The Kind of Church Exiles Need

“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” (Heb. 10:23–25)

My family and I lived for two years as one of the few white families in Flushing, New York. We miss a lot of things about New York City—Saturday afternoons in Central or Domino Park, Friday nights at The Landmark of 57th West, and Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day before the U.S. Open. But what we miss most is the food. From Korean BBQ to Chinese hot pot to halal trucks to the endless variety of New York–style pizza, nothing compares to the food scene in Queens.

I suppose part of the reason is that New York City is full of exiles. Almost everyone’s from somewhere else, even if they’ve lived in Queens all their lives. They’re between two homes—the one they’ve known and the one their parents or grandparents used to know. In the best of situations, this reality creates culturally conversant and adaptable kids; it’s wonderful. In the worst of situations, it creates kids who don’t speak the same language as their parents, kids who feel most alone when they’re at home with their families.

The comparison isn’t exact, but healthy local churches are full of people between two homes. They’re exiles. But whereas kids in NYC live between the present and the past, our tension runs in the opposite direction. We live between the present and the future, between the home we grew up in and the home we’re heading toward. It’s why the “exile” metaphor is so apt for Christians. And it’s both wonderful and tragic.

Healthy local churches are full of people between two homes. They’re exiles.

For Christians, our unavoidable immersion in the present can dull our longing for the future, tempting us to merely blend into a world we’re supposed to bless. Thankfully, our God knows this, so he gave us the local church, where we gather each week to feast on the glorious promises of the gospel. Through our local churches, we receive instruction from the Word that reinterprets our past, fuels us for the present, and shifts our ultimate hope toward the future Christ has already secured for us (see Heb. 10:23–25).

Christians may read that sentence and say “Amen” while having no idea how the abstract encouragement moves to reality. I want to help make that connection explicit. In particular, we’ll reflect on Timothy’s life and work as both a Christian and a pastor, as both a model exile and a model leader of exiles.

Fight for Faith

Timothy was the son of an unbelieving Greek father and a believing Jewish mother (Acts 16:1, 3)—so he likely knew what it was to live between two worlds. His mother, Eunice, and his grandmother, Lois, passed down their “sincere faith” to him from a young age (2 Tim. 1:5). Sometime after his conversion, he accompanied Paul as his protégé and functioned as his representative to various churches (1 Cor. 4:17; Phil. 2:19). At some point, Timothy was imprisoned and later released (Heb. 13:23).

We also know he served as the pastor of a struggling church in Ephesus. That’s why we have 1 and 2 Timothy, Paul’s letters to his pastor friend who, amid a disastrous situation, wasn’t sure what to do. Paul’s solution was to give clear instructions to Timothy for the church but also to encourage him to “share in suffering as a good soldier” (2 Tim. 2:3). Clearly, Paul was concerned his son in the faith may shrink in retreat if the battle continued to rage.

Timothy’s primary opponents were false teachers. Like clowns who make balloon animals at a child’s birthday party, they twisted God’s law so it said strange things about genealogies (1 Tim. 1:4), marriage (4:3), and food laws (4:3). Paul explained these men were “swerving from” truth (1:6) as they shipwrecked their faith (1:19); they were “liars” (4:2) who were “puffed up” (6:4) and addicted to controversy (6:4–5). They were also hypocrites. They were “godly” because they were greedy for gain; they loved morality because they loved money (6:5, 9–10).

And those were just the challenges from his first letter. By the time Timothy received the sequel, Paul was at death’s door and Timothy’s situation seemed more or less unchanged. Interestingly, Paul’s counsel also seems more or less unchanged.

So what’s the divine strategy when the gospel is under attack because false teachers have scaled the church’s walls? Do we retreat? Do we capitulate? Do we reframe our beliefs and reposition our posture so the grinding conflict smooths out? Do we accentuate our similarities to our opponents so they see we’re not all that different anyway?

In short, no, no, no—and no.

We face similar questions. We live in a world awash in false teaching. We’re told it’s narrow-minded to believe Jesus is the only way. It’s bigoted to believe men and women are created fundamentally different. And it’s narrow-minded and bigoted to believe a church ought to be led by qualified men called pastors. False teaching is orthodoxy outside the church. We get that. But false teaching can also be a siren song inside the church, a magnet for the immature, doubtful, and disaffected.

If I could summarize Paul’s counsel to Timothy into a single command, it would be something like this: Fight for unstained doctrine and unstained living so that at the end of your life, you may receive an unstained crown of glory. That’s the “good warfare” and “good fight” Timothy must commit himself to. That’s his job as a pastor. And guess what? It’s our job as Christians to enlist ourselves in that work too.

Find Faithful Churches

How do we find churches that help us fight for unstained doctrine and unstained living in order to receive our unstained crown? What should we even look for? A few things come to mind.

1. Find a church that prizes doctrine.

Paul exhorted Timothy to wage a war with words as his primary weapons (1 Tim. 4:6, 11, 13–16; 6:2, 13–14, 20; 2 Tim. 1:13, 14; 2:2, 14, 15; 3:14–15; 4:1–2). As we read through 1 and 2 Timothy, it’s clear the pastor is both steward and soldier; he always defends the Maginot Line, and he sometimes storms the beaches of Normandy. Though he fundamentally preserves, he also proactively attacks.

A pastor should guard the truth, follow the pattern, continue in the truth, and remind others of what’s been passed down to him. How? Primarily by preaching the Word (2 Tim. 4:2). There’s no better foundation than a ministry built on patient and even repetitive proclamation of what God’s Word says about God’s glorious Son (1 Tim. 1:15–18; 3:16; 6:13–16; 2 Tim. 1:8–10; 2:8).

Fight for unstained doctrine and unstained living so that at the end of your life, you may receive an unstained crown of glory.

But guarding isn’t always defensive. After all, as George Washington once said, sometimes the best defense is a good offense. That’s precisely why Paul encourages Timothy to defend truth and destroy falsehood (1 Tim. 1:3; 2:8–15; 4:7; 5:1–25; 6:3, 8–10, 20; 2 Tim. 2:23; 3:1–9).

The burden of the pastor and the Christian is to resist the temptation to pick and choose which truths to defend and which falsehoods to destroy. “Don’t love money!” happens to be a command from Paul that many will agree with, including the Notorious B.I.G. and adherents to the Qur’an. But Christians must recognize all Scripture is profitable (2 Tim. 3:16), the parts that make sense in this world and the parts that are otherworldly.

So we’ll speak about the danger of greed and the danger of not paying our pastors. We’ll speak about the dignity of families caring for their own widows and the dishonor of women usurping roles God has reserved for men. And we’ll challenge men who shamefully retreat when they should step forward.

Christians, then, should seek a church that teaches the whole counsel of God, not weaponizing its words to the “world out there” but also addressing failures within its own walls. As Paul warns Timothy, there’s a time coming when people won’t endure sound teaching but instead will accumulate teachers who only reinforce what they already believe or want to believe (2 Tim. 4:3–4). Such teachers fail the most basic test of faithfulness. They preside over a church full of yes-men and yes-women rather than exiles.

As usual, there are ditches on both sides of the road to faithfulness. One ditch is for itchy-ear preachers, nonconfrontational accumulators of crowds. Such men (and women) effectively waste their pulpits by leaving lost people without direction and saved people without correction. The other ditch is for opposition-obsessed preachers, overly confrontational accumulators of a different kind of crowd. Such men effectively waste their pulpits by failing to equip exiles to navigate with love and wisdom an increasingly difficult world.

So find a church that cares about doctrine. As you’re on the lookout, 1 and 2 Timothy should keep you on the straight and narrow. But there’s more to say.

2. Find a church that prizes character.

Paul exhorts Timothy time and time again to fight for the truth. But he spends perhaps just as much time exhorting Timothy to be a specific kind of man, and in doing so to become a model for all Christians.

The obvious place to point to is Paul’s list of expectations for elders and deacons (1 Tim. 3). But both letters are shot through with similar encouragements about character (1 Tim. 1:5, 12–16; 2:8–12; 4:12, 16; 2 Tim. 2:24–26; 3:10).

Who cares what you believe if you can’t first be? And what kind of person should you be? A loving person with a pure heart and clean conscience. A humble person who’s astonished she gets to serve Christ in the first place. An exemplary person who studies himself as much as he studies the Scriptures. A person who fights without being quarrelsome. A person who endures evil and keeps smiling.

While these two values—doctrine and character—may seem distinct, they’re interrelated and even interdependent. Consider Paul’s opening remarks:

As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith. The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions. (1 Tim. 1:3–7)

Did you notice the connection? The error these false teachers made wasn’t getting their doctrine from some strange first-century subreddit. Their first misstep was swerving away from love. Their theological error was born out of a moral and motivational error. They wanted to be teachers, but they ended up teaching things they didn’t understand. They wanted to elevate the law and morality, but they tried to produce fruit without the root. Instead, they should have wanted to be teachers because they loved God and others with a sincere faith. And they should have led others to a similar and sincere love. But they failed.

What a tall task for pastors; what a tall task for all Christians.

Like Timothy, we’re facing confusing and difficult times. As we live as exiles in a fallen world, we’ll be tempted—like these false teachers—to swerve in our teaching and our temperament. We’ll be tempted to wonder if our meek and meager faithfulness even matters. In those moments, we need to reorient our perspective and remember Paul’s words to Timothy:

The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will. (2 Tim. 2:24–26)

Church leaders need to remember we defend the gospel and fight for faith through our gentleness, kindness, patience, respect, and love. We need letters like 1 and 2 Timothy because they hold out to us models of faithful exiles, from Paul and Timothy in particular to the offices of elder and deacon in general. It’s a good thing for men and women to want to look like Paul and Timothy, since elders and deacons are models of godly character for the whole church. Does that describe you? Then meditate on Paul’s words, and find a church led by those of good character who are worth following.

3. Find a church that prizes our hope in a secure future.

The sum total of our church’s teaching and our church leaders’ temperaments subtly but surely shifts our ultimate hope toward our secure future with the Lord Jesus. They remind us we are, in fact, exiles—people from somewhere else, people between two homes.

As we live as exiles in a fallen world, we’ll be tempted—like these false teachers—to swerve in our teaching and our temperament.

And yet we’re not homeless exiles, because we have the local church. We’re members, as Paul says, of “the household of God” (1 Tim. 3:15), the best place on earth to see God’s authority on display and our responsibility in action.

How can that be? These metaphors seem to be at odds. They aren’t. God in his infinite wisdom has gathered us strangers together and made us siblings. We should feel like exiles least when we’re gathered with our spiritual family.

That otherworldly truth doubles as a rallying cry for exiles. If we look around our churches next Sunday, we’ll see lots of people with whom we have many differences—some trivial, some far from it. But if we all can confess this “mystery of godliness” together (v. 16) with a sincere faith and pure conscience, then guess what? We’ve found a temporary home.

But we haven’t yet arrived at our ultimate home. We’re still fighting, still running, still waiting for our crown of righteousness we’ll receive at his appearing (2 Tim. 4:6–10). Until that day, we must plant roots in a healthy church and give our whole selves to it—for the next 5, 10, or 50 years. We must be shaped and captivated by the gospel that our qualified leaders proclaim and protect.

The church, at its best, is God’s appointed means to make us faithful exiles to the very end.

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