Let us turn to our Bibles to 1 Timothy, 1 Timothy chapter 3. As you know, I go over larger portions and then I may stop and dig into those verses, and that’s what I’m doing here. 1 Timothy 3.15, let us listen attentively to the Word of God. But if I am delayed, I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.
Let us pray. And here, God, we read a description of your called-out people of God, of the body of Christ. These different descriptions, Lord, highlighting to Timothy the importance of how he conducts himself in that domain of your people.
And also through that, Lord, teaches us the importance of the church in these descriptions and its relationship to you and the Christian life and sanctification. Help us in that aim, we pray, that we may grow and understand all the more if we have forgotten how and why you’ve given us the church, the body of Christ, that we may grow more into our Lord and Savior, we pray. Amen.
Earlier I preached on the office of pastor there in an earlier part of chapter 3. Since Paul was what? Describing the qualifications for that office of bishop. Here it is appropriate to preach about the Lord’s church as well and its importance in the life of the believer. Although it was not the proper subject of these verses, that’s about Timothy and how he should conduct himself.
That’s the main idea there. Yet it assumes the importance of the doctrine of the church there and its significance for us. That’s why Paul heaps up descriptions of it, right, here at the end of verse 15.
He’s urging upon Timothy, take seriously what you do because this is the holy place you find yourself in. So let’s explore a little more carefully these three different ways of how the church of God is the house of God, the church of the living Lord, and the pillar and foundation of the truth. The first point, the house of God.
The House of God
The house here, of course, is another way of talking about family, the domain of God’s people. They find themselves in a relationship with him. This is described as such, as we know, multiple times in the New Testament and even assumed.
First Timothy 5.1 is one of the more specific ones where we read, Do not rebuke an older man, Paul writes to Timothy, but exhort him as what? A father. Younger men as what? Brothers. Older women as what? Mothers.
And younger sisters with all purity. This is clearly, of course, a spiritual metaphor. I’m not saying you give up your family.
Who cares about your biological mother or your father? They’re not Christians. Why should you bother to deal with them? You’ve got the church. That’s your family.
People kind of teach that once in a while by implication. Historically, weird things have come up out of that in some of the sects. But we know better by God’s grace.
This is a metaphor, a way of speaking of the spiritual relationship we have with one another through what? Christ Jesus highlights our close relationship with one another. And this house of God, this domain of our Lord and King, this family, is entered in by baptism. As commanded in the Great Commission, which of course includes the entirety of the world, Go ye therefore and teach all nations, we read in Matthew 28, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.
Even lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world. The world meets in the Great Commission where the church is to go forth in what? Bring the world into the relationship with God, into His kingdom, into His household by baptism. It is through baptism that we are separated from the world, at least objectively and publicly right, because it’s not supposed to have private baptisms but public baptisms.
And part of this idea of baptism is that we are taken into the sons of God, which is called adoption as well, in particular. And it is in this baptism that we have, as adults and as kids, when they own the covenant, a public confession to the world that we take this seriously, that we are separate, we are in the house of God and He is our Lord and Savior. It’s suggestive, as I said before, of adoption.
The house of God is not ours by nature, that God had to transform us and bring us into this relationship with Him by Christ Jesus, by supernatural grace bestowed upon us by the Holy Spirit. And that is represented in what? The act of baptism. It’s a picture of regeneration, of being born again.
And it’s maintained. We are brought into the house of God by baptism, and it’s maintained by the fellowship meal, and I don’t mean Sunday afternoon, chowing out, which has its place, of course, but the Lord’s Supper. A common meal that not only shows our union with Christ, but demonstrates our unity to one another and for the world.
1 Corinthians 10, 16, For we, though many, are one bread and one body, for we all partake of that one bread. The picture there is we have unity through Christ, unity not only with Him, but with each other, brothers and sisters, and not just this church, but other churches as well, that name the name of our Lord and Savior, because we have a common what? We read in Ephesians 4, 1. This is what it means to have the house of God. And in that house, to put a side note here, he has put leaders, Timothy being one of those leaders, so he tells them, you must conduct yourself aright, and properly, in a public form, that is God’s domain, the house of the Lord.
Now, the idea here, of course, of the house of God is that God owns the house, He is the king, He is the ruler of His people, of the church. To have a house, in the Old Testament thinking, the ancient Near East thinking, even today, is to have a place in which you are in charge of it. Someone else is there, they follow your rules.
Now, the whole world is under God, it’s His footstool. It’s His house, in that sense, His relationship there is as creator to creation, and after the fall, especially judge to those who are judged and condemned. But to we who are His people, He has a particular rule, a particular way of preserving and being our king.
He protects us, and He rules over us, as the body of Christ, guiding all things carefully for the good of us. This twofold aspect of our God as our king, as our ruler, as our master, that we want to submit to, is exercised at least in two different ways, I’m describing it, ruling and protecting. Ruling, of course, guiding us, directing us externally with the word of God.
Here we read the law of God, His will for us. Here we see the glories of the gospel, the good news that we who are sinners can be saved and are saved and redeemed by our Lord and Savior. The gospel gives us comfort.
We need both of them, we need the word of God. And it’s external, and I describe this externality in so far as, there’s another dimension to the Lord’s ruling over us in His house, that’s with the Holy Spirit, that’s within us. That’s something you can’t see, I can’t see, but it’s there.
And through the power of the Holy Spirit within our hearts, the word of God is attested to us, the truth therein, and thus we believe. And conviction and comfort come through the Spirit by the word. This is why we have to grow and learn about the Bible.
We are people of the word, and therein we have the rule of God and our lives found in the Bible. So here in 1 Timothy 3.15, the idea of the house of God and God Himself being a ruler is also, therefore, as our king, the one who protects us. And it’s good to have a good king who cares for us and loves us.
The world doesn’t like this, again, especially in America, as I pointed out before. We are a democracy, we are a republic. We don’t have kings over us.
We don’t want that kind of submission. We want that for the church, for our souls, because we know how unruly we are, how stubborn we can be in our own sins. And part of God’s rule therein, because of our weakness, is He protects us from ourselves.
And how does He do this? Again, by word and spirit, by the Bible here, external to us, objective. Even the unbelievers can read the Bible and interpret it correctly, but if they have not the Spirit of God, it means nothing to them. They won’t submit, they won’t believe it, they won’t accept it.
They’ll just say, yeah, that’s what it says, but it’s an old book, who cares? But we have the Holy Spirit, and so the Spirit and the Word come together, and we say, yes, yes, amen, God Almighty, may it be so. And that’s part of the protection God gives us. He protects us from foolishness.
He protects us from lies. This is from the Word of God and the Spirit of God within us. In particular, I want to highlight here that God protects us as our king, providentially.
That is through history, through the things around us. The flow that we find in our lives is guided by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He guides our life in the right direction, even though it may look like it’s the wrong way.
And churches and friends, of course, and families that we know that come and talk to us, that convict us, that comfort us, that encourage us, that warn us, that’s part of God’s rule over us as well. Don’t think of the rule as personal only, but everything around you as well. We walk this path together as believers, the path of holiness in this world, as we work our way to heaven.
Our God and Savior is our king. He is our ruler. He rules and guides us.
He protects and guards us, brothers and sisters, with his Word and the Spirit and providence and the things he directs. Even the difficulties of life are part of his plan for your good. And he does it as a king, not as an impotent god, a white-haired man, as the picture has it, sitting on a throne, wringing his fingers, what shall I do with these people? I don’t know what to do.
Some people teach that, and it’s a sad picture of God. It’s a terrible picture of God. Rather, we have what? The house of God.
It is owned by him, and that’s a comfort. In other words, the church is a place to receive God’s rule and protection. It’s the house of God.
This is the image here. That outside the invisible church, that is, those who are not born again, by spirit baptism, that would be something you cannot see, but externally, of course, they’re not baptized or members of the church. They are in the house of the devil, the servant of darkness.
But we, who are saved, we are redeemed by our Lord. He has brought us into his protective cover of the house of God. The second point, the church of the living gods, he continues here to describe.
The Church of the Living God
What is this house of God? Which is the church of the living God? Let me impress upon you, young Timothy, the significance and importance of the body of Christ, of the church, the congregation of the heavenly saints. It is not just the house of God, where he is a ruler and he guides and protects his people, but it is the church of the living God. The church here, the word is gathered together.
It’s related to the idea of the Old Testament, called out ones, or that is gathered together from what? The world. You’re called out from the world, from wickedness, from the domain and kingdom of the devil. To gather together for two things, worship and service.
The church of the living God, church, that word, called out, gathered together for two ends, worship and service. Worship, of course, in a two-fold sense. One is formal public worship, what we are doing here and now, especially setting aside our temporal arrangements so that we can have no distractions and we can think and meditate upon God Almighty to hear his word, to sing praises before him and to pray together as God’s people.
It reinforces what it means to be a Christian because it’s a public act. We don’t do it in shame. The world knows we’re here.
We’re invited to come to hear of Jesus. But worship also is an everyday act throughout the week. We have private family time.
It’s called private worship. In the old days, acts of prayer, meditation, whatever you think explicitly and directly of God, speak about God. You do it carefully.
You don’t curse his name throughout the week. That, too, is an act of worship. Perhaps we forget that at times.
So that’s the two-fold way in which we are called out ones and gathered together in particular, as you can see, to gather together for what? For worship. But also for service, brothers and sisters, for service, to help and care for one another. So it’s the first table of the law and the second table of the law, the first four commandments and the last six commandments.
It has our calling and duty and the idea and the word of church. To be gathered together or called out from the world to be gathered together. The two ideas going together here.
And because it’s from the world or called out, to haul the old Hebrew word, which I can see is used in Greek, that means the world is a place of sin and wickedness. And we are no longer to be like them, to live among them in that way. It doesn’t mean world in the sense of the place you hike or you work or you eat.
That’s not what it means about world. It means the spiritual domain of wickedness. It’s a moral category.
And thus the implication is because we are what called out, therefore what gathered together in worship and service, we are supposed to be holy and separate from the sins of the world. It means therefore following the law of God. 1 Corinthians 5, in that chapter there, as we did 1 Corinthians last year, highlights there of church discipline.
Verse 11 and following, 1 Corinthians 5, 11 and following, emphasizes this point of the congregation or the called out ones, the gathered together people of God are supposed to be godly and holy and sanctified and consecrated differently from the world. But now I have written to you, he writes to the Corinthian church, not to keep company with anyone named a brother who is sexually immoral or covetous or an adulterer or a reviler or a drunkard or an extortionist. No, not even to eat with such a person.
These people are supposed to be disciplined. And that was the point of that chapter where the man and the women were wrong, shamed them saying what is going on here. Even the pagans know this is the wrong kind of relationship.
And he continues, for what have I to do with judging those who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But those who are outside God judges. Therefore, put away from yourself the evil person. What’s this outside and inside? The outside and inside is those outside the church, that’s not what I’m talking about.
You have to rub elbows with them. You have to live with them. But those in the church, there’s a special emphasis on holiness in which they must be disciplined even to the point of excommunication if the sin is serious enough and unrepentant of.
God judges those outside the church, not us. Therefore, put away from yourselves, you within the church of God, because God’s church is supposed to be a holy place, called out from the unholiness of the world, is the idea here of the implication of ecclesia, when used often in the New Testament. Living God, again, what is this? The house of God here is the church, the gathered together, called out from the world of the living God.
Living God, of course, is the source of spiritual life. As shown in worship, it’s him alone that we serve and honor because he alone has life and all life abundantly. As shown in our confession, our theology puts God first as the source of all good things in our life, both body and soul.
The decision to follow Christ, even faith itself, is not properly the source of life, only God. Against the pagan background, more and more Christians in the New Testament era, leaving their paganism and joining the Christian church, who wants to highlight those are dead gods, here’s the living God, the source of your spiritual living. What does this entail? The church is a place to find the living God, to find the source of life.
Primarily, of course, in the preaching of the word. It is not me, it is not you, it is not your words per se, but it’s Christ using us as instruments, that they find him and him alone. And they preach, they’re supposed to preach the whole Bible, and nothing but the whole Bible.
And it’s through the word, read and especially preached, that life is found. And secondarily, through the means of grace. Baptized in the nations is part of the beginning of living with God, or being in the house of the living God, the house of the source of life.
The Lord’s Supper, prayer, even church discipline itself is used by the Spirit of God to draw us unto Jesus, our Lord and Savior, who is the source of all life. And so Acts 2.47 uses a proof text in the Westminster Confession of Faith on the importance of the church, where it says ordinarily there’s no salvation outside the church. The Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved.
And that happens a number of times in the book of Acts, and in fact there are numbers given. Two thousand here, another thousand there. The numbers therefore show that what’s going on there, those are added to what? The church visible.
Many are added to the church invisible, that’s true, but we can’t, a number of them, I can’t read your heart. But you can read the visible, the external, the confession, the baptism. That’s where God has left us, and we should be satisfied with that.
And so there in Acts 2.47, the Lord added to the church, the visible church, clearly, they were baptized. When Peter was preaching to visible Jews, and they were coming and repenting and being baptized visibly, it was an external action to the church daily, those who were being saved, if you are born again and saved, you will be added to not only the invisible church, that is always the case, but ordinarily, which means there are extraordinary cases, yes we know, you will be added to the church invisible. Baptism in particular, and local membership.
You can be baptized and end up not finding a local church, I use the extreme example of course of war time and famine and dissolution and chaos in society that happens, you may never even get baptism at times. Even baptism doesn’t save, properly speaking, for our sanctification. This leads us thirdly to the importance and significance of the church in the Christian life, as Paul highlights here to young Timothy about conducting himself in this house of God.
The Pillar and Ground of the Truth
Why is that important? Because it’s the church of the living God. This is where you find the gospel preached and taught and exemplified in the sacraments. It is the pillar and ground of truth.
This is strong language, at least from our hearing today I think. What does it mean then, pillar and ground? It’s a public support of the truth is the idea here. Her function is to present and support, that’s the idea of a pillar and a ground, it supports and holds up something more significant than itself, which is the house of God, or in particular the truth.
The truth is the gospel of Jesus Christ, which he unpacks in verse 16. So in general, the gospel is, as one commentator put it, found in and sustained by the church, sustained in a public or historical or sociological sense as a public testimony of the truth. And he, Timothy here, that’s how it fits this context, is supposed to conduct himself accordingly as a pastor, and his job as a pastor is what? To preach, that is to be a pillar and a ground of the truth.
To sustain it publicly. So it’s a relative sense, not an absolute sense. And I know some of you have grown up or had Roman Catholic backgrounds or Roman Catholic family members, they love to use this verse, the Roman Catholic Church, to argue, see the church as the be-all and end-all.
I want to remind you, similar language is used in other matters, in Galatians 2.9, when James, Caiaphas, and John, who seem to be pillars, there’s that word, perceive the grace that has been given to me, when they gave me Barnabas and the right head of fellowship. Paul is saying that, not that the church exists because of them, but rather they are pillars, that is their job as public leaders is to support the church and the truth. They stand out in other words.
But they’re just an instrument. They’re not the be-all of the church. And similar imagery is used with Jesus from a different perspective.
Jesus is what? The foundation of salvation, 1 Corinthians 3.11. Of course Jesus is the pillar and foundation. It’s a metaphor. You shouldn’t hang too much on a metaphor.
Describe here the relative importance of the church of God when it comes to the gospel and its preaching, its proclamation to God. The apostles, I remind you again, are also described as a foundation. So it’s all these different foundations because the imagery is being used because it’s talking and emphasizing different theological points.
Again, why this language? Calvin gives a nice, succinct description here in his commentary. Hence, we may easily conclude, he writes, in what sense Paul uses these words. The reason why the church is called the pillar of truth is that she defends and spreads it by her agency.
God does not himself come down from heaven to us, nor does he daily send angels to make known his truth, but he employs pastors whom he has appointed for that purpose. He employs the church. He employs you and I and our various vocations and callings of life, brothers and sisters.
And that public sense, especially, is the church of the pastor, described as the pastor in conjunction with the church. The pillar of foundation of truth. That’s why.
God is pleased to use mere human vessels and instruments of the institution of the church, which the world finds offensive. They want those angels. They want those miracles.
They don’t want the simple, plain preaching of the word of God. What does that look like in practice? To be the pillar and foundation of truth. Well, we already saw, I heard Calvin emphasize it’s the pastor, and again, the text is that you, Timothy, may know how you ought to conduct what? As a public officer.
That’s why he describes the office there in the open prior verses. And so, another commentator, I think it was the same one as earlier, the church is to be the stain of the truth, and it’s conserver to the world, and God’s instrument for securing its continuation on the earth, in opposition to all heresies. This is the point of the Great Commission.
It was given to the church, to maintain the truth, and to sustain it. Now, of course, it will fail. The church is not infallible, contrary to Roman Catholic dogmas and lies, and it will sustain and continue on.
In fact, the church, to flip the metaphor, as we know elsewhere in the word of God, sustains, excuse me, the Bible sustains the church. The church is sustained by the Bible. In a rare and real sense, always and at all times.
Like a high tower, the church is what? A high tower is another way of talking about a pillar. To lift up the gospel of Jesus Christ, what’s important is not the pillar, but what it’s holding, the gospel of Jesus Christ before the world. That’s the significance here.
Jesus is indeed more important than all these things. The point here, the third point, last point, and all these points, I suppose, combined and put together, the church is the place to find the truth. The body of Christ, the house of God, is where you will find the truth.
And, of course, it’s not the truth in the abstract, it’s the truth in the Bible. The Bible is what holds the church together, externally again, but the spirit internally, like a precious jewel on a pedestal for all to see. You behold the beauty of the jewel, not the pedestal.
You want the pedestal to be nice-looking, you want the church to be holy and pure, that’s true, but it’s ultimately Jesus, his word, the gospel, that’s the top of the pedestal, that is the beautiful jewel of redemption and salvation for us. The Westminster Confession of Faith gives a summary, and I’m not going to unpack this, it would be yet another sermon, about the church. Unto this Catholic visible church, the word Catholic is the old word for universal, it doesn’t mean Roman Catholic, they hijacked that word.
Unto the universal visible church, Christ has given, what? The ministry, pastors, bishops, oracles, the teachings, instructions, ordinances, the Sabbath, for example, of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints in this life to the end of the world, and does, by his own presence and spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual thereunto. All that way of, old way of speaking. In other words, God has so created the Christian life that we need to have the visible.
There is, maybe you’ve run across it, I know it’s still out here, in Christian circles in America, this emphasis upon the invisible, I don’t need the visible church, I have Jesus and the Bible, is the old way of speaking. And that is simply wrong. This text really highlights how wrong that is.
It tells us, the church is the pillar and foundation of the truth, not you. God has given, in other words, the church a special role that you don’t have individually. And it’s especially highlighted, of course, in the ministry, as Timothy here is the example, conducting in the best sense of preaching, teaching, instructing, warning, admonishing.
And so God has deigned to use external things, the ministry, oracles, the teaching of the word of God. Again, there are Christians who say, I have the spirit of God, why do I need the Bible? And the ordinances, the Lord’s Day, the Lord’s Supper, baptism, they say, why do I need all these externalities? It’s me and God, me and Jesus, my spirit to his spirit. I need nothing in between.
I have the blood of Christ. They’re confused. The Bible clearly gives us a public office.
Timothy, he’s not invisible, he’s clearly there, and therefore part of what a public institution known as a church. What? The visible church, that you can touch and see and interact with. This is what he’s talking about.
The work of the Holy Spirit is an invisible work, it’s his decision how he uses and moves and the wind blows where it wills. But ours is to deal with the revealed things of God, Deuteronomy 29, 29, and to our children. Leave the secret things to him.
And the revealed thing is that which is visible. The word of God, baptism, preaching of the word, the church, external or visible. And therefore it’s important that we become and maintain and support those churches.
The church we find ourselves in, whatever the case is, because God has told and described it as a house of God, a place where he rules, and therefore we want to be under his rule. As the church of the living God, that is the source of truth that’s found here in the preaching, especially of the word of God, and thus we want to be in the house of the living God. And it’s the pillar and ground of the truth.
And thus again, the importance of being there. I want to be where the pillar of ground is, because that’s where our God above, let us pray to him, and let us stand firm in the importance and our conviction that we take the visible church, seriously, it is a tool, an instrument to be read in our confession that summarizes the truth of these verses and other verses for your growth and sanctification and protection of your soul and the guidance to heaven. Let us pray.
Lord God almighty, help us to continue to love and support the body of Christ, wherein we find your guidance and your love and your living power of the spirit, not in the church as such, but as it is an instrument that holds and sustains, historically speaking, the truth of your word, your preaching, through the Bible, translated and perpetuated through the nations and the world. Help us, we pray God, to continue to grow thereby and to be blessed as you have guided us and given us your spirit through the word and through the instruments, Lord, although secondary or remote instruments, of the church. Help us, we pray, and help your church to stand firm.
Amen.