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We need to know what things are for and use them in the right way in life. That’s true of God’s law just like anything else.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor uses the metaphor of a phone’s low battery warning to describe how God’s law functions in our lives. What does he mean by saying that trying harder to “sin less” is like going into low power mode rather than actually solving the problem? How does this challenge the way you typically think about moral improvement?
The sermon opens with the image of eating tomato vines instead of waiting for the fruit—toxic rather than nourishing. In what ways do you find yourself consuming God’s law as an end in itself, using it as a checklist rather than letting it point you toward something better? What does that misuse cost you spiritually?
The sermon argues that the law is good precisely because it shows us we can’t measure up on our own. How does this understanding of the law’s purpose differ from how you were taught about God’s commandments? Does it change how you view rules and expectations in your faith?
The pastor draws a parallel between pastors using AI or borrowed outlines to avoid doing their own theological work and how we all find loopholes and shortcuts in obedience to God. What are some specific areas of your life where you rationalize cutting corners or finding exceptions to what you know God is calling you to do?
Paul lists serious sins like murder and kidnapping alongside less dramatic failures like unkindness, misplaced priorities, and coarse language. Why does the pastor insist these belong in the same category? What makes that perspective uncomfortable, and what does it reveal about how we tend to judge ourselves versus others?
The sermon concludes that the gospel is glorious because it offers grace to sinners like Paul—and like us. How does understanding yourself as someone who genuinely needs transformation rather than just improvement change your relationship with Jesus and your approach to following him?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I want you to imagine something for just a moment. We’re coming up to spring. Last week it seemed believable we were reaching spring. Maybe not so much the last couple of days, but we all can feel it coming. And let’s say you go and you decide to plant a garden. In that garden, you put in some lettuce and some carrots and, of course, some tomatoes. You have to have tomatoes in a garden, right? So you plant the tomatoes, and then you start cutting off the branches and bringing them in and making salads with the branches of the tomato vine. What would you probably conclude? You’d conclude that tomatoes were bad. Because while common varieties of tomatoes today reportedly have a fairly low level of toxins in them, the vines are still toxic. They will still cause indigestion and, in some extreme cases, even damage to the heart. So if you were eating tomato vines, you’d think, well, I’m definitely not planting that in my garden again.
It’s not the proper use of a tomato vine, is it? No. What’s the proper use of a tomato vine? It’s to let it grow until you actually have tomatoes on it. Ripe tomatoes. Because those ripe tomatoes, they’re going to taste far better than that vine. The ripening process scientists have discovered actually is a key component of why a tomato vine can be toxic. It’s part of the nightshade family, and the fruit isn’t, because the ripening actually removes the toxins. So you need the right process and the right use of the vine as a vehicle to grow something we can eat rather than something we eat in itself for it to work right.
Tonight, we’re talking about God’s law. That’s where Paul takes us next in 1 Timothy. And as we look at it, Paul is helping us to think in those same terms about how God’s law works. Because here’s the problem: we often look at God’s law and think of it as something to use. That’s correct. But we use it sort of the same way that we would be using a tomato if we ate the vine and not the fruit. And it poisons us. It’s deadly to us. There’s a better way. Let’s pray tonight that we can understand that better, and through that, understand our God better. Because that’s the big thing we want to do here: understand who God is, understand his care, and through that be blessed by him more fully. Will you pray with me, please?
Father, thank you for this evening. Lord, we thank you for your word, for the truth we find in it, both Old and New Testaments. And as we think about how the law plays into things, how that Old Testament truth plays into the overall picture of what you’re doing, would you help us to understand it better and to have it applied to our hearts more fully? We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
As we’re getting started tonight, you know, a lot of people have questions on the law. And so I’m going to ask you, I ask you every week, but would you please hit like and share? Maybe even post a comment right now to start the comments early. Because as we do those things, we’re helping tell social media, hey, this is something that people are interested in. And a lot of people need to hear how God’s word is actually functioning, how the law is actually functioning.
There’s an awful lot of people who think, okay, I want to know something about God’s word. They read the law, they try to live up to it, and they consume it like a tomato vine, and it leaves them, at best, with a stomachache. Worst, dead. Well, there’s something better.
Now, the starting point that we need to land on in this is that the law is good. Verse 8, 1 Timothy 1:8: “But we know that the law is good if someone uses it legitimately, realizing that the law is not intended for a righteous person, but for lawless and rebellious people, for the ungodly and the sinner, for the unholy and the profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers.” Whew! That’s quite a list, isn’t it? Paul says the law is good, and it’s made for bad people.
What do we do with that? Well, the key thing here, I think, is that we understand what Paul’s really saying isn’t, it’s laid down for those bad people over there. He’s saying it’s laid down for everyone. We’ll get to that more in a moment, but what is laid down for everyone? What is laid down for everyone? It’s something good. It’s something that tells us about our God, right? Because as we encounter his law, as we see how he says we should live, we’re finding out who he is. What does he care about? We find out that we have a God who’s consistent, a God who is just, a God who is loving, a God who values life.
You read the law, even the parts that maybe don’t apply to us today, the parts that speak specifically of how Israel operates or speak about things we simply don’t do, well, they still convey the spirit behind who our God is, and that’s how then we can look at modern situations, things that maybe didn’t even come up then or not in the exact same way, and still come to an understanding of how God views those things because we get the heart of God in the law. And so if that were all the law did, it’s a good thing, right? Because it tells us about the one who made us and ultimately redeems us.
But it’s more than that. The fact that it tells us what he values and what he calls us to do in all kinds of categories, big and small, well, it turns the law into an operating manual for life. It’s like those books we often don’t read when we buy a car or computer or phone or whatever else—often not physical books anymore, right? We get the link to the website or the app, but there’s that documentation, maybe some YouTube videos, how to do something. Well, God’s given that to us for life. And so when we say, “Well, how do I repair my dryer?” maybe you go onto YouTube and you type in the model number and you look it up. When we say, “How do I live life?” we look at God’s law. We see, “Oh, here’s what God is saying is good. Here’s how we’re not going against the grain. We’re not actually turning the operating instructions on their head, but we’re living in the way that we were made to live.” And so the law is good.
But it’s not just good for those reasons. That’s where we stop. Okay, we know about God, we learn about him in it, and on top of that, bonus, we also learn how we should live. And ironically, that’s the one we often hang out on, even though it should almost be more of the bonus and the first one should be our focus. Why? Because it feels good if we have a checklist, right? Have I done these things? Have I murdered anyone today? Paul lists off those who murder their fathers and mothers. I don’t believe anyone listening today has done that, thankfully.
Okay, I can check that off. Haven’t murdered. Haven’t murdered parents. Haven’t… You can just go down the list, right? We can do these things. Makes us feel good about ourselves until we actually read all the law and we look at all the things he’s calling us to do, and then we start to feel pretty bad about ourselves. Say, “Well, that seems like a bug in this whole program,” right? Because if it’s supposed to help me learn how to function, now I don’t feel like functioning because I realize these things that I’m doing that are bad. But in this, we’re actually encountering another aspect of what’s good about the law. Because, and this is the part Paul’s focused on the most in speaking up for the law, what the law does is show us that we can’t do it on our own. Maybe, maybe we can live out the Ten Commandments. I put a big maybe there because I think if we’re really willing to peer into our hearts, we’re going to see places where we clearly violate almost every commandment. And if we listen to how Jesus explains them in the Sermon on the Mount (turn to Matthew 5), we realize we definitely aren’t fulfilling even the Ten Commandments. But notably, too, there’s nowhere in the law where it says if you just do the Ten Commandments, that’s good enough. You don’t have to worry about the others. We like to think that way, but it’s not how God thinks. Everything else pours out of it.
So if that’s the case, does the law have a bug in it? Some of the people Paul’s addressing would, or Paul is going to address through Timothy, I should say, well, they’re going to think that way, right? We can’t do it. We have the gospel now. Clearly, the law is bad because the law talks about things we can’t do. We need to hear about what we can do. Paul says, no, it’s there for that reason. The law is holy. The law is good. And the sinner isn’t. But the law is there for the sinner, for the person who’s breaking the law. Why? So we actually understand what we need. There’s a contrast between where we are and where God wants us to be. Because as long as we think that we have everything under control, we’re not going to actually really soak in the gospel. We can’t truly understand what the gospel is doing in our lives, what the purpose of it is, what we need from our God, if we’re going around feeling like, “Well, you know, I look around my life and I’m doing pretty well. God’s going to look at me at the end and say, you know, you did more good than bad. Come on into heaven.” If that’s how we’re thinking, we’re not receiving the gospel. But if we actually let the law critique us, and we say, “God, take your law and show me every place that I’m out of conformity,” we get this huge list of errors, huge list of problems in our lives. Like that worst exam you ever took, where there was red ink everywhere. We say, “Oh, well, I guess I need something else.”
Brings us back to where we were last night in Isaiah chapter 1, as we were looking at that. God’s saying to the people, “You’re trying to do good. You’re trying to build yourself up with these rituals and offering plenty of sacrifices, all these things. But what you’re not doing is actually having a relationship with me. So let’s reason together. Let’s come back together. Let’s talk about what I’m willing to do for you, because you need that.”
Law’s good if we understand that it’s doing that, and we respond appropriately.
If I were on the other side of the screen tonight, if I were where you are tonight, there’s a decent possibility that this video would be blocked on my screen at some point during it with a big old message that said, “Your battery’s low.” Because as many of you know, I’m terrible about charging things. I always am forgetting to charge things. And so my phone, well, right now, I have my Bible app and my notes on it here. My phone is at 32% because I just charged it to get through this time together. I don’t learn. Even when it’s a sermon illustration I’m going to talk about, do I remember to charge my phone? No. The answer is no, I don’t. So there’s a decent chance that message would pop up and say, “Your battery’s low.” Now that message often says, “Do you want to go into low power mode? Do you just want to confirm that you saw this?” And either of those are good choices, but there’s also a bigger good choice, which is that then I go in as soon as possible, I plug in the phone and charge it, right? Because if I just say, “Okay, I’ve seen the message. Now I’m going to move on because I still have 20%,” well, then it pops up again at 10%. Well, I still have 10%. Then it pops up at 5%. Well, this message is annoying. It should get out of the way. Well, no, I should plug in the phone. And if I don’t, what happens? Well, mid-Bible study together, I’m off. I’m just disconnected, right? And plugging in, come on, charge up phone and start back up.
That isn’t the right response. Simply hitting confirm or even going into low power mode isn’t enough. Well, that’s really how it is with the law. The law is saying we’re low on righteousness. And when we actually look at the law every time for every one of us, it says we’re low on righteousness. And sometimes we hit, “Well, I’ll hit the low power mode. I’ll try to sin less,” right? But that doesn’t fill up the righteousness battery. It just slows down the discharge a little bit more. Or I just hit confirm and go blazing full speed ahead. Either way though, the problem is still there.
What God’s law is calling us to do is say, “How about a different response to God’s perfect law? How about actually responding and saying, God, I need you.” Clicking the button isn’t enough. I need to plug in. And when it comes to sin, I need to plug into Jesus. I need to plug into his righteousness that he is willing to give, right? Jesus lived the perfect life, died the perfect death, unjustly convicted, and triumphed over death so that when we plug into his righteousness, as he offers for us to do, what do we find? We find life. Because here’s the key thing, and I promise we get to this: Paul goes on in verse 10 listing more things. We’ve had murder, and then he goes on, verse 10, “sexually immoral people, practicing homosexuals, kidnappers, liars, purgers. In fact, for any who live contrary to sound teaching.” This accords with the glorious gospel of the blessed God that was entrusted to me.
It sounds a little weird to actually think about this phrase. Paul lists all these things, takes up several verses. We came in in the middle here. We looked at the first part a little bit ago. So a lot of sin. And he lists all that out, and then he says, “And this is the glorious gospel entrusted to me.” What are you talking about, Paul? This doesn’t seem glorious at all. But it is when we understand that that low battery warning is for us.
What Paul’s saying here is, what’s glorious about the law, and how does it tie into the gospel? It ties into the gospel because I’m not getting out of the conviction, but I am being offered something to do about it. Maybe one of the most important phrases we see in the whole passage is that very end there. Take a look at that again: “This accords with the glorious gospel of the blessed God that was entrusted to me.” Well, that’s nice. One jot further back: “In fact, for any who live contrary to sound teaching.” It’s not a mistake that the glorious gospel part comes right after that. Because yes, Paul’s listed really bad things, right? We say, “Well, I haven’t done this. I haven’t done that. I haven’t kidnapped anyone.” Okay. But have we ever lived in any way that isn’t in accord with sound doctrine? Of course we have. Of course we have. We are fallen human beings, and every single day we do things that don’t accord with sound doctrine. We’re not kind. We’re not loving. Our priorities are out of whack. We’re more worried about ourselves and getting ahead, or getting our group ahead. We’re more worried about lots of things other than giving glory to God.
Sometimes we even add in a little blasphemy by saying that those things that we do prioritize are about glorifying God, when they’re really about glorifying ourselves and our own desires. So what Paul’s saying here is, here’s what we can understand from the law: the gospel is glorious because it’s for sinners like me. Not just the really bad sinners over there, but the really bad sinner right here. Paul says, that’s what we’re talking about. Verse 9 had a series of categories: the lawless, the disobedient, the ungodly, before Paul goes into the more specific details. And what Paul is really saying there is, we all fall at different times into one of those categories consistently, right? If we’re not following Jesus, we’re ungodly. If we’re not following Jesus faithfully, we’re ungodly. If we’re not doing exactly what he said in a particular situation, we’re disobedient.
Had a conversation with someone this week about using coarse language. The person said—used the favorite phrase of the time—”I was being a Karen” for saying that Christians shouldn’t do that. Well, no, God says we shouldn’t do that. Not being persnickety, it’s not just being moralistic. God says we shouldn’t do that. And if we embrace coarse language, well, we’re being disobedient to God. In other words, according to Paul here, well, the same is kidnapping or murder. It puts us in that bad sinner category. When we see a neighbor in need and we keep going, all of us have done this, right? I’ve done this. I’m too busy. I don’t want to deal with this right now. Well, it’s being disobedient.
We all have our flaws. We all have our sins. And we can’t just brush those away and say, “Well, those are unfortunate little quirks of my personality. Over here are the really bad things.” No, no. All of us fall into the bad sinner category. So, if we feel like we’re confident, something’s going to go wrong, right? Something’s going to go wrong. And God’s saying, quit feeling so confident. Because whatever you’re doing that isn’t what I’ve called you to do, because whatever you’re doing that isn’t what I’ve called you to do, it’s disobedient. It’s contrary to sound doctrine. We need to turn around from it and understand that it’s not what he wants us to do. But we all fall into it. Do we understand that?
Here, doctrine, what we see is that it’s more than theory. It’s more than a nice thing to think about. It’s how we actually live. It’s only sound if it’s actually going from “here’s what’s true” to “here’s what I’m doing with that truth.” And if we stop at the first part, it’s not sound doctrine. All this sounds really tough. So, how do we get to that glorious part? Well, it’s what follows next. What makes the gospel glorious is that a murderous persecutor of the church could be the one talking about it. Because if Paul lists out these things, he’d overseen people being killed. He’d opposed Jesus and sought to stop the church. And he could talk about the gospel. Why? Because God works through all who turn to him. Whatever you’ve done, whatever I’ve done, we can come to him and he will respond.
The law is what hits us over the head, as Luther said, to say, okay, we need to respond. Because until we get hit over the head with that club and say, “Wait, there’s no way out, there’s no loophole for me,” we’re going to search for those loopholes.
Reminds me of a long time debate amongst preachers and really just anyone in the church, because we think about how preaching should be, right? But it’s really come to the forefront now that AI is here. I read that 65% of pastors are now using AI in relation to sermon preparation. Now, I don’t know where they’re using that in their sermon preparation. Perhaps they’re using it to critique something at the end or to look for inaccuracies that they may not have caught on their own. But I suspect a very significant portion of that—this is the worrisome part—are actually using it to, say, break apart the passage or come up with illustrations.
We see that in all kinds of fields. We’ve seen lawyers turning in legal briefs to the court that cite things that don’t exist. Why? Because they let AI do it. We’ve seen politicians do this. We see students doing this. We see it everywhere. But preaching isn’t immune to that either. And so rightly, that’s being critiqued, right? A pastor, anyone preaching, if you’re teaching a Bible study, maybe you don’t preach, but you’re teaching a Bible study, you need to actually go and dig into God’s Word on your own. You can’t just go and let an AI do it for you. We have to plow our own fields here and actually do the hard work.
But notably, and someone pointed this out and I thought it was so astute, this is not a new problem. Because for years, pastors have sometimes given citations, sometimes not, and borrowed other pastors’ sermon outlines, right? “Oh, you preached on this? I’ll take your outline. Then I don’t have to do all the work again.” And if you think about it, well, to view someone else’s outline to get inspiration because you don’t know everything, that’s not a bad idea. But if you’re going to do that and not actually go and dig into the Word yourself and try to understand it yourself, you’re shortchanging the people listening because they’ve come to hear the person preaching or teaching the Bible study dig into God’s Word, actually pray before our God, actually use the gifts that God’s given him, and find something and share it. And yes, use commentaries and dialogue, but actually do the work.
I go into all this for a simple reason. For a lot of pastors that probably have used those outlines for years, they can point to the people using the AI and say, “How dare you? You should be going and doing your own work.” And yet they haven’t done it themselves. And there are those who now turn on AI, and it’s new and trendy and shiny, so they don’t think about the fact that they would have rejected four or five years ago someone handing them an outline and saying, “Hey, don’t bother looking into the passage. Just use my outline.” That’s how we are with sin.
We find the area that is convenient for us, and it’s okay, right? AI, well, you know, it’s unique because I’m encouraging it. So that’s okay if I don’t actually dig into God’s Word. No. Or my friend dug into God’s Word. No. The pastor, the Bible teacher should dig into God’s Word and do the work. But that’s what we do with sin, right? You say, “Well, it’s okay that I didn’t help my neighbor in this case, because my neighbor’s annoying.” But we wonder why someone doesn’t help us. What Paul’s saying here, we can’t find the loophole. We can’t find the new trendy AI loophole. We can’t find the old-fashioned borrow it from someone else loophole. There are loopholes. We’re all guilty.
And that’s not to say that those of us who don’t have AI do the outline or borrow an outline aren’t guilty as well, right? There are plenty of times where I’m working on preparing a sermon. I don’t use either of those things, and so it’s easy for me to say, “Oh, you know, you shouldn’t have AI outline it. You shouldn’t borrow someone else’s outline.” But how many times am I going through, and I look at something, and I know I could dig deeper into it, but I just don’t, right? I’d rather do something else. Maybe I’d rather spend more time on the illustration and less time getting into something that’s really kind of mind-boggling. We all have those places. And the point that comes up here is that none of us, none of us actually do it right. None of us live life, because all of us in our lives are preaching a sermon. We are preaching by how we live. And all of us find the shortcuts. Sometimes it’s the AI. Sometimes it’s the outline. Sometimes it’s just not putting enough effort in this spot or that spot. But all of us do it. Some way we’re cutting corners.
But there’s the glorious gospel here. And that’s the beauty here. Because Paul could say, I cut corners. I thought the way to advance in God’s kingdom was to kill people who spoke about Jesus. If someone came into our church today and said that, we’d be aghast. And we certainly wouldn’t think, “Oh, here’s someone I should listen to.” And yet we see God working powerfully through him. Here’s the key thing, though. Paul rejected that. Paul said, I want to follow Jesus. I want him to transform me.
And so if you’re not yet following Jesus, and you say, “Well, sounds like you’re saying it’s okay if I just go about life as I’ve been doing it. Thanks for saying I don’t have to worry about all this law I can’t measure up to.” No, that’s not the point. The point is to say, Jesus, I know I can’t, but I want you to transform me. And for those of us here who believe in Jesus and have for a very long time, it’s not a way out for us either. It’s saying it’s a way in. Jesus, continue to work on me. Transform me. Because here’s what the law does. It shows us how bad we are. But it shows us how good the gift that Jesus is offering each and every one of us is, too. And that’s why it’s glorious.
Would you pray with me, please? Father, thank you for this evening. We thank you for your word. Please help us to be faithful to you. We know we can’t on our own. We all take shortcuts. Maybe it’s AI. Maybe it’s borrowing other people’s work. Maybe it’s doing it ourselves, but inevitably having shortcomings and yet being prideful because we’re not taking the shortcut. Whatever it might be, Lord, on kindness and gratitude to you, whatever it might be, Lord, would you help us to be those who instead say, “No, I want to do what’s pleasing to my God, and I can’t. But I know he will work in my life. He offers me the grace to save me and transform me.” Would you help us to trust more and more in you? In the precious name of our Savior Jesus, we pray. Amen.
Hope this has been an encouragement to you. Once again, please do give it a like or a share. And also, if you have any comments, any questions, feel free to text us at 833-356-4032. That’s 833-356-4032. Or leave a comment in the comments below. It is always great to hear from you either way. Happy to talk with you. Happy to pray with you. And so is our church family, if you leave it in the comments. Hope you have a wonderful and blessed day. I’ll see you again very soon.
Amen.
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