Monday 15 June 2020

Godly edifying

Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do. – 1 Timothy 1.4

Timothy, we are going to see, had a real problem with being involved in the things of this world. He loved to argue, it seems, and may even have been a bit of a contrarian. Wow, do I get that. It is a HUGE issue for me. I love to talk about almost anything and have an opinion of everything even if I don’t know what I am talking about.

Paul made his instruction clear over and over on his two letters to his son in the faith. He is constantly telling Timothy, and us, to avoid such entanglements. I am sure that we will hear more about this later.

For now, though I think we should look at what we should do instead. We ought to spend our time, instead of seeking hatred and division in our petty arguments, seek to edify and build each other up in the faith.

We all need ‘faith builders’ in our lives. Therefore we all need to be faith builders for others.

I have found as the years have rolled by that some of the great faith building comes by how God as delivered us through tough times in the past. James writes about how when our faith is tried it teaches us patience and how when patience matures it makes us mature in our faith. A lot of times we can help build up faith simply by helping people through their trials.

Just imagine if we spent the same about of time building up faith as we do in silly arguments. Wouldn’t this be a great social media guide? What if we saw Facebook and Twitter and Instagram as our personal platform to build up people in faith instead of to tear down?

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