treat younger men as brothers. Notice what he says after that. He says, older women as mothers. Notice these are intensely relational examples that he's using. Okay? You treat older women like mothers. I mean, when Diane comes up to me and tells me it's time to do something, I treat her like, you know, she's my mom. I listen sometimes. Sometimes, you know, not as much. You know, Diane's going, that's true, that's true. I. Younger women as sisters, okay? Just intense. What's he saying? You got to treat them like their family. You got to treat them like the family. It's not a business, okay? This is not institution. Institutions are terrible. I want you to listen to me. We got to have them. Got to have them, but they're terrible. I say it all the time. People be. Be upset about some institution, you know, in the county or something like that. And I say to them, and it's an institution. What do you expect? Okay? That's hard for them. Bureaucracies are bad, okay? You take 20 A players, top of the line A players, you put them in a bureaucracy, they gonna function as B team, okay? They just are because the institution is going to drag them to be. It's just by rules and all that stuff. It's not God stuff. They. They're not. They're not free to do ba people. And so I know when I'm dealing with people who are in the grips of an institution not to be mad at them because I know they could do better not really? That make sense? And so what he's saying to you is, if you're going to use a leadership style to lead a group of people called the church, you better use the model of a family and not the model of an organization or an institution. All right? You gotta be a family. You gotta be a family. And, and, and one of the things you do with your family is you hug folks and you tell them you love them. Isn't that what you do? All right. First church I ever went to, I told you. The pastor ran off with his wife's best friend. But they didn't run far. They just ran two miles down the road and got a house. All right? He was heavy. He couldn't run much farther than that. All right? He's like me. And, and, and the church was just really upset. And I started out and I, you know, I was a hugger anyway, so I started hugging people. I know some women looking side eyes. He's hugging everybody. But they finally got to realize, I hug everybody. I'm a hug them all. I'm going to hug them all. Now. If I don't hug you, if I pass you by, you get upset, right? Well, what, I can't. I don't get a hug today? You know what's up with that? I hug me and hug women hug everybody. Why? Because we're family. And Paul's telling, Paul's telling Timothy that. He's saying, listen, we're a family. You got to act like a family. You got to be a family. You gotta. You gotta function like a family. And when we treat people like that, you know, older women and older men like fathers and mothers and, and younger women and younger men like brothers and sisters, and we treat them with, with, with. Now, listen, we're not talking about equity. Everybody's the same because everybody ain't the same. We're talking about equally. Everybody has equal value before God when we do that. I believe in equality. I don't believe in equity, okay? The equity don't work. Everybody ain't the same. Don't, don't expect them to be the same, okay? Don't expect them to be the same. We got folks in this church don't like to be hugged or didn't like to be hugged till they'd been here for a while, okay? I walk up and hug them. It's like, he's hugging me now. In some ways, I'm like, Shrek, you just got to take it. You know what I'm talking about? I'm just, I'm Just huge. We. We. We made a picture of all the board members of the. Of the Chamber of Commerce last night. And I realized when I was looking at that picture, everybody else hit me about right there. It was like a giant was behind in the back corner taking the picture. I realized that. I realized some people don't want. Don't like to be hugged. And if you don't like to be hugged, I don't do it. I'll come up and start patting you. You know, I'm talking about. I pat you on the shoulder if you don't like to be hugged. And eventually they'll start leaning in, you know, let me get all the way the other shoulder, you know, and then back about two years, they go, okay, hug me. That's fine. All right. Well, you go, why you do that? Well, because, you know, people are different. I mean, my. My youngest daughter, she did not want to be kissed, period. Now, when she started getting boyfriends, that's all she wanted to do is smooch them. I'm sitting there going, why are you smooching them? You wouldn't even give me a kiss when I. When you were little. Okay? My oldest daughter. Oh, she's all into kissing, you know, she. She loved it. I. I'm almost. I'm a tame. My granddaughter. My grand. My. My oldest granddaughter, more like my youngest daughter in some ways. And I'm going to tell you, I've noticed she ain't all that fired up about me kissing her, even though I've been kissing her her whole life. Okay? But we're a family. We're a family. And you got to function like that. Notice you do it, but you do it with what? Purity? All right? Do it right. All right? Do it. Do it. Do it the right way. Look, and if you ain't doing it the right way, people know. People know. And you go, well, who knows the women? Women, Women, Women. All right? I just be real with you, and I'm just giving you leadership principles. But. But if you're in a room, if something goes wrong, just look at the women's faces, okay? Men will be sitting there going, I don't know what's happening here. I mean, men won't even know what's going on. All the women be going, you know, if you see that on all the women's faces, something just happened, okay? Something. Because all. Every one of them. Every one of them. Every one of them there'll be. That's. That's exactly how it works. I'm a. I mean, you. You can see it in the room. You can read it in the room. And, and I learned that as a young pastor, I, I, if I walked in the room, all the women were upset. Oh, if I walked in the room, men were upset. Alabama probably lost her. Auburn or somebody. Tennessee. I mean, you know, it doesn't really matter. All right? But if the women are upset, then everybody's upset. Why? Because we're a family. We're a family. That's the way it works. Huh? Did I make that point clear enough to you? He, he says next, next verse 10 tail. All right, I'm gonna stop here because the next section is going to deal with something that's very important, but it doesn't really. It doesn't really. And let me, let me just lay a framework for it, okay? It's, it's going to have a principle that's really important, but, but it's not a principle that we necessarily function in because of the way we function as churches, okay? The, the, the, the functional thing he's talking about here is not going to be as important as the principle, although there are a couple of functional things that we do need to deal with. Okay? And what I mean by that. Well, he's going to talk about taking care of people. And, and, yeah, I hear you back there. I hear you back here. He's gonna, he's gonna, he's gonna talk about what we would call charity, okay? The taking care of the widows, which was a problem in the early church, okay, because they didn't have a methodology by which to take care of themselves financially and physically. Make sense, all right? And he's going to say, he's going to say that you don't give charity to everybody because if you can earn it yourself, you shouldn't take charity. Now, that is a societal thing and a church thing that is really important that we have really messed up in our society, okay? Because what it does is it causes you not to properly take care of the people you're supposed to be taking care of, and it causes the people who you're not supposed to be taking care of to become. Not what they're made to come. Become dependent, okay? And we've got that problem in our society, and we got, we've got that going on, and the principle is at work here, and we need to know that, all right? And it's a very important principle as far as leadership's concerned, because if I help you to do what you can do, I've not helped you at all, okay? If I've Helped you to do what you can do. I've not helped you at all. Now, I'm not talking about lending a helping hand, being a encouragement, hanging out with somebody. I'm talking about making you dependent on me helping you. Okay? And. And, you know, I'll kind of end this this week, and we'll move into it next week. But I was in the parking lot in Louisiana. We were on a fishing trip with the first church I started, and there was seven or eight men. We were down there, and we got down to Louisiana. We're going in the bayous. We're going to be fishing in the bayous. It was really cool. Cool trip. We went on, and we were out in the parking lot, and. We were over near this. They had, like, alcoholic smoothies that you could buy. And we were kind of. We were kind of mesmerized by it. Like, they gave you a Styrofoam cup with a top on it, and it had alcohol in it, and you just get in your truck and drive off. I said, you can't do that in Alabama. What in the world are y' all doing? But Louisiana is a different place. I. I mean, to buy you is to buy you. All right? And so. And so we're out there in the parking lot, and I noticed this guy was going up to his dark. This guy was going up to women and asking them for stuff. And I saw him do it to two women. You could tell the two women were not happy about it. So he comes up to me and he says. He says, man, can you let me. And starts giving me the Jesus stuff about, you know, he walking fine. I said. I said, no, I can't give you nothing. And you don't need to go up to women in his parking lot. It's dark parking lot, Asking them for. For a handout. And then he really bucked up and started quoting scriptures. I said, don't quote scripture to me. I'm a pastor. You may give you a pastor, man. Don't work, don't eat. That's in the Bible. Get your butt to work. And then he really got mad. I said, let me. Let me tell you something else. If I see you go up to any other woman in this parking lot, I promise you, you walk out, you're gonna get. Be out in cuffs going out. Now, I didn't know how I was going to do that, but I. But you know what I'm talking about. Now I know exactly how I was going to do it. All right? But, but, but you know, that principle if he thought he, he deserved charity, and he did not deserve charity. He did not. Man don't work, he don't eat. Now if he's totally disabled or too old to work and he don't, then he needs to eat. But if he can work, he should, he should work. Now I want you to listen to me. I believe that. I live it. I believe it. You, you should, you should, you should get out there and, and prove your worth. Even as, even, even if you're in the ministry. You gotta work. You can't just be hanging out, you gotta do ministry. You know what I'm saying? I mean, you gotta do what you've been called to do. You gotta earn those positions too, by the way. That's the way it works. And I just say that to you because, because we have so many people who, who think it's Christian to take care of people who they're hurting. Taking care of. Don't call it Christian if you're an enabling bad behavior. You know, let me say this. Every pastor we have works and they do side stuff and some of them are retired and some of them have full time jobs. And you ought to work, you ought to be out there, I mean, you ought to be out there doing. That's the way it goes and the way it should be. And, and we're going to get into this passage because they were doing it wrong and it was hurting people. And so, and you know, it's a hard teaching because the church, we think so many times, let's just help them out. Okay, let's do help them out, all right? But the next time we need to think about helping them out and the third time we need to go, okay, maybe we ain't helping right now. If they're 80 years old, we need to be taking them stuff every week. If they're 30 years old, that stomach needs to motivate them. If it's empty, they'll get to work. Right? That's just the way it is. It's the way it is. And you'll find that most people who serve God, even if they don't have a full time job, they are out working and doing. Most of the greatest people in the church today, you know, as far as getting things done, are retired people. They work harder than they worked when they were at the job. You know why they worked harder than they worked at the job? Because they're doing something they want to do right? When they were in their job, half the time they didn't even want to be there right now they do. They doing things they want to do, and God's using them. All right. I just felt like I need to throw that out there, just, you know, some good God stuff. Because if. If you don't understand it, you'll think that you're owed something, and you're not owed anything. You are not owed anything. All right. As you go today, I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you, and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.