shadmans Musings  

  (1) Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus according to the commandment of God our Savior, and of Christ Jesus, who is our hope, (2) To Timothy, my true child in the faith: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. (1 Tim 1:1-2) As John MacArthur rightly stated, one of the greatest joys for any parent is to see their son or daughter grow up into a mature adult. And in the same way, it is also true for someone you have mentored. As Christians, we pray, hope, counsel, encourage, guide, correct, restore and trust those whom we love in Christ and have poured our lives into. “There is no greater joy for a spiritual parent than to beget a true child in the faith and lead him to maturity.” [1] This is even more true for Paul, since he is our example.  In this epistle, we will see not only the great love that Paul had for Timothy, but his desire to equip him with everything that he would need to pastor and lead the large Ephesian church as well as anything else...

  The book of first Timothy is one of the pastoral epistles and is a personal letter from Paul to Timothy. It is a letter whose express purpose is to build up a young leader who is the pastor of a huge church in the city of Ephesus. Timothy is dealing with false teachers within the church itself and seems to be overwhelmed with the responsibilities of how to address and root them out of the church. It is a problem that is not so uncommon in churches today. This letter is meant to encourage Timothy by reminding him of God’s faithfulness.  Who was Timothy?  Timothy grew up without a father. Acts 16:1 tells us that his mother and grandmother were believing Jews who understood the Old Testament Scriptures but his father was an unbelieving Greek. It would also appear that his father did not have much of an influence on his son. We also know that it was Timothy’s mother and grandmother who raised him in his faith (2 Tim. 1:5; 3:15). So, when Paul came through on one of his miss...

  To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, Ignatius of Loyola, Thirteenth Rule As we start this blog, number 41 in the Sola Scriptura series, I am struck by the quote above from Ignatius of Loyola, the creator of the Jesuit order within the Catholic Church. This is slightly different from the one given in Webster’s book, but it is no less stunning and relevant for the topic at hand.  In the last two blogs, I showed that the appeal to the ‘unanimous consent of the fathers’ by both Trent and Vatican I, is beginning to be ignored altogether. In this blog, we will see why. In the past, Catholicism used this phrase in an attempt to appeal to the past, specifically the Church fathers, as a basis to justify some of the beliefs demanded by the Church for her parishioners to faithfully and obediently believe in, even though there is no biblical or historical basis for these beliefs. I also examin...