Good to see all of you here today. Let me invite you to turn in your Bibles to 1 Timothy chapter 5. 1 Timothy chapter 5 for our time of study in the Word this morning. we are just today coming back to our series through First Timothy, and as we pick up in this series we come this morning to 1 Timothy 5:3, and I'll have to tell you guys up front on Monday of this week I didn't have the slightest clue I would end up preaching the message I'm going to be preaching today.
This has totally taken me by, surprise. I, I spent the week immersing myself in verses 3 through 16 of First Timothy 5, where Paul is giving instructions on providing care for widows in the church, and as I was immersing myself in these verses, there were certain things that started leaping off the page at me, and there was a certain theme to those things that were, leaping out at me and, it's that, theme that I want to focus on today which has very little to do with widows. So the topic of the message this morning is the local church and your family. The local church and your family.
Do I sound OK? OK. Do I look OK? the local church and, and your family, and I'll give you an idea of where we're coming from with this.
in these verses, it's not like Paul is trying to say to the church, Hey, you got to take care of widows. The problem was that there were too many widows that were on the rolls being cared for by the Ephesian Church, because there were households, there were families that had dependent widows in those households. And those households, those families had the means to provide financial help for those widows, but instead of using their own resources to meet the needs of the widows in their household, they were thinking, hey, the church has a widow ministry where they're providing financial resources and support for widows, so we know what we'll do. We'll just go to the church and we'll sign up our widow in our household so that she can get funds from the church....
