I Timothy 1.5 is the purpose of teaching and Christianity in general: love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a genuine faith. Love from a pure heart doesn’t do good for others hoping to get something in return. It’s a love that’s selfless because that’s the right thing to do.
A good conscience doesn’t mean we feel extra guilty about bad things. In fact, emotion has little to do with συνειδήσεως (the word translated conscience). Conscience means an awareness of the difference between right and wrong. A good conscience means we act on our understanding of what is good.
A genuine (or sincere) faith is one that’s above any kind of scrutiny. A sincere faith isn’t hypocritical. To some extent, anyone who has any kind of standard for themselves is a hypocrite. We’re never going to live up to God’s standards of morality, but that doesn’t mean that hypocrisy defines us. The Pharisees were extremely legalistic, but had depraved lifestyles. That’s a hypocrite. A genuine faith is one that at least tries to meet the standard.
1.7 calls out the problem directly: there were members who were eager to teach but had no business doing so. This is, unfortunately, one of issues facing the church today. Many take the approach of emphasizing regulations and rules and prohibitions, which is what these bad influences were doing. The goal of our teaching is to cultivate love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. But this is not done by teaching just the thou-shalt-nots of Christianity, which we’ll see next week when we study verse nine.
Gary Pollard
