By God’s grace, in the next few months Christ is King Publications and Ministries would be launching a monthly YouTube program where I would answer bible-related questions. If you would like to send questions you want considered for the program please click this link:
https://tally.so/r/3XXprd
Paul is saying that Timothy is a rare specimen of a man because of his unalloyed deep concern for this church.
Timothy was part of the ministry team that went with Paul to preach in Philippi (Acts 16:9-10). And now that Paul does not have a full picture of how things are going, Timothy would be able to fill him in because he was there before the gospel was preached to those people.
Two churches come to mind that Paul preached to, but certain influences came in, and the church did not turn out the way Paul would have wanted, and he wrote letters to try to address them.
The Galatian church suffered from external influences that began to change the shape of the church from the church of Christ to a hybrid of Judaism and Christianity.
Similarly, in our days, there are religious systems that are hybrids, a mixing of something else with Christianity that gives you something other than what Jesus wants.
They may come with a special interpretation that diminishes the place of Christ. That was what happened in the Galatian church, where they were being told that to be truly saved, they had to be circumcised. Paul was livid. It's either Christ alone or not at all. No mixture.
Other religious systems can say that to be saved, you have to be part of us and perform these rituals, which were received by revelation by a founding father of the religious system.
And what can be stronger than the religious system that God founded himself by speaking on Mount Sinai, but is now deemed obsolete with the death and resurrection of his son Jesus, and the foundation laid in the scriptures and their 66 books.
Another religious system may mix human wisdom with the supposed knowledge of Christ. They preach another Jesus and another gospel, as Paul screamed in his letters to the Galatians. We may not have seen an angrier Paul than in his letter to that church. He wants to reach the unbelievers with compassion, but to the one who pushes a mixing of the gospel with something else, he was livid, and you can see it in his writing.
He said the gospel he preached was not good advice; it was not something in the competing space of ideas. And to emphasize that, he proclaimed a curse on anyone bringing another gospel different from what Paul had preached (Galatians 1:8-9). This does not give us a license to curse; we need to see that as a special case, and not something we are being asked to reproduce.
Remember, Moses placed a curse on the law in Deuteronomy 28 for any violation and persistent violation of the law that was laid out. The law now is to believe the gospel to be saved.
People can be afraid of the law of Moses and try to incorporate the law into Christianity. So Paul, in the order of Moses, like God instructed Moses to pronounce curses on a mountain, he pronounced curses on himself, angels, and on anyone who crosses the line marked by the gospel he preached. In other words, the gospel he preached does not have an update.
Another church that Paul wrote to with some measure of vehemence was the Corinthian church. This church was not suffering from wrong external influence, but influence coming from among themselves, beginning with divisions among them. Paul said it was because they were reasoning like children.
Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking. Instead, be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature. (1 Corinthians 14:20)
This was a church where sexual immorality was rampant, while they argued about who was the greater preacher, Peter, Paul, or Apollos. They are reasoning like children (with out-of-shape emphasis and focus), and they also needed a strong rebuke in that letter so that they can be sound in the faith (Titus 1:13).
There was a lot of disorder in their midst. And Paul had to tell them to tone down the speaking in tongues and emphasize speaking in understanding, focus on building up one another as the primary focus of the church, and not just themselves.
I say all these things to show you that things did not always go the way Paul wanted after he had preached to a church. We can situate this verse we are exploring in that context. Timothy was the man who shared Paul's concern for the church and would be the perfect person to go to the church, and he could trust his report fully.
From Addiction to Freedom by Favour Oyinloye
