1 Timothy 5:11 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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1 Timothy 5:11

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At first sight this looks very hard. ‘But the younger widows’ –that is those who are under sixty – ‘refuse.’ Refuse what? Relief? No, refuse admission to this role of approved workers. ‘For when they have begun to wax wanton against Christ, they will marry.’ It gives the impression that any Christian woman who is widowed under sixty is inevitably going to wax wanton against Christ, and that is not of course what the apostle is saying, not for a moment. Among the younger women there will be some who will let the side down, so on the whole it is better not to have the younger widows on the list of people set aside for special activities. That is what he means. But what is it that the younger widows are doing? Are they committing sin because they remarry? No, that is not what the apostle is saying, because in verse 14 he says that is exactly what they should do. The younger widow should remarry ideally, if they are young enough to care for children again; that is his counsel under God. So in verse 11 he is not condemning them because they want to remarry. What he is saying is that some of the younger widows – evidently they had had this experience – had grown cold concerning their dedication to Christian service, and had wanted to return to the married state. What had happened therefore is they had given up their loyalty, they had grown restless, they had remarried which was not itself a bad thing. What was sad is that they had thrown away their commitment to their service and lost interest in it. Now, says the apostle, I don't want that to happen, I don't want the younger women to incur guilt before God by going back on their pledge to serve him. I would rather they didn't take up that pledge when they are younger, and they weren't set aside for special ministries. It is perfectly all right for them to remarry, but I would rather they didn't incur the guilt of dedicating themselves to a particular function in the church and then dropping out. That is what he is saying.

Application

Now of course that has an application to us. Loyalty was very important in the New Testament church. If a woman, an older woman who was a widow, said, ‘I would love to serve the Lord and be set aside to this special service in the church’, and she gave herself to that, she must stick at it. Loyalty is not just a nice option in the church of Jesus Christ. It is a duty. We are all of us to be loyal. We are to be loyal to the faith, loyal to the Lord, loyal to our Christian service, loyal to our church. It is the sin of schism ever to leave a church without good biblical reason, perhaps because the Lord has called you somewhere else, unmistakably and definitely. We can understand that. Perhaps through circumstances, perhaps through some special calling, or because your church is ceasing to preach the gospel and is committing serious doctrinal error. Or because it is indifferent to conduct and to matters of discipline.

There are certain things laid down in the Scripture which make it actually right to leave a church, but, those things aside, we have the duty of loyalty if the Lord is there. If the gospel is preached, and the doctrines and the practices of the church are wholesome and biblical, and people are sincerely striving to walk in discipline before the Lord, then it is the sin of schism ever to walk out, to abandon our pledges in Christian service, or ever to just grow cold and give up. It's wrong and it was very serious.

Once a child of God is committed to an avenue of service for the Lord, once a child of God has joined a Church, committed himself or herself to the Lord's work, it is very wrong to just abandon ship or to turn ones back upon those duties. Of course there are many considerations here. We very often have to take a step back on things that we might like to do, because our circumstances in an unforeseen way change. So that is understandable. Sometimes adjustments have to be made, but that is not what is described here. Generally speaking, loyalty to the Lord, faithfulness in his service, stickability, these things are very important for Christian people to pursue. It's quite wrong for us to let the present age rub off on us. The present world we live in knows no loyalty at all. People owe nothing to anybody, and this is coming into the churches. Christian people say to the Lord, ‘Lord I will serve thee, I will love thee’, and then they do no such thing. Or they join a church and treat it like a supermarket or a bank, and drift away when it suits them. It is quite different if the Lord were to greatly overrule our circumstances in such a way that we were compelled to uproot and move to another district. Again, it would be quite different if the church threw down its biblical responsibilities and became apostate, abandoned the faith, or ceased to fulfil the great commission of the Lord, or ceased to exercise godly discipline. Then you may have full justification to leave a church. But if we are heedlessly disloyal, we sin against the Lord. If we occupy a position in Christian service and then we decide, ‘Oh I'm getting a little tired of this, I think I'll just abandon it, lay it down’, we do what is described here. Far better, says the Apostle, to let people who naturally are going to be inclined or have a desire to remarry and to bring up families; far better not to enrol them into special service, because if you do that unnecessarily, you are causing them to sin. So don't put them in that position.

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1 Timothy 5:11 Commentary and Bible Study

Explain meaning of 1 Timothy 5:11