1 Timothy 5:11-21 | Episode # 1206

June 1, 2026

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

1 Timothy 5:11-21

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, but refuse the younger widows. Why? Now? He. I don't know why it uses this word, but it says when they have become. When they begun to grow, wanting of Christ, they desire to marry. All right, now I want you to hear me. That is a. The term there means. Doesn't mean that you're rejecting Christ, okay? What it means is, is that. Well, I mean, you still have. Carnal. Is still desirous of a human relationship. Lot of widows are not. A lot of widows are not. They're not. That's what he's talking about. Okay, but if, If. If you can get married and you won't be married, you need to get married. And what, what, what. What that means is she's. If. If she's replacing. If she was. She. She's trusting Jesus to take care of her, but she's also desirous of marriage. So she's not wanting Christ to take care of her. She wants to be in a marriage. What's he saying? Do we'll get married. Okay. He says they desire to marry having condemnation because they've cast off their first faith. And I don't know. I really don't understand why. Why it translates this. The word condemnation means to make a judgment. Okay? The word condemnation that, that we use meaning I'm condemning myself because of sin. Okay? Is not the same idea. It's not the same idea. Well, if. Let me, Let me, Let me, Let me read it and use the term judgment. Having judgment because they have cast off their first faith, meaning they had wanted God to take care of them. But now they desire to be married, so they're casting off that first faith and they're wanting to be back in a marriage relationship. Okay, it's not condemning. The passage is not condemning. All right? But translations do matter. And besides, they learn to be. I. Now he's saying this. If. If you've got. If you've got a widow who's. Who doesn't fit the criteria, all right, he's going to go through the problems with. With having widows in the widow's ministry where you're handling all their needs. And, and, and they're not. They. They don't qualify. What happens? Well, this is what happens. He says they learn to be idle, wandering about from house to house. And not only idle, but also gossips and busybodies saying things which they ought not. I mean, I don't really have to explain that. Do it to do I. I mean, as you're thinking about it. Just leave it alone, Pastor. Leave it alone. Don't touch that. I mean, busybodyness is a. Is a problem, ain't it? Huh? It is. It is. Go. Being a gossip is an issue. The Bible speaks plainly about it. Don't go around gossiping about things, all right? If you're going to talk about it, you need to talk about it to an end. That's going to be best for everybody. You just talking about it. Talk about it. No, no. And if you've got a woman who is wanting to meet a man, she's out talking with everybody and she's being taken care of. And before you know it, you got. You got a problem in your church. Okay, I'm sorry. Listen. Women's cat vocabulary, okay? Generally speaking, this is. This is. This is sociologically proven. Women's vocabulary, generally speaking, is about twice the size of the average male. Did y' all know that Women know twice as many words as men do on average? Okay, now, I know a lot of words, okay? I'm on the high end of the average. I know sometimes I'll use a word and folks will be looking at me like, what? What in the world you talking about? And then I try to come back when I see that look on somebody's face, I try to give them another word immediately when I'm teaching. And by the way, women, on average during the day speak twice as many words as men. Did y' all know that? Well, all the men said. All God's men said amen. All right? And that's why when you get home at night, the men are run out and the women just half done, okay? Am I right? The men, they done talking, and the women are half are just halfway through. And that's why you gotta learn to love your wife as Christ loved church. You gotta let her talk. Right? I'm just teaching you men something. You gotta let your wife talk. And if she's in a profession where she doesn't talk much, I mean, sometimes Kathleen be going for an hour or so, you know, I'm talking about just running. She just. I mean, just fast, as hard as she can go because she, you know, she'd been working on spreadsheets all day. And I've been in court talking to people, and I'm tired talking to anybody, you know. And so, you know, I just had to sit there and look at her. I don't even have to talk a whole lot. Yeah. And then what happened? I mean, you know, just throw a few words out there and. Oh, that's, you know, grunt in the right spots and, you know, make the right noises in different place because. I'm listening. I'm listening. But I don't want to say nothing about it. Right. Very important. Very important, though. I'm teaching y' all stuff that's just. It's just one of those things that you need to. You need to know. A lot of people want to get out there and talk about things they don't need to be talking about. All right? And. And who is more prone to do that? The people who talk the most. Right? I mean, it's just the truth. Okay? It's just the truth. And so, so what? What Paul's telling Timothy is you go. If you let every woman who's lost her husband into the widow's ministry, you fixing to have a big old problem. And so we need to lit. We need to limit it. It's pretty good explanation, isn't it? Why is he telling Timothy this? Well, because he's a young man who was raised by. Who? Women. He's raised by women. He didn't have a dad. He's a mumser, remember? He didn't have a father, okay? And so he was raised by women. So he's going to think that this is just the way it works. Paul said, no, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. Don't you love it when you kind of get the nuance of it and you realize, why did Paul go into all this with him? Well, because Timothy needed to hear this. Because Timothy grew up in an environment where he needed to hear this. And as a leader, he needed to learn that, you know, when. When you grow up in certain environments, you need to realize these are the problems with the environments I grew up in. You need to do that with your parents. And it's very difficult when you. When you are a parent and your children do that with you. But your children, every person, when they become an adult or as they grow into adulthood, they need to look at their parents and evaluate them. Listen to me in a biblical way, okay? With grace. But a realization that your parents had some problems and they gave them to you, okay? And there's nothing wrong with that. Give your parents grace in the middle of it, probably they got it passed down from them. And we know that happens because the sins of the father passed to the second, third generation. If you know that's the case, then you just got it. You got to deal with it. And what do you. What do you do? You reject whatever that is without rejecting them, okay? You reject whatever that is. That it's not right. My grandmother, she was my. My mom's. I mean, my dad's mom. She was the sweetest lady in the absolute world. But, man, she could worry with the best of them. She could worry all day and she could worry all night. She could worry in her sleep. She could worry when she's having fun. She could worry. Worry in the morning. She could worry it in the evening. She could worry. She could worry on the plane. She could worry on a train. She could worry while she's eating green eggs and ham. She could do it all time, okay? She could do it all the time. And let me tell you something. My dad, he was not bad at it. He was not excellent. He was not the best I ever saw, because she was. But he was pretty good at worrying. And you know what it taught me to do? To worry. To worry. Ain't good. Worrying's bad. Where's an absence of faith? This is absence of trust in God. Do I reject my dad and my grandmother because of that? No. No, no, no. But I do know we worried every time I left. He said, you make sure you be careful. I said, daddy, I'm going to be careless. I tell him that when I. When we were driving off. Bye, dad. Being careless, you know, and it was my way of reject. I've been rejecting that. You worried about whether or not we get home. I'm not. Not going to worry about it. I'm gonna let God be God and I'm gonna let me be me. And him being God and me being me is gonna work better than me being God and worrying about it make sense. So it is a good idea to evaluate where you came from so that your children. And by the way, my children have, and I've got girls and so they're excellent evaluators, okay? They're way better evaluators. And boys. And they have evaluated me, okay? And, and I'm quite sure they've rejected some of the stuff and probably should have. All right. He says, he says, therefore I desire that the younger widows married, bear children, manage the house, give no opportunity to the adversary to speak reproachfully. If you're younger, keep, get married. If you can have kids, have kids. By the way, that's another thing that I just don't get. All right, sorry, but I mean, he's talking to culture. I'm just speaking to culture. I do not understand the Christian church's idea. Christian, young Christian people thinking that it, that, you know, we're going to, we're just going to date for eight years and get married when we're 30 years old and then start a family. That's, that's just not. Don't. I don't, I don't get that, Okay? I don't get that. There's all kinds of problems that go along with that. You need to hear that. And we need to be telling, we need to be telling our children that. Okay? What are the problems with that? Well, if you wait till you're in your 30s to start having children, you might have a lot more problems having children. Okay? And I'm going to tell you, raising children is for the young, okay? It is for the young. There's a lot of people that have had that child, you know, that, that, that, that one that just snuck up on them when they were 33, 34. I'm going to tell you, if I had a child When I was 33, 34, Kathleen probably had to kill me. I mean, it's rough. It ain't easy to have kids. I mean, it, it's hard to have kids. Kids are rough. You know, live life. What life? What life? What life are you living? Is it God's life or is it a self. If it is a self oriented life, I'm asking the question, and I know there are going to be people watching this. You know, I'm going to tell you that's that that thought process is not only out of line with scripture, but it's also out of line with the culture, the culture that existed for thousands of years before us. I talked to, I talked to young people in front of me, in front in the courtroom and they're 17 and 18 years old and they're still acting like children. And I say. And they say, well, you know, I just want to. I just want to have fun, do what I want. That's fine. But you do realize that, that 80 years ago, that half of a. Half a high school class of females in the high school were married. They were married in their senior. Did y' all know that? Did y' all know that? Okay. They were married during their senior year. It was not uncommon for you to get married at 16, 17, 18 years old. Try to have as many children as you could have because children died back then. When you were 19 years old, you were a grown man with a job and you've been doing it for a while and you usually had a family and one or two children. If you treat children like their children until they're adults, they'll continue act like children as long as you treat them like children. Now do. Am I, am I saying 16, 17 year olds need to get married now? No, not necessarily. But I'd much prefer 19 to 20 year olds to get married than 35 and 40 year olds to get married for the first time because we wanted to live the life. One of the most rewarding things you can do is raise children. Let me tell you something. One of the best things to do is, is to grow old having started young with someone. Now I know that doesn't fit the culture we live in. Well, I'm sorry, people. When, when World War II began, and especially World War I began, 16 and 17 and 18 year olds joined the military and they weren't supposed to, but you know what? They didn't have birth certificates, so you didn't know how old they were. And when they showed up, they were already men. Both my grandfathers joined the military before they were legally supposed to join the military. And they didn't act like 16 and 17 year olds. Today. They act like grown men. You know why they acted like grown men? Because they were grown men. They had responsibility and they learned to be adults. 16 and 17 and 18 year olds should be. You should expect them to act like an adult and you fail them if you don't. I didn't let my girls be. I didn't let. Once they got to be 14, 15 years old, it was time to be adults. And it, it did. It, it benefited them greatly. That get me kicked off Facebook. All right. He says for some have already turned aside to Satan. That's bad. If any believing man or woman has. If any believing man or woman has widows, let them relieve them. And do not let the church be a burden, meaning if you've got widows in your family, take care of them. He said that. Now, the third time, he said the family's responsible for it first, that it may relieve those who are really widows, meaning they got nobody. And that's what he means by being really a widow. You got nobody. All right, we're getting in some. This practical stuff. Practical stuff. I don't even know what time it is, but who cares? All right? Let the elders who rule well be counted worthy of double honor, meaning you got to honor the people that are leading you. Now, I'm not going to ride this a whole lot, but it's important. It's not important for me that you honor me or any of the other pastors or any other leaders in the church. It's not important for me that you do that. It's important that you do that. Okay? Listen, when the Bible says honor your father and mother, who's that important for? That's important for the person who's doing the honoring, not for the father and mother. Why? Because the blessing comes from honoring your father and mother that your days might be long on the earth. Okay? All right. So it's important that you honor your father and mother, even if they're not super honorable, because it is a blessing to you to honor them. What a great thing it is to deal with a Christian whose parent was an absolute heathen, okay? And they've honored them their whole life. And now they're passed away and they're still honoring them. And I know that their fam. Their mom or daddy was, well, a heathen, okay? It's a very, it's a very powerful thing to see that. Okay? Likewise, if someone's doing their job leading the church, well, you ought to honor them, okay? And he, and he. And he. And he gets specific. Especially those who labor in the word and doctrine. If they're teaching you, if they're discipling you, you need to honor them, okay? And you need treat them honorably. And, and there's. There's no way to get around that. I'm not asking y' all to. I, I, I, y' all call me Chad. That's the way you are. You know, I want to be, I want to be your shepherd. And, and the other pastors do, too. But, but, but in your heart, this matters. And it's, it's a blessing for you, not a blessing for me, okay? I don't serve God to get your Honor, Okay? And if I did, I'd have done quit a long time ago. Okay? This is for the believers. Timothy needs to teach them that it's important to honor those who are spiritual leaders. For the scripture says, you shall not muzzle the ox while it treads the grain. That's Deuteronomy. And then this is Jesus. And the labor is worth his wages, meaning it's that you. You know who your leaders are that are valuable, and you need to treat them valuable if they are valuable. Right. Right now. And by the way, this is a good passage to understand that you ought to pay. Pay them if that's what they need, okay? Paul deals with that a whole lot. You read that a whole lot in his epistles. Some places he goes, they take care of him. Some places they go, he doesn't. He's a tent maker. So what does he do when they don't take care of him? He makes tents, okay? All right. When they do take care of him, he don't have to make as many tents, all right? He can focus on his ministry. Now, the way we do pastoring here is if you're a called man of God, if you come in, we ask you what you need, all right? We ask you to get involved into a ministry, and we ask you to ask you what you need. And there are some here that don't need anything, and there's some here to do, and we just. We pay for. Pay as. As you need, all right? We don't muzzle the ox, okay? That's the way. That's the way it works. And you go, how's that going to work in. I don't know. I don't know how it's going to work in the future. We're going to do it that way, all right? I don't need to get paid, okay? But there are some that do, and there's nothing wrong with that. And we need to honor them in that way, okay? He says. He says, do not receive an accusation against an elder except from two or three witnesses. Now that is a good principle. That's a very important principle, okay? We don't just. Just because somebody says they don't like what somebody said to them. Two or three witnesses, okay? Sorry. That's the way we're going to do business. That's the way we do business, all right? I don't want to hear from somebody who's. Who's disgruntled about something telling me some junk about somebody not listening to it, okay? All right? Those who are sinning, rebuke in the presence of all that the rest also may fear. Which means if there is a present tense issue that's public, then needs to be dealt with. Deal with it. Okay. Rebuke them. Notice. Did it say reject them? No. What it say? Rebuke them. Tell them they doing wrong. Quit doing that. All right. Nothing wrong with that. All right. I've been rebuked many times by somebody. Okay. All right. And I've, I've done some rebuking. All right. But, but, but you got it. You, you, you need to get that. That's a. These are, these are some. If you'll notice, there's principles here about leadership that they just are overwhelming once you kind of think about them. And how much. How hard is it going to be for Timothy to grow into this? Hard, hard. It's hard to get, get all this right in your mind and think through it and how to do it well, and then you're dealing with all kinds of stuff. And, and by the way, young men who've got families, it's even harder on them because they got to deal with their family and, and all that. You know, it's hard, hard, hard, hard. Okay. And there's all kinds of issues that go along with that. Now he's fixing to say something. I'm going to just kind of move past it. All right. I charge you before God and the Lord Jesus Christ and the elect angels. Oh, the angels are elect too? Okay. It's in there. I'm just letting you know. There it is. The angels are elect. That's Paul, all right. Just. He only uses election and predestination. But it's only mentioned 32 times in the Bible. Okay, all right. 12 books. 12 different books. Mention it. Just letting you know. Okay. Written by Peter, Paul, James, John. That's the good quartet right there. Are you following me? Have I said enough? The angels are elect. That means that we definitely need to be elected. Am I right? Just asking. See, here's the problem. If it's in there, I gotta. It's gotta fit in my theology. Right? Or it's, or it's the chat ology. It's chat ology. It don't work 32 times in the Bible. 32 times this idea is mentioned. Just letting it sit there for a minute. All right. He says, I charge you before God and the Lord Jesus Christ and the elect angels, that you observe these things without prejudice, doing nothing with partiality. What is he saying? Don't pick favorites. Don't pick favorites. If you're going to do for one, do for the other. Now, do you have to treat people differently? Yeah. Yes, you do. Yes. Yes, you do. Why? Because they're different. All right? Some people need to be. Need a little bit more of a helping hand. Some people need a little bit more words of encouragement. Some people don't need any of it. All right? But if you're going to do it, do the same for everybody. It's a great lesson to learn. If you're going to hug women as a pastor, you hug all the women the same way. Okay. If you're going to hug one, you better hug them all. Makes sense. All right. It's just the way it works. Side hug everybody, period. And by the way, if you're going to hug the women, got to hug the men, right? So that's the way it works. Back when I was young, that was like a no, no men. We came home from Promise Keepers and men were hugging people in the church I was in as a youth pastor, that just shook folks up. Men up there in front of this church hugging each other. What in the world has happened? Okay, well, you treat people. You treat people differently in the sense that they have different needs, but you don't. You don't treat them differently in that you pick favorites. And Paul's telling Timothy to do that. Make sure you don't pick favorites. 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.