The Confession and Conduct of the Church

I was glad when they said to me, Let us go to the house of the Lord. Heavenly Father, we do come to you this evening in the name of your Son. We do sing songs, hymns that point to your great attributes, that we are the body of Christ and you are our head. You are our older brother who has gone before us under a Heavenly Father and you have made us brothers and sisters adopted into the family of God. You are the one that has become our Lord and our Redeemer and has saved us from our sin. We sing of these truths this evening as we go into worship, both Son of God and Son of Man. We pray this evening that worship would be honoring to you and we pray that your truth would be communicated on the great and many attributes of the Lord Jesus Christ and his work on our behalf. I invite you to turn your Bibles to 1 Timothy 3. If you were visiting with us this evening, I've been preaching once a month on the book of 1 Timothy and we are now in chapter 3, starting in verse 14. I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that if I delay you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth. Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness.

He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. Heavenly Father, please bless the preaching of your Word. Bless ears to hear and eyes to see the truth of your Word this evening. Let us see the full Christ in his work, in his redemptive work, in this hymn to Christ. In your Son's name we pray.

Amen. Heavenly Paul is now telling us the purpose of this letter. It is that you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God. This is a hymn portion, this is a song, and in this song it is confessing the faith of the Christian church.

When we say confess, we don't mean confessing sin, what we mean is declaring, making a confession of faith, declaring the truth of our faith. In this letter, Paul tells us the nature of the church, which in turn gives us instruction on both the conduct and the confession of the Christian church. I think in recent times I have been looking out at the landscape of the American church and I feel like we are chipping away at our own foundation. Entire denominations are starting to minimize and to reduce the Christian faith into a few ethical concepts, give our youth an ethical teaching on how to live, and give a few spiritual truths. I see it in the news, I see it in social media, that someone might say something to the effect of the real message of the Christian faith is to be like Christ, is to be like Jesus. They will say good and right things like to love one another and to show tolerance and to have humility and acceptance and to help others.

On the surface level, this sounds great. We should love and show tolerance and be humble. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ ought to humble us that it is nothing in ourselves, it is simply what Christ has done for us. But what happens as this language is used in American culture, what happens is people minimize the truth of the Christian faith down to these small details, these few attributes of tolerance and love that we start to deny the Christian faith when we do not give it the full expression of the historic Christian faith.

There is a minimization that comes when we start to look at these truths as basic and simple. We have to give it the full expression that the Bible gives the faith. Back in the early 20th century, there was great discussion about whether or not the Bible was the Word of God or the Bible contained the Word of God. Now that might sound the same to you, but what happens is when the Bible contains the Word of God, you and I can go in and we can start picking and choosing the parts that we like and then we can throw out the rest because it contains the Word of God, we start selecting personally what we want the Bible to tell us. Instead, what we ought to say is that the Bible is the Word of God. Back in 1924, there was a statement, this is not quite 100 years ago, there was a statement called the Auburn Affirmation. This is where 1200 PCUSA, that's a different denomination, but 1200 Christian ministers came forward and they signed a document that denied the following.

I'm not making this up. Inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, right there, the faith is gone. They have cut away their own foundation. The virgin birth of Christ, the substitutionary atonement, the idea that Christ died for you, denied. Christ's real and historic resurrection, the concept that Christ conquered death and sin, done away with. And the idea of Jesus's earthly ministry containing miracles.

Men in that denomination like J. Gresham Machen and Ned Stonehouse, they realized that they had to abandon this institution as they have abandoned the Christian faith. And when they left, they said, we are committed to the gospel, have the buildings, have the property, have everything that goes with the PCUSA. We will keep the historic Christian faith. We will hold on to the truth that's been handed down over generations.

And there were other men that came with them and said, we want to join you. And Machen and Stonehouse spoke with them and they said, we are called fundamentalists. We believe in the fundamental doctrines and we do as well.

Creation, incarnation, the death burial, resurrection, ascension and enthronement of Christ. We believe these things. But they were known to commit just to these essential truths and it was a problem as they unfolded their theology. Machen and Stonehouse said we must be defined as a church that holds to a historic Christian faith. We do not cut out 1900 years of Christianity. We must hold to this faith that is described in God's Word, communicated to us through the prophets and the apostles once delivered to the saints. This is the church and this is what it means to be the pillar and the buttress of truth. We do not minimize creation.

We do not minimize a historic Adam. We do not cut away the resurrection to promote various social activisms and look at Christ as simply some social revolutionary. We have to look at him with clear lens at the Gospel in the Bible. We have to go in and see that this is a faith that has been handed down to us. And then Timothy is told by Paul to guard the deposit.

Protect this message. We have to protect the message of the Gospel. It is our historic witness in the Christian faith. And there was a term, we don't use it as much, I think in history it was much more embraced, it was the term of Christendom. Some of you might know that term meaning it is the worldwide society of Christians. It is where nations were considered Christian nations. They were unashamedly Christian in their culture. They dealt with sin like all of us do. There was still sin throughout these nations, but they would claim to be a Christian nation. There would be local churches that preached and taught the Gospel. And anywhere the Word is faithfully preached, I want to tell you that they are part of the church of Jesus Christ. Whether we are talking about faithful churches in Canada, Anglicans in Nigeria, Dutch Reformed, and Presbyterians in South Africa.

We just sent off Sean Hurry back to South Africa where he will preach faithfully there. We have friends in Burma, Burmese Baptist, David and Henry Ling. These men in Yangon, Myanmar, these men are part of the church of Jesus Christ. Vody Bockham and Conrad and Bellway, these men in Zambia, they are proclaiming the Gospel truth. And so we would count them among the church abroad. We would count them among Christendom. They are proclaiming the person and work of Jesus Christ.

And they with us are upholding the pillar and buttress of truth. But before we get there we must look first at the conduct in the household of God. Starting in verse 14, I hope to come to you soon, writing these things to you, so that if I delay you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God. Paul hopes to visit his son in the faith Timothy and the congregation there in Ephesus. He is a pastor after all. Paul loves the church, loves the flock. He loves his son Timothy in the faith and he wants to encourage him and be among God's people. That is the real mark of the heart of a pastor is he wants to be with God's people.

He wants to be in the congregation. Paul is desiring to be with them and he goes ahead and he writes ahead and says, if I delay, again knowing that things can come up, we see that sometimes Paul is providentially hindered. Remember, Paul was brutally persecuted in Jerusalem and Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Macedonia. He has endured many delays as he is a missionary throughout Asia Minor and throughout the world. We see that he has been imprisoned and stoned and shipwrecked, assaulted by government officials. This man has endured much for the Christian faith.

But he wants to write ahead. In case I am delayed, I want to go ahead and have it in writing that you might know how to behave in the household of God. This is God's household.

There are house rules. According to the master of the house, God in his wisdom sent Christ into the world who appointed the apostle Paul to be an apostle. In his writing, he writes Timothy to hand this letter out to the churches.

It is not a word just for Timothy, but to the congregation that is present there in Ephesus. He establishes through this letter leadership consisting of elders and deacons. He establishes church discipline through the church courts. In the house of God there is food, there is bread and wine through the Lord's Supper. We have instruction throughout the church. Going back in chapters 2 and 3, we have instruction on how we are to live. We are to live quiet and godly lives. We in worship must be at peace with one another, lifting up holy hands.

We are instructed even on modesty of dress. We are told how to dress in worship and the order of worship as it is described in God's Word here. We have leadership consisting of elders and deacons. We have the Lord Jesus Christ, our Great Shepherd, appoints Paul to communicate these truths to the local church. So the privilege of being called out to live in God's presence, to be in the church, is that now we have a responsibility to live according to the one who has called us. What that is, is we are the church of the living God.

This is in contrast. Again, you're in Ephesus. There's a lot of paganism going on. There's the massive temple of Diana in town. So many that live in the church might have come out of paganism where they once were worshiping Diana and they are now living in the new temple, the temple of the living God. They are living in the church of Jesus Christ, which is the dwelling place of our living God. Thinking back to the tabernacle back in the day of Moses, think of the time in the wilderness called the tent of meeting, the temple later built by Solomon. These are earthly places where the people of God would get together as the local congregation and be present with the Lord. Just as this pillar is described here in our verses here, the temple is being held up by a pillar and a buttress of truth.

This is a powerful image that we're given to describe us, to describe the local church. This pillar and buttress are architectural metaphors. The pillars are standing upright and they're upholding the roof. They're giving the building its structure and its beauty.

The pillars support the roof but also giving the building its height. It's bringing the church up that those see it on a hill, that it's lifted up and proclaiming this is the place that God dwells. Back in Jerusalem the temple was up on a hill.

People would look up to the temple and say, where does my help come from? They're looking up to where God dwells with His people. The term buttress, you don't see this many, often times we don't see this on buildings today. It's often on old buildings, older cathedrals. But a buttress is a structure that's outside of the building that upholds the walls. Some of your translations might say ground or foundation.

I'm sorry to break it to you. This is more of an external support wall. It would run along the side of the building. Philip Ryken notes, a buttress is not a building's foundation. It's part of the supporting structure. To be specific, a buttress helps to stabilize the walls and pillars of a large building.

A buttress is a support structure that reinforces the walls. So this imagery is that we are the pillar and the buttress that is the support of the walls of the building. And I don't think that Paul is mixing metaphors here when he also says in Ephesians 2.20 that the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. The foundation that is being laid here is on the prophets of the Old Testament, the apostles of the New Testament, and then finally that Christ is the cornerstone. But what does this make up where we have Old Testament, New Testament with Christ? We see the Word of God is laid as the foundation. So Paul, to call the church of Jesus Christ the pillar and buttress of truth is to say that the church is to uphold the dwelling place of God and His truth. We are to be as God's people defined by the truth of God's Word. Jesus prayed for us. Back in John 17, sanctify them by the truth.

Your Word is truth. So the truth of the Bible, this foundation, is to form and inform the church as we are the pillar and the support of that church. And wherever the church is faithful, that is the true church. I think Roman Catholicism makes this mistake where they call themselves the Catholic, Catholic meaning universal. They claim to be the church. When we say Holy Catholic Church, they say that's us and we don't know. It's wherever the truth of the Gospel is communicated.

That is the little c Catholic Church. There's a denomination, the Church of Christ. I met a guy there that said, yes, we are the church. We're called the Church of Christ. As though we could change Grace Church to the true church and officially we are the only faithful church in the world.

No, wherever God's Word is faithfully communicated, the Gospel, that is the person and work of Jesus Christ, is clear. That is the true church. What happens is we are committed to our denominations, like the Roman Catholics who stay their whole lives and the Church of Christ where the church drifts. I think we're in a good spot.

I love the PCA and I think we're in a good place. We do preach and teach the true Gospel. Where a church might drift and start teaching false doctrine and heresy, they cease to preach the Gospel and, sadly, cease to be a church at all. So again, whether we're in Presbyterian churches, Baptist churches, Anglican churches, non-denominational churches, if that truth is communicated, they are part of the truth. One of our older ministers, Harry Reader, said, you don't have to be Presbyterian to go to heaven, but I wouldn't take any chances.

But I mean it though. Those men out there in the world and you go out in the mission field and you realize how minimal the Christian witness is in Myanmar, that you are thrilled to hear a clear Gospel message from our Baptist brothers. They are our brethren. Where they are teaching these truths, they are with us. And if we are wrong and we go to the word, we go to the foundation, where we are denying the faith that is taught in Scripture, we must repent.

We must correct our teaching. But where we are correct, and I mean we, not just pastors and teachers, not just elders and deacons, but I mean the church that is the congregation, we must stand firm on the foundation of God's Word and we must herald the truth. We must teach the truth to those in our families and friend groups.

We must be a witness to the truth. But to those, and I'm thinking there might be a few on live stream, and I know there are many in America that it's just them and the Bible and they don't have a membership anywhere in a local congregation. You might be here visiting this evening and I want to encourage you, even if it's not this church, you need to join the local church.

If you love Christ, you must love His bride. That is the church. You need to be around other believers that can encourage you, that can stir you up to love and good works, that can encourage you. You can stand with them on this foundation and you can hear the Word preached and taught and administer sacraments and have the bread of life and receive this cup that is the blood of Christ.

You have to have these elements and receive it by faith and be counted among those that are professing faith in Christ. Ephesians 2.21 says, the whole structure being joined together, we're called to be joined together as the local church, growing into the holy temple of the Lord. Because we are in Christ, we are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. I imagine these pillars and these buttresses that are coming in, buttresses are often made of bricks and there's brick and mortar that are being fused together.

They are drying and they are connected. That's what the local church is. We are connected together as individuals within the corporate body of believers. The greatest truth is that God dwells with us. Kent Hughes says, because God dwells in us, we come together, we come as the church of the living God.

This is the great glory of the assembly of the Lord's day. All of us make up the assembly of the living God and the most important thing, we are the temple of the living God. I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them.

I will be their God and they shall be my people. God tells us in his word that by his Spirit he will come and dwell with us. He makes his dwelling among us.

And that is the greatest reason that we must be here locally. Second, we see the confession of the church. In your Bible, depending on the layout, it might have six individual lines. Again, this is a portion of a hymn, but these six lines are divided up into couplets.

Every two lines go together and work in this phrase of sort of a hymn together. Verse 16 starts off, great indeed we confess is the mystery of godliness. Back in Paul's day, godliness would be a reference to just the content of the faith. We typically think of sanctification or growing in holiness, but godliness is a more expansive idea to refer to the faith.

Not only the faith itself, but also holiness, personal holiness that comes with the faith. It was crucial for Paul to illustrate this because back at that time there was a bit of a division between the faith, that is the belief, and the behavior that comes with it. So there's the doctrine, the truth that we believe, the orthodoxy, but there's also the orthopraxy, the practice of the Christian faith. There was an effort by false teachers to divide these things. And so Paul's saying, don't divide these things, put them together. We start with faith in Christ.

We have to have conduct that follows. Confession with no conduct is a false convert. They profess faith, but they don't show their faith by any works.

James warns us of this. I will show you my faith. There will be evidence to my faith. Then also conduct with no confession. We have Phariseeism.

That's people working hard and earning their way to heaven with no reliance upon God. We have to have both a confession and conduct. We have to have both professing these truths and living life in light of these truths. But finally these six lines in scripture are divided up. The first two are the revelation of Christ. First, He was manifest in the flesh. This is pretty straightforward, but it refers to the Incarnation.

It is that Christ dwells with us. God, the eternal Son, before He was in the world and took on flesh, He was creating in the beginning with the Father. He was creating the world.

He was creating the heavens and the earth. But then John 1-14 tells us He took on flesh and dwelt among us. The word here is not just simply body, but it is flesh.

It is this. It is flesh that the apostles could hug His neck. Thomas could feel His hands. He was very much a real man. There was a humanity to this Christ. And so even other hymns within scripture, the Carmen Christi, Philippians 2, emphasizes that though He was in the form of God, He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. He emptied Himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form.

He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. In the Incarnation we see that God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, shows His power by coming into His own creation, clothed in human flesh, dwelling among us, tabernacling among us. John 1-14, the word is tabernacling, meaning to dwell with us.

So we see the Incarnation. Second, we see the vindication, vindicated by the Spirit. Some of your translations might say justified by the Spirit. This is not justified in the sense of having His sins forgiven. Christ had no sin to be forgiven of. He was the man without sin. Rather, the Resurrection serves to vindicate the claims that Jesus made about Himself. People doubted Him throughout His earthly ministry.

They minimized Him. They told Him, you're just the son of that carpenter. You're Joseph's son. The Pharisees didn't believe Him when He said before Abraham was I Am. There were these claims that He was not able to show them the full glory of His divinity. So finally, with the Resurrection, this was a big step. As a matter of fact, the burial was important. Christ's burial proved that He truly died and He adored the curse for His people, you and I. The wages of sin are death and we've heard this many times and He endured death on our behalf. But if Christ had not died, there would not be any assurance that truly that our sins had been paid for. His death, His burial, and then finally His Resurrection were essential for our redemption. We needed the Resurrection because it showed that Christ could conquer sin and death.

He overturns this unjust verdict that He endured on earth. He accomplished the redemptive work by having power over sin and death. Romans 8 tells us that the Spirit of God raised Christ up from the dead and that through the Spirit, Romans chapter 1, through the Spirit of Holiness was declared with the power to be the Son of God by His Resurrection from the dead. It was by the power of the Holy Spirit that Christ would be raised up. So this first couplet, these first two lines are pointing to the supernatural power of Christ, the divinity of Christ, His Incarnation and His Resurrection revealing that He is truly the Son of God. Second, we see the witnesses of Christ.

We have one supernatural and one natural. First, He was seen by angels. Angels bore witness to who Christ was. They saw Him at the Incarnation. Angels told Mary and Joseph about what was going on. Angels were there present at Christ's temptation in the desert. They appeared to Him and strengthened Him at Gethsemane. Angels came to Him and attended Him at the empty tomb. And now the Lord of glory is in heaven and angels see that He is truly the Son of God.

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise. This is the same Jesus that we know will return again as our King and our Deliverer. Second, we see the proclaimed among the nations. This is going back to Pentecost. Christ was proclaimed among the Jews as well as the Gentiles.

This was an absolute scandal but Peter gets up in front of thousands and says the promise is for you and your children. They hear the Abrahamic Covenant there. You and your children. But also those who are far off.

And those who are far off are you and I. Or the Gentiles. Those that would be grafted into the Covenant. We see that we are offered this Gospel and that alone was a scandal. But then we see the reception of Christ. He's believed on in the world.

He's not believed on by anybody. He's believed on by these foreign, unclean Gentiles. They are offered this Gospel message and Romans 11 says that we are grafted into the Abrahamic Covenant. We are making up the Christian church being called out of the world, called out of darkness. And the Christian church is now made up of people from every nation, tribe, and tongue. Galatians 3, Paul tells us there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. We are children of Abraham.

God expands this by his good pleasure because Christ came into the world to his own. He was in the world. The Word was made through him and the world did not know him. He came into his own and his people did not receive him. He came into the Jewish people and they denied him. But to all who did receive him, who believed on his name, he gave the right to become children of God.

That is us. We are children of God. We are in the household of God now.

And we dwell together as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Finally we see taken up in glory. At the end of Christ's ministry, Luke and Acts both bear witness to the ascension of Christ. Luke 24 verse 51, while he blessed him, he parted with them and he was carried up into heaven.

They worshipped and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. Then in Acts chapter 1, the angels come to disciples as he was ascended into heaven. They say this Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same as you saw him go into heaven.

Referencing his second coming. And so we see, and again these are fundamentals, it's a good thing, we see this birth, resurrection, proclamation, reception, and the ascension of Christ. All in a simple fragment of a hymn. I want to encourage you while you're at Grace Church to not take the music for granted, but to read the words of the songs that we sing. Even before I came up here, I was underlining some of the lyrics to some of these hymns and the great truths that are being communicated through the worship music here. We want to write these truths on our hearts and prepare our hearts as we go in for worship. We must sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to the Lord.

In closing, I want to encourage you with a few things. Know that first, this is our home. This is our household. This is the family of God. We, the church, are a family. We are brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers.

This is where we dwell in unity. And while we see more and more of a hostile culture coming at the church, where we see in the media more and more resistance, I want us to prepare to give a defense to anyone who asks for the reason for the hope that is within us. And as we tell the truth of God's Word, let us do it with gentleness and respect and let the Word of God speak. We are the pillar and the buttress of truth. We uphold the truth.

We uphold this Gospel message. Secondly, we must address hard subjects. Martin Luther said we must always address controversial topics. Some of you might think, do we have to talk about gender roles? The culture is pushing equality. Do we really have to put such an emphasis on gender roles within the church?

LBGT+, do we really have to go into that? Do we have to? Do we have to talk about heaven and hell?

Yes, we do. We are called by God to uphold the truth of God's Word. We are called to preach the whole counsel of God, regardless of cultural or societal pressure. If God's Word addresses it, we must address it. Finally, we must follow God's Word as it is revealed.

We must verify the truth. We must go to our study Bibles, go to our pastors, go please talk to us, go to commentaries, go to original languages, go into the text. Let us be good Bereans and study and seek out the truth. Let us be defined by the truth, obsessed with the truth. Let us love the truth of God's Word. I'm still praying that a visitor might come up to me one day and say, do you all preach the truth here? Do you really love the truth at Grace Church?

I do not want my ears tickled. I do not want you to soft pedal the Gospel. I want you to proclaim the truth. Let us be defined as people that love the truth above all else. As we know the confession of our faith, it will in turn continually sharpen us, recalibrate us.

It will correct our wrong thinking. Let it shape our Christian conduct. And so as you leave here tonight, remember God's Word is the foundation laid on the prophets and the apostles, Christ who is the cornerstone. We must uphold the truth of God's Word in a lost and dying world. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father we do look to Christ as our Lord, as our Redeemer, as our Savior. We ask that you would continue to write this truth in our hearts that we would love your truth and uphold the truth and bear witness to the truth in every opportunity that we have. Let us not be ill-prepared when the moment comes for us to proclaim boldly the truth of your Word. Let us be ready. Let us stand on the foundation and let us uphold the truth. Let us be strong. Let us bear the burden of being a blood-bought disciple of Christ. Let us be fully committed to your truth. Your son's name we pray. Amen.