By John A. Huffman, Jr.
Paul is telling us to be sensitive to others. Treat others with respect. The bottom line in all relationships is mutual respect.
II.
Word of Counsel Two: Don't cop out of your relational RESPONSIBILITIES.
This passage, in my estimation, has in it one of the most important verses in the entire Bible. Back in the early 1970s, I wrote a book titled Becoming a Whole Family. I recently wrote another book titled The Family You Want. The thematic verse for these two books is right here in this passage, 1 Timothy 5:8: "And whoever does not provide for relatives, and especially for family members, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever."
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Now is a very dangerous moment for me in relationship to this message, when I have already acknowledged that I have written two books, each with several hundred pages, based on this one verse. I will declare a decisive "no" to the temptation to include some of that voluminous material in this message, except to remind us that Paul is emphatically calling us, as followers of Jesus, to set an example in the way that we provide materially, emotionally, spiritually for our relatives and especially for those of our own immediate family. He has a clever way of almost shaming us into paying attention to this as he says that to avoid providing for our own, we are actually denying the faith and living at a lower standard than many nonbelievers. In essence, he is saying, "Do you want the pagans in Ephesus, in the Newport Harbor area, to embarrass you by showing greater love and sense of responsibility in the way they provide for their own than you do, as one who claims to be a follower of Jesus?"
The case study Paul uses is that of the widow.
The early church had many widows. Some of them were widows because their husbands had died. Others were widows "for the sake of Christ," because when they came to faith in Jesus Christ, their pagan or Jewish husbands had divorced them. Others, according to William Barclay, were widows because, when their husbands came to faith in Jesus Christ, they turned from polygamy to fidelity to one wife. That today continues to be a problem in Africa when a polygamist comes to trust in Jesus Christ. Just what are his responsibilities for his previous wives?
For whatever reason, there were many of these widows in the early church. The question was, what was to happen to them? There was no social security. Women were not easily employed. Many resorted to the only job they knew that paid money, and sometimes quite good money, prostitution.