Sermon Tone Analysis

This week has been wild with VBS.

In fact, that has been the theme of this year’s VBS: Life is wild, but God is good.

Our kids learned that when life is unfair or scary, when life changes or is sad, and even when things are good, God is always good.

That is hard for us to believe some days, isn’t it?

We all want to live the good life, to be happy and have everything we think we want, but something always gets in the way.

What does the good life look like to you?

What would have to happen for you to be able to say, “I am happy.”

For most of us, the good life is always at least one step away.

We may not want to express it this clearly, but we live as though our lives are ruled by the statement, “I would be happy if...”

We just had a little more in the bank or in my retirement accounts.

If I could just get that job or our house was just a little bigger or my car a little nicer.

If I was just a little skinnier or a little stronger or if my health would improve.

If the kids would behave better or if they would come back for a visit more often.

If I could just find a spouse or if we just had sex more frequently or if we communicated better.

Can I remind you of something?

If you live your life to try to be happy, you are going to be constantly disappointed.

There is no situation in this life that will ever leave you completely happy for the rest of your life.

Relationships will disappoint you, money will run out, things will break, and your health will fail.

Sounds depressing, doesn’t it?

Our world has so oriented us to chasing our version of happiness that we can’t imagine that life would be worth living if I am not happy all the time.

However, the picture we find in this morning is dramatically different than what the world says.

Why? Because there is more to your existence than what we find in this life.

Peggy Noonan, a former presidential speech writer and a columnist for Wall Street Journal, summarized this well in an article she wrote all the way back in 1992:

“Our ancestors believed in two worlds, and understood this to be the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short one.

We are the first generations of man that actually expected to find happiness here on earth, and our search for it has caused such unhappiness.

The reason: If you do not believe in another, higher world, if you believe only in the flat material world around you, if you believe that this is your only chance at happiness—if that is what you believe, then you are not disappointed when the world does not give you a good measure of its riches, you are despairing.”

(Peggy Noonan) [1]

It hasn’t gotten better in the last 27 years, has it?

We still live like this life is all there is, so if this life seems to be treating me wrongly, then I have no hope.

However, what we find today, is that the secret to the good life is to fight, not for that one more thing, but to fight for contentment.

That’s what we are going to find in our section of 1 Timothy this morning, so turn over to .

Read it with me...

As we have seen in other parts of this book, the false teachers in Paul’s day were touting the same lies that many do in our day.

They put the focus of following Jesus on what it could do for us in this life, turning it into a selfish, short-sighted caricature of what it really is.

By obsessing over the small details, their teaching leads to fights and all kinds of problems because their focus is just on what I can get out of Jesus in this life.

Like most in our world today, they lived like this life is all there is.

We saw back in Chapter 4 that their focus was on what happened in this life—what you ate and whether or not you are married.

Now, we see that fleshed out even further and find that their primary motivation was trying to follow Jesus for material gain.

Despite what they taught, and despite what we find in blogs, magazines, commercials, and even from the mouths of some preachers, following Jesus is not about material gain.

Yes, God does give good gifts to his children, but he doesn’t always make life easy.

So, then, what is the point?

We find it there in verse 6—Godliness with contentment is great gain.

The key to the good life is to fight to cultivate godliness and contentment.

For us to understand this, we need to take a look at these two terms further.

First, let’s examine the idea of:

1) Godliness: a right attitude toward God displayed through right actions.

We have seen this term used several times already in 1 Timothy, but let’s refresh our memory on it.

Just like we said a minute ago, this is picking up the theme we saw in chapter 4. There, we saw that we are called to train ourselves in godliness, which is the outworking of our right attitude toward’s God.

This word isn’t used a lot in the New Testament, and most of the uses are here in 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus.

Most often, the Bible’s focus is not on our outward actions but on our inward heart attitude.

However, the idea of godliness covers both.

It just makes sense, doesn’t it?

If I have a right attitude towards something, I will behave the right way towards it.

You have seen stories in the news of people owning exotic animals like chimpanzees and lions, only to forget that they are dealing with a wild animal.

One day, they turn on their owner and the situation ends tragically.

They let their guard down, and someone gets hurt badly.

Why?

Because they didn’t have the right attitude towards the animal, so they didn’t act like they should have.

That is getting us closer to the idea of godliness.

It isn’t that he is a wild lion, ready to rip us to pieces the moment we turn our back.

“Our ancestors believed in two worlds, and understood this to be the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short one.

We are the first generations of man that actually expected to find happiness here on earth, and our search for it has caused such unhappiness.

The reason: If you do not believe in another, higher world, if you believe only in the flat material world around you, if you believe that this is your only chance at happiness—if that is what you believe, then you are not disappointed when the world does not give you a good measure of its riches, you are despairing.”

(Peggy Noonan) [1]

However, we need to have the right attitude towards him.

We saw that back in chapter 1:

Our attitude is that we were sinners who had turned from doing life God’s way and turned to doing it our way.

We rejected him, and we didn’t deserve him to come after us.

However, because he loved us, he pursues us, offering us a new relationship with him based off Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection.

When we surrender to him, we are turning from living life our way to turning to him as the King over our lives and all creation.

That change in attitude has to change the way we behave.

If we have been shown grace and mercy by God, then we should be gracious and merciful to other people when we are wronged.

If we are trusting God with our eternal life, then we should be able to trust him with the daily challenges of life.

It will change the way I speak and the way I use my money and time.

Godliness, then, is that whole picture, where my attitude and actions are in line.

Don’t make the mistake, though, that the false teachers were making.

They acted as though doing the right thing was enough to be right with God.

They weren’t obeying out of a desire to honor God as their Savior, having been brought from spiritual death to spiritual life.

Their obedience, as we have seen, was out of a desire to have more money!

That is why Paul would describe them differently in the next letter he wrote to Timothy.

He said that many people would be:

From the outside, their behavior may have matched what you would expect of a believer, but in reality, it was all just an act.

By the way, now is a great time for you to stop and think about your own life.

You are here on a Sunday morning.

You probably sang along as best you could with the worship today, and you may have put something in the offering plate.

You might have come here every night this week for VBS, but in all seriousness, you are just an empty husk.

You aren’t practicing true godliness, even though it looks like it.

Stop and think: have you genuinely placed your trust in Jesus and him alone for eternal life, or are you trying to just be as good as you can and hope you make it?

That kind of godliness can’t save you.

It is powerless to raise your heart from being dead before God and make it alive.

Right now, where you are, why don’t you cry out for his mercy to change your heart from the dead shell it is into something vibrant for him?

That’s the first aspect of the good life: you are growing in godliness.

You aren’t obeying so others will see how great you are, but your life has been changed, and you look different because of what Jesus has done.

You know he is in charge, and you act like it.

With your heart and actions squared away, that enables you to then start adding in the second word we are defining:

2) Contentment: an unshakeable awareness that I have enough.

Going back to our text, let’s look again at this idea of contentedness.

Read verses 6-10 with me.

Contentedness is the unshakeable awareness that, whatever I have, it is enough.

Some commentators define it as self-sufficiency, which it is to a degree.