Supporting Your Family is Christianity

Supporting Widows

Text: 1 Timothy 5:3-16

People were demanding the congregation take care of their parents and accusing them of not being “Christian” if they don’t.

Gospel for widows or good news for widows (vss 3-4)

Christian children, nieces, and nephews must care for their own widows. This was a teaching of Jesus Christ and a teaching given to Israel by Moses millennia ago.
Anti-Christian or anti-Christ religion destroyed this commandment.
- Jesus faces this opposition by the Jewish religious leaders in Matthew 15:3-9. Did you notice how the LORD characterizes their religion? Their religion is just a worthless confession!
- It’s a faith that does nothing, as James says.
- Proverbs 28:24 Whoso robbeth his father or his mother, and saith, It is no transgression; the same is the companion of a destroyer.
- This is part of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and part of his teachings to all nations.
Caring for your widowed mother, father, aunt, or uncle is a basic tenet of Christianity.
- Learn piety at home.
- Caring for widowed parents or aunts and uncles is acceptable to God.
- As Paul would say in Romans 12, learn self-sacrifice to honor Jesus Christ and this is the good and acceptable will of God.
- Apparently, this is part of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and part of his teachings to all nations.

Widows without family are widows indeed. Some of those widows are widows are spiritually minded. We have some of them here in our church honestly.
- Ms. Betty is one such person. What she does on Sunday mornings to prepare breakfast is Christianity.
- We realize that we all appreciate true Christianity in other people.
- Anna is one of these in the Bible. Anna is around at the birth of the Jesus Christ in Luke 2.
Other widows are dead in their sins. They desperately try to please themselves. Their lives revolve around pleasing themselves.
Ephesians 2:1-3 And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; 2 Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: 3 Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.

Paul told Timothy that as a teacher of Christianity, he needed to be teaching this.
It is so important that a church congregation get this.
- This is a part of being blameless.
- Paul said this is so important that if someone will not do this, they are not to be considered part of the congregation and have denied Christianity.

Over sixty years old and has had a good reputation
Younger widows can remarry.
Let the family take care of widows that don’t meet the qualifications so that the church can take care of the widows that do.