Passage Read: 1 Timothy 1-2
Meditation Verses: 1:5-7
Thought
The Christian life is centered on love, which comes from a pure heart, good conscience and sincere faith. Christian love is all about being of benefit to others, as the Word of God teaches, doing so out of a heart purified of sin and guile and self-seeking, purified by God's Spirit and according to the standard laid down in God's Word. It requires a good conscience, which is one that does not condemn the believe for acts of unrighteousness, but testifies of the owner's diligence to walk according to God's commands. And it requires a genuine faith in God, His Son, the Spirit, the Gospel and the rest of the Scriptures. It is not knowledge for knowledge's sake. It is not study so as to teach others, but so as to direct my own behavior in righteousness, so that I live a life of blessing and true spiritual benefit to others. These guys that Timothy needs to rebuke think the most important thing is to search out obscure knowledge and detail so as to appear so smart, and be held on high honor by those who value meaningless discussion and intellectual debate. Those people think they need to prove their superiority by debating and confounding others. That's not the Christian life at all. That creates conflict and comes from arrogance and is intended to be a smokescreen, distracting people from their actual lack of loving and godly deeds.
Application
The Christian life is not about mastery of all kinds of knowledge about the Scriptures and God and the world, but obedience to Scripture's commands. From the beginning, God's instruction was to love Him above all else and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That's the key reason I need to be reading and studying God's Word, so I know better how to live out what God calls love, so I can have a pure heart, keep a clear conscience and maintain a sincere faith. It's not so I can think I'm smarter than those who don't study the Scriptures as much as I do. People who study the Scriptures so that they can be teachers, but don't conform their lives to what the Scriptures teach are teachers who don't really know what they're talking about. But those who diligently seek to know the Scriptures so that they can walk in obedience to God, these gain insights about God and life and the Scriptures that those who pursue knowledge can never discover. I don't need a bunch of facts and figures about the Bible or from the Bible; I need to know what God wants me to be and do, as taught in the record of the Bible. My life isn't about how much I know about the Bible, but how much my life conforms to the love of God described by the Bible.