November 23, 2025

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Can everyone hear me okay? Nice. Nice. Oh, sir. I work for a living. So my name is Drew Ivey. I'm a deacon here. So I'm sorry you don't get the other Drew. So really, I'm just the shorter, more handsome version. But I do wanna come out and just start off with an apology. I can only imagine Drew's little black book of pastors must have been exhausted before he came to me and asked me to preach. So I'm sorry that you get me today. I'm gonna do my best. This is my first time, but hey, I love the Lord. I love you guys, so let's just get it going.

I do kinda wanna start off with a little bit of some expectations. I'm a college professor, so I always like to have expectations between me and whoever I'm talking to. So for one, hey, let's all try to stay awake. I'm gonna do my best to keep you awake. And I am a college professor, so please note that if you are nodding off, I have no qualms about calling you out. I may even come sit next to you and put my head on your shoulder, who knows. But the other expectation is really, I would love you just to take what I have to say to heart. Today, we're gonna be looking at a unique part of the scriptures, a unique set of Paul's letters called the pastoral's. And right around the Ephesians area, we have three books, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. These books were written by Paul, but they weren't written to a congregation. They were written specifically to the pastors

or the discipling leader of the churches of say, Ephesus or whatnot. Okay, so these books are a little bit more instructional and they're a little bit more conversational than they are the normal type of Paul letters. Okay, so let's go ahead and turn in our Bibles to 1 Timothy, chapter four, verses seven and eight. And then also, actually, really before we get started, could everyone just stand up for me? Let's just stand up. Let's just have a stand up. Nice, nice. And can we just raise our hands and just say amen. Amen. Nice. I made a bet with Drew that by the time the sermon ended, I could have everyone on their feet with their hands in the air screaming amen. So thank you, he lost that bet. I appreciate it. All right, you guys can have a seat. Thank you, thank you. It's always nice to prove the head pastor wrong. And maybe we can get a few more amens than he usually gets.

Nice, we're already there, we're already there. And so as we get started, I just wanna keep in the back of your mind that what we talk about today is not a set of checklists, right? We're not gonna create a bunch of boxes that we can just check off in order to accomplish a godly life. This is a mindset. This is a heart posturing that we have to take into account as we move into this sermon, okay? Salvation, again, is by grace through faith and it's not just by works, but spiritual growth and maturity requires spiritual discipline. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. That's what these verses are kind of focusing on. All right, so if everyone's with me in 1 Timothy, excuse me, the allergies are hitting hard today. I'm gonna read from the New American Standard and so there may be some slight variations, but we'll talk about those as we get going. So verse seven and eight.

But stay away from worthless stories that are typical of old women. Now, some of your Bibles might say the old wives' tales. So yeah, we just took that and just turned it into something easier for people to read. Rather, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness. For bodily training is just slightly beneficial, but godliness is beneficial for all things since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. So what we have here is Timothy is pretty much being told by Paul that he was to exercise himself unto godliness. What does godliness mean? Anyone know? This is not rhetorical. Paul would love an answer. What's godliness? Anybody brave enough to share? If not, I will call you.

Do what? Yeah, it literally means god-likeness, right? God-likeness. So it literally means to take on the image of God. Now, not physically, but in what we know, what we have in the word, what we see through the life of Jesus Christ, we want to make our lives mimic the example that God has put before us. Now, if you want to achieve that, it has to be done. And it has to be done within the realm of a disciplined life. And the first part was, and this isn't much difference in today's world, the old wives' tales and all that other, it's referring to a lot of the folklore teachings that in that time in Ephesus were creeping their way into the church. And some of these stories were from the old Jewish folklores. Some of them were some of the pagan folklores, but it didn't matter. These stories weren't being incorporated as biblical truths within the church. That's why Paul wrote this letter to Timothy

for him to squash that out before it ran rampant. So that's where that first part of the verse comes from. And we kind of see that today, right? How many of us live our lives, and how many of us have so much of the world screaming in us, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, CNN, NBC, right? Our friends. I know, like my kids, I love my kids, but my son, he gets his news from TikTok, and I'm like, man, I'm pretty sure that's not peer reviewed. Right, but he walks around like he's got a strong understanding of cultural knowledge, and I just sort of laugh and tell him he's pretty, pat him on his head, send him on his way, right? So really, it's, we don't, what is in the Bible is the truth. Is this true or true? True, true or true? Nice, right? Anything outside the Bible is a substantial truth, but not an absolute truth. This is the absolute truth. Anything that you add, whether it be from your social,

from anything else, is folklore. Get it out. The Bible was made and created to remain pure, because it's the only guideline that we have to a godly existence. Sound good? So that was that first part. The second part, the language is kind of fun. I love sports, right, Tennessee, yay. We don't get to cheer too often, right, but I love, I grew up doing sports, like I'm a very competitive person, and one of those guys where, like, if you pass me, I speed up. Like, I'm gonna make it hard for you to pass me. Even if I'm walking, I wanna be, right? Like, I just love that competitiveness. But the language that Paul is using here is in reference to the Greek games, right? And the Greek games, of course, were, they're sort of like what's today's modern world championships in all of our individual sports, right? But the main sport that was done back then was the sports of strength, right, physical feats.

Today, that's translated into gymnastics, right? Today would be the modern day gymnastics is the stuff that they used to do back then, except it was probably a lot cooler. Just joking, not in gymnastics. But it has a very sports-like connotation. And what we're saying here is what Paul is saying is, hey, the physical feats, while they are good, they are not permanent. Back in those days, if you won the championship, you got what was called a faded or a corruptible crown. I tried to find a picture, but they were all kind of weird cartoons. So just bear with me, but if you've seen the pictures, remember those little green leaf crowns you see on people's heads? Like back in the old, old Greek days, that was the fatable crown. They were plants that were taken out of the ground. They didn't last, right? Those crowns faded and eventually died. They were temporary. Not only did they die,

but the feats that got that athlete, the crown, were useless and pointless because the next year, you had to do it again. So it was a temporary thing. It was a temporal, and it was not something that Paul was trying to get Timothy to say, hey, these are temporary things. The more permanent one is the crown of glory that we get by serving our Lord Jesus Christ. That is an eternal crown. Not only is it the eternal crown, but we are still promised glory on this earth. We get to join a family of Christians, and we get the glory of being in that. We get the benefits of being in a family. We get the benefits of knowing that if a member of our family has a need, somebody will fill it.

Beyond that, it's the discipline that we acquire in the process of becoming more God-like. And that's kind of what we're gonna, I wanna kind of spend a little bit of time just sort of bringing our brains into that mentality. Let me know if you guys know this name, Usain Bolt. Yeah, yeah, you know who Usain Bolt is, Ian? See, I saw you nodding. I don't know if you were going to sleep or not. Okay, do you know who he is? Have you ever met him? No, I didn't think so. But Usain Bolt, he's the fastest man on the planet, is he not? Literally the fastest man on the planet. Did he get to be that just automatically? No, when he actually first began his career in 2006, he came on and he was so mouthing, he's like, I'm gonna be the fastest man on the planet, I'm gonna do this, guess what happened? For the first two world championships, the first one he didn't place because of injury,

the second one, he was still last place. So something had to be done. So he started doing a different type of training. Every single day, he would get a regimented amount of sleep. Every single day, he would have a regimented diet based on his blood work and whatever he was going through that day. He had meals, he had workouts based on longevity, based on strength, based on speed. He spent his entire day around like-minded individuals that pushed him further and further. He did this for four years. And if those of you were old enough to remember, in 2008, he went to the Olympic Games. Do you know what he did? No, I'll go ahead and tell you. He became the fastest man on the planet. He won gold, but not only that, the very next race, the qualifying race, he beat his world record. The next race that he actually won the medal, he beat his record again by 300 milliseconds.

So really, 9.58 seconds is what it took him to run 100 meters. Yeah, yeah, I'm not running. If you see me running that fast, like something ugly is chasing me, you better just follow. So dude, the guy killed it. Not only did he kill it, but look how much he killed it by. And he had been ridiculed this entire time. Publicly, they said when he was mouthing off, they ridiculed him. When he was quiet, they ridiculed him. Because of this dream that he had to be the fastest man on the planet, still today, for three more Olympics after that, he went and he set more world records and still won more gold medals and other events. Today, he's still the fastest man on the planet. No one has beaten his record. That man for four years trained all day so that he could run a perfect 100 meters. Is that not amazing? His whole life for four years every day was for nine seconds of excellence.

What I think and what I looked into my own life is that I'm too busy living my nine seconds for my entire day. How many of us get to check our box? We did our cool quiet times. Yay, right, we had our quiet times. We had our cool prayer time. We said our prayers before our meals. We may have come to church at least twice this month. Boom, boom, boom. And yet we expect the same level of godliness that we see people who have dedicated their whole day to achieve that excellence. What if we decided to live our life our entire day for those nine seconds? What if our entire day was built with the mindset that I want to be godlike every single second? So that way when the time came, when that witnessing moment happened, whatever occurred, you were ready and you were excellent. Not because you were better than everyone else, but because you chose to submit and live a life of spiritual discipline and be godlike.

This kind of slapped me across the face because I was the nine seconds for the 24th, right? I was like, man, why am I so tired? Many of us, and the world is screaming, right? All those lies and all those folklores that Paul was telling Timothy about, how many do we believe? How many of us believe that we have to go to work for 12 hours, right? As a man, right, that's what my dad did. He went to work all day, boom. But he wasn't a spiritual leader, he wasn't a disciple, and he was never there. Was he a success? I don't know. Am I saying quit your jobs? I'm not saying working 12 hours is bad. I'm just saying, what is your mentality while you're working? Are we becoming a VP of our company ahead of being the excellent godlike disciple that we're supposed to be called to be in the Bible? If we're a Christian, our mentality has to be based on the spiritual discipline mindset

that we need to be excellent here, and then everything else comes second. Does that make sense? If you're a teacher, if you're a doctor, if you're a financial advisor, if you're a student, that's all second. Your first job is to be a spiritual disciplined, godlike individual serving the kingdom. Is that your mentality today? So as a way, you know, we sort of looked at that. Really, there's three things that I looked at, and I grew up a very disciplined person just because, I don't know, maybe I just needed it. I probably did. And so really, there's really three things that you need to be a disciplined person or to start living a disciplined life. First thing, and this is something that I find less and less, especially when I was teaching college, is finish what you begin. It was this lesson that I taught my kids. If you don't finish what you begin, you're unreliable and you're a liar.

Finish what you began. That's easy, is it not? We'll give some examples. Number two, when you begin to finish what you started, then you can do that just a little bit better. Sound good? So once we've established this event, whatever it is, we're gonna complete it, but then the next time we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it just a little bit better. And then we're gonna do it just a little bit longer.

Three easy steps. Let's take, for example, sleep. Now again, I'm gonna talk about what I call the non-negotiables in your life, the non-negotiables. Is your job a negotiable or a non-negotiable event in your life? That's, you can just answer that in your head. And then I'll give you the right answer. It's negotiable. Most of you negotiated your salary. Most of you negotiated your employment. And your very job every single day is negotiated on the fact that you're doing it well. It's a negotiable. You're replaceable. So we're not even gonna talk about your job. Let's talk about something non-negotiable, but yet reoccurring sleep. We all need sleep. Raise your hand if you love sleep. I know. My daughter wanted to put me in timeout for five hours the other day, and I was like, oh, yes, yes. I will take a five-hour nap. So sleep. How do we begin sleep? Well, we start by getting rid of all the junk, right?

You need a good six to eight hours of sleep, not medically proven, whatever, six to eight hours. So we need to start setting the time that you can go to bed, and you're gonna get at least six to eight hours of great sleep. That may mean nine o'clock. It doesn't, right? That's just your own personal, that's your own personal schedule. But we're gonna go to sleep. We're gonna put our phones down, our TVs off, and we're going to start initiating something else. Maybe we could start going to bed in prayer. My grandmother used to say, there's no better place to fall asleep than in the arms of our savior. And I try to exercise it every day. My brain is one of those brains where it takes a miracle to shut off, right? It just goes, and it's very annoying. But I just start praying through my day. Now, God already knows your day. He already knows, but you know what? Just me telling him, that's another level of intimacy

in your relationship with Jesus. My wife and I, she taught me a great lesson, we got married. And she knew why I was mad, but when I started, she wanted to know more. She just wanted me to tell her. She just wanted me to talk to her. And that is what built an intimacy there that I just didn't understand, especially as a guy. I'm like, hey, I'm mad. There we go. But telling her and talking to her about it, it really broadened our relationship and made it deeper because she was so much more appreciative of it. It's the same principle with God. He just wants to hear it. So how about just start praying, go through your day. Go through your day, man, could I have handled that conversation better? Ooh, did I just miss a witnessing opportunity? God, did I put you first in every single one of my situations today? God, did I wake up wanting to serve you or serve my own needs?

Just talk to him. Vigsh, you're gonna go to sleep. Nice, we've achieved our goal. Then we're going to, well, hopefully we're gonna wake up. Hopefully we wake up. And what are we gonna do? Is our sleep done? Have we completed our task? Is it done? Yeah, we literally just did it. We went to sleep and we woke up. Nice, we began what we finished. Hey, next day, how are we gonna make it better? How are we gonna do that longer and better? How about you make your bed?

I know, sorry, Ian. Probably should start doing it, my man, if you can find your covers. Yeah, all right. So how about make your bed? How do you even do it? All right, we can start making our bed. Maybe even just your side of the bed, if your spouse is in the bed making type. And then maybe you can start making his or her side of the bed. And hey, we're gonna get better. Now, that's just not enough. I promise you, that won't be enough. In the morning, just getting up and just making, no. We're gonna go and get those 80 pillows that our wives bought, that we have know what their purpose are for, and we're gonna start decorating the bed. And if you want it even really cool, you can get online and make cool little shapes with towels and put them on there for everybody when they get, right, I mean, it's balanced. It's endless what you can do. And it's easy, but once you establish it

as something that's going to take place as a non-negotiable recurring event. Right, now again, that's just a check. But why are you doing that? Why are you making your bed? You're gonna make your bed just to check the box, or you're gonna make the bed because you want to establish this unique pattern of something that is necessary and healthy in your life, boom. It's a mindset. Let's talk about our quiet times. I get up, Clay and I get up really before the chickens. All right, we go work out together. We're up at 4.30. We're gonna go work out. I don't know about you, Clay, but I get to bed about, I usually crawl into bed, literally pulling myself into bed about 9.30 or 10. That's a long day, right, a long day. Now, taking an hour out of your day, if you don't do quiet times or Bible studies now, taking an hour out of a busy day is just probably not wise. But what if you did five minutes, right?

If I'm awake for 16 hours, oof, oof, cutting it close in that sleep, right? 16 hours, what if I did five minutes a day, or five minutes an hour just sitting down? Do you know how amazing it is just to stop in the middle of a day? The busyness, the hectic, the annoying conversations, just to stop. You take a breath, man, and you refocus. You refocus on a source of grace and of strength that you could never achieve on your own. You stop and you give thanks for what you have. You give thought, thanks. You ponder on a Bible verse for just five minutes. I promise you, it's gonna be amazingly refreshing. But you have to forget about your day for five minutes. God gets those. Your boss, your wife, your kids, no. Those are God's five minutes. I promise you, you established that. How do you make it better? How about, let's add 10 minutes.

10 minutes every hour throughout your 16 hour day. Pretty soon, you're going to start experiencing that God-likeness. You're gonna start seeing the fruits of what it's like to be a God-like, disciplined follower of Jesus. And you're gonna start wanting it more and more. Could you imagine if after four, five, six, maybe a year, that you were spending your entire day focused on the Lord and Savior that gave his life for you, and you decided, hey, I wanna give you five minutes, and you realize I need more. And then your whole life, your whole day is spent around serving him with the mindset of discipling, of serving.

It is life altering. What would happen if every single member of the Church of America decided to restructure their lives, get rid of the noise, and focus on the peace that we were promised, and started living our lives according to biblical standards? What would it look like today? It would look pretty good, wouldn't it? So of the core disciplines, really, you can go all over the place, but really, I wanna talk about there's four. Let's focus on just four areas of our lives that we can use to become spiritually disciplined in to achieve that God-likeness.

I'm not gonna put the Bible verses up there. I'm a college professor, so I know if I put a bunch of words up there, you're gonna read them instead of listening to me. So I'm just gonna let you look those up later, promise? Raise your hand if you promise. Oh, I'm gonna hold you accountable. All right, so the first really core discipline, right, is the word. All right, the word. You have to be in the Scripture. Right, you cannot have a Christian mind without reading the Scriptures regularly, because really, you can't be influenced by what you don't know.

If you're not spending time in the word, how are you expecting to grow? If you're not spending in the word, how are you not going to be challenging the truths that are coming from the world? You can't do it. You have to be in the word. You have to be able to be influenced by the truths found in the Scriptures. Okay, I always tell people the Bible will keep you from sin or sin will keep you from the Bible. Really, it's one way or the other. Prayer, prayer is huge, right, but prayer is both talking to God and listening to God. Right, we can't just sit down and talk for the whole 10 minutes. Now we know those people, right, we know those people that sit down and once they just start talking, you don't even have to say a word. They're my favorite conversations. I'm an introvert, if you're gonna talk the whole time, yay, but we know those people. If you don't know those people,

you're those people, right? But we really, we can't just talk the whole time. There has to be a time of listening. That's why, man, those five minutes, oh, it's just being still. Right, and I'm not just talking about hearing. I always talk to my kids, I know you hear me, but are you listening to me? Right, are you just hearing God, or are you actually listening? Are you taking it in, and are you applying it? Okay, this is a big one, fellowship. Right, fellowship. Christianity, being to believe, this is not a solo sport, sorry. It's not, if you think Christianity is a solo sport, we're reading two different books. Okay, two separate books. Spiritual discipline comes with accountability. It comes with encouragement. I'll give you just a brief story real quick. I have just a few minutes left, but I started cycling probably about 20 years ago. My first ride on a bicycle was 10 miles, woohoo!

Yeah, 10 miles, I did it in two hours, and I probably, and I didn't walk much the rest of the day. I know, I was a stud, yeah. And I kept trying to do that by myself. It didn't work. So I actually stumbled upon a group of guys, and we decided we were gonna start our own biking club, our own team. And this was a team of all people from all different walks of life, but we started meeting every single week. We started riding, we started pushing each other. When one of us was cramping from our waist down, I promised you there was always at least one or two other guys. You could literally feel their hands on your backs, pushing you up the hills because you couldn't go. Like we were a brotherhood, we were a family. We bled together, we sweat together. We pushed each other. We kept each other accountable, we kept each other honest. I was more afraid of saying I couldn't make it to a practice

than I was telling my wife I was going to the practice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right? I mean, because the ridicule you get from a group of guys for not showing up, oh. So I had this encouragement. I had this accountability. Two years later, we rode the pace group in the hotter than hell. Hotter than hell is a race that literally is named after what it is. It's in Wichita Falls in the middle of July. It was 170 degrees, 121 coming off the pavement. We rode that bike ride, we rode that 100 miles at a 28.7 mile average and we finished it just under four hours. Afterwards, I drove home from Wichita Falls. Guess what I did? I mowed the yard and then I took a little nap. Could I have achieved that without any discipline? Could I achieve that without a group of people coming and fulfilling needs? If you ran out of snacks, somebody always had one. If you needed water, somebody already had.

Literally, that is the description of what the Christian church family is, guys. If someone has a need, we should be there to fulfill it. The reason why we don't have to worry about our needs is because God created this community so that we can fulfill each other's needs so that we can focus on what we really needed to do. Spiritual discipline is not a solo thing. It involves all of us. It involves all of us. And now you don't have to go to church to be a Christian. I tell people that all the time. You don't have to go to church to be a Christian, but I also tell them that you don't have to go home to be married. But if you don't, the consequences are gonna be pretty severe, don't you think? You're not gonna have any relationship with the people that are important, with the people that support you, and the people that love you. So going to the church, participating in church,

serving in church, is an integral part of being disciplined and becoming God-like. It will not happen on your own. We were created for this community. And the last one, of course, is disservice, is learning to serve together. And this is natural. As you grow that spiritual discipline, as you become more God-like, you want to get out there. If you understood the sacrifice that Christ gave to you, and I promise you, if you're anything like me, I didn't deserve it.

I still don't today. And if you're not willing to shape your whole life about sharing with somebody who doesn't know God, then that means that you don't love people like Jesus did. Serving is submitting. Being disciplined is the gym. This church, this community, this is the gym in which we become trained. We become fit. It becomes a way of life. It becomes your way of life. I wish it, actually, I quit, I retired. Did you guys know that? I retired from my job a year ago because my job was getting in the way. Not only that, but the job was getting in my way of fulfilling his purpose, and I walked away. What's in your way? If you had to give yourself a grade today on your spiritual discipline, what kind of spiritual shape are you in, what would it be? You don't have to tell me. God expects an A.

Are we ever gonna get to the A level? No, but it doesn't mean we don't work for it. We don't work towards it. Grab some accountability. Join a home group here at Southboro. Join a life group. Talk to me, talk to a deacon, talk to one of the pastors. There's always a starting point. Let us help you get started so that we can help you finish what you began. Get involved with this family so that you can become better, and you can do it longer as you finish what you began. What spiritual shape are you in? Grace saves us, but spiritual discipline is what sustains us in the godliness that we need to be disciplined in his word. Pray with me real quick.

Tell me, Father, I just thank you so much for who you are. I wanna thank you so much for the peace and the grace that we have for who we are in you. I thank you for the word that you gave us. I thank you for this established church. I thank you for this family. Lord, I thank you for grace so that as we can come together and we can talk about where we need to improve. Not to be improved, Lord, not to check a box, but so that we can re-engage our brains, so we can focus our hearts on serving you. Lord, we don't wanna be spiritually disciplined. We wanna do all these things, just to say that we've done them.

We wanna do it so that we can live a life worthy of you. We want to live a life so that when we meet you face-to-face, we get to hear, well done, my faithful servant. Lord, bless us this week. Help us honor you in everything that we do. In your name we pray, amen.