This is the Bama podcast with Marty Salman. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today, we examine the lives of two very different pastors, Discipled by Paul. Timothy and Ephesus and Titus on Crete, and here are their different personalities and how Paul uses each of them in his ministry.

Yeah, now for this conversation today, we're going to talk about Timothy and Titus, both Pat and we'll all three pastoral pistols today.

And for basically all my material here, I'm just, I mean, I'm a dead adult. My teacher's on pretty much everything that I teach, but this one especially is a lesson that I picked up from Ray Vanderlaun.

I'm not going to do that lesson, but he just as influenced me so much when it comes to Timothy that I just give him a shout out. So there is the lesson that influenced me the most is actually on one of his DVDs, volume session of volume seven, titled Walk as Jesus Walked.

And then there's the third lesson on that DVD. So volume seven is a DVD, seventh DVD of his series. And faith lesson number three is called, I believe, an unlikely disciple. And that's the one that impacted me. Now, I'm not going to do all of it.

I'm not going to do half of it on, I'm going to repackage the whole thing for our podcast today. And that's because I save the goodies for our trip.

And the conversation about Timothy is a good one, Brent. Absolutely. Like top 10 top five of the whole trip. Yeah.

It's tough because you guys are on there too. Yeah. It's up there though. It's good. It's one of the good ones. One of my favorites. It's one of my probably it's getting close to top five for me.

So I save some of it. So if you if you think you're going to end up on one of my trips to Turkey and you don't want to ruin the moment, then don't watch the DVD. I'm just telling you right now, like if you want to ruin it, watch the DVD. If you don't want to ruin it, then don't watch the DVD. Save yourself a little bit of money. No, don't do that. I want you to support race ministry. Just watch everything but lesson three.

Get the DVD after you come back from Turkey. Sure. There you go. Then everybody wins. There you go. Absolutely. So I'm going to I'm going to withhold some goodies here for I'm just going to repackage it all so it's not the same thing here, but that's what we're going to do.

So the next three letters of Paul are often what people call the pastoral epistles letters written from Paul to highly debated as always. We say that all the time.

But written by Paul to two pastors he discipled and left at their respective posts. These letters are far more personal in nature compared to like say as other letters written to churches, large groups of people, but this doesn't mean that they weren't to be shared. Paul writes these correspondences in such a way that they would be shared with the elders and then the churches at large. So it's not just like between him and Timothy or him and Titus alone.

He's writing to Titus. He's writing to Timothy with the assumption they're going to share these these conversations with the larger churches, particularly with their leadership, especially. These letters are particularly useful because they speak of ecclesiological, I like that word ecclesiological means study of the church.

They speak of ecclesiological matters and address issues of church order and what we might call polity.

This is also what makes addressing these books a little bit more difficult is in a similar fashion to Leviticus.

We can either address the book verse by verse or at a macro level. And as we usually do, I'm going to choose the latter for the sake of the scope of session four.

We'll also serve us well because of the rampant disagreement within the church on very specific issues of church polity.

I have no desire to dodge the tough conversations, but I also have even less desire to miss some of the greater more poetic and compelling points of the stories that lie behind these letters.

And trust me, there are some things I would love to talk about in first Timothy that we're not going to talk about because it's just not the point of the letter.

And it would distract us from the larger narrative that we're building here on the podcast.

And then there are other topics that you're going to be mad that I don't address because we have a ton of listenership in this podcast.

And it's not, we're just putting out a podcast, right Brent? Like we're not elders, we're not the leaders of some church movement.

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